Rubio rising
Stephen F. Hayes calls Marco Rubio “the most important freshman senator” in this Weekly Standard article.
Rubio not only won handily in Florida, he also gave a great and widely-admired acceptance speech. He’s one of the rising stars of the Republican Party, who along with Chris Christie of New Jersey has captured the attention of the public and whose bedrock fiscal conservatism is highly thought of by the Tea Party movement. And in this day and age, it doesn’t hurt that he’s young, smart, handsome, inspirational without being saccharine, and Hispanic.
But Rubio’s obvious talents went largely unappreciated by the conventional Republican leadership at the start of the race. Almost to a person, they endorsed his opponent Charlie Crist until their hands were forced when the latter ditched the party and become an Independent. There were a few surprising exceptions, however, and one of them was Jim DeMint, who showed remarkable prescience and was nearly alone in seeing Rubio as a very impressive candidate on first meeting him:
Rubio told DeMint and his staff that he was in the race for the duration, and he did so in a manner that left a strong impression. Rubio told DeMint that his parents had come from Cuba seeking a better life. His parents had worked in the hospitality industry. It wasn’t glamorous, but they understood that the harder they worked the more opportunities they could provide for their four children. It hadn’t been this way in Cuba, even before the revolution, and Rubio explained, with great passion, that he felt a moral obligation to do whatever he could to make sure his children had the same opportunities. “I remember my eyes welling up,” says DeMint. Others in the room remember the same thing. “You get pretty hardened in Washington. But I thought, this guy is for real. We don’t meet many people like him in Washington.”…
DeMint was angry that the NRSC had supported Crist. “If you listen to what the moderates have said””we need youth, we need minorities, we need women. And here we have this young Cuban American who had proved himself as speaker of the House in Florida. And the committee was dissing him and ignoring him.
And now that Rubio has proven the NRSC wrong and DeMint right, the senator from South Carolina has another prediction, a surprisingly selfless one:
“Marco Rubio is a natural leader and is likely to be a leader of our party,” says DeMint. “In five years, no one will remember Jim DeMint, and Marco will be president.”
So i guess we are going to stare at the magicians empty hand and go wow when something happens?
An ICBM sized missile was launched 35 miles off the coast of california, and no one knows whose it is, since the navy denies it.
the main story spin is really just a made up thing by the person who said it wasnt a tomahawk…
he said it may be a show of military might…
but alas, when you do that, you dont shoot from your area to some unknown place in the middle ocean, you shoot from near THEIR area…
this is a, we have you by the short and curlies kind of thing…
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/09/national/main7036716.shtml
lets instead keep trying to pretend that things have not changed and that in a few weeks, and a couple of years we have fixed things by voting.
what SEEMS to be relevent today, will not be when the inflation hits. one center is predicting 50 dollars for a lb of sugar…
you really think that if that happens, Marco Rubio and all this kabuki theater will mean anything?
basically…
if this icbm missle was NOT a US missle..
they just showed how we could have lost the west coast yesterday, and not had ANY warning, time, or even response..
that is, somethign happened, the news is not saying, no one is covering it, and if it aint us, its a very bad thing for stability.
rocket
This image captured by a KCBS News helicopter shows an unidentified projectile launched from an unknown point in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Los Angeles, Nov. 8, 2010.
wwwimage.cbsnews.com/images/2010/11/09/image7036732g.jpg
half way through the comments CBS cut them so you cant read them…
after hours of people saying they don’t know, they now claim its a US missile launch…
do we believe them?
i don’t know…
the US launched it meme comes from the musings of the first person to comment on the fact its not a tomahawk. that underwear stuck to the wall, and so everyone is reporting its a US secret test with no basis in any fact!!!!!!!!!
so its like watching a made up reasonable sounding point into a validity it never had, as it gets passed from news poitn to news point, with NORAD saying they dont know and are launching an investigation
the likely culprits are China and Russia, and MAYBE north korea.
personally, as part of national security efforts, such launches within views of urban areas should not result in no one anywhere in the chain not being able to even say it was a test!
and the newer articles are throwing in commentary as to deaths of civilians by US in afghanistan… (which of course relates, right?)
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/150322.html
I have an acquaintance here in North Florida by the name of Art Graham. He’s a former city councilman and a recent appointee to the local Public Service Commission.
He’s as conservative as they come and very sympathetic to the Tea Party. Yet he supported Charlie Crist for governor to the point that he became annoying to those of us in his inner and outer circle.
When a friend of mine asked him why he wouldn’t support the obviously better candidate in Rubio, he responded that it was essentially (and yes I’m paraphrasing a second hand discussion here) out of loyalty/obligation to the political leverage that he had earned through Christ’s patronage. He said he would only change his endorsement if Meeks dropped out to and it became a 2 man race.
From a local headline: “Governor Charlie Crist appointed Jacksonville City Councilman, Art Graham to the Florida Public Service Commission.”
For the Record I’m still a fan of Art Graham and I think he has a bright political future. But I think that people underestimate this sort of “loyalty” at all levels of politics. You don’t bite the hand that made you unless you have absolutely NO choice.
My reaction, favorable overall, to Rubio’s victory speech is here at the Belmont Club.
(Since Neo has expressed admiration for Richard Fernandez, I trust she is not offended by my directing traffic to his site. However, I request that responses, if any, to me be posted here.)
