Month: September 2012

Q:  In political debates, when is a tie a win?

A:  When the other side says it was a tie.

That’s the problem Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown faces on the morning after his first debate (of four scheduled) with Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren.  WBUR political analyst and former Republican political consultant Todd Domke scored last night’s debate a tie; his Democratic counterpart Dan Payne scored it a clear victory for Warren.

That seemed to be the general consensus:  Brown had some good moments, particularly towards the end of the debate, but he started off poorly and Warren was, for the most part, steady throughout.

Warren also repeatedly aimed at one of Brown’s weak spots:  a vote for Scott Brown is a vote for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell…and Environment & Public Works Chairman Jim Imhofe…etc.

Scott Brown may be a “nice guy” (and Brown did himself no favors by starting the night with an attack on Warren’s ancestry, an issue that seems to fascinate the political chattering classes…and nobody else), but his problem with Massachusetts voters is that he hangs around with the wrong crowd.

Update: The Dorchester Reporter breaks the other big political news of the day in this race: Boston Mayor Tom Menino, who tends to maintain a certain distance from the party’s Amherst-Cambridge-lefty-reformist wing, will publicly endorse Warren at a rally in Roslindale, a neighborhood Menino first represented as a district city councilor nearly 30 years ago.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/

I hate to bring the candidates’ wives into the whole campaign. I mean, I know that that they are out there campaigning and are therefore fair-game, but I never said a bad word about Laura Bush is the eight years that she spent in the White House. I don’t believe in that, except in the most extraordinary of circumstances. But Ann Romney wants Republicans to leave her husband ALOOOONE, and I think it is pathetic. Ann Romney, by her own admission, has never worked a day in her life, and her husband hasn’t worked a day since he left his job as governor of Massachusetts seven years ago. She doesn’t get to tell anyone about hard work. She needs to STFU.

If you saw this diary at the great orange Satan, Amazing Open Letter to Romney (and I recommend you do if you haven’t and share it on facebook and twitter), than you need to meet the woman who wrote it, Sara Zacharias. She posted this video on YouTube and please, please, please, help make it go viral. The audio quality is not the best, but don’t let that stop you for going and listening to this brave woman in her own voice. The image of this woman and her emotions are raw and real and powerful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC3IMBt0cWM&feature=youtu.be

She also has a PayPal account you can donate to if you wish and have the resources. It is at her blog The Bucking Jenny.

Also, please go to her her Facebook page and Like it.

Perhaps her story means so much to me because I too, have a disability (though not as severe as Sarah’s), and my wife, a pancreatic cancer survivor who suffered brain damage and has Type 1 diabetes as a result of her chemotherapy, receives SSDI, which is an major part of our yearly income, and my wife also receives Medicare to cover her medical expenses. We pay income taxes each year, though obviously, not as much as before we lost our careers due to our medical issues.

We were simply more fortunate than Sarah to become disabled after working for many years as attorneys and contributing money for many years to our 401K accounts, IRA accounts, whole life insurance policies, etc. We had well paying jobs and were “successful” until, of course, our health issues took our good jobs away from us. If we had become disabled when we were younger, just after completing law school, we might very well be the same situation as Sarah.

So do what you can to make her video go viral on social media, and hopefully gain her exposure on one of the cable news shows. And as I said, contribute to her Paypal account if you can to help her and her family.

For the record, I am not related to Sarah, nor am I a friend. I know her as you do – through the power of her voice, the strength of her will, and the rightness of her convictions.

The text of her letter from her blog follows:

An Open Letter To Candidate Romney

Dear Mitt Romney:

I saw your video.

I saw you speaking candidly and off the cuff about me. Don’t get me wrong, I know that you didn’t mention me by name or anything, but we both know you were talking about me.

When you were talking about 47% of the population that is never going to vote for you because we are “dependent victims” who lazily live on government programs like food stamps, I can’t help but take personal offense. In fact, once you decided to lump in anybody who is never going to vote for you, you weren’t just talking about me, but many people I love, and about 90% of the people I know.

