You’ve heard Dunn’s work, even if you didn’t know who was playing the bass. He was part of the Mar-Keys and later Booker T and the MG’s, which group also doubled as the house band for the Stax-Volt recording studio when Booker T wasn’t playing with them. Dunn recorded with Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, and Arthur Conley as well as many others during his career. He was also, famously, part of the Blues Brothers band.

See? You did too know who he was. And now he’s gone. Let’s hope a thousand young bass players pick up where he left off. We could use some more funk on the bottom.

And now, links!

• Jeff Goldstein has a heck of a question about selective rule enforcement and our money.
• If you really think President Obama’s “brave” stand on gay marriage is anything but a political calculation, guess again.
• Ooh! Ed Driscoll has treated us to a shiny new Silicon Graffiti!
• I like this bit of advice for busy mothers unearthed by Pundette. C.S. Lewis is always a good place to go for a useful bit of inspiration.
• Here are more people killed by the Obama administration’s Operation Fast and Furious. But we don’t care about them since they’re Mexicans, right?
• It’s treason! Treason, I say! TREEEEEAAAAAASOOOOONNNN!
• Arthur Brooks’ interesting life (from horn player in a symphony orchestra to the American Enterprise Institute) has given him a particular vision of success and helplessness and why free enterprise makes for strong adults. His new book, The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise looks to be an interesting read. I’ll let you know how it is once it arrives this week!

I slipped into my Pure Geek outfit for the second half. I really like that particular outfit — I am a geek by birth and upbringing — and it’s nice to get away from politics for a few minutes and talk about the fun parts of life. So, you’ll get some Avengers talk, an early review of my new iPhone, and some hockey love just in time for the second round of the playoffs. Note that the show was recorded before My Beloved Capitals bowed out, so there will be less pain and far more optimism in my voice than you’d expect.

I also co-hosted Strictly Right last week with Ben Swenson. Andrew Lawton, man about town, was down for the day, and I was glad to jump in and help out. Take a listen!

The Delivery - Episode 146

In the second half, I talked about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and why I believe this year ought to be the last year it is held. We desperately need independent journalists and I’m not quite sure how that happens when, once a year, they gather among the celebrities and politicians on whom they are support to report and perform like a bunch of 12 year-old girls backstage at a Justin Bieber concert. I wasn’t explicitly political — this happens during Republican administrations as well as Democratic — but there are some obvious political considerations. How, exactly, do you “afflict the comfortable” when you are yourself one of the comfortable?

The Delivery - Episode 145

We can probably chalk Chen’s abandonment up to “realism”, the cowardly school of foreign policy that puts us on the side of dictators and against those who only want to lives their lives with a fraction of the liberty that is our birthright. I would be very happy if we threw every single “realist” out of public life forever and turned our vast power toward crushing every dictatorship we can find, but unfortunately, this particular way of handling our foreign relationships has a pretty solid fan base on the right as well (most notably among libertarians, who want as much freedom as they can get but don’t seem very willing to help other folks get some too).

I hope we dump the realists in time to save Chen Guancheng’s life, but I doubt it.

And now, links!

• If Arianna Huffington truly is on her way out at AOL, that’s a good thing for new media. It’s high time people learned that building an empire on free labor isn’t exactly an innovation. Ask the Egyptians.
• Unfortunately, Kwame Kilpatrick is not exactly a rarity among Democratic politicians. You have only to look at the Washington, DC city government to find more than a couple outright crooks.
• The White House has had three years to plan for the President’s first official campaign event, including a couple dozen unofficial campaign stops the administration said were official government trips, so perhaps the campaign should be just a teeny bit worried that it got an audience about the size of a Washington Wizards basketball game.
• Gather ’round, folks, and hear the story of Fauxcahontas and her Composite Women.
• Remember the days when 6% unemployment was “no cause for celebration in the streets” and 4.4% was “the worst jobs record since the Great Depression”? Good times. Good times.
• New Media: 1; Filthy Occupier Criminals: 0.
• Duane Lester did a bit of home-town journalism and just look at what happened!
• If you own a movie theater, know a movie theater owner, or go into a movie theater, please read this piece by John Nolte and do everything in your power to make it happen. Movie theaters should be good places to go but, for a long time, they have not been.
• This is a movie review. This is a whiny and pathetic political screed dressed up like a movie review.

Newt was a good candidate — a man of wide vision, with real plans to pry the government off our throats and a track record for making government smaller. Indeed, he was the only candidate who could claim he made decreased the power and scope of government when he had his hands on real political power. Neither Mitt Romney nor Rick Santorum could claim that, though they both tried in some form or another. After a big win in South Carolina, Newt got buried by the Mitt Romney money machine in Florida and spent a lot more time carping about negative campaign ads than he did talking up his optimistic vision for America (which, I believe, is what made him an early front-runner).

That turn in the tone of his campaign after South Caroline ultimately doomed his candidacy. Not only did he turn his attention from the incompetence of the Obama administration and the perfidity of the lapdogs in the MSM, but he changed the tenor of his message from optimism to complaints about his Republican rivals’ tactics. More than that, though, he changed (from my POV at least) the way his campaign ran — from a hungry and creative money-poor message machine to a more extravagant operation. Except that Newt, who hadn’t been running for President the past 6 years, didn’t have the money and GOP insider help Romney has. That change in operation put Gingrich in debt and unable to capitalize on his opponents’ many mistakes.

I still like Newt. We conservatives need someone to remind us, insistently at times, that our goals ought to seem ridiculous and grandiose sometimes. He tool a lot of heat for his talk about neuroscience and a moon base, but I’d rather have more of that. Aspirations are important. Vision matters. If we conservatives want to grab and hold America’s imagination, so that they let us do all the things we want (mundane and otherwise), we’re going to have to spin tales of the amazing things America can do once we get utopian progressive government out of the picture.

