• Buck McKeon,  CA-25

    Is the Handwriting on the Wall for Rep. Buck McKeon?

    Patricia and Buck McKeon CA 25: FEC Complaint Filed over Buck and Patricia McKeon Mailer

    Rep. Buck McKeon and his wife, Patricia McKeon, a candidate for California Assembly with House Speaker Boehner

    When your top Congressional staff leave the state for another staff position, it is a definite tell. Buck McKeon who in November won easy re-election in his Santa Clarita and very GOP registered district is 74 years old.

    Bob Haueter, former district director to U.S. Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Santa Clarita, has been hired to fill the same position for Blake Farenthold, a second-term GOP congressman in Texas.

    Haueter started work Monday in Corpus Christi.

    “(Farenthold) is a nice guy, a great guy, and he offered me an opportunity to do what I know,” Hauter said from his district office on Shoreline Drive, looking out over the Gulf of Mexico. “I’m excited to have the opportunity to serve both him and the constituents of (Texas’) 27th congressional district.”

    The move comes just days after Haueter’s former boss, McKeon, announced he had hired Farenthold’s chief of staff, Alan Tennille, as his chief of staff in Washington.

    The rumor in Ventura County politics is that former California State Senator Tony Strickland who recently lost to Democrat Julia Brownley for a Ventura County based Congressional seat will move into McKeon’s district.

    But, former California Assemblyman Cameron Smyth and recently elected Assemblyman Scott Wilk are both said to be looking at the race.

    Remember it is top two in California – so, when McKeon retires it will be a two Republican primary and general election.

    Who will be the first to throw their hat in the ring?

  • Barack Obama

    Obama Digital Team Say Mobile Ads Targeting Young, Females and Hispanics Worked

    President Barack Obama’s reelection effort spent millions on mobile ads that targeted down to the neighborhood level in battleground states, digital operatives for the campaign told Adweek.

    And the victors claim targeting on-the-go voters moved the needle, underscoring a 2012 that saw the mobile marketing space seemingly toddle towards significantly impacting the larger advertising world.

    In the case of mobile video ads, the Democratic operatives said they got click-through rates from 3 percent to 19.5 percent during the race’s crucial stretch run when Mitt Romney appeared to surge in late October and early November. The promos criticized the GOP candidate’s tax plan and praised Obama’s auto industry bailout, among other examples.

    “We knew we had to be in mobile,” said Shannon Lee, the campaign’s digital lead who previously worked at interactive shop Digitas. “The work we did there was exciting because we felt it was directly impacting the election.”

    The ads typically zeroed in on young, female and Hispanic voters in Ohio, Michigan, Nevada, Iowa, Florida and Colorado, appearing via mobile properties owned by major regional news outlets such as the Cincinnati Enquirer, Detroit Free Press, Las Vegas Review-Journal, Des Moines Register, Miami Herald and Denver Post. The Obama digital team also bought ads directly from CNN, The Weather Channel, Associated Press and Pandora, leveraging through those publishers’ mobile apps.

    And, the Romney campaign focused on television ads that made GOP political consultants richer. Nobody in the the targeted demographics probably even saw them.

    You would have thought someone in the GOP would have learned from the drubbing they received in 2008.

    And, now again in 2012.

  • Robert Bork

    Judge Robert H. Bork – R.I.P.

    Judge Robert Bork with President Ronald Reagan

    President Ronald Reagan and Judge Robert H. Bork

    Judge Robert Bork has passed away.

    Robert H. Bork, the conservative jurist who fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973 and whose failed nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 sparked an enduring political schism over judicial nominations, died early Wednesday at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington of complications from heart disease. He was 85.

    I recall meeting the judge at Pat Buchanan’s house in Virginia in 1990.

    I was to have a photo taken with him but he insisted in getting rid of his drink and cigarette. Ha!

    Unfortunately, the photo came out blurry.

    However, his conversation was lively and impressive.

    R.I.P.

