Former Fresno Mayor Jim Patterson is expected to contest the 2010 GOP primary from California's 19th congressional district. It turns out that Representative George Radanovich, who has held the seat since the Republican earthquake of '94, is retiring. Patterson is expected to run against Radanovich's hand-picked candidate, State Senator Jeff Denham.
One source said Radanovich will back state Sen. Jeff Denham (R) as his replacement. CA Senate districts are actually larger than congressional districts, though Denham's is more closely related to Rep. Dennis Cardoza's (D) neighboring 18th district. Top GOPers had tried to convince Denham to run against Cardoza, though Radanovich's district has a stronger GOP lean.
But Denham is unlikely to get a clean shot at the seat. Fresno Mayor Jim Patterson (R), who had backing from the Club for Growth during his '02 primary against now-Rep. Devin Nunes (R), is also likely to run. One source even suggested that ex-Rep. Richard Pombo (R), who lost his neighboring 11th district to Rep. Jerry McNerney (D) in '06, may be a potential contender as well.
I'm focusing on Mayor Pattersonsince I'm fairly well-acquainted with him. We attended Fresno State together, both graduating in 1992. He's a super intelligent man with a business background in Christian radio. Although Hotline On Call doesn't mention it, I suspect Patterson is even more conservative than the incumbent. The California Central Valley's been a hotbed of tea party activism this year, and the water crisis has been hammering farmers. Apparently, Radanovich favors the San Joaquin River restoration project, a major Central Valley environmental initiative which is opposed by area farmers. And a recent Miami Herald piece reports that Patterson had signaled his intent to challenge Radanovich in the primary. That, combines with wife Ethie Radanovich health questions, moved the 9th-term congressman to call it quits. According to the Herald's report:
Republicans in California's San Joaquin Valley are girding for a potential intramural clash pitting former Fresno Mayor Jim Patterson against incumbent Rep. George Radanovich of Mariposa.
Though Patterson has made no official campaign announcement, Republican and Democratic circles alike are abuzz with anticipation that he will declare his candidacy in early January. Privately, some Valley political activists say they have already been assured Patterson will challenge Radanovich.
"It's certainly going to be an interesting race if he does run," prominent Republican and Fresno Lincoln Club president Michael Der Manouel Jr. noted, though he stressed that no decision can be counted as final until candidacy papers are filed.
Patterson insisted Wednesday that he is still undecided, though he acknowledged he has been "testing the waters up and down the district." Tellingly, he added that he has no interest in running for an open seat in the state Legislature.
"I think I am suited best to be in Congress and that is where I'd love to serve in these times," Patterson said.
A primary race between Radanovich and Patterson would instantly become one of the most closely watched in California, if not the nation. It would likely become expensive, forcing campaign contributors to either choose sides or hedge their bets.
A GOP primary also would almost certainly select the next congressman from the 19th Congressional District. Republicans enjoy a commanding 44-37 percent voter registration advantage in the district, which sweeps through all or part of Fresno, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, Mariposa and Madera counties.
Patterson's extremely ambitious. Folks mentioned his name for a congressional seat back in the early '90s, before he left the mayor's office. He's apparently a big fundraiser as well, with the support of the local business sector and Club-for-Growth activists. I imagine that State Senator Denham's going to have his hands full.
I agree with Clemons when he suggests that "President Obama must step back and think about America's current strategic course." But Clemons' precedingpassage is deeply problematic:
National security officials in the administration need to go back and read Peter Bergen's Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden in which he recounts many aspects of bin Laden's plan from the Islamic extremist uber-guru's own words - which was to draw the US deeply into the Middle East, and by its presence -- destabilize the governments in the region.
Bin Laden, hiding somewhere in Pakistan, remains the single most significant sculptor of global affairs today, pushing the buttons of an American superpower as well as other regimes, so that they engage in emotional, knee jerk crusades that undermine what is left of a global equilibrium and the perception of American power.
Bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and enemies yet to be named win with each new soldier deployed to the Middle East and South Asia.
I have not read the Bergen book, although published in 2001, the thesis that Bin Laden remains at the center of the global al Qaeda organization is badly outdated. While Bin Laden affiliates and family members remain important terrorist actors in global jihad, experts today speak of intense decentralization as the defining element of current international terrorism. As I reported previously, al Qaeda is now a drastically tranformed network of follow-on jihadi cells and copy-cat Islamists. Indeed, the group is actually making a comeback from its decimation in Iraq, when U.S. forces badly degraded the cells operating under Abu Musab al Zarqawi. In 2006, Zarqawi was killed by U.S. bombs in a fighter strike outside of Baqubah. (For more on this, see Frederick Kagan's pathbreaking analysis, "Al Qaeda In Iraq.")
Plus, be sure to watch Sheila MacVicar's penetrating analysis on al Qaeda in Yemen, especially her discussion of next-stage bomb technologies, "Yemen's New Wave of al Qaeda."
The Obama administration has come under fire from critics who said the president waited too long to address the nation publicly about the Christmas Day terror plot, and that his administration has not been tough enough on terrorism.
The mostly partisan attacks came after Friday's attempt by a Nigerian national to blow up Northwest Flight 253 as it approached Detroit. Terror plots in the past have tended to unite the two parties, but recent attacks have departed from that norm.