My children eat because of food stamps, Mr. Romney. Now, sir, I want you to picture a Wyoming cowgirl: a mother, a fighter, a righteous, determined, God-loving woman. A Rocky Mountain Grizzly Bear Mamma that would make Sarah Palin’s makeup-wearing pit bull shudder. Picture me staring you in the eyes as I ask you, “What business have you got talking about me and mine like that?”

I am watching you run your Richie Rich mouth on TV right now, with your little flag lapel pin over your heart. You brag that you will bring “12 million new jobs and rising take home pay.” Quite frankly, I have no reason to believe you or your failures in arithmetic. Even if you did manage such a feat, I’d point to the 4.5 million job head start you had thanks to President Obama saving the nation from the failed GOP policies which you use as a platform, and which nearly caused a second Great Depression.

You said that you think that 47% of Americans “think they are victims” and you even said it wasn’t your job to worry about us.

First, I must argue with you. I am not a victim. I have been beaten. I have been bullied. I have been raped. I have been addicted. I have been alone. I have been poor. I have been homeless. I have been sick and broken. I have chosen — each and every single time — to stand up and pull myself and my family out of those circumstances. I beat every one of them without any riches to aid me. I did that without any inheritance, any gifted stocks or bonds, any loans, any rich family, or any elevators for my cars. I did it because I am not a victim, I am an American. I am the Mom-in-Chief of my house and nothing less than the very best that I can provide will do. I am the product of women who forded rivers to fetch the mail after working a hard day’s labor on the Laramie high plains. I am a force to be reckoned with.

If you don’t believe me, you could ask the doctor who has to take fluid from my spine on a regular basis to preserve my ability to see, due to a rare disease. If you don’t believe me, you can ask our Ambassador to China Gary Locke, who personally invited me to a bill signing when I helped Washington State legislate protection for children in schools against bullying by sharing my own experiences. If you don’t believe me, you can ask my children who have seen me struggle but always, always provide for them. Any one of these people will tell you, that this American is not a victim.

You call me entitled. I devote every day of my life to bettering the planet I live on, with no hope of profit. I am sorry, sir, but you calling me entitled is like the pot calling the dove black. That isn’t going to work. I challenge you to stand at my side and let the American public judge which of us is entitled. I spend every dime of my and my husband’s earned income as quickly as it comes in, right here in my town. Every dime I earn and spend stays in America. I am the ultimate Job Creator. Who are you to challenge me?

You call me entitled. Every year on April 15th, I am certain that I have shown every cent that went through my pocket honestly. I dream of a day when I am well enough off to pay taxes. I fantasize of the flourish with which I will write my first check to the IRS. I would give any earthly belongings I have to be self-sufficient enough to be able to pay it forward to the society that I love.

No, you cannot challenge me, Mitt Romney. I challenge you: where are your tax returns?

I fought, I graduated at the top of my class in college, and I pursued graduate studies. I took loans against myself, believing that this would pay off, but then, in 2009, something happened.

No, it wasn’t Barack Obama’s inauguration; it was a sudden injury to my spine that ended up revealing not one but two severe spinal diseases. Since then I have been unable to finish my studies or to work. I’d like to know, Mr. Romney: how many months of physical therapy, how many of my surgeries, how many of my scars must I share to prove my devotion to wanting to be better? How many of my efforts must I submit before you’ll see me, an American citizen, as worthy of your worry? When you tell me to take responsibility for myself, I ask you: what after that?

This evening, when you justified your awful statements in that video, you said that you had said what you did because you were reassuring your donators that you could win this election. I’m sorry that you have to pander to your base like that. You seem to have sold out your soul. You have forgotten “the eye of the needle” with that wealth you’ve got. You’ve left behind Matthew 24:50. I hate to be the one to tell ya buddy, but you are not the promised one. The promised one understands that the 47% you are talking about are more than low wage workers and elderly people who worked their whole lives and paid into the system, they are the 100% that your God is concerned with when he said “Love thy neighbor.” You may pay a tithe with your wallet, but it’s obvious you’ve neglected to tithe your heart.

My husband left for work at 7 AM. It is now 9 PM and he won’t be home again for two more hours from his second job today. I spent yesterday at the emergency room. I have been waiting for two years for Social Security. I do not understand. How much more do we have to work to show you that your call for jobs isn’t enough? You must also be concerned for the whole nation, and whether we eat, and whether we have medicine. You must care if a hardworking, devoted family like mine is unable to survive after investing their best efforts. How many jobs do you expect every American to take? Three? Four?

