Moe Lane

The New York Times reports that Steve Driehaus has had his DCCC advertising cut.  This more or less confirms his impending DOOM at the hands of Steve Chabot; but I want to note something else from the same article.  In it, local Democratic party chair Ed Good reports on OH-06 & OH-18 (two more districts where the NRCC is starting ad buys on behalf of the Republican challengers):

“They are going to try to pick off what they think is low-hanging fruit,” Mr. Good said. “But the only way Charlie [Wilson] or Zack [Space] can lose is if our party does not get out and vote.”

Yup.  The locals are playing the GOTV will save us! card, three weeks before the election.  Not a good sign for them; and the lack of any evidence that the DCCC will be matching the NRCC’s expenditures is an even worse one*…

Moe Lane

PS: Bill Johnson for OH-06; Bob Gibbs for OH-18.

*As it stands now, and if I understand the article correctly, the DCCC can allocate existing ad time to Space’s race.  If they don’t, then Ohio Democrats have even more of a problem than they do now, and right now they have a very bad problem.

So… nightly music video called on account of that.

More here.

As usual, it breaks the GOP’s way.  All of these are now “Likely Democrat:”

• AZ-07 (Raúl Grijalva) (Ruth McClung)
• MA-04 (BARNEY FRANK) (Sean Bielat)
• MN-08 (Jim Oberstar) (Chip Cravaack)
• NM-03 (Ben Ray Lugan) (Tom Mullins)
• TX-27  (Soloman Ortiz) (Blake Farenthold)

Five more ‘safe’ seats for the Democrats that aren’t safe anymore.  Five more incumbents that the DCCC must divert money to.  Five more cracks in the firewall that the NRCC can pound upon.

As somebody noted on Twitter: twenty-two days and counting.

Moe Lane

It’s been an interesting week for Missouri, so I thought that I’d look at the races that matter on the federal level (all of the Republican-held House seats in Missouri are pretty much safe at this point).  In order:

• MO-SEN: It would seem that Robin Carnahan’s desire to distance herself from the President is hurting her with a critical segment of Democratic voters: African-Americans, who do not see why a Democratic candidate should distance him- or herself from a Democratic President – and particularly this President.  Mind you, the way the race is improving for Roy Blunt, at this point we’re just seeing how far the rubble bounces anyway. (more…)

…because the technical term here would be ‘divorce.’

Yes. Fox News reports that the source of the misogynist attack is now alleged to be no less than Anne Gust Brown herself, who is both wife and campaign aide to Jerry Brown.  This is ‘alleged’ because there is some indication that this may be, of all things, a deliberate attempt by the Brown campaign to fix blame on the one person that cannot be fired or reprimanded by the candidate… because how can somebody go after one’s own wife*?  And what makes this so stereotypically… well, Democratic… is that there’s a hint – just a hint - that Moonbeam himself may have uttered (or at least repeated) the slur in the confusion.  Which, if true, means that Brown is making his wife take the fall for his own vicious, anti-woman attitudes.

Yeah. That’s one big hero that the Democrats have running over there in California.  I’d suggest that Californians ask him about this, but Brown’s reportedly canceled all of his public appearances until the next debate.

As I said: one big hero.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Yes, definitely, Meg Whitman for Governor.  Aren’t you tired of THOSE PEOPLE yet?

*Although Sanford Bishop (D, GA-02) certainly managed.  Relatedly: Mike Keown for Congress.

(via Instapundit) It’s an interesting discussion, to be sure – how we’re going to evolve, and all that – but it really isn’t the right word.  I’m not an evolutionary biologist or anything, but I was under the impression that evolution was fueled by the need to adapt to a changing environment.  But the history of human-based technology is the history of changing the environment to suit our needs.  Our increasing ability to directly manipulate the DNA of our offspring isn’t really going to make us ‘evolve,’ then: it’s under too precise control.  And you probably couldn’t call it ‘mutate,’ either: it’s not random.

‘Diverge,’ maybe?  – I’m bringing up the semantics of this because I don’t want people to think that any of this is particularly inevitable, and calling what we’re going to do to our specie’s genetic structure either ‘evolution’ or ‘mutation’ suggests a certain inevitability, or at least passivity.  It’s neither; and though a lot of it will probably be desirable, things should be thought through first.

Yes, yes, yes: we’re supposed to be subtly embarrassed of this holiday, given that apparently it’s an act of global insensitivity to remember the date, or because there’s a whole subset of the grievance culture out there who grind their teeth, turn widdershins thrice, and spit at the very mention of the name ‘Christopher Columbus,*’ or even because it’s starting to look like everybody in the world ‘discovered’ America before Christopher Columbus did.

(pause)

OK, that last one? Kind of a fair point. Still, speaking as somebody with most of his teeth at forty, no dietary deficiencies, and two kids that survived their first six months – which would not have happened if I had been born an illiterate turnip** farmer in Ireland, which is where I’d be if there hadn’t been an America for my ancestors to flee to – let me just say that I am not exactly broken up about the thought that In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety-Two / Columbus Sailed The Ocean Blue. And probably, neither should you. Ever try living on turnips? I’m pretty sure that trying to get away from pre-potato, pre-maize, pre-chocolate, and pre-tomato cooking was what fueled the European Age of Exploration…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

(more…)

…the major criticism of this article about the Obama administration’s DNC’s (really, what’s the difference these days?) decision to brand the US CHAMBER OF FRICKING COMMERCE* as un-American and a threat to our democracy:

The Democratic National Commitee is using the same sort of tactic and logic that Sen. Joe McCarthy used in the 1950s: Level a headline-grabbing and unsubstantiated charge, like the State Department is filled with communists, and then say it is up to the State Department and the employees so charged to prove it is not true.

…it’s wrong to compare the US CoC with the Truman-era State Department, even by inference.  There were Commies in the latter.

Moe Lane (more…)

It shows.  This one was probably my favorite:

This is what an eloquent first lady’s writing looks like: “Though some Afghan leaders have condemned the violence and defended the rights of women, others maintain a complicit silence in hopes of achieving peace. But peace attained by compromising the rights of half of the population will not last. Offenses against women erode security for all Afghans — men and women. And a culture that tolerates injustice against one group of its people ultimately fails to respect and value all its citizens.” Yeah, I miss her too.

Who doesn’t?  Well, the antiwar movement, of course.  Then again, they hated the liberation of Afghanistan, too – so we already were aware of their lack of judgment*.

Moe Lane (more…)

No Sleep Till Brooklyn, Beastie Boys

Really, it made perfect sense at the time.

101010 (42).

IO! IO! IO! …ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-SIX BUCKS?!?

IA! IA! IA!

…OK, I’ll stop now.

I picked The New Annotated Dracula because it’s October, so horror seemed appropriate; and you might as well start with the classics.  In this particular case, I haven’t read it yet.  But both the promise of a fully-annotated text and a conceit that warms the cockles of my yearning-for-autumn heart conspired to make this one Book of the Week:  I look forward to its arrival on the doorstep.

And so farewell to 1635: The Eastern Front.  Grimmer than I expected.

Moe Lane