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• Tim Pawlenty is Kind of In; Full In-Ness to Occur Later Today
• Clearing the Browser Tabs – Prayers for Joplin Monday Edition
• How Herman Cain Went from Awesome to Not-So Awesome in 24 Hours and How He Can Be Awesome Again
• Mitch Daniels Declines, Smug “Centrist” Consultants With Dubious Records Hardest Hit

Tim Pawlenty is Kind of In; Full In-Ness to Occur Later Today Posted: 23 May 2011 04:30 AM PDT Yesterday, Tim Pawlenty released a video in which he announced that today he will announce his candidacy for President of the United States. His announcement of the announcement has some punch to it and I, like William Jacobsen, hope that means that T-Paw will have some fire in his campaign. That said, the video begins silly and ends with some truly bad music that threatens to drown Pawlenty out. It’s not a great idea to tell folks that you’re not going to announce your campaign with a speech while pre-announcing your campaign with a speech. Or perhaps I’m just reading too much into it. It ends well enough, assuming you can hear what he’s saying over the bad keyboards. Take a look and judge for yourself. I do hope he does well; as I’ve said before, I want as many strong candidates in the race throwing hard shots at the President and honing their own policies.

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Prayers for Joplin Monday Edition Posted: 23 May 2011 03:10 AM PDT Yesterday evening, a tornado that may have been an F5 tore through the city of Joplin, Missouri. As of last night, the death toll was 24, but that number is sure to rise as rescuers continue to work under daylight conditions. According to Josh Elliott of ABC, the Red Cross said that 75 percent of the town was gone. The editor of the city’s local paper, who is still missing member of his staff, said the damage was “massive”.  Photographs of the storm damage are staggering, especially those of St. John’s Regional Medical Center that had to be evacuated. If you are the praying type, I’m sure the people of the city and those with loved ones there could use your help. Ace has a thread going with updates as they come in. It might be worth a check or two later tonight or tomorrow. And now, links! Whereas most of the time I wield a sledgehammer on The Shack, Chris Muir wields a stiletto like a Borgia. Ed Driscoll has noted that President Obama seems to be doing his dead-level best to out-Carter Jimmy Carter when it comes to Israel. Jeff Goldstein has a few thoughts on the President’s throwback policies as well. Yet another Socialist government in Europe has gone down to crushing, and entirely deserved, defeat. That doesn’t mean Socialism is dead, but it does add another chapter to The Big Book of Socialist Failures. I think Mollie Hemingway is a fantastic writer and an interesting person. She works in an area — faith and religion — where she’s not likely to get very much of the spotlight. I’m glad Ricochet added her as an editor (her deft evisceration of a Nck Kristof column on abortion and the Bible is especially worth your time) and I hope she gets more paying work than she can handle. Come to think of it, I really would like a moat full of alligators on the southern border. At least it would slow down the drug gangs. It is refreshing to see some commentary in the MSM on the Camping Heresy from someone who knows a bit about Evangelicals (via memeorandum). This is an interesting infographic on the record industry’s war on piracy, or at least what the RIAA considers piracy.