You simply must stop and consider those you dismiss as beneath you or you cannot be our leader. It is an unwritten but widely understood rule of the presidency. I don’t know what they taught you when you were out there scalping businesses hard-won on the backs of people like that 47% you so rudely kick around, but in the real world, we care when Americans suffer. We care when you forget the young military men and women who serve our nation by sacrificing their lives. We care when Americans go hungry. We care when Americans jobs are sent overseas and rich men hide societal resources in offshore accounts. We care that we are being ripped off and even if you find profit and power in our suffering, we still exist, we still care, and we will still stand up.

See? You called me a victim, you called me entitled, you called me a lot of other things in that video, but on every count you are wrong. Just by writing you this letter, I’ve proven I am not your victim. Just by living my life of hard and dutiful effort I have proven that I am not entitled. In fact, I consider it a duty as a citizen of this Great United States to shout loudly and proudly: “Mitt Romney is not and never will be my President!”

I warn you Mr. Romney, the one thing that I have not, and will not ever lose, is my voice. I will sound it each and every one of these 50 days until Barack Obama is re-elected, we will vote with Compassion, and Wisdom, and Empathy…and you, sir, can keep your spite and your hate and your rhetoric and see your way out.

Sincerely,

Sarah Zacharias, a.k.a. The Bucking Jenny

This is what an ass-kicking looks like:

It’s also what happens when one party attracts nearly every creative person in the country.

I also get comments and letters nearly every time I take the wood saw to David Brooks, which falls into the annoying category of people telling me how I should invest my time. Helpfully, driftglass explains the purpose of our hobby. However, he neglects to mention an additional rationale…that it is just so damn fun to mock BoBo. Don’t let anyone try to convince you that David Brooks doesn’t matter because no one ever watches The Charlie Rose Show. He matters. He matters if for no other reason than he is about the best and most decent man we can possibly hope for to represent the “reasonable right” in this country, and that alone is cause for a revival of the art of bomb shelter design.

When this incredibly stupid man (who has many a time come right to the brink of understanding the conservative movement that provides him with his vast spaces for entertaining, only to shrink from the precipice) is the only adult in the Republican room, you know our country is screwed. Is there no blind soothsayer of Thebes who can scrape the scales from Mr. Brooks’ eyes? Or, as Upton Sinclair once noted, is this a case of ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it’?

Yes, Mitt Romney is running a depressing campaign, but it is many unsavory and deplorable things besides. To wit:

Was Brooks alive in 1980? Did he hear the campaign that Reagan ran? Has he looked recently at Reagan’s first budget? Everything that Mitt Romney said at that fundraiser was the inevitable result of a process that began under Barry Goldwater, when extremist economics and the sad detritus of American apartheid both got mainstreamed into the Republican party, that reached its apogee under Reagan, and that has been the ideological identity of the Republican party ever since.

Maybe we can debate about the time and location of the ‘apogee,’ because I don’t think we’ve yet reached Peak Wingnut. Not when Patrick Buchanan begat Gary Bauer and Gary Bauer begat Alan Keyes and Alan Keyes begat Michele Bachmann. No, that is not a trajectory away from the apogee (unless, by ‘apogee,’ you mean this).

Bowles-Simpson has about as much to do with modern Republicanism as an Orange County convening of the John Birch Society has to do with the Civl Rights Movement. And never the twain shall meet.

Paul Ryan, ladies and gentleman, would sooner use David Brooks’ brain as a free weight as he would see things from his point of view. He will never come around to the kind of centrism Brooks seems to believe is possible but must know is not.

I admired Rodney King when, after discovering it was legal for him to be beaten half to death by publicly-funded police, he asked why we all couldn’t just get along. But I thought he was hopelessly naïve, too. How many more billy-club blows will Brooks have to receive from publicly-funded Republican politicos before he stops asking that question?

