Moe Lane

“Night Moves,” Bob Seger

Funny part is: most of the time you more or less feel the same at almost forty-one as you remember feeling when you’re almost twenty-one.  Which can’t be right.

Right?

I do not have a bracket; I will not have a bracket; and I will not bore the life out of you about the bracket that I do not have.

No applause, just throw money. Hey, why not? I gotta get the money together to have an iPad2 for next year’s Republican convention somehow.

OK, that’s not the title of the piece.  The title of the piece is “Social Security reform splits White House political, economic teams.”  I’m merely providing a translation from the original Beltwayese.

The problem is this: somebody told The Hill that Obama’s advisers are broken up into two groups.  The first group consists of the financial people, who are patiently explaining that Social Security is taking in less money than it puts out, that the supposed Social Security trust fund is actually a bunch of IOUs, that it’s a bad idea to borrow money to pay our Social Security obligations, and that it’s absolutely vital that Social Security be put on a sounder fiscal basis immediately.  The second group consists of the political people, who are curtly saying things like “Touch Social Security and you lose the 2012 election.”

The political people will win the internal debate.

And there’s really nothing else to say about that, is there?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

(H/T Hot Air Headlines)

I mean.  Hell, I think I may know this guy.

Background: Republican Christopher Lee rather abruptly resigned from that seat over, of all things, a Craigslist ad (well, that and the attempts at adultery associated with it).  It’s a fairly reliably Republican district – Lee first won it in 2008, which was not exactly a great year for a Republican to win an open seat in the Northeast – so any real hope that the Democrats have of winning the seat in a special election* would be in a GOP split.  Enter former Democrat Jack Davis, who is… um.  Yes.  Yes, I think that ‘um’ is really the word, here, based on evidence ranging from his novel views on agricultural policy to his hiring practices (kind of NSFW, that last link).  Davis is trying to run on his own line (‘Tea Party,’ which is the hot, trendy designation these days) using petitions: the major argument against him being an obvious Democratic plant is that surely even New York Democrats aren’t that dumb.  Or don’t have better recruiters, at least**.

Fortunately, the state GOP party had a collective rush of oxygen to the brain and went with Jane Corwin, who is currently the state Assemblywoman for that district.  As a state legislator she was supported by both the GOP and NY’s Conservative Party (NY state election law gives third parties considerably more power than average): and, in fact, she has just been endorsed by the Conservative and Independent Parties for the special election.

The special election will be May 24th.  I suspect that it’s Corwin’s to lose, and that she won’t.

Moe Lane (crosspost) (more…)

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: when it comes to blogging, there are hassles.  Nothing like dangerous hassles, or even the ones associated with ‘mere’ hard physical labor: but it’s not all beer and skittles.  You have to wade through a lot of junk… and the more well-known that you are, the more junk you have to wade through.  After a certain point, you get sent junk to wade through – and you have to be polite about it, too.

Still, there are news stories that make up for the hassles.  One of these was in 2009, when I woke up to discover that the NJ Hudson County Democratic party had just been thrown into jail – and it just kept getting better.  It is a glorious day for partisan political blogging when one discovers that “human organ trafficking” is an actual charge on the rap sheet associated with one’s political opponents.  The posts write themselves.

All of which is why I’m making The Jersey Sting: A True Story of Crooked Pols, Money-Laundering Rabbis, Black Market Kidneys, and the Informant Who Brought It All Down Book of the Week.  Normally, I’d shorten the title of these things to just the title, but that subtitle deserves its proper place in all of this.

And so, farewell to The Best of Randall Garrett.

I agree with Mickey Kaus on one thing: people like that aren’t Republicans, Lefty agitprop peddlers to the contrary.  But progressives in California who are fighting public sector unions aren’t fighting them because public sector unions are bloated ticks on the backside of the American economy.  No, they’re fighting them because there’s not enough for both progressives and the aforementioned bloated ticks.  These guys  would happily go back to the old cash-for-votes deal if only the treasury wasn’t so bare.

Put another way, this is all just strictly business.  Nothing personal.

…and the technical term for what it promises to be is “doozy.”  There’s an $8,000,000,000 hole in the budget that needs to be filled (Ohio requires balanced budgets), and despite polling suggesting that Kasich could get away with raising taxes to fill it the Governor apparently won’t.  It’s expected that the budget will cover the gap by privatization programs (including selling some prisons), leasing out state highways, large budget cuts across the board, and projected revenue increases.  This is not going to be popular – according to the above poll, Kasich is already at 40% – but, as the Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register bluntly puts it, “The money has run out.”

I know that some Democratic politicians (and their sycophants, particularly their New Media ones) are licking their chops at the idea of watching their political opposite numbers do unpopular things to fix the economy.  Not to ruin their mornings – oh, this is a lie; this is totally about ruining their mornings – but said politicians and sycophants may wish to consider the larger implications of recent elections.  Put bluntly: the country has put in power on the state level a lot of people who do not care if they are loved for their actions.  These people have internalized two lessons (one from the Democrats, and one from the Republicans):

• (Democrats) It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t take political survival into consideration. Sure, Obamacare’s a monstrosity of a bill that’s waiting its turn at the Supreme Court unconstitutional buzzsaw – but it did pass, and we do have to deal with it now.  Imagine what can be done with that kind of sheer political will if it was used for good.  Well, a lot of Republican state legislators already have.
• (Republicans) If you’re going to be hated for what you do anyway, you might as well put your backs into the effort. I suspect that in twenty, thirty years the prevailing wisdom among political historians is going to be that the one election that the Democrats absolutely needed to win and didn’t in this time period was the 2009 New Jersey gubernatorial race.  Chris Christie’s example of in-your-face-with-a-happy-smile has been at minimum an inspiration for Republicans over the last two years.

(more…)

American Woman, The Guess Who

I should find a way to use this song in a suitably ironic fashion.

(Via @vermontaigne, via Gateway Pundit) Apparently kids in Wisconsin are going to have to stay in school an extra twenty minutes a day for the rest of the school year.  Why?  Because of the teachers union’s unscheduled four day vacation from their responsibilities in order to go fight the ever-so-noble cause of not paying their fair share of their healthcare costs. Dan Collins notes that the kids are going to love this; speaking as a parent of two, I’ll add that so will the parents.  Particularly the ones who rely on after-school activities to fill up the time between the end of classes and the earliest that a working parent can make it home.  Ach, well, you can’t expect the leadership of a public service union to understand the concept of empathy towards others.

On the bright side, unexcused absences by teachers last month won’t be paid for and teachers using phony sick notes are going to get suspended.  So there’s that, at least.

The word is that Tim Kaine (former governor of Virginia and current head of the DNC) is on the verge of declaring his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for Virginia Senator, and I for one support that move thoroughly.  Why?  Well, because of his record.  Below is a chart comparing the number of Democrats (and Democratic-controlled legislatures) at the start of Kaine’s tenure in January 2009 with the number of Democrats now (March 2011):

That is precisely the kind of campaigning record that I like to see from a Democratic nominee.  Especially the state legislature numbers: the first three categories all had their own dedicated groups entrusted with Embracing The Fail for the Democrats, but the DNC neglected the state houses in a Census year. And goodness gracious, but it showed.  So run, Timmy.  Please.

Please.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

I know that it’s all trendy and all, but we don’t pay these people to actually, you know, think or anything – so a lot of them don’t have those little voices in their heads that say Is this such a good idea, Gilbert? at appropriate moments.

Which, by the way, it was not.