  • Pinboard Links,  The Morning Flap

    The Morning Flap: December 19, 2012

    Time Magazine Person of the Year

    These are my links for December 18th through December 19th:

    • A Bad Budget Deal – Higher taxes now for notional reform later is worse than nothing – It’s clear by now that the budget talks are drifting in a drearily familiar Washington direction: Tax and spending increases now, in return for the promise of spending cuts and tax and entitlement reform later. This is a bad deal for everyone except the politicians who want more money to spend.Consider the tax increase now being touted as a sign of “compromise.” Speaker John Boehner has moved from opposing higher tax rates to offering higher rates for incomes above $1 million a year. While that’s better than the scheduled increase on incomes above $200,000 a year (for singles), it would still put the GOP on record as endorsing a tax increase, in particular on small businesses that file individual returns.President Obama has countered with a ceiling of $400,000. If they compromise at $500,000, we are all supposed to thank the two sides for their reasonableness. Yet both parties will have declared that raising tax rates is no big economic deal. This will hurt the economy, and it further advances Mr. Obama’s political goal of separating the middle class from the affluent on tax policy.

      What about tax reform next year? A final judgment on this prospect depends on the fine print, but it’s already looking grim. The GOP has prepared the ground for a genuine tax reform, on the Simpson-Bowles model, that lowers rates in return for fewer deductions. In what is shaping up as this budget deal’s prototype, tax reform looks like it means both higher rates and fewer deductions.

      This isn’t reform. It’s another tax increase next year disguised as reform. The Fortune 500 CEOs who are lobbying Republicans don’t mind because they hope to get a cut in the corporate tax rate. But small businesses will be stuck with a huge immediate tax increase, at least until their owners can scramble to reorganize as corporations instead of Subchapter S companies or LLCs.

    • How Do We Know an ‘Assault Weapon’ Ban Would Not Have Stopped Adam Lanza? Because It Didn’t – Although Friday’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School has prompted renewed calls for reinstating the federal “assault weapon” ban, we know for a fact that such a law would not have stopped Adam Lanza or made his attack less deadly, because it didn’t. The rifle he used, a .223-caliber Bushmaster M4 carbine, was legal under Connecticut’s “assault weapon” ban, which is similar to the federal law that expired in 2004. Both laws, in addition to listing specifically prohibited models, cover semiautomatic rifles that accept detachable magazines and have at least two out of five features: 1) a folding or telescoping stock, 2) a pistol grip, 3) a bayonet mount, 4) a grenade launcher, and 5) a flash suppressor or threaded barrel designed to accommodate a flash suppressor. The configuration of the rifle used by Lanza, which his mother legally purchased and possessed in Connecticut, evidently was not covered by that definition.
    • Democrats Dismiss Boehner’s “Plan B” on Budget – With one eye on the clock and the other on the White House, House Speaker John Boehner introduced a “fiscal cliff” backup plan Tuesday that would only address taxes — an apparent attempt to pressure President Obama into moving Boehner’s way in deficit-reduction negotiations.“Plan B” would permanently extend current tax rates on those with annual incomes below $1 million, a concession by Boehner from his earlier opposition to any rate increase. The speaker insisted he was not walking away from the negotiating table, but said he wants to move faster to ensure that most Americans’ taxes won’t rise starting Jan. 1.
    • Benghazi review slams State Department on security – The leaders of an independent panel that blamed systematic State Department management and leadership failures for gross security lapses in the deadly Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya will explain their findings to Congress on Wednesday.The two most senior members of the Accountability Review Board are set to testify behind closed doors before the House and Senate foreign affairs committees on the classified findings of their harshly critical report.An unclassified version released late Tuesday said serious bureaucratic mismanagement was responsible for the inadequate security at the mission in Benghazi where the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed.

      “Systematic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department resulted in a Special Mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place,” the panel said.

      Despite those deficiencies, the board determined that no individual officials ignored or violated their duties and recommended no disciplinary action. But it also said poor performance by senior managers should be grounds for disciplinary recommendations in the future.

      Wednesday’s classified testimony from the review board – retired Ambassador Thomas Pickering and a former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen – will set the stage for open hearings the next day with Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, who is in charge of policy, and Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides, who is in charge of management.