Pew Research Center is just one polling outfit, and a bit of a pro-Obama outlier, at that. But, according to their research, Mitt Romney is the only candidate from either party to have a net-negative favorability rating in September in any election going back to at least 1988. As a cautionary tale, however, the last time the Democrat had a comparable advantage in favorability in September was in 2000, and we know how that turned out. Al Gore managed to squander his likability in the debates, and the election grew close enough to steal.

That’s probably Romney’s only hope in this situation, but he’s starting from a worse position than George W. Bush, and these numbers were compiled before the 47 percent controversy erupted.

Romney has many problems that George W. Bush didn’t share, including a party that is scurrying away from him like his name were Todd Akin. On the other hand, Romney is a more accomplished debater than George W. Bush, so he can hold out hope to do well in the debates on his own merits, rather than just dreaming that Obama sighs and rolls his eyes a lot.

The Republicans go about winning elections quite a bit differently than the Democrats. They don’t rely so much on a ground game and field offices. When Obama and Biden go into a community and hold a rally, they mine for names and organizers, and that’s really the main benefit of the event. Romney should be doing the same thing, but he’s spending as much time fundraising as he is holding events, and that could be in part because he gets no benefit from campaign events. If people don’t like you, appearing in their community doesn’t help. Still, attracting at least modestly-sized crowds should help a campaign identify enthusiastic voters who will be willing to work for the campaign, and it also helps you tighten up your voter-contact lists since you can cross-off a bunch of names that you now know will be voting for you without any nudges.

As far as I can tell, Romney’s strategy has been to load up on cash and deluge the airwaves with ads at the end of the campaign. I don’t really think he’s been forced into this strategy, either. It seems to have been the plan all along. It’s definitely a hail-mary strategy. It doesn’t invest people in the campaign. It doesn’t build a grassroots organization. It annoys people who are exposed to way too much political advertising. And it doesn’t work very well when you’ve allowed the key messenger, the candidate, to be discredited in the interim. Not only do people not like Mitt Romney, they don’t believe him. Amazingly, Bill Clinton now has a near-infinite advantage over Romney in credibility.

The Republicans’ big money advantage concerns me a lot when it comes to Senate and House races, but it causes me no heartburn in the presidential race. At this point, I pretty much want Romney to run ads because I think they’ll probably work against him.

Tim Pawlenty was supposed to be different. He was going to be the architect of a new Republican Party that focused less on the needs of the country club and more on the needs of the kind of people who shop at Sam’s Club. Then, when he began his run for president, he introduced a tax plan that “offered the bottom 20 percent an average of $23 and the top 1 percent an average of $260,000.” In June 2011, while his campaign was very much still alive, Pawlenty was asked, “What is your truth message to Wall Street?” He responded:

“It will be, ‘Get your snout out of the trough just like everybody else.’ If I am president, we will not have any more bailouts, carveouts, handouts or special deals. We will reduce the corporate tax rate from 35% to 15%. We will get rid of all the deductions, credits, or exemptions, and you will compete not based on your connections to a congressman, but connections whether you can convince consumers if you have a good product.”

Tim Pawlenty is the only man who managed to be on both John McCain and Mitt Romney’s short list for running mate. Until this morning, he was co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign. He would undoubtedly be offered a top position in a Romney administration, but today he decided to jump ship.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty will take over one of K Street’s most prestigious jobs as CEO of the Financial Services Roundtable.

The group announced Thursday morning that the former GOP candidate for president would replace longtime CEO Steve Bartlett. Pawlenty will step down as co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign to take the position.

“Tim’s leadership, vision and ability to find common ground make him the right choice to represent the broad membership of the Financial Services Roundtable,” said Tim Wilson, the group’s chairman and CEO of Allstate.

“He is exactly the kind of leader we need to continue to improve our industry’s reputation, advocate firm-but-fair regulation and help maintain our global leadership of the financial markets.”

In his new job as a top lobbyist for Wall Street, he will be the one making connections to congressmen and women, and he won’t be seeking to take away Wall Street’s “deductions, credits, or exemptions.” But, of course, he was never going to do those things as president, either. That was all a pretense.

I don’t think there is much difference between lobbying for Wall Street and serving as co-chairman of Mitt Romney’s campaign, but this spectacle shows how empty all these gestures to the middle class really are. Tim Pawlenty can take his Sam’s Club card and bite me.

