From Peter Hannaford at The American Spectator:

She’s tall, blonde and looks you straight in the eye on meeting. You tell her about a local shipping port issue. She asks for more details and clearly understands the economic significance of the issue in the greater scheme of things.

A few minutes later she’s at the podium telling her personal story in an engaging way, then shifting to the very large problems facing the state. In clear, crisp fashion she tells her audience what she wants to do about them.

She is Meg Whitman and she is running for Governor of California. Like Ronald Reagan more than four decades earlier, she is traveling the state introducing herself to potential supporters in cities and towns large and small. [Read More]

The week of August 17 was a special one for the men in uniform who are considered the fathers of the modern Special Operations Forces so critical to today’s armed forces: The Marine Raiders, whose heroism in World War II was saluted with the opening of Raider Hall at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va.

The crucial role played in the Pacific by the four Raider battalions in the early days of World War II was highlighted in remarks delivered by a former U.S. Marine Corps Commandant, Gen. Alfred Grey. Raider Hall features equipment and exhibits about the Marines, who conducted amphibious landings in the island battles in the Pacific and operated behind enemy lines.  [Read More]

(H/T John Gizzi at Human Events)

Last weekend the California College Republicans met for their CR leadership retreat in Simi Valley.  The Executive Board covered the rooms and a tour of the Reagan Library.  Saturday was an intense day of trainings, including workshops on Fundraising, Media Messaging, Activism, among others.  State Senator Tony Strickland and his wife Assemblywoman Audra Strickland spoke on their experiences of running for public office.  On Sunday morning former NFL star Damon Dunn spoke on why he’s a Republican.  There were over 75 CR’s attendance.

Carly Fiorina filed papers this morning forming an exploratory committee for a US Senate  run against Babs Boxer in 2010.

From the San Jose Mercury News:

“I have received a great deal of encouragement to make a run for the Senate in 2010 from people across the political spectrum,” Fiorina said in a news release. “Today’s filing … is a logical next step in the process of evaluating running for this office.”

Fiorina will face conservative Assemblyman Chuck DeVore in the Republican primary before facing Boxer in the fall.

The creator of the now infamous Obama as The Joker poster is a Kucinich supporter from Chicago.

Still waiting for an apology from the “journalist” who said the artist must have been a conservative racist:

The Joker’s makeup in “Dark Knight” — the latest film in a long franchise that dramatizes fear of the urban world — emphasized the wounded nature of the villain, the sense that he was both a product and source of violence. Although Ledger was white, and the Joker is white, this equation of the wounded and the wounding mirrors basic racial typology in America. Urban blacks — the thinking goes — don’t just live in dangerous neighborhoods, they carry that danger with them like a virus. Scientific studies, which demonstrate the social consequences of living in neighborhoods with high rates of crime, get processed and misinterpreted in the popular unconscious, underscoring the idea. Violence breeds violence.

It is an ugly idea, operating covertly in that gray area that is always supposed to be opened up to honest examination whenever America has one of its “we need to talk this through” episodes. But it lingers, unspoken but powerful, leaving all too many people with the sense that exposure to crime creates an ineluctable propensity to crime.

Superimpose that idea, through the Joker’s makeup, onto Obama’s face, and you have subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument. Forget socialism, this poster is another attempt to accomplish an association between Obama and the unpredictable, seeming danger of urban life. It is another effort to establish what failed to jell in the debate about Obama’s association with Chicago radical William Ayers and the controversy over the racially charged sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama, like the Joker and like the racial stereotype of the black man, carries within him an unknowable, volatile and dangerous marker of urban violence, which could erupt at any time. The charge of socialism is secondary to the basic message that Obama can’t be trusted, not because he is a politician, but because he’s black.