So this morning the Washington Post runs a story detailing what kind of a jerk Mitt Romney was in high school. This is a surprise, right? A high school kid being a jerk. This has never ever happened before. Why, you might well ask, would the Washington Post devote valuable time and space to writing about this event? And why, you might well follow up, is this worth posting about when everyone should be talking about the environment? The answer is easy. It builds a meme and it translates Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage from a liability into a perceived strength. If you missed this is the graf that has the left exercised: BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney returned from a three-week spring break in 1965 to resume his studies as a high school senior at the prestigious Cranbrook School. Back on the handsome campus, studded with Tudor brick buildings and manicured fields, he spotted something he thought did not belong at a school where the boys wore ties and carried briefcases. John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it. “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled. A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors. Of course the story gets much sadder with Romney presumably responsible for the guy’s failed life and death from cancer. He came out as gay to his family and close friends and led a vagabond life, taking dressage lessons in England and touring with the Royal Lipizzaner Stallion riders. After an extreme fit of temper in front of his mother and sister at home in South Bend, he checked into the Menninger Clinic psychiatric hospital in Topeka, Kan. Later he received his embalmer’s license, worked as a chef aboard big freighters and fishing trawlers, and cooked for civilian contractors during the war in Bosnia and then, a decade later, in Iraq. His hair thinned as he aged, and in the winter of 2004 he returned to Seattle, the closest thing he had to a base. He died there of liver cancer that December. He kept his hair blond until he died, said his sister Chris. “He never stopped bleaching it.” There are unanswered questions here, like what this has to do with anything, how a high school dropout bummed around Europe taking dressage lessons and, my favorite, how getting an “embalmer’s license” led to a culinary career? But the Post doesn’t address them. The main source for this vignette is a former classmate of Romney’s named Stu White. According to the Washington Post: “I always enjoyed his pranks,” said Stu White, a popular friend of Romney’s who went on to a career as a public school teacher and has long been bothered by the Lauber incident.” But ABC News reports “White was not present for the prank, in which Romney is said to have forcefully cut a student’s long hair and was not aware of it until this year when he was contacted by the Washington Post.” From this it is pretty clear that the Lauber incident did not unfold in the way the Washington Post describes, if, indeed, it happened at all. ( h/t to the Daily Caller ) Why this and why now? As we’ve mentioned before this is all part of a process to brand Romney as a vicious, thoughtless, out-of-touch rich guy. It is really Obama’s only hope as he can’t possibly win if he runs on his objective accomplishments. This story has obviously been in the works for a while but the news value of it is questionable. It is the basic oppo dump material that the Washington Post obediently churns out on Republicans. As Major Garrett reports in National Journal , the whole Biden-evolving postion idea was a scam to allow Obama to support gay marriage: Did Obama sacrifice huge swaths of swing voters? Probably not. The polls have shifted to net favorable on the question of same-sex marriage and independents are unlikely to punish Obama for a policy position consistent with everything else he’s done on gay issues. Social conservatives will, of course, be aggrieved. But they were already. Also, consider this on the gay-marriage pronouncements: Biden was first, Obama second. That the two happily reversed the common order of things ought to tell you something about their relationship (solid), their understanding of tactics (advanced), and how they can play Washington’s chattering class for fools (easily). But suddenly, the nothingburger story developed by the Post had a hook. In fact it had a hook that could effectively frame the entire story to fit into the overarching Obama campaign. Obama was against gay marriage, but then he met parents of friends of his daughters who were gay and the subject was discussed at family dinners and he changed his mind. Another “gutsy call” in which he took an unpopular position after carefully weighing everything, and, of course, consulting his deeply held Christian faith. Romney, on the other hand, when he went to an elite private school for elite rich kids relentlessly bullied a kid who was gay and continues his bullying and homophobia to this day by not supporting homosexual marriage. It all fit. And the Post was able to make good on its investment. The ABC story makes it clear that there are other Romney classmates lining up to dish on him, presumably after they sign with a literary agent: One former classmate and old friend of Romney’s – who refused to be identified by name – said there are “a lot of guys” who went to Cranbrook who have “really negative memories” of Romney’s behavior in the dorms, behavior this classmate describes as “evil” and “like Lord of the Flies.” The classmate believes Romney is lying when he claims to not remember it. “It makes these fellows [who have owned up to it] very remorseful. For [Romney] not to remember it? It doesn’t ring true. How could the fellow with the scissors forget it?” the former classmate said.