If you need any more proof that the GOP is all about the plutocrats look at a speech Paul Ryan gave back in 2005 that people are looking at anew. In that speech, Rep. Ryan describes Social Security and Medicare as “socialistic” and “collectivist” and says that the Republicans’ long-term goal must be to privatize them. In his world, having your retirement money in the hands of a mutual fund manager turns you into a “capitalist” and an “owner” who won’t consider voting for the Democrats. It’s both ideological and rawly political. But, I’m sorry, a guy or a gal who is working on a General Motors assembly line is not suddenly an “owner” or a “capitalist” just because his Social Security is now dependent on the vagaries of the stock market.

These are plans to screw the middle and working classes. If you care to look with open eyes, this is as plain as Mitt Romney’s condescending attitude.

Jesus Christ is back, and he has some thoughts on Mitt Romney’s stance on immigration, using the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Apparently Jesus hasn’t seen Mitt Romney’s comments on Latinos and the rest of the 47% of us that aren’t as awesome.  

The political wiseguys in Massachusetts (and yes, I mean “guys”—check out the lack of female political experts quoted in today’s long pre-debate story in the Boston Globe for a good and typical example) have been saying for months now that Elizabeth Warren needs to prove she’s “nice”, and “approachable”, and “can connect” with average voters.  And that she can’t be too “aggressive”, or “preachy”, or “wonky”.

Meanwhile, Scott Brown continues running lots of TV ads featuring his truck, and sscrambles to keep his distance from the Republican Party (partly by never mentioning he’s a Republican).  Brown’s problem comes when interviewers ask him about specific issues and votes, as happened recently on a Boston radio show when Brown reiterated his opposition to retaining current tax rates for the first $250,000 of income if it meant increasing rates on income above $250,000.

Warren’s response?  “Today Scott Brown said he’d vote to raise taxes on hardworking middle class families…. I wouldn’t do that. I don’t want to go to Washington to vote for millionaires and billionaires; I want to fight for small businesses and middle class families. There’s a real choice in this election and you can count on me to fight for middle class families.”

Then she released a new TV ad filmed in a gym with local boxing trainer Art Ramalho talking about what a “fighter” Warren is, while Brown sides with “the big money guys”.  So much for showing her softer side.

Given that she’s climbed ahead of the “most popular politician in the Commonwealth” in recent polls, I’m beginning to think maybe the wiseguys aren’t so wise.

Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/

The New York Times reports today that thanks to the increasing loss of sea ice, Big Oil Companies in the West are in a race with China to just “Drill, Baby, Drill” and “Mine, Baby, Mine” in the previously unexploited areas of the Arctic. Previously unexploited because the Arctic was covered by a near permanent layer of sea ice and land ice. That is no longer the case:

NUUK, Greenland — With Arctic ice melting at record pace, the world’s superpowers are increasingly jockeying for political influence and economic position in outposts like this one, previously regarded as barren wastelands. […]

While the United States, Russia and several nations of the European Union have Arctic territory, China has none, and as a result, has been deploying its wealth and diplomatic clout to secure toeholds in the region. […]

… Here, as well as in Alaska, Canada and Norway, oil and gas companies are still largely exploring, although experts estimate that more than 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas reserves are in the Arctic. Warmer weather has already extended the work season by a month in many locations, making access easier.

At one point this summer, 97 percent of the surface of Greenland’s massive ice sheet was melting. At current rates, Arctic waters could be ice-free in summer by the end of the decade, scientists say.

“Things are happening much faster than what any scientific model predicted,” said Dr. Morten Rasch, who runs the Greenland Ecosystem Monitoring program at Aarhus University in Denmark. […]

And Chinese companies, some with close government ties, are investing heavily across the Arctic. In Canada, Chinese firms have acquired interests in two oil companies that could afford them access to Arctic drilling.

Indeed, despite setbacks, Big Oil is increasingly committed to drilling in the Arctic Ocean as this article from yesterday demonstrates:

WASHINGTON _ Although Shell Oil Co. is scrapping its plans to drill into potential oil reservoirs underneath the Chukchi and Beaufort seas this summer because of damaged spill-containment equipment, president Marvin Odum said the firm will not abandon its $5 billion quest for crude in the remote region.