Democrats no longer dream big dreams. They talk about bringing down the achievers, about paving over the grand accomplishments of our parents and grandparents. When once a Democrat challenged us to go to the moon, our current President challenges us to build windmills and bridges. We can do those things — indeed we almost certainly will in some form because they must be done — but we need greater challenges. We need someone with a glint of “Well, why the hell not?” in his eye to remind us that we are America, that we have done the seemingly impossible, and we can do so again.

Our deficit seems out of control, but we can rein it in, and not in 20 or 25 years. Our manned space program sits dismantled, but we can build not just one new program but many thanks to visionaries like Elon Musk and Bert Rutan. Thousands of us succumb to incapacitating or deadly diseases, but we can beat them as we’ve beaten polio and malaria. It requires vision. We don’t have that in this Presidential race and I hope Newt sticks around to make sure it’s a part of the discussion.

“Over the weekend Dr. Armendariz offered his resignation, which I accepted. I respect the difficult decision he made and his wish to avoid distracting from the important work of the agency. We are all grateful for Dr. Armendariz’s service to EPA and to our nation,” said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in a statement Monday.

In his resignation letter to Jackson, Armendariz reiterated that the 2010 comments did not reflect his approach to the job.

“As I have expressed publicly, and to you directly, I regret comments I made several years ago that do not in any way reflect my work as regional administrator. As importantly, they do not represent the work you have overseen as EPA Administrator,” he wrote.

This, as we know, is manifestly untrue. Armendariz reflected perfectly the work to which Lisa Jackson has set the EPA. As I noted last week, the EPA did find themselves a perfectly innocent target called Range Resources, and promptly crucified them right out where every other oil and gas drilling company could see. Jackson and her horde of legionnaires have done everything in their power to make sure that we do not drill for our own oil or gas, even if that meant trumping up charges against innocents.

The real story of L’Affaire Armendariz is that he unwittingly spoke truth to power about what our government under the extremists who currently run it thinks of us and the society we have built. We are flawed people in need of their guiding hands and if we resist, well they’ll just nail a few of us to the trees as a little lesson to everyone else about who truly wields the power in Progressive America.

I suppose that’s a good thing. After all, under the former Chairman Michael Steele, the RNC was a big-spending non-entity with a mission statement that seemed to contain one line: Promote Michael Steele. We on the right should be glad that the RNC has someone who recognizes that electoral politics is a contact sport and you won’t win if you aren’t in the game.

However, it’s not enough to react, even with a room of really smart 20-somethings who spend a bit of time on Twitter. What the RNC really needs is a smaller team of people who have been around new media long enough to know that blogs and videos and Twitter and Facebook can be used to create a narrative and not simply respond to one already set by Democrats.

Priebus would be a lot better off if he scrapped his “war room” and hired this guy, whose article “Writing for Relevance”, sets up a bare bones strategy for how the GOP can stop reacting to events in new media and start setting the trends. While he’s at it, Priebus could also toss a few consultant bucks at Stacy McCain for some ideas about how to start a few web sites that could own the election cycle not just for six months but for entire Presidential administrations.

And now, links!

• Once upon a time the Obama administration thought it could wage a war on family farms and the notion that kids should do chores. The President lost that war. Have you noticed how often the President loses when he tries to gin up some fake “war” on something or another?
• Barack Obama, the Contender.
• Three years ago, the Democrats in the Senate passed a budget. They have refused to pass one since then. Go ahead and try that yourself. See how well it works for you.
• If you were waiting for harry Potter to show up and bring the price of gas down, you can stop now. According to the Secretary of the Interior, he’s not coming to help. Unfortunately, neither will the Secretary of the Interior who, unlike Potter, has the ability to help.
• If you’ve been to college in the past ten years, you know that Rule One of writing a term paper is “Thou Shalt Not Rely on Wikipedia to Do They Work”. If only the President obeyed that rule.
• Da Tech Guy knows why old media hates new media.
• At whose feet, exactly, do we lay the brutal beatings of white victims by black assailants seeking “Justice for Trayvon”? I only ask because I am told, by sundry in the MSM, that it is my fault the actions of hispanic/black/white George Zimmerman are on my head. If I must carry that sin, if sin it was, then who carries these sins?
• What does your Klout score mean, if you’re engaged with social media? Nothing at all. As best I can tell, as an early Klout adopter, it measures how often you get re-tweeted by famous people, whether those famous people actually engage on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ or not. As such, your Klout score is a measure of celebrity, not necessarily influence. It is certainly not a measure of who actually uses social media platforms well.
• One day I want to meet the Pioneer Woman, if for no other reason than to thank her for this Bruschetta Chicken recipe. Well, and several other recipes.

Hey, did you know President Obama ate a dog? He did. He proclaimed it “tough”, unlike most people who would proclaim it “OH MY GOD!! EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW!! GET ME SOMETHING TO DRINK! WHAT ARE YOU, INSANE? WHY DID YOU JUST FEED ME DOG???”.

After that, I talked a bit about my time at Blog Con and a couple conversations I had about community and why it’s vital that conservatives build communities around things that have nothing at all to do with politics. I think in the past couple of years, we on the right have crept a bit closer to embracing the arts (especially music and movies) as important to what we’re doing politically. Very few people can survive on politics alone and I think it’s critical for us to build places where people can form their own communities around interests that aren’t political so that when they do want to get involved, they have a group of like-minded friends around them to help.

The Delivery - Episode 144