This is interesting. The top vote getters so far in FreedomConnector’s poll about the Tea Party’s strongest Senate come from arguably the reddest and the bluest state in the nation. Ted Cruz from Texas and Dan Bongino from Maryland are running away with it. Cast your vote.

Certainly not a scientific poll but hopefully it shows that the national conservative movement need not be timid about jumping into Maryland politics.

Governor Martin O’Malley has really done it this time. Not only has he used Obama’s stimulus slush fund as an excuse to raid the state’s transportation fund resulting in massive budget deficits. Not only has he chased businesses and hundreds of jobs out of the state with his abhorrent tax policies. Not only is he making gasoline and alcohol more expensive. Not only has he hamstrung rural Maryland economies with his United Nations approved, junk-science “sustainable development” PlanFairyland.

This time he has gone too far. His power and money grabbing policies have now placed Maryland at risk of losing a distinguished resident of the (not so) Free State. I’m speaking of the independent journalist and blogger Robert Stacy McCain, who may leave Maryland thanks to Marty’s recent plan to tax internet sales (on which McCain relies for a substantial piece of his income).

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley Is a Stupid, Dishonest and Corrupt Swine

My friend Jeff Quinton at QuintonReport.com alerted me to this outrage and got an Instalanche out of it. And this could be the last staw for me.

I’ve lived in Maryland more than 14 years, ever since I moved up here to work at The Washington Times in November 1997. My friends have often asked, “Why Maryland? Their taxes are so high. You should move to Virginia.” And there was always a reason, or at least a plausible excuse.

For years, the commute to the Times office on New York Avenue, and the availability of a more direct bus/rail connection than could be found in Virginia, was the best argument to stay in Maryland. Then our daughter enrolled at Highland View Academy here in Hagerstown, and we moved into faculty housing on campus, where my wife subsequently became the food service director or, as she prefers to call herself, The Cafeteria Lady.

Frankly, however, the best argument for staying in Maryland now is inertia. We’ve lived in this house for seven years, and the mere thought of having to pack everything into a moving truck — my office library alone would take days to pack — is enough to give me a headache.

Nevertheless, O’Malley’s lamebrain Internet tax might make me do it. Because in all likelihood, as we witnessed in California last year, if the state tries to tax online sales, Amazon will pull out, and I need that Amazon money.

Read the entire article

O’Malley has been doing to Maryland what O’bama has been doing to the whole country for the last three years.

I don’t want Stacy McCain to leave Maryland. Maryland needs people like him. We’re organizing in Maryland and we will defeat the Democrat machine in Annapolis. It won’t be tomorrow or next week, but it will happen. The Maryland Conservative Action Network, The Maryland Society of Patriots, Constitutional Conservatives for Maryland, Conservative Victory Maryland, Election Integrity Maryland…the list goes on.

We’re getting our act together. We’ve got great candidates like Dan Bongino and Kathy Afzali running for seats in Washington and activists and PACs preparing for battle.

Now is when Maryland really needs Robert Stacy McCain.

Love is in the air.

Senator Ben Cardin has found his date to the congressional prom. The announcement came today via Twitter that his date for the evening will be Mississippi Republican Senator Roger Wicker. I’m sure Ben is clumsily picking out a corsage and/or washing his dad’s car as I type this. No word on where the happy couple’s dinner reservations were made for the evening. The conversation will undoubtedly be about whether this is the night Roscoe Bartlett finally scores with Nancy Pelosi.

As you probably recall, the State of the Union became Prom Night in Congress last year in order to help perpetuate the Democrat/mainstream media narrative that overheated political rhetoric is what made a mentally ill person snap and shoot up a crowd of people including Congresswoman Giffords. The idea was for Congressmen and Senators to sit across the aisle with members of the other party to pretend they’re unified for the good of the country for an hour or two. (See Caleb Howe’s RedState post from last year for more.) Then they can applaud in a bipartisan fashion when the President blames all the country’s ills on Republicans. It’s very much like the Democrat’s’ version of Dinner for Schmucks

Hey, Senator Cardin, instead of phony baloney political stunts maybe you could show your bipartisan spirit by standing up to your boss, Harry Reid, and telling him to let the Senate vote on some Republican bills. Or how about actually doing something like…I don’t know…PROPOSING  A BUDGET? (I believe we just passed the 1000-days-without-a-budget-mark.)

