Paul Nehlen's 15 Seconds of Fame

As your representative cartoonist from House Speaker Paul Ryan's congressional district, I've had a front row seat to Tea Partisan Paul Nehlen's challenge to the Congressman in this Tuesday's Republican primary.

Ordinarily, Nehlen's candidacy would find itself desperate for any attention. Wisconsin's First Congressional District is home to no television stations, and the media in the district generally accord non-incumbent congressional candidates the same level of coverage that national media grant to Green and Libertarian candidates.

But then Donald Trump decided he'd pay Ryan back for the Congressman having spent the presidential primary season "just not there yet" to endorse the mercurial business mogul. Trump praised Nehlen for running "a very good campaign" and declared that as far as endorsing the House Speaker, Trump was "just not there yet," either.

Suddenly, Nehlen found himself welcome to appear on national TV to fulminate against Ryan for supposedly supporting porous borders and job-killing trade pacts. California-based liberal pundit Mickey Kaus published an open letter to Wisconsin Democrats to cross over to vote for Nehlen, forsaking the two candidates running for the Democratic nomination.

I don't know of any push by local Democrats to encourage crossover votes for Nehlen, but then I'm not close to anybody who would be behind such a strategy. It would be just desserts for the party that has been free to cross over to vote for the weakest Democrat in every race for the 1st CD seat for the past 20 years.

I do know that a bunch of signs have suddenly cropped up along our highways, printed on Ryan's shade of kelly green (but not in his Gill Extra Bold font) with messages like:

Corporations first! Vote for Ryan.

Open our borders! Vote for Ryan.

Don't be selfish! Vote for Ryan and give your job to a foreign worker. 

Those might well come from the Nehlen campaign, which already had plenty of Vote Nehlen signs festooning our roads, or from a shadowy organization called "AmericaSpeaks" that took a full-page ad for Nehlen in this morning's newspaper. We also got a mailing yesterday paid for by "Volunteers for Nehlen" headlined "Speaker Ryan - Congressman for Beijing." After a series of bullet points using the ¥uan symbol for bullets, the tag line is "Vote August 9 for Speaker Ryan and Make China Great Again!"

Trump finally endorsed Ryan this Friday, which probably carries little or no weight here anyway. Conservative talk radio is solidly pro-Ryan and has hardly warmed to Donald Trump since leading the Never Trump movement in the Wisconsin presidential primary.

To cap off Paul Nehlen's day, he was refused entry to Trump's rally in Green Bay. He accused the state Republican Party of keeping him out of the rally even though he had two tickets to get in, but the state GOP says it was the Trump campaign that turned him away.

A Trump spokesperson supports the Wisconsin GOP version of events.

My Phone Call With Romney

I sat through 20 minutes or so of a live telephone "town hall" call with Mitt Romney on the other end last night. Wisconsin's primary is coming up on Tuesday, and Romney and his SuperPAC are spending heavily in this state. (I haven't seen any ads by the Santorum campaign, although his "Red White and Blue" superPAC has one ad up on TV.)

While I was on the phone call, there was one questioner who thought high gas prices were caused by oil company profiteering. Mitt told her he disagreed and blamed Obama for not drilling, mining and fissioning enough. Mitt saw great potential in natural gas, but avoided any reference to fracking.

The other questioners lobbed easy pitches like what his first executive order would be, whether he'd consider Paul Ryan as his running mate, whether he agreed that Governor Scott Walker is a national hero, and what he thought of President Obama's "I'll have more flexibility after the election" comment to Russian President Medvedev. For the record, Romney listed five first orders, from stopping "Obamacare" to opening up government contracts to non-union shops. Mitt praised Ryan's budget plan while promising that his own budget plan would balance the budget sooner (and said naming a running mate hadn't occurred to him yet). You'll also be astounded to hear that Mitt applauded Darth Snotwalker and disapproved of that flexibility remark.

If I had answered the call on the phone in the computer room, I could have put it on speaker. I could have live-blogged it and at least not have felt it a complete waste of time. But 20 minutes is about as long as I can stand to hold a phone to my ear and listen to someone else's conversation.

Between questions, a staffer urged us to press "1" if we agreed with Romney and would vote for him. I never heard anything about what to press if I wanted to ask a question. At least when I sit through these "town hall" calls from Paul Ryan, listening to all the questions from birthers who want to press the congressman about what he's going to do about exposing the president as a socialist or to compensate the Notch Babies, they regularly tell you how to ask a question. For Romney's call, I have to assume that even the woman who didn't like oil company profiteering first had to tell the Romney campaign that she liked and would vote for him.

Oh, and the staffer pronounced Mequon "McWahn." (It's "MECK-wahn.")

Q Toon: Stocks Make a Comeback

This week's cartoon would have had more oomph if Rick Santorum hadn't managed to fritter away his lead in the Michigan polls with a lousy debate performance and those truly goofy remarks about President Kennedy and the snobbishness of a college education. And then there was his open appeal for Democratic crossover votes; with all the talk in the media about how Romney needed a convincing win in Michigan or it would show how weak his candidacy is, I wonder why I never heard anything about how anything less than an overwhelming Santorum win there would mean that he had only won due to crossover mischief.

You do have to wonder why Santorum thought that criticizing JFK was a good idea. That kind of talk just might sell in the Bible Belt -- maybe -- but a lot of Catholic voters up north still revere the assassinated president. Even if they're rock-ribbed pro-life Republicans today. And saying that college education is for snobs? Even voters who haven't been to college themselves are likely to aspire to sending their children there.

Well, anyway, here's a cartoon about returning America to the 1650's, when everybody lived according to Christian morals whether they liked it or not, and folks didn't send their kids to snobby colleges, and JFK couldn't have been elected president. But I think the guy in the stocks on the right might have a difference of opinion about the 1950's not having been so bad.

Q Toon: The Ron Paul Report

Oh, Iowa! You send Ron Paul to the top of the Anti-Romney heap in the week before your caucuses (cauci?), so I go to work to churn out this cartoon about Ron Paul and his lovely little newsletters, cramping my hand creating all the teeny tiny type, and what do you do? At the last minute, you decide to make Rick Santorum the story, after stubbornly ignoring him for an entire year!

How do you expect anybody to pay any attention to you in the future if you can't be serious about the selection of a presidential candidate? 

The rest of us (well, outside of New Hampshire) don't get to meet candidates strolling into our breakfast nooks and hardware stores. If we see them at all, it's from the back of a crowd, catching Mr./Mrs. I Want Your Vote as he/she sweeps through the state on the way to some other state a thousand miles away -- that is, if we feel like standing around in the cold starting at 6:00 a.m. for a campaign visit that is scheduled for 11:30 but that includes an hour and a half of pep talk from local politicos and activists and a couple of pastors before the Candidate actually strolls onto the stage.

At least we think that's him/her. It could be that comedian from Saturday Night Live. The Candidate's plane is snowed in at Buffalo. Or Boise.

And if we're not able to lose a whole day at work for the stump speech the press corps can recite in its sleep, what are we left to do to decide who ought to lead the free world? 

We can always Google the guy. 

Oh, Iowa...