Before you send your submissions, make sure you read Pat Cleary’s hilarious backstory at shopfloor here.

OK — now your turn.

Duncan Hunter wants to run for president.  Political trivia lovers surely remember that the last Southern California Republican member of Congress to run for president was B1 Bob Dornan, circa 1996.

This is critical to stipulate so we can nostalgically salute Dornan’s entry into the lexicon of classic, stirring, statesmanlike political speeches.  From his 1995 announcement:

“Here’s my Clinton countdown watch showing 572 days until the election. Sallie, what’s your counting down until the inauguration? 648! Just add 76 days to mine and you have the inauguration day. I’m counting the hours and the days until we send the Clintons packing.”

Oh, the watercress and fresh cranberry bean salad with shaved artichoke, fennel, and perserved lemon in a creamy tarragon vinaigrette. Oh, the pan-seared breast of chicken wrapped with pancetta on a bed of corn spoon bread with roasted roma tomatoes and blue lake beans. Oh, the individual apple quince tart tatin with ginger creme anglasie and candied cranberries.

Oh, the before-dinner remarks by David Brooks: “Human Nature and the Elections.”

Extreme Mortman began his third Hoover Media Fellowship mere miles from Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco war room and ground zero for Condoleezza Rice’s 2008 political base by listening to a rousingly depressing talk by the New York Times’ affirmative action conservative David Brooks, who presented to Hoover’s fall retreat of major donors (one public summary: “300 intelligent, articulate wealthy people”) a lengthy litany of reasons why the GOP is doomed next Tuesday and what’s wrong with conservatives. Brooks predicted a “Republican party that gets spanked.”

We put down our glass of 2001 Fisher Vineyeards Coach Insignia Chardonnay (Extreme Mortman doesn’t normally allow Chardonnay access to his lips, but this one earned his trust) long enough to hear Brooks lament a “decline in conservative books as energy gets diverted to blogs” as one of the reasons why all is lost. Now, we here at Extreme Mortman’s Palo Alto bureau have long respected David Brooks as a funny, witty wise intellectual conservative who also went through Hoover’s Media Fellows program. But conservative blogs are to blame? It was blasphemy enough for us to put down our Chardonnay and reach instead for an old trusted friend, a Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley.

But the Kitchen Cabernet couldn’t save us. A very lovely senior lady next to us — she of a Pebble Beach house in addition to her New York residence but who still was hard-pressed to name Hillary Clinton’s GOP Senate campaign opponent — cursed Eugene Volokh for missing his Hoover speech because of L.A. traffic.

Maybe David Brooks is right — damn those energy-inefficient conservative bloggers!

Please forgive sporadic blogging this week.  Extreme Mortman is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, beautiful Palo Alto. I may never return — particularly after salivating over local California TV stations full of campaign ads focused on ballot initiatives.  One that caught my eye — Bill Clinton speaking about Prop. 87. 

Followers of America’s public diplomacy and international broadcasting efforts should take note of Robert Satloff’s Weekly Standard piece, “Hip Hip, Al Hurra!”

Dead-on analysis of what’s wrong — and how to fix it.

Even if it’s in Texas.  And even if it’s regarding Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who’s running for reelection.

The Washington Post today asserts:

Hutchison, a White House stalwart who is not up for reelection, broke from Republican talking points, saying: “If I knew then what I had known now, on the weapons of mass destruction, which was a key reason I voted the way I did, I would not have voted to go into Iraq.”

How can you tell Hutchison is up for relection?  Check out the festive balloons:

Any blogger who links to this morning’s Washington Post story “The Year Of Playing Dirtie: Negative Ads Get Positively Surreal” is sure to be inaudated by spam-spewing blogbots.  But here at Extreme Mortman, we’re willing to take the risk, if only to run this quote by Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI), who’s facing a sex-themed XXX ad in his re-election run:

The “pays for sex” ad against Kind in Wisconsin — along with a similar one aired against Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) — may be the most extreme. It says Kind spent tax dollars to study “the sex lives of Vietnamese prostitutes” and “the masturbation habits of old men” and “to pay teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes connected to their genitalia.” Cue the punch line: “Ron Kind pays for sex, but not for soldiers.” The Wisconsin Republican Party denounced the ad, and several TV stations refused to air it, but that only got it more attention. It is the centerpiece of Nelson’s Web site: “This ad is so powerful, a sitting U.S. Congressman threatened TV stations with legal action if they dared to play it.”

Kind joked in an interview that he has been paying for sex ever since he said “I do.”

Love the “I do” line!  A great in-Kind contribution to the cause of political humor.  A Kinder, gentler, funnier nation is what we need.

With the Dow Jones soaring again, it’s hard to imagine there was a time when not everyone had some form of investment instrument in the stock market.

In his new book, “The Real Deal,” Sandy Weill, who built Citigroup, brings us back to the late ’50s when he began transforming banking, investement, and markets:

As we opened our doors, there were about fifteen million individuals in the United States actively buying stocks — that number was less than 10 percent of the country’s population but was up sharply from only about five million at the start of the 1950s.

Read an excerpt from Weil’s book by clicking here.

Courtesy threesources.com:

Continuing to follow the media frenzy surrounding President Barack Obama (who horrifyingly has been absent from the network TV news the last two nights.  Good lord, is he OK?) … the DC Examiner’s great gossip column Yeas and Nays today writes about all the Obama domain names getting commandeered — and gives us this wonderful graphic.