As for Senator Wicker, he’s probably a very qualified Republican Senator in that he’s a disappointment.

Ken Timmerman

Tomorrow, investigative reporter and author, Ken Timmerman will officially announce his campaign to unseat Congressman Chris Van Hollen in Maryland’s 8th district.

Jan. 18, 2012  (Kensington, MD) – Nationally recognized investigative reporter and international religious-freedom advocate Ken Timmerman announced he will challenge incumbent Rep. Chris Van Hollen in the 8th District of Maryland, vowing to rein in out-of-control federal spending, promote jobs through growth, and maintain a strong national defense adapted to the challenges of tomorrow.

“In just three years, the Obama administration, eagerly assisted by Chris Van Hollen as Chairman and Ranking Member of the Budget Committee in Congress, has racked up a breath-taking $5 trillion in new debt, and now they are asking for $1.2 trillion more,” the Montgomery County conservative said.

“The scandalous enactment of Obamacare, with its special interest waivers and the potential bankrupcy of our health care system, is a poster child for everything that is wrong with Congress. Chris Van Hollen had a chance to work toward getting our fiscal house in order. He failed. Now he needs to go,”

The long-time Kensington resident announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the newly-drawn 8th district in separate appearances in Frederick, Montgomery and Carroll counties.

Carroll County commissioners (and PlanMaryland foes) Richard Rothschild and Robin Frazier have sent Timmerman letters welcoming his candidacy, as have prominent members of Tea Party groups.

Timmerman has already won support from leading Republican figures, including Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R, MD-6th), and several Maryland Republican party voices in their individual capacities.

During a previous run for the U.S. Senate in 2000, Timmerman was endorsed by former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick, and by Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi-hunter. Timmerman is the only candidate Wiesenthal ever supported for public office in the United  States.

“We need a strong voice for Maryland jobs and for fiscal sanity in Congress,” Timmerman said. “We need to lift the burdens on small businesses which are our job-creators. We must stop the malignant growth of government and its encroachment into every aspect of our daily lives.”

Timmerman’s expertise and judgment have been praised by former CIA director R. James Woolsey. “Your professionalism and persistence make a great contribution to our understanding, to the public debate, and ultimately to our national security,” Woolsey wrote Timmerman in an endorsement of one of his recent books.

Timmerman is a recognized authority on national defense and intelligence issues who has testified as an expert witness in terrorism trials in U.S. federal courts and before Congress. He is also the president of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran (www.iran.org), and was nominated for the Nobel Peace prize in 2006 for his work to halt Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

For the past seven years, Ken has been the lead investigator for families of 9/11 victims in a civil lawsuit against Iran. Based on Ken’s evidence, a federal district judge ruled just before Christmas that Iran “shared responsibility” for the 9/11 terrorist attacks with al Qaeda, and had provided “direct, material support” for the attacks.

“2013 may be our last chance to bring real course correction to Washington. It’s time to stop the insanity in Washington, where Chris Van Hollen has played a leading role in driving our economy off a cliff,” Timmerman said.

Timmerman and his wife of 24 years have five children, all of whom have gone through the Maryland public schools in his district.

Event Schedule for January 18, 2011

• 9:00 AM: Frederick County Courthouse, Frederick MD
• 11:45 AM: Outside of Bertucci’s at White Flint Mall (11301 Rockville Pike, Kensington, MD)
• 2:30 PM: Salerno’s restaurant, (1043 Liberty Road, Eldersburg, MD 21784)

If you attended the MD CAN Turning the Tides Conference back in October, you’ll recognize Ken Timmerman as the moderator on the Sharia Law panel discussion.

I don’t like to refer to public figures as “the next [insert name here]” because it trivializes the person’s individual story. However, sometimes you come across people who you admire or support for many of the same reasons as someone else, so comparisons are inevitable. It’s hard to listen to Dan Bongino on the campaign trail in Maryland and not be reminded of recent conservative political heroes like Senator Marco Rubio or Congressman Paul Ryan.