How Herman Cain Went from Awesome to Not-So Awesome in 24 Hours and How He Can Be Awesome Again Posted: 22 May 2011 06:40 PM PDT Well, at least Herman Cain isn’t wasting any time. Yesterday, he officially entered the 2012 GOP race in front of a crowd larger than the other GOP candidates combined could draw. Today, he went on Fox News Sunday and whiffed the foreign policy portion of his interview. Badly. This one is right up there with the Sarah Palin/Katie Couric interview, folks. That’s how bad it was. Chris Wallace asked Cain about Israel and the Palestinian demand that it accept “right of return” as a condition for peace. The result wasn’t pretty: When asked about his stance on the matter, Cain appeared confused. CAIN: Right of return? Right of return? WALLACE: The Palestinian right of return. CAIN: That’s something that should be negotiated. When asked again about whether he believes in the Palestinian right of return, Cain seemed unclear about the Israeli position on the matter, as well as his own. CAIN: Yes, but under – but not under – Palestinian conditions. Yes. They should have a right to come back if that is a decision that Israel wants to make…. I don’t think they have a big problem with people returning. Yeesh. Look, I’m one of Cain’s biggest fans. I like him as a Presidential candidate and as a person. His reluctance to give us even a basic opinion on foreign policy issues, however, is not acceptable. What happened today was, well, it’s going to cost him at a time when he really needs to keep all the forward momentum he has. Claire Berlinsky is ready to write Cain off, as is Paul Rahe in the comments at that link. I want to quote Rahe’s comment as is represents what I think will be the commonly-held opinion among the insider types who have been looking for a chance to put about a dozen torpedoes into Cain. I am with Claire. Cain is a very successful businessman with good political instincts. He appears to be and probably is a very fine man, but he knows very little about the larger world. He should not be in the race. And let’s face it: he really is not in the race. There’s your CW, folks, in all its poorly-informed fashion. To borrow a quote, Rahe is a very successful historian and author. He probably is a fine man, but he knows very little about this Presidential race. Now, unlike Rahe with Cain, I’m willing to give him a chance to do better. I won’t write someone off based on one poorly-informed statement made in the heat of a moment. I don’t say that because I think myself a better political pundit than Rahe but because anyone can make a boneheaded mistake. Which brings me back to Cain. The only thing about Cain that has bothered me is his reluctance to give even basic positions on foreign policy matters. I understand that world affairs are sloppy and there often isn’t an easy simple answer. I get that no Chief Executive is going to have a particularly detailed policy before they get a few skilled and experienced people around them who can lend their knowledge to its crafting. On the other hand, I do expect that every candidate for President have at least a working knowledge of what is going on around the world and the ability to share share it. We voters are smart enough to understand that a candidate like Cain doesn’t have access to as much information as the President — we don’t expect him to be Henry Kissinger. I suspect that Cain’s people will be on the phone tomorrow to a few foreign policy wonks to see who he can bring in as advisers. It’s likely he won’t get the big names; he doesn’t have that kind of campaign cash yet. However, he might do very well if he look a bit lower than the top tier, perhaps even into the blogosphere where there are plenty of people who know about the region and its history (including Maggie of Maggie’s Notebook). Whatever he does, it needs to happen quickly. He’s not such a darling of the talk show circuit that he can get as quick a second-chance as Newt Gingrich got today, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea for him to try. He can still claw back most of the momentum he lost, not with the Paul Rahes of the world who have found the excuse to dismiss him they wanted but with the Claire Berlinskis. I suspect that she, and most of the GOP electorate, are willing to forgive him this mistake if he’s willing to show them he learned a lot from it. UPDATE: This clarification is a good start toward repairing today’s damage. All Israeli governments have rejected the “right” of large numbers of Arabs or Palestinians to return to what is now the state of Israel. Such an en masse return would unbalance Israel’s demographic makeup as the world’s sole Jewish state. In this light, should the “right of return” “be negotiated,” as I said, “if that is a decision that Israel wants to make”? Certainly, and to reiterate, it’s Israel’s call. Israel has a long record of being more gracious to its enemies than its enemies are to it, and this would be yet another example of that. But is the “right of return” a moral imperative? Is it something Israel must grant? Is it something the United States ought to encourage? The answer is no on every count.

Mitch Daniels Declines, Smug “Centrist” Consultants With Dubious Records Hardest Hit Posted: 22 May 2011 05:30 PM PDT Move Mitch Daniels into the “No” column. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels joined the march of would-be GOP presidential hopefuls offstage Sunday in a dead-of-night decision that put his supporters in play and muddled the fight for front-runner status against President Obama. Mr. Daniels' exit, which he said he made at his family's behest, clears the upcoming news cycle to absorb former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's entry into the race Monday in Iowa. The Sunday Morning politi-shows were abuzz with all manner of “what does it all mean” commentary from the GOP insider set. A snarkier blogger might note here that neither Matthew Dowd nor Mike Murphy are exactly conservative in their political outlook and that neither of them have exactly put together a string of victories. I, of course, am not such a blogger, but I know someone who is. Take it away, Stacy: The discomfiture of "Republican insiders" is a very good thing. Can we get a show of hands of anybody who thinks "Republican insiders" (you know, the guys who backed Dede Scozzafava and Charlie Crist) have a clue as to how to win elections? Anybody? Dowd notably stabbed his boss George Bush in the back in 2008 and quickly found a home as a “centrist” at ABC News. Murphy piloted the Meg Whitman campaign straight into Mount Loser and is best known for trash-talking Sarah Palin two months before the Presidential election. If the Conventional Wisdom could take form and walk the Earth it would do so as a GOP political consultant like one of those guys. I think the rest of us who aren’t angling for a gig on a 2012 campaign can sit back for a couple months and let events happen as they will. Those who were inclined to vote for Daniels will scatter among the other candidates (most of them to the Pawlenty camp). Most of them won’t stay there long because things change in an election season, often very quickly and without previous warning. I think Daniels would have been a great addition to the roster of candidates. We could use more smart, conservative people in the race who have a few years of executive experience and who know their way around the business community. But we have what we have and it doesn’t make much sense to sit around and moon over our dream candidate like a teen-aged girl sighing over an issue of  Tiger Beat. We need to test the mettle of the people who are running right now. Every one of them will make at least one mistake and I want to see how they react. I want to know their policy strengths and weaknesses. I want to see who they hire to advise them (Note to candidates: if you hire Matthew Dowd or Mike Murphy, you’re a loser. Don’t be a loser). It makes a lot more sense to do the testing now, at least a year before “crunch time”, than it does to ride a dreamy space unicorn of a candidate into a general election only to find out he (or she) had a few nag-like tendencies. So Daniels is out. Fine. I wish him well in all his endeavors. Maybe he can help us figure out what we have among the people who are running. If he’s interested in doing that, then he’ll provide us a very valuable service, unlike certain “centrist” strategists.

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