Most of the material in Neo’s link is impressive and positive, but I was put off by Rubio’s connections to the Bushes and Huckabee. It’s inevitable that as Florida Speaker, Rubio would have worked with Governor Jeb Bush. Tax Hike Mike Huckabee is a different story.
I’m receptive, but I’m not sold.
Art,
I think the key is (as an ex Navy enlisted) I don’t know what anybody in the blogosphere can add to the story even if ex-military.
It’s a big story with nothing to add.
We need answers from Obama as he is the where the buck stops.
It was despicable how Rubio was treated by the debate moderator.
It was similar to Clarence Thomas treatment.
The “missile” appears to have been a jet contrail. See this:
http://uncinus.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/4/
More importantly, Marco Rubio isn’t a hyphenated-American. In that, he provides exactly the kind of inspiration this country needs.
Rubio and Allen West were the two victories I most celebrated Tuesday night. They are the face of either a new Republican Party. Or if the Republicans attempt to minimize their future they will be the seed for a new third party.
I too am thrilled that Rubio won, and he appears to be one of our most promising rising stars.
Unfortunately, idiots like Mark Levin are using their early support to bash anyone they don’t think got on board soon enough. Whoever said political correctness doesn’t exist on the right as well?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/rubios-rise_516107.html
Artfldgr, looks like you’re the one looking at comtrails from jets while the other hand has slipped your attention. Hmmmm.
re “idiots like Mark Levin”
Blasphemy!
Seriously, though, Levin can be prickly as hell, and sometimes he carries on with the “I did it first!” line a little too much for my taste — but an idiot? Never.
Mark Levin es el senor.
I will never forget Jim DeMint.He stood up to this administration; he defied them and went to Honduras on his own dime(much to Kerry’s chagrin) and helped save that country from the leftists.
A tip of the hat to Sen.DeMint, a real hero,IMO.
S.Graham: I saw a minute or two of an interview with DeMint yesterday that indicated he might be planning a run for president in 2012.
Ugh. No more “stars.”
SteveH
the station had 10 minutes of film taken from a helicopter, you can see a chinook helicopter in the vid. no one is asking them what they saw.
helicopters generally have to be over a certain minimum, and such gives them a farther view over the horizon than a person on the ground.
the distance to the source was way within this point, and thats what caught the eye of the pilot, who then shot 10 minutes of footage with lots of closeups.
what would the government say if it WAS a launch or accidental launch?
you realize that we lost several H bombs by accident?
one off the coast of the US, and one around spain…
oops…
G20 meets in south korea…
China has been making big shows of late, from shooting a satellite, to surfacing a undetected submarine in the middle of US war games…
lets put this in perspective…
the chinese hold several trillion dollars in debt…
hyper inflation, would mean that I might be able to pay off the loan after a short while out of house money (its always interesting to convert your currency to rupiah, and see 50 dollars become 50,000 rupiah)
from march
Mr. Johnson, a former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, estimated that China owns about $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, or nearly half the $2.37 trillion stock of Treasury debt held by “foreign official” owners.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The amount of U.S. debt held by China is even higher than that, said Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University.
Under the widely held assumption that 70 percent of China’s $2.4 trillion in foreign exchange reserves is invested in dollar-denominated bonds, Mr. Prasad told the commission that China probably holds about $1.7 trillion in U.S. government debt.
That would include the more than $400 billion in debt issued by U.S. government agencies, such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose obligations are liabilities of the U.S. government, Mr. Prasad said.
so lets say they have 2 trillion…
the monetizing the debt game they are playing will wipe out 20% of the dollar (on top of what has been whiped out which we havent felt yet, but it WILL be here by end of next year)…
that means that China loses 400,000,000,000 in value… do you think that this is not just the profit that they hoped to get on the bonds, but actually is banging into principal value…
let me put it this way
Obama tries to take mone from us through inflationary measures as a way to tax us without a law…
he is doing the same to China!!!!!!!!!
brazil, germany, etc…
basically, everything we may have bought from china in 10 years may end up being free if we decide to default…
is that enough of a reason to show a real show of force to slap someone silly about the seriousness of the game he and his crew are playing?
ergo… if this keeps going, i will pay the Chinese out of house money in the near future.
do you think THAT might be big enough?
Oh, and if your going to bring up the blogger who has it down to 808
Bahneman wonders if he is the first to call it: “I did a lot of extrapolation of what flights could be at the right position (off the coast) at the right altitude (for contrail formation) and came down to two possibilities: UPS Flight 902 (UPS902) or America West Flight 808 (AWE808).”
and he goes on to say that 808 made a copy contrail the next day
but then where is the contrail for 902 if 808 and it are so close? and there are other planes around too
so we have huge contrails but only from one plane
“We can’t determine the exact source of the contrail because we don’t know its location, trajectory or altitude,” he told FoxNews.com. “Remember, we did a radar replay of an area based on MEDIA REPORTS of the location of the contrail, not on any precise location of the contrail.”
It could have been an accidental launch of a test by american sub. a launch by a ship which is pretty easy for truck launch to be cut down and put on. a launch by a submarine…
when the long video was up it was really easy to see more detail than the short that’s now dominant..
oh… and JANES says it was a missile too..
But Rubio’s obvious talents went largely unappreciated by the conventional Republican leadership at the start of the race.
Give the Republican leadership a break! They were busy picking Dede Scozzafava to run in upstate NY and bashing Sarah Palin.
Jeez! They can’t be everywhere at once!