Dan, having been part of the NYPD and the U.S. Secret Service, has a uniquely compelling back story but when he talks about common sense economics and how to put the country back on the right path, he evokes the same kind of excitement and hope for the future that Rubio and Ryan do.

Yesterday, Dan did an interview with WCTR radio in Chestertown, Maryland which really illustrates all that I’ve said above. If he weren’t running in the state perpetually written off by the national conservative movement, Dan Bongino would already be a household name and topic of discussion on all the big talk radio shows. Conservatives need to shed their preconceptions about Maryland and get behind Dan Bongino.

I challenge you. Listen to the interview and tell me electing Dan Bongino is not worth the fight and that you’d rather concede a Senate seat to the likes of Ben Cardin.

WCTR Interview with Senate Candidate Dan Bongino

TGDaily.com reports that the evil geniuses at IBM have created a 12-atom storage device.

IBM has discovered how to store a bit of information in just 12 atoms, compared with the million or so normally required.

The technique, based on ferromagnetism, could in future allow smaller, faster and more energy-efficient devices to be built.

“The chip industry will continue its pursuit of incremental scaling in semiconductor technology but, as components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom,” says Andreas Heinrich,  lead investigator into atomic storage at IBM Research.

“We’re taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit – single atoms – to build computing devices one atom at a time.”

Read more.

In other tech news, progress has all but halted in the effort to create a Twitter app that doesn’t suck.

Hardcore internet geeks will probably remember this meme. The sideways glance of a pudgy Asian kid inspired all sorts of Photoshop parodies.

I couldn’t help but notice a resemblance to the new dictator of North Korea.

This week Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings launched an investigation into private sector, for-profit schools. The specious reasoning he uses to justify this is that students attend for-profit schools using federal tuition aid. The Baltimore Sun reports:

Cummings, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, sent letters to 13 schools requesting their senior executive contracts. The Baltimore lawmaker said he wants to determine whether salaries, bonuses and other compensation are tied to student performance.

Elijah Cummings with fellow socialist Michael Moore in 2009

Wait, what? Tying compensation and bonuses to student performance? Perhaps Mr. Cummings would like to propose that sort of metric for government run schools as well? The bosses of the big teachers’ unions would respond to that like vampires to sunlight.

The federal government providing college tuition to anyone apart from perhaps veterans is a questionable use of  taxpayers’ dollars to begin with. Arguing that students choosing to spend those dollars at for-profit schools gives the federal government the authority to dictate their executive compensation practices is downright absurd.

“If the American taxpayers are funding the majority of these schools’ operations, I believe we have the right — not only do we have a right, but we have an obligation — to understand how our money is being used,” Cummings said during a speech Monday at the AFL-CIO headquarters.

What’s wrong with this picture? If it is true that the “majority of these schools’ operations” are being funded by the American taxpayers then what Cummings and his cohort are obligated to do is justify to the taxpayer why they are spending so much money paying for people’s tuition in the first place. The problem, if there is one, lies not in the private sector decisions but in the dubious policy of using federal funds to pay for students’ educations.

What truly is galling about this government overreach is that public and private universities are left out. How much federal tuition aid gets spent at schools who crank out deadbeat “occupy wall street” protesters with useless degrees? How much do those universities’ presidents, professors and coaches make? What are their pensions when they retire?

Thankfully someone is pushing back against Cummings’ presumptuous intrusion into private sector practices. Brian Moran, interim chief executive officer and president of the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU), called Cummings’ probe “just more politics.”

“This appears to be just more politics and unfortunately fails to acknowledge the important role private sector colleges and universities have in educating non-traditional students to compete for jobs in a very difficult economic environment,” Moran said in a statement sent to The Hill.

In this “very difficult economic environment” I’m betting that for-profit DeVry University’s degree in Small Business Management & Entrepreneurship is a better investment than Columbia’s degree in African American Studies or perhaps Princeton’s degree in Slavic Languages and Literature, both of which I imagine consume federal dollars.

Cummings said there are studies have found that chief executives at for-profit colleges “consistently make much more than their counterparts at public and nonprofit schools.”

When compared with public and nonprofit schools, “for-profit companies spend a smaller percentage of their funds on student education, reserving more for marketing, advertising, recruitment and other non-education expenses,” he said.