By all accounts, it’s been a bumpy week in the news. The question of gay marriage clearly topped the charts with the president fighting his post hoc war of words against voters in the Tar Heel state. The CIA mobilized its double-agents to sniff out the next generation in underwear bombs. Meanwhile, in Damascus, Syria witnessed a steep uptick in violence, while a Russian commercial jetliner slammed into the side of an Indonesian volcano. At the polls, France broke left , and Greece broke bad . On the bright side, however, I’m very much looking forward to spending some old drachmas on my next trip ’round the Aegean, because there’s no chance the Eurozone survives this latest mess. Until then, I’ll have to lean on something a little closer to home to pass these troubled times. Although native to the Philadelphia ‘burbs, I’m a lifelong fan of Kentucky bluegrass and the commonwealth’s homegrown blends of corn-mashed bourbon. Sipping a dram of that charred-oak cocktail, smashed with mint and simple-syrup, is an annual treat when the three-year-olds Run for the Roses . This year, I’ll happily admit I didn’t lose any money, but a couple juleps cost me my cares. So it was with great pleasure that I read this morning that the owners of Maker’s Mark, my go-to brand when it comes to the brown stuff (“On the rocks, splash of water, thank you.”), won a major victory at the Sixth Circuit US Court of Appeals. Judge Boyce Martin ruled that the iconic red wax seal, dripped on the Marker’s Mark bottle, is protected “trade dress,” and, as such, it’s shielded from imitation, duplication, copycats and clones. As the Wall Street Journal ‘s Joe Palazzolo ( big h/t ) notes, Judge Martin clearly reveled in his historic defense of our native spirits and, frankly, the American way. His opinion opens: Justice Hugo Black once wrote, “I was brought up to believe that Scotch whisky would need a tax preference to survive in competition with Kentucky bourbon.” While there may be some truth to Justice Black’s statement that paints Kentucky bourbon as such an economic force that its competitors need government protection or preference to compete with it, it does not mean a Kentucky bourbon distiller may not also avail itself of our laws to protect its assets. This brings us to the question before us today: whether the bourbon producer Maker’s Mark Distillery, Inc.’s registered trademark consisting of its signature trade dress element — a red dripping wax seal — is due protection, in the form of an injunction, from a similar trade dress element on Casa Cuervo, S.A. de C.V.’s Reserva de la Familiatequila bottles. We hold that it is. The judgments of the district court in this trademark infringement case are AFFIRMED.
Here are the final results of last night’s primary contest, and presumably a variant of this will end up on Democratic political operatives’ desks across the breadth of Wisconsin : Barrett 390,109 Falk 228,940 Vinehout 26,926 La Follette 19,461 Huber 4,842 Total 670,278 Walker 626,538 Note that that total does not include the almost 20K of ‘Republican’ votes accumulated by ‘Republican’ Arthur Kohl-Riggs, given that the use of square quotes in both cases is justified.: he’s not a Republican, and neither were his supporters . And let me make this one point: Kohl-Riggs demonstrates why I don’t really believe in strategic opposite-side voting and/or Operation Chaos-style shenanigans. I am not convinced that such things worked, and yesterday’s results seems to back me up on that. Yes, I know that Republican spoiler Isaac Weix came in second in the LT-GOV primary recall (which is why nobody on the Left is bring that race’s total voters up); but I should note that he did not, in point of fact, actually win. So. Let’s look at what happened, shall we? What happened was that yesterday we had two primaries. The Democratic primary was supposed to be an enthusiastic, multi-candidate affair with clear differences (from a Democratic perspective, at least) between them; it was also being energetically fought, with the primary underdog (Falk) supposedly having still having broad financial and logistical support. That should have translated to ‘high turnout’ – especially since supposedly the Democrats are all selling what Wisconsin wants to be buying. Meanwhile, the Republican primary was… an annoyance. Scott Walker was going to be the nominee; the only reason why he had a challenger in the first place is because progressives thought that it made good agitprop*. And I believe that Walker’s was the only Republican primary that night. And all of that should have translated to ‘low turnout.’ Which would have been fine; incumbents often have sparsely populated primaries. I was personally expecting Walker to end up ahead of any one candidate, and to get somewhat less votes than the top two combined (Barrett & Falk). For that last scenario, Walker being ‘behind’ by anything less than 100K wouldn’t have concerned me. Instead? Walker ended up ‘losing’ to the entire Democratic field by less than 44K votes, and ‘ beat ‘ Barrett/Falk by almost 7.5K. This happened because of one of two things: either Walker voters are very motivated – which is to say, motivated enough to participate in a token primary race – or Democratic voters are not very motivated (please note that the final number of recall signatures was almost 901K**). The Left will be doing their level best to push back on either interpretation, because either interpretation is disastrous to their recall hopes. But watch their actions, not their words : The three losing Dem guv candidates will join nominee Tom Barrett in Milwaukee for a unity event, the state party has announced. Given that the news before the election was that Barrett couldn’t be bothered to attend a previously-announced Unity rally on the Capitol steps, this is interesting news. As is the fact that the rally now has to be outside Barrett’s house; it would be cruel for me to note that this represents a somewhat desperate, unprepared scrambling for a half-suitable emergency venue. :pause: This represents a somewhat desperate, unprepared scrambling for a half-suitable emergency venue. Moe Lane ( crosspost ) PS: Scott Walker for WI-GOV recall . *Spoiler warning: it didn’t. **The difference between the number of petition signers and the number of Democratic voters is of interest. Then again, as I noted on Twitter last night, it could rather easily be explained by the minor detail that recall signers could only vote once .
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The DOOM that came to Wisconsin Democrats.
Hi, Morons… So, in the news, we’ve had the death of former San Diego Chargers LB Junior Seau by suicide. He is the eighth member of the 1994 San Diego Chargers football team (made a Super Bowl run) to die…. See the original post here: Head Injuries and Collision Sports (tmi3rd)
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Head Injuries and Collision Sports (tmi3rd)
The Chinese dissident and opponent of forced abortion will be allowed to stay in the U.S. — perhaps not permanently, but at least past the 2012 elections (which is the important thing for Obama). In reporting the news, Ed Morrissey lists the Obama administration’s mistakes in handling this situation : Thus ends, one presumes, the shockingly inept performance from the State Department and the Obama administration in handling the Chen matter. The State Department all but pushed Chen out of the US embassy in Beijing, reneged on a promise to accompany him to a hospital, and then blamed Chen for the miscommunication. They let themselves be pushed around by Beijing, which miscalculated exactly how the rest of the world would react to their heavy-handed treatment of the anti-One Child Policy dissident, but that doesn’t let the White House off the hook for its callous abandonment of a democracy activist. We are in the best, and most principled, of hands.
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Chen to “Study Abroad”
