Frank Strategies: The Blog

Not a bad gig if you can get it.

Astronauts in the International Space Station fly directly over an erupting volcano off the coast of Japan. More photos here. In a related story, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi today called on the EPA to sanction the volcano for contributing to “climate change.”

This morning between 6:00 and 6:30 am, a major thunderstorm rolled through Northern Virgina – just as polls opened for rush-hour voters in today’s Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Now check out below what’s hitting the same area as potential evening rush-hour voters are on their way home.

With Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran needing as many votes as possible in Northen Virginia, will these two huge rush-hour storms in NOVA provide the margin of victory for rural, downstate candidate Creigh Deeds?

UPDATE, June 10, 7:41 a.m.: OK, so Deeds won, but Mother Nature didn’t exactly provide the winning margin.

In this morning’s Washington Post, Dana Milbank provides further evidence that the grassroots energy level on the left continues to wane.

Even as his Post colleague Dan Eggen attempts to put a positive spin on attendance at this week’s “America’s Future Now” conference by describing it as the gathering of “several thousand liberal activists,” Milbank tells the real story on the opposite page:

“(Group Co-Director Roger) Hickey estimates attendance dropped from 2,500 last year to 1,500 this year, and even that may overstate things. At yesterday morning’s four concurrent “issue briefings,” 585 chairs were set out. Only 213 of them were occupied, including just 15 for the session on global warming. “Radio row” was quiet, the “TV Terrace” was empty, and two people sat typing on “Blogger Boulevard.”

This is completely consistent with what we’ve seen at many other political events this year. Grassroots conservatives and libertarians, newly freed from the Bush and McCain albatrosses and aghast at government bailouts and debt piling up at previously unimaginable levels, are staging massive Tea Party rallies and packing the Virginia GOP Convention literally to the rafters of the RIchmond Coliseum.

Meanwhile, liberal Tea Parties draw embarrassingly small crowds, and as the video below shows, even Democratic debates in the the biggest campaign of the year are playing to half-empty rooms.

It’s indisputable that since January the grassroots energy has shifted monumentally to the right. The only question now is whether it’ll last long enough to translate to electoral victories in November of 2009 and 2010.

Time magazine has a heartbreaking series of photos here chronicling the ruins of Detroit. Here are a few of the pics:

Want to make your town look like this? Just ask your U.S. Senators to support the Employee Free Choice Act, aka “card check,” which will expand that oh-so-successful Detroit/UAW business model to the rest of America! Because these photos show how well unionization works out. Right?

Andy Roth at the Club for Growth has started a Twitter feed that aims to list every entity asking for a taxpayer-funded bailout.

My personal favorite (so far) – the “Halfway to Concord” blog wants a bailout.

Just in time for the Inauguration, somebody’s created the “Obama Speech Generator.”

Simply type in a bunch of adjectives, nouns, verbs and a body part and presto – you can see how your speech compares to Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau’s final product.

Pretty cool.

Still, we all know this is really a do-it-yourself Inauguration drinking game, right? Simply type in your words (“better,” “hope,” “change,” and “heart,” anyone?) then take a drink every time the new President utters them. Voila… you’re hammered by 1:00 on Tuesday! Cheers!

HT: Mashable

The Politico’s popular Shenanigans blog reported yesterday that Fatty’s Custom Tattooz in DC is offering a free Obama tattoo if you also get another tattoo priced at over $200.

However, check out the photo that accompanies the post on the left side of the pic below – that tattoo doesn’t look anything like Barack Obama. It does, however, appear that Fatty’s may in fact actually be offering free tattoos of former Congressman William “Cold Cash” Jefferson, the disgraced Louisiana lawmaker who was caught with $90,000 in ill-gotten cash in his freezer.

What do you think? Is that a tattoo of Barack Obama or William Jefferson?