The for-profit companies need to do things public schools don’t in order to stay in business. Personally, I have degrees from both a public university and a private, for-profit university. In my experience, the latter put far more effort into realistically preparing students to enter the workforce in their chosen fields. Of course that’s anecdotal and proves nothing but, the relative quality of the education isn’t really the underlying problem here. The selective overreach by left wing Democrat politicians is.

The White House is encouraging their thralls to be snarky to their “friends” on the other side of the political spectrum. Why? Because it’s “fun” apparently.

Of course we can be reasonably certain that snark isn’t the primary motivation here. As White House Dossier points out,

The Obama presidential campaign is launching an effort to collect Republican email addresses by inviting its supporters to submit information about their Republican associates to the Obama 2012 website.

The effort could help the Obama campaign build a database that would enable it to target Republican voters during the general election campaign. But, more perniciously, it could also become part of an Democratic effort to influence Republican primary voters to select a candidate Democrats think Obama could most easily defeat.

I personally don’t count many left wing Obamatons among my close friends so I doubt anyone I know would claim that I inspired them to give their money to a failed Marxist president who is projected to raise one billion dollars in campaign funds for the 2012 election. (A billion would buy a lot of health insurance for poor people or pay a lot of tuition, wouldn’t it? Just sayin’.)

I’m not sure how I’d feel if I got a notification that I inspired someone to give to Obama. I’d probably laugh, knowing what little good it would do the Obama campaign to spam my email address. I’d probably welcome it as a reason to write a follow up to this blog post and chalk it all up to another laughable strategy like “Attack Watch” or “Fight the Smears.”

If you are stupid enough to give your money to the Obama campaign, please put me (human AT anthropocon DOT COM) down as your inspiration so I can see what sort of chicanery they perpetrate with it. Thanks.

From Frederick News Post staff reporter Bethany Rodgers:

“With the recent news about Congressman Roscoe Bartlett’s longtime chief-of-staff preparing to run for Congress and the Democratic party’s cynical and corrupt redistricting plan to oust Congressman Bartlett, I felt it was time for me also to start an exploratory committee for Congress,” Mooney said in a prepared statement. “We cannot let Congressman Bartlett’s seat be taken by a tax-and-spend liberal like Rob Garagiola.”

Read more.

You may have seen my earlier post with the video of Lord Christopher Monckton using math and logic to destroy the alleged reasons for PlanMaryland (aka Plan Fairyland). As with most sweeping environmental regulations, it’s all about government gaining more power, not saving the environment. The below just landed in my inbox from the office of Delegate Kelly Schulz.

After much attention from legislators, counties, municipalities, farmers and businesses, the Governor has agreed to hold a public hearing to discuss the proposed Plan Maryland. The original intent was to pass the regulations onto the specific agencies for inclusion into our state’s standards without any legislative oversight. This public hearing is the first opportunity to address the multitude of issues that are present in the Plan in the legislature. I strongly urge you to attend if you are an opponent or a supporter. This is a very important part of our governing process that we, as a group, have worked very diligently for on your behalf. Please see the details from Senator EJ Pipken below:

“The Maryland State Senate’s committee on Education, Health, and Environmental Affairs will be conducting a briefing on PlanMaryland on December 12, 2011 at 11:00am. At this briefing both supporters and opponents to the Comprehensive State Plan will be allowed to speak. While, the panel of both sides will be limited to the number of speakers, a presence of local officials will signify to the Committee that there are real concerns regarding the Plan. The presence of county officials, farmers, and landowners will show strength in our numbers.

As of right now, the committee will conduct the briefing within its hearing room, on the 2nd Floor of the Miller Senate Building, in Annapolis.

Before the briefing there will be a rally on Lawyer’s Mall here in Annapolis at 9:30am to protest PlanMaryland. Because not everyone will be able to speak at the briefing, this will provide a forum for speakers to express their concerns publicly. Press will be in attendance, so a strong showing will impress.

What: 

• Rally and Briefing on PlanMaryland

Where:

• Rally – Lawyer’s Mall, Annapolis, MD
• Briefing – Educations, Health, and Environmental Affairs Committee Room, 2nd Floor Miller Senate Building, Annapolis, MD

When:

• December 12, 2011
• Rally-9:30am
• Briefing-11am