Reagan Ranch Tour

Gateway Pundit was there with me, and actually had a camera on him, so you can see what I did.

It's a pretty nice place. It's way up in a hill on a one-lane road of dangerous switchback after dangerous switchback, but once you get up there, it's nice. It was like Reagan's Fortress of Solitude.

Sorry about the non-blogging. I didn't get internet service in my hotel room until late yesterday and wasn't sure what to blog about anyway, having been separated from the net for almost two days. I see you guys have taken care of things.

I just saw Nonie Darwish speak, the author of Now they Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel and the War on Terror. Among the points she made was that shari'a family law forces women to accept an even more subservient role in Muslim society than the Koran or Hadiths explicitly require, because each woman lives in the fear that her husband will, if not sufficiently happy with her, marry up to three other women, and many Muslim women are scared of this possibility.

She also noted that Islamists in America are pushing for shari'a-lite type measures, including footbaths in schools and airports, as a method of subtly asserting/imposing their culture on America. But, she said, in her thirty years in Egypt she had never seen a foot-level faucet in any Egyptian school or airport. In other words, those "pushing the envelope" (as she termed it) for greater Islamicization are actually demanding a more Islamic way of life in Minneapolis than is typically encountered in Cairo.

Last night Dinesh D'Souza spoke at a banquet type thing on the topic of atheism and religion. The speech was good, and made some decent points, but most of it was just points he made in this debate with Christopher Hitchens:

...so if you watch that, you pretty much saw the speech.

The first night -- Thursday -- Andrew Breitbart addressed some VIP college Republicans. I guess it was a select group of big college leaders. His speech was actually off-the-record, so I can't report much about it, except to say that it was about his own political awakening, the liberal media, and the soft blacklist against conservatives in Hollywood. His major point is that the media is actually far, far more important a political player than the Democratic Party itself, and, one might say (my words, not his), the Democratic Party is actually merely the Elective Office Subdivision of the greater Liberal Media Party. Harry Reid and Tom Daschle may come and go, but the liberal media is eternal. And of course this was all a preamble to a call for conservatives to become players themselves in the media, including Hollywood itself, whose storytelling through tears and very charismatic actors has more emotional and visceral impact than any twenty slanted stories by David Schuster.

In a couple of hours 24 producer Joel Surnow is speaking, and then after that John Ashcroft will give the closing address. Looking forward to that, obviously.

Oh... I should note this junket is being run by the Young American's Foundation (yaf.org), an organization dedicated to promoting conservative student activism. They actually bought the Reagan Ranch in 1998 when the liberal (duh) government of California refused to buy it and make it into a historic landmark. So private enterprise did what non-responsive government wouldn't.

It seems like a pretty cool outfit. Then again, maybe they just seem cool because they gave me a nice hotel room and airfare and surrounded me with lots of college chicks who are pretty cool once you get to know them, and by "know them," I mean steal all their used towels from the maid service.

posted by Ace at 06:43 PM

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