Month: August 2009

Book of the Week: A Song for Arbonne.

It being Sunday, we replace Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals with Guy Gavriel Kay’s A Song for Arbonne – a older book, but a fine one, and an excellent introduction to Kay’s work.  Given that he’s finally given out information about his next book (Under Heaven, drawing from Tang Dynasty China, due in Spring of 2010), this gives some of you plenty of time to get up to speed on the author, and why you’ll want this one in hardback.

Pandas ‘too fat to mate?’

Well, according to this Twitter entry, they are – so Chinese zoo workers are trying to get them to exercise more.  The only confirmation of this that I have had so far is this, which is a year old.

I know that even writing this may violate an unstated taboo, but at some point we may have to ask if giant pandas actually want to avoid extinction.  It’s like they keep coming up with ways to provoke natural selection into deselecting them; if they looked like opossums – or even squirrels, which aren’t actually ugly-looking – the panda would have long since left the Circle of Life.  So… are we just encouraging more and more self-destructive evolutionary behaviors with our misguided altruism?  Have we trapped ourselves in a codependent relationship with a bamboo-chewing species of lazy nihilists?  Are we enablers?

Moe Lane

PS: That being said, Suicidal Pandas would be a good name for a band.

Reviewing the August Democratic Party’s town hall performances.

This is not going to be a link-fest; this is going to be a scolding.

Speaking as a former Democrat: August was a personal humiliation for me.  I would never have believed that the Democratic party could have produced such a crop of perpetually-terrified, start-at-their-0wn-shadow, two-for-flinching scaredy-cat politicians as the ones that showed up on our television screens and monitors, usually moving at high speed away from the cameras.  Note that I did not use the term ‘old women.’  They were running away from old women.  Extremely annoyed (and for good reason) old women, true: but you’d have thought that the Democratic party was facing the combined specters of the Mongol Horde, the bubonic plague, and Skynet, the way that their politicians stood not on the order of their coming, but went at once.

Yes, I know that the level of vitriol and projection on the people opposing health care rationing grates on a lot of people.  I’m one of them; probably the most teeth-gnashing aspect for me was watching the Speaker of the House call people who disagreed with her Nazis, particularly since (as somebody else pointed out) a goodly number of the people who she was slandering actually fought Nazis.  The casual sexual slurs and projection of motives weren’t particularly welcome, either.  But what highlighted it for me was the way that  the Democrats hid while they did all of that.  Telephone town halls.  Attempts to hold meetings without telling constituents.  Last-minute changes in venues.  Rigged question-and-answer periods.  Bussed-in ‘supporters.’  Some of them didn’t even dare hold a town hall – and more would have tried that trick, if they hadn’t been pressured into doing it by their Republican challengers.  And the ultimate item?  They’re going to hide behind a dead person and try to pass health care rationing that way.

Which, by the way, won’t work.

All in all, this was just… embarrassing.  I used to identify with this party.  Most of my family still does, in fact – and from now on, when political topics come up, it’s going to be awkward for everybody involved.  Them, for being stuck with a bunch of wimps representing their interests – and me, because I hate seeing my family distressed.

Incredible.  Simply incredible – in the more archaic sense of the word.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Keep watching the skies! …Err, local Missouri news.

(H/T: @cayankee): The title is “FBI launches inquiries into alleged public corruption in Missouri” – which is an odd definition of the word ‘alleged,’ given that three Democrats (two of them state officials) have already pled guilty to federal obstruction charges.  The FBI press release is quite fun, actually, given that it’s full of the sort of details you only get when somebody’s fully-cooperating-with-the-authorities, or when somebody’s phone’s been tapped.  Or both.  As Top of the Ticket noted, this could be an interesting autumn.

Along that line of thought… it’s certainly been a year for Democratic corruption at the state level, yes?  Blagojevich over in Illinois, half of the Bergen County Democratic Party in New Jersey, now what promises to be an extensive and loving look at Democratic state party shenanigans in Missouri… if this keeps up, people might start thinking that there’s, oh, a Culture of Corruption or something going on here.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

So, the DNC declares that Cheney’s a proponent of torture.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Explicitly, and as part of the pushback to the Cheney interview where the former Vice President weighed the current President in the balance, and found him wanting.

Democrats hit back just minutes after Cheney’s interview aired. The Democratic National Committee fired off an e-mail to reporters disputing Cheney’s argument that the CIA records released last week showed the enhanced interrogation techniques under the Bush administration were effective in gathering intelligence about Al Qaeda. The e-mail, which cited various news reports, also accused the former vice president of being a “strong and vocal proponent of torture,” and pointed to polls that show “American’s don’t agree with Cheney on national security.”

Leaving aside for the moment the wanton cruelty done to the English language with that rogue apostrophe – grammar-boarding, perhaps? – I have to ask: will this official accusation by the Democratic National Committee be acted upon, or even officially noticed, by the President of the United States?  And if not: well, why not?  After all, I assume that he agrees with the accusation – no competent party leader would let his organization go so off-message like this – so you’d think that he’d want to do something about it.

You’d think.

Moe Lane.

Crossposted to RedState.

How to get sympathetic coverage from NPR on Tea Parties.

Hold out the hope that a national third party – i.e., continued control of the federal government by the Democratic party – will be the end result.  Personally, I think it’s cruel to get their hopes up like that.

Which should not be taken as a request to stop doing it, of course.

(Also via Instapundit – heck, the same post, even.)

Crossposted to RedState.

Hmm. Meet Mike Halfacre (R Cand, NJ-12).

(H/T: Instapundit) This one is speculative: while NJ-12 is only D+5, its incumbent is Rush Holt, who has held the seat for ten years now, with election margins in the 60s.  On the other hand, that’s also enough time to get sloppy; he’s a good bit more liberal than you’d expect from somebody in a D+5 seat; and if this report is correct he’s not handling well being on the other side from actual populists.

So… here’s Mike Halfacre.  Mayor of Fair Haven, running on fiscal responsibility (has lowered property taxes and reduced debt as Mayor), frankly looks better than Holt did with regard to access at Holt’s own town hall.  This isn’t my old district when I was living in NJ, but I know the area: it’s not infertile ground for Republicans.  The fact that he’s pro-choice will be a deal-breaker for some people reading this, which is of course their privilege.

If it’s not a deal-breaker, keep an eye on this one.  It may prove interesting.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.