President Obama has ordered a sweeping review of how the suspect managed to board the flight from Amsterdam, but that has done little to appease his critics.
Michigan Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, blamed the Obama administration for taking its eye off the threat of terrorism from abroad.
"I think there's enough blame to go around here," Hoekstra said Monday in an interview with ABC News. "The bottom line is we ended up with a bomb on a plane with a detonator ready to go off. That's totally unacceptable. There's probably failures at every step of the way, in Nigeria, in the Netherlands, and in the overall procedures. Early on in this administration, I think that this administration sent a clear signal that they believed that the threat to the homeland was not as significant as what it really is."
The plot to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas Day was, according to multiple news accounts, organized and launched by al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen. ABC News has reported that the Nigerian man who attempted to blow up a plane over Detroit, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, spent a month at an al-Qaeda compound north of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, where he completed training alongside a Saudi al-Qaeda bomb-maker.
Little noted is the fact that the second in command of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — the group that reportedly trained and deployed Abdulmutallab for his mission to attack the American homeland is a released Guantanamo detainee: Said Ali al-Shihri.While al-Shihri’s specific role has not been determined, it is increasingly clear that the terrorist network he helps lead was behind the attempted Detroit attack.
Known to Guantanamo officials as Detainee No. 372, al-Shihri was captured on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in December 2001. He denied being a terrorist and claimed to have traveled to Afghanistan two weeks after the 9/11 attacks to deliver money for the Red Crescent. At Guantanamo, he told officials that he had never even heard of al-Qaeda until he arrived in Guantanamo, and declared that “Usama bin Laden had no business representing Islam.” He promised that if released he would return to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, reunite with his family and work in their used furniture store.
Despite evidence that he had trained in an al-Qaeda camp north of Kabul, he was released in 2007 to a Saudi rehabilitation program. But al-Shihri never became a furniture salesman. Instead, last January, he appeared in a series of jihadist videos identified as al-Qaeda’s second in command on the Arabian Peninsula. The New York Times reported that he is “suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa,” in September 2008.
Each new layer of security, each new inconvenience for the travelling public, is mostly a placebo. It does very little to improve our inflight safety. Instead, each is imposed mostly to make it appear as though authorities are doing something and to give us the public some reassurance that they are safe in the air.
And most are implemented, too, to preserve the politically correct, multicultural myth that anyone is a potential terrorist, that all are equally worthy of official suspicion, that everyone must be searched as thoroughly as the next passenger in line.
.... by the time security personnel have caught on to one terror technique, the very real enemies of the West who would blow up airliners loaded with innocents have moved on to a new tactic. Once we learned to forbid box cutters, the terrorists moved on to shoes with fuses, then sports drinks laced with incendiaries and bags of powder strapped to their thighs.
No matter what we screen for, no matter how much we irritate and inconvenience passengers at airports, the bad guys will figure out new ways to bring potential death aboard our planes.
The real trick is screening out bad guys. But to do that would require a cultural will the West has not yet shown itself capable of. It would require us to admit that young Muslims -- mostly young Muslim males -- see themselves at war with the West, so they require a special level of scrutiny from security and intelligence forces.
Abdulmutallab's father, a prominent Nigerian banker, had notified the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria of his son's increasingly extremist religious beliefs. But no one had thought enough of the warning to subject the 23-year-old engineering student to an added thoroughness of search before he boarded a U.S.-bound flight.
Not all Muslims need be harassed -- not even most. Following 9/11, a U.S. think-tank devised a pre-flight screening technique that would red-flag the appropriate suspects.
Anyone, Muslim or not, who had a mortgage, had held the same job for more than 10 years, had a lengthy history of incident-free commercial flights, had a solid credit rating, a retirement account and no reports, like Abdulmutallab's, of extremist tendencies might well still have to do the detector walk-through, but wouldn't need to toss his latte and nail file before getting on a flight.
The trouble is, we are too timid as a culture to do the obvious -- focus on young Muslim men with radical connections, who have proven themselves to be 99 per cent of the problem.
Plus, while searching around for a new image, and also from a Cindy fan (Victor Field) at the comments, it turns out that the topless shot is from a Herb Ritts photo-shoot for Playboy in 1988. I also found this awesome gallery of Cindy Crawford cover shots over the years. And in other (not so great news), Pepsi's pulling out of the Superbowl advertizing blitz for 2010. Previous years have featured Cindy Crawford guzzling soda out of a can. What a babe. (Ads are going to the Internet, so at least I'm in the right business.) Added: Just found the Pepsi ad:
Ace commenter Kreiz suggested some Smashing Pumpkins after last night's Jessica Simpson entry. I checked around for some clips. I like "Tonight, Tonight," which was Kreiz's pick, but the embed was disabled. I'll find another and post it. That, along with "Zero" as well, which I really dig. Meanwhile, enjoy No Doubt's "Don't Speak." Especially good here is the acoustic guitar break solo. Always loved it in the studio version, and it's a cool stage setup at the viddy ... more sounds later:
By the way, the commercial video that accompanied this song on initial release is one of the coolest clips from the '90s. No Doubt's a local Orange County band, and Gwen Stefani's live performance hipness is unsurpassed in that footage (here).