Instead of seeking to penetrate underground zones that could contain hydrocarbons, Shell Oil Co. will focus on completing initial so-called “top-hole drilling” in the Arctic, effectively getting a 1,000-foot jump-start on its Arctic wells so they can be finished next year.

Why is this possible? Because of the loss of sea and land ice in the Arctic is in a downward death spiral:

The European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 probe confirms what the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS) at the Polar Science Center has been saying for years: Arctic sea ice volume has been collapsing faster than sea ice area (or extent) because the ice has been getting thinner and thinner.

In fact, the latest satellite CryoSat-2 data shows the rate of loss of Arctic sea ice is “50% higher than most scenarios outlined by polar scientists and suggests that global warming, triggered by rising greenhouse gas emissions, is beginning to have a major impact on the region,” as the UK Guardian reported in [January, 2012].

We could have an ice free Arctic Ocean in the summer by as early as 2016, but certainly long before previous climate models had predicted:

Given the estimated trend and the volume estimate for October–November of 2007 at less than 9,000 km3 (Kwok et al. 2009), one can project that at this rate it would take only 9 more years or until 2016 ± 3 years to reach a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean in summer. Regardless of high uncertainty associated with such an estimate, it does provide a lower bound of the time range for projections of seasonal sea ice cover.

This pattern continues, as a record for loss of Arctic sea ice was set this year, beating the prior record set in 2007:

More than 600,000 square kilometres (sq km) more ice has melted in 2012 than was ever recorded by satellites before. {…]

“In the 1970s we had 8m sq km of sea ice. That has been halved. We need it in the summer. It has never decreased like this before”.

“We knew the ice was getting thinner but I did not expect we’d lose this much this year. We broke the record by a lot”, says the NSIDC scientist Julienne Stroeve.

“The acceleration of the loss of the extent of the ice is mostly because the ice has been so thin. This would explain why it has melted so much this year. By June the ice edge had pulled back to where it normally is in September,” she says.

“The 2007 record was set when you had weather conditions which were perfect for melting. This year we didn’t have those. It was mixed. So this suggests the ice has got to a point where it’s so thin it doesn’t matter what the weather is, it’s going to melt in the summer. This could become the new normal,” says Stroeve.

Meanwhile, in America, oil and gas companies continue to run ads and donating funds to politicians and front groups in states where hydrofracking is occurring or proposed, as well as promote information on their websites, such as Chevron does, that we can produce all the “clean energy” from natural gas we want and “create jobs in America” at the same time.

Big oil is also spending big bucks this year on political “issue” ads attacking President Obama and other Democrats and promoting more drilling for oil and gas:

The Times reports that the fossil fuel industry–oil and gas–and its allies have spent nearly four times as much money as its competitors, almost all attacking the president, who, despite misgivings by environmentalists over his ‘all-of-the-above’ energy policies, is insufficiently pro-oil in their view. The report states:

“With nearly two months before Election Day on Nov. 6, estimated spending on television ads promoting coal and more oil and gas drilling or criticizing clean energy has exceeded $153 million this year, according to an analysis by The New York Times of 138 ads on energy issues broadcast this year by the presidential campaigns, political parties, energy companies, trade associations and third-party spenders.

“That tally is nearly four times the $41 million spent by clean-energy advocates, the Obama campaign and Democratic groups to defend the president’s energy record or raise concerns about global warming and air pollution.”

The same oil companies that fund climate deniers at the Heartland Institute, who are planning a curriculum for our schools that will teach our kids climate change is at best, controversial and unproven:

Internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green reveal that the Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy.” This effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.

How much more money will Big Oil spend to attack Democrats, attack clean alternative and renewable energy, fund climate deniers and seek to gain access to oil and gas in the Arctic? My guess: Whatever it takes. Oh, by the way, guess how heavily Big Oil is financing Romney’s campaign? Officially the tally is $2,206,735. That is the highest amount for any single candidate running for any office this year. Off the books in anonymous contributions to Conservative SuperPacs? Your guess is as good as mine.