Moe Lane

These Old Spice responses are worth delaying the Movie of the Week until tomorrow.

Via Hot Air Headlines, Here are our three participants in today’s Circular Firing Squad:

• Rep. Steve Cohen (D, TN-09).  White guy representing a majority-minority district. Hates Tea Partiers and conservatives.
• Willie Herenton. Hates the white guy representing a majority-minority district.  Hates the fact that the President is endorsing the white guy in the primary.
• President Barack Obama.  Hates… his job at this point, probably.

Watch it all unfold.  Of the three of them, the closest that I’d come to feeling sympathy for would probably be the President, except of course that Obama’s earned these kinds of headaches, a dozen times over.

Moe Lane

PS: Charlotte Bergmann for Congress.  Which reminds me, Willy: when you lose, are you going to endorse the GOP candidate?  What with this entire ‘Just One’ thing, and everything.

(H/T Instapundit)  I’m quoting the Politico title because, honestly, it’s absolutely accurate.

[Tea Party Express spokesman Levi] Russell contended the NAACP is guilty of overstepping its bounds and of acting juvenile.

“As the tea party movement has gained political momentum, groups or individuals still playing the race card look like a foolish embarrassment to their own party,” he said. “It’s time for the NAACP to grow up and stop hiding behind hypocritical race-baiting politics.”

It occurs to me that it has been a long time since any sort of national group has been willing to so bluntly call Democratic hyper-partisan groups like the NAACP on their nonsense.  Or to even so publicly state what everybody knows, but few want to say: the NAACP is a Democratic hyper-partisan group.  Apparently, enough people in the Tea Party movement have internalized the lesson that since the Left is already calling them every name in the book, there’s no downside to plain talking.

How… refreshing.

Moe Lane

Not even the dead want him re-elected at this point:

Chances are good you never met Charlotte McCourt during her 84 years, but I’m willing to bet you’ll be hearing about her in the coming days now that her obituary has taken Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to task.

[snip]

Her obituary, printed in Tuesday’s Review-Journal, reads in part, “We believe that Mom would say she was mortified to have taken a large role in the election of Harry Reid to U.S. Congress. Let the record show Charlotte was displeased with his work. Please, in lieu of flowers, vote for another more worthy candidate.”

And here we all thought that a Democrat could never lose the necro-American vote.

Crossposted to RedState.

Thus completely confounding Harry Reid.

…at least, that’s probably going to be Harry Reid’s excuse today for his rather bizarre claim that illegal immigrants aren’t part of the Nevada construction industry.  When a local reporter pointed out that American citizens were out of work because it’s currently easier in many ways to hire illegal immigrants, Reid replied:

“I think that any information you have in that regard is absolutely without foundation,” responded Reid.

But a Pew Hispanic Center study shows 17-percent of all construction workers are in the United States illegally. Reid says not in Nevada. “That may be some place, but it’s not here in Nevada.”

But their latest 2009 numbers show Nevada is the state with the highest percentage of “unauthorized immigrants” in the labor force.

(H/T: Jim Geraghty) Watch the video fast, before it gets taken down, too:

(more…)

(H/T: Red Hampshire) It has been confirmed: Senatorial candidate Rep. Paul Hodes (D, NH) did in fact attend in person the Canadian trial lawyer fundraiser that was mentioned yesterday by both myself and others.  Interestingly, the Hodes campaign isn’t really trying to push back on this: they’re simply admitting that he went abroad in person to pick up trial lawyer lobbyist money.  I wonder why?

Today, Paul Hodes fought to end the influence that corporate and foreign special interests have in American elections by supporting the DISCLOSE Act. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, foreign corporations, Wall Street banks, and oil company CEOs have been given a green light to spend unlimited money anonymously in order to influence our elections. The DISCLOSE Act ends these corporate loopholes and forces Washington special interests to play by the same campaign rules that govern the actions of middle class Granite Staters.

Ah. Of course.  You see, there’s dirty corporate lobbyist money, and then there’s what Democratic politicians have to travel to Vancouver to pick up.  Hodes, being one of the latter, can clearly see the difference – the only problem is that ‘middle class Granite Staters’ might have their own opinions on the difference.  Best to just stare right ahead, say nothing that you have to, and hope that the controversy about your hypocrisy dies down quickly, no?

