Moe Lane

I think that Marco Rubio will forgive me if I quote extensively from his testimonial to his late father.

I realize everyday, and today more than ever, that every opportunity I have had is the result of the selfless decisions he made, even before I was born.

We, his four children, were the purpose of his life. And our accomplishments were not just a source of natural parental pride, they were and are affirmation that he mattered. That his life had real purpose. That his sacrifices were not in vain.

My dad was proud of all of his children and grandchildren. And he would have been proud of me no matter what I chose to do. But I think what made him especially proud of the career I have chosen is because of how far it is from the one he had.

For years, my dad would work banquets at hotels. Many times, these events featured a well-known figure giving a speech. At these events, there are usually only two people standing behind a table.  The speaker who is behind a podium, and a bartender behind the bar.

My dad was the one behind the bar. But he worked all his life so that his kids could make the symbolic journey from behind the bar to behind the podium.  And in fact, I literally did.

That journey is a testament to the greatness of America. And that journey was the purpose of my father’s life.

Marco and his family have requested that well-wishers contribute to The League Against Cancer, in lieu of flowers. (more…)

Eric is one of the candidates running in next week’s primary: he’s the one who did the (accurate) Barbara Mikulski as ‘Political Insidersaurus‘ campaign ad recently.  We interviewed him yesterday on the primary and the race:

Eric’s site is here, and his Political Insidersaurus site is here.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

This passage (from a Froma Harrop article on, apparently, why partisan Republicans shouldn’t read anything into the NJ and VA wins from last year) is right, for the wrong reason:

Professional partisans see every race as a mark on their team’s scoreboard. But these activists err in treating the win of a state governorship and U.S. Senate seat as similar victories.

Indeed, they do. Governorships are in many ways more important. (more…)

The worst prejudices and preconceived notions are the ones that you don’t even realize you have.  Take this story about African-American Republican candidates in 2010 – particularly Tim Scott, who is well on his way to winning his district in South Carolina handily.  A feel-good kind of tale, right?  See if you think that after you read this section:

With black unemployment at 15.6 percent, African-Americans are questioning what Democrats have done for them. What’s more, this year’s black Republican candidates were far from being upper-middle-class racial mascots. Scott grew up in a poor Charleston neighborhood with a divorced mother who worked double shifts as a nurse’s assistant. Vernon Parker (who lost his August primary) was born to a single mother in Houston, and grew up in California with his grandmother, a housekeeper.

Still, black Republicans will have to face four decades of skepticism about GOP bona fides on race, not to mention the opposition of a Democratic party with the first African-American president as its head.

Why the heck should anybody expect candidates like Scott to have to deal with that? (more…)

This is a copy of a letter from 2004 House Democrats and sent to then-President George W Bush. In it, the signatories complained that the administration had taken a hard line with ‘housing-related government sponsored enterprises’ (GSEs) such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by insisting on emphasizing fiscal prudence and responsible lending over increased affordable housing access. The relevant section?

We have been concerned that the Administration’s legislative proposal regarding the GSEs would weaken affordable housing performance by the GSEs, by emphasizing only safety and soundness. While the GSEs’ affordable housing mission is not in any way incompatible with their safety and soundness, an exclusive focus on safety and soundness is likely to come, in practice, at the expense of affordable housing.

Needless to say, this letter more or less completely subverts the narrative – lovingly created during the 2008 campaign, and kept up ever since – that the entire housing meltdown was really the (racist) Republicans’ fault.  Barney Frank is particularly outrageous, here: he’s gone from being Freddie Mac’s most devoted patron to calling for its dissolution without once explaining (or apologizing for) his own role in the mess.  Which is a strategy that worked fine in 2008; but it isn’t 2008 anymore.

Several additional thoughts on the matter: (more…)

(Via Instapundit) I almost agree with this:

Obama came into office drunk on his own hype. He thought that he was bigger than the job; that his charisma and cool alone could shape history. (“This campaign is about you,” his campaign’s website said. That’s a good tip-off: whenever someone says that it’s not about them, it’s always, always about them.) Now, he’s a human being: nobody — not me, not you, and not Barack Obama — can be anesthetized from the egomania that must come with reading about how his words and deeds can shape a generation’s legacy. But whose idea was it, after all, to send a man with such an astonishingly thin paper trail to lead Western civilization during a period of war and recession? Well, it was his. It was Obama’s idea. The thing about our system is this: you don’t inherit the job. It doesn’t fall into your lap. In the final analysis, you nominate yourself for the job. Obama kicked off his own campaign from Illinois in January 2007. He’d been in high office for two years, and already he’d decided that he was such an important figure that he really ought to be president.

(more…)

Move Away, The Killers

Had this one recommended to me.

Yes, yes, Dead or Alive is a 850 page Tom Clancy novel, and it’d probably stand to be cut down about three hundred pages because nobody wants to tell Tom Clancy that he shouldn’t write 850 page novels. Including, apparently, me, because I’m going to read the blessed thing. I’m obviously weak that way.

And so ends the reign of The High King of Montival.

When I went along with calling what the Democrats are doing in the House ‘triage.’ Triage implies a situation where an overwhelming number of people have been injured and absolutely must be sorted out by severity of injury, in order to save as many as possible.  What we have here instead is a situation where “sick” individuals are being sorted out not by the severity of their (political) illnesses, but by a combination of the absolute cost of the patient’s treatment, cost-effectiveness of that treatment, and the perceived overall value of the patients themselves.  Those that make the cut get treated; those who don’t, get a palliative.

In other words, House Democrats have set up their own personal death panel.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

An Old Testament angel.

That is, “Very beautiful, and absolutely terrifying.”  There’s a reason that they always started conversations with corporeal beings with the phrase “Fear not.”

…but I have to take some umbrage at this point in an otherwise excellent piece on why the vaunted pivot to the economy is too little, too late for this administration.  While discussing the way that the President has… well, voted ‘present’… on jobs and the economy, Byron wrote:

It’s hard to overstate just how surprised Republicans have been by Obama’s performance.

I’m actually not surprised at all.  The man’s been a member of the legislative branch all his political life; he has no executive experience worth mentioning, and it shows.  Isn’t this largely why we don’t usually elect Senators President anymore? – And it’ll be a long time before we elect another one President, huh?

Moe Lane

PS: Via Hot Air Headlines.

Yes, everything that has happened up to this point has been the overture, prologue, or whatever other metaphor is most suitable for the reader. This is the time when the rest of the people who will be voting in the midterms will start looking around and paying attention to everything that’s going around them. Which is, of course, their privilege; besides, there’s probably less of them this time around. And they’re going to see the following: (more…)