    • Inquiry Into Libya Attack Is Sharply Critical of State Department – An independent inquiry into the attack on the United States diplomatic mission in Libya that killed four Americans on Sept. 11 sharply criticized the State Department for a lack of seasoned security personnel and for relying on untested local militias to safeguard the compound, according to a report by the panel made public on Tuesday night.
    • 2012 Person of the Year: Barack Obama, the President | TIME.com – Why of course. He won decisively RT @TIME Barack Obama is TIME’s 2012 Person of the Year | #POY2012
    • Resolutions: So Irresistible, So Hard to Keep – WSJ.com – RT @WSJ More than half of the 45 million smokers in the U.S. tried to quit in 2010, but < 10% of them managed to stop.
    • Sleep’s Surprising Effects on Hunger – WSJ.com – RT @WSJ Study: sleep deprivation triggers hormonal changes that can lead to overeating, weight gain.
    • Obama to Announce Gun Task Force – President Barack Obama will on Wednesday announce the first step on gun control following the Newtown school shootings: an interagency task force, led by Vice President Joe Biden, charged with guiding the administration’s continuing response.The announcement will be the third time in five days Obama has addressed the massacre that killed 20 first-graders and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. And it will follow a call on Friday for “meaningful action” and his Sunday pledge to use the White House to “engage” Americans to prevent mass shootings.
    • Magazine Clips, Background Checks Lead Gun Talk – All of a sudden a dam broke, and it’s OK for members of Congress to talk about guns. The discussion is civil and calm for now, and everyone hopes that means sanity will prevail when it comes to new firearms policies.“I think elected officials are thinking about trying a little experiment. They might try to get the policy right in the hopes that the politics will take care of themselves,” said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, an organization run by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.In an incredibly divided Congress, it seems ridiculous to assume lawmakers would focus on policy before politics. (For Exhibit A of political gamesmanship, look at the back and forth on a fiscal-cliff deal on Tuesday.) But on guns, it turns out there is a lot of rational agreement among even gun enthusiasts about trying to protect innocent people from being killed by them.

      New rules being tossed around by lawmakers include banning high-capacity magazine clips, the kind that allow hundreds of rounds to be fired at a time, and tightening up background checks for gun purchases. Existing gun laws could also be enforced with greater regularity, such as compelling or enticing states to do a better job of reporting red flags like drug abuse or domestic violence to a national crime database.

    • New GOP polling firm goal: Catch up with Dems – The Republican polling community is about to get a shake-up.With the GOP still reeling from its defeats in the 2012 election, a new Republican polling firm is seeking to help the party bounce back with a fresh stream of data on the state of the electorate.The outfit, Harper Polling, launches this week with the goal of putting the party on parity with Democrats in the field of IVR polling – a term that stands for interactive voice response polling, commonly known as “robo-polling.”

      For several cycles now, Democrats have benefited from a high-volume, relatively inexpensive flow of survey data from the company Public Policy Polling, which takes hundreds of polls in any given cycle checking up on individual races and national issue debates. Some of those surveys are released to the public, while others are conducted for private purposes by Democratic campaigns and interest groups.

    • Flap’s California Blog @ Flap Twitter Digest for 2012-12-18 – Flap’s California Blog – Flap’s California Blog @ Flap Twitter Digest for 2012-12-18
    • Flap’s Blog @ Flap Twitter Daily Digest for 2012-12-18 – Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Flap’s Blog @ Flap Twitter Daily Digest for 2012-12-18 #tcot
    • My Daily Twitter Digest for 2012-12-18 – Locum Tenens (Temporary) Dentist – Gregory Cole, D.D.S. – My Daily Twitter Digest for 2012-12-18
    • Behind the Curtain: Grand old white male party gets diversity memo – Republicans are in full panic mode about being the party of old, white, straight, conservative men for years to come — and struggling big time with how to change things.Under pressure from party leaders, most Republicans have chucked the anti-gay marriage, anti-illegal immigrant hostility — at least in public — that defined the party the past three elections. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other prominent Republicans are privately warning conservatives to put a sock in it when it comes to arguments that turn off large swaths of voters, sources tell us. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy is doing the same on the House side.
    • The Morning Flap: December 18, 2012 – Flap’s Blog – The Morning Flap: December 18, 2012 #tcot
    • Byron York: Anxiety rises as Americans face start of Obamacare | Mobile Washington Examiner – Anxiety rises as Americans face start of Obamacare #tcot
    • Log In – The New York Times – President Delivers a New Offer on the Fiscal Crisis to Boehner #tcot
  • Twitter

    Flap’s Blog @ Flap Twitter Daily Digest for 2012-12-18