Such courage, the man shows.

Moe Lane

PS: The GOP primary hasn’t happened yet.  Feel free to pick one.

Crossposted to RedState.

I was trying to figure out what was nagging me about this entire Pick-Up Artist (PUA) thing that Little Miss Attila linked to here and here, and it finally came to me (if you’ll pardon the pun): these PUA people are sex nerds.  Which is to say, they are people who show the classic signs of nerdity – an obsessive focus on a particular topic, meticulous research, careful experimentation on how to maximize their skill levels, and a fundamental indifference to how larger society reacts to them – but who have decided to focus on having sex with women, instead of on comic books, science fiction movies, baseball scores, or the likely makeup of the 112th Congress.  Looking at the comments sections of some PUA blogs, I have to wonder how many of them have Asperger’s*.  Or who would claim to have Asperger’s if they were more mainstream nerds, which is not quite the same thing.

Observing this probably makes me a hater, or a beta male, or whatever it is that PUAs call mundanes.  Yup, that’s another sign.

Moe Lane

*Indeed, people who actually do have Asperger’s – it’s one of those conditions that is often self-diagnosed, which means that it’s the semantic equivalent to “I’d rather come up with a medical reason for my rude behavior than actually correct it” – might find some of these techniques almost therapeutic.  Not that I am qualified to diagnose anybody, up to and including myself.

PS: Full disclosure: I am a nerd.  Yes, you’re all shocked.

“Morning has Broken,” Natasha Marsh

[Expletive deleted] Cat Stevens. He’s a hater now.

This is the district held by Democratic freshman Jim Himes, and is listed as being in play by Cook (Likely Democrat). The primary’s coming up, but Rob took the time to talk to us:

Rob’s site is here.

Crossposted to RedState.

(Via Instapundit) Oh, God, not this again.

Reason has an interesting debate on the question of libertarian political strategy. Should libertarians seek to forge an alliance with conservatives or liberals or neither? Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg and Tea Party leader Matt Kibbe argue for reconsituting the libertarian-conservative coalition that was badly frayed if not completely severed during the Bush years. Cato Institute scholar Brink Lindsey argues against that view. Although I am much closer to Lindsey’s political views than Goldberg’s, I find myself agreeing somewhat more with Goldberg’s position in this particular debate.

Yup!  He should be. (more…)

Again.

It’s not quite counting coup on my part – I had suggested that by about June the DCCC would be bragging about how they’ll keep us from getting enough votes for veto overrides – but I am pleased to see that the slow march by the Democrats towards objective reality is continuing.

Slowly.  Slowly is good.

…the last thing Dems need is a group of major donors convinced that another check will just be throwing good money after bad.

But the goal posts keep moving. At other times over the last 2 years, Dems have said their goal was to limit losses to fewer than 10 seats. Dems later said they would gladly take a 15-seat hit, assuming the environment might worsen further. By Feb., Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), who leads the DCCC’s incumbent retention program, said they party would lose fewer than 25 seats.

[snip]

On Tuesday, DNC chair Tim Kaine acknowledged the possibility of losing the House. But, he said, that’s not anything new, citing an average loss of 28 seats in midterm elections for an incumbent party — though he hinted that party losses might be much greater.

(more…)

You can practically see the bafflement on the page:

While many conservative organizations immediately decried a federal judge’s decision last week to invalidate the federal ban on recognizing gay marriages, tea party groups have been conspicuously silent on the issue.

The silence is by design, activists with the loosely affiliated movement said, because it is held together by an exclusive focus on fiscal matters and its avoidance of divisive social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. Privately, though, many said they back the decision because it emphasizes the legal philosophy of states’ rights.

Before we go any further: if you look at what happened last week, what happened was that the judge declared Section 3 unconstitutional, and did not address Section 2. Essentially, that means that if the ruling is not appealed then the federal government is no longer obligated to treat only opposite-sex marriages as legitimate. It does not mean that states are now obligated to recognize other states’ same-sex marriage licenses – and, at any rate, the ruling is expected to be appealed anyway. (more…)