Moe Lane

And that’s specifically Rep. Bachmann.

[X] says he has made attempts to let the Bachmann campaign know about its alleged Iowa transgressions, but he hasn’t heard from anyone with the campaign since the Straw Poll.

‘X’ in this case is Ryan Rhodes, “director of the Iowa Tea Party;” the “alleged Iowa transgressions” are referenced in the article, and mostly refer to questions about whether Rep. Bachmann is making herself sufficiently accessible to supporters on the campaign trail (particularly in Iowa).  I used ‘X’ instead of the name because… well, while I do feel that Iowa voters are just the tiniest bit needy and cranky about what constitutes ‘sufficiently accessible,’ the truth of the matter is that few people in this business really think that her campaign is all that accessible, either.  It’s not the impervious stasis field that is the Sarah Palin whatever-it-is, but it’s not exactly transparent, either.

That may be a bit of a problem, because the other campaigns are being a bit more accessible.  I’d suggest that she look into this…

…by Dick Cheney will make some heads explode.

Maybe I’ll pick it up then. If I do, it’ll be on Kindle: it’s just easier for me to read political books that way.

(more…)

Karl over at Hot Air analyzes this WSJ article by Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen about as I would, but I have a couple of things to add.

• Executive summary of the Caddell/Schoen article: a third party is really, really likely next year!  And it’d be good to have!
• Executive summary of the Hot Air article: no, it’s not really likely.  Here, have some links to all those examples and historical data that Caddell/Schoen referenced, but inexplicably declined to link to*, and you’ll see why.
• Executive summary of my reaction: what Karl said.  Besides, when Democrats start talking about how spiffy third-parties would be in a given race, it’s typically code for “Oh, God, we are so hosed next year if we run the current candidate.”

No, really.  The thing about the way that third parties are talked about by the media is that people only bring them up when they want to make it look like Generic Election X is going to be another Bush/Clinton/Perot ’92.  The problem is, our current political system is designed to bring about results that are more like Christie/Corzine/Daggett ’09**: two ‘real’ parties, with the rest acting as minor spoilers at best.  Which means that results like Hickenlooper/Maes/Tancredo ’10 are widely – and properly – seen as places where the system broke down, rather than a goal to aspire to. (more…)

If you’ve followed the economy for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed by now that every month it turns out that the economy has gone to pot – and that every month this shocks economists and financial reporters, like the first green-gray mountain of sea water on the horizon legendarily terminally shocked the sages of Atlantis.

Every month.

Jim Geraghty has finally stated the obvious about this:

If you ever have to get into a fistfight, make sure your opponent is an economist often consulted by the mainstream media, because that way you’ll always have the element of surprise.

Via… Jim Geraghty.

She Talks To Angels, The Black Crowes

Well, they’re not always going to be happy songs.

It’s apparently a cyberpunk shooter/RPG that just came out, and is now eating everybody’s brain:

…including Penny Arcade’s: the site keeps crashing every time I try to get the link.

Anyway: is it any good?

Frankly, it’s not a bad persona for him:

(more…)

Yes.  This is good advice.

Let me tell you: there’s nothing like hearing the Governor of New Jersey tell people who live one town over from your widowed mother (living six blocks from the ocean) to stand not on the order of their coming, but go at once.  Gives you a certain urgency to the day.

Alternative title: Pam Geller loses her anti-Idiotarian Status.

Yeah.  I’m kicking it Old School here: “anti-Idiotarian” is one of those terms of art from the far-off dawn of the blogosphere (which is to say, 2003 or so).  Then again, a lot of the people who are going to be talked about here have been in the ‘sphere for that long; so keep that in mind.  There’s a history here, and it’s not always a nice one.

Give you the background: Pamela Geller – who has been hysterically screaming at the top of her lungs about Islam (admittedly, not always unreasonably) for as long as I can remember – has picked for her latest digital jihad* Governor Rick Perry’s** association with the Ismailis.  At issue (aside from Perry being friendly with Grover Norquist, which apparently is intolerable right there***) is a curriculum that Perry had his education people put together about Islam that involved input from Ismaili groups in Texas: oddly enough, Geller goes off on this curriculum in the American Thinker without actually linking to it.

Remember that Old School thing from the last paragraph?  Well, when you’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while you tend to recognize the tell-tale signs of a snow job.  One of the prime ones?  Not linking to what you’re complaining about. (more…)

This time, they have (allegedly, to be sure) filled a primary school’s locks with glue and metal in what will end up being a profoundly futile attempt to keep Governor Scott Walker from reading Oh, the Places You’ll Go! to a bunch of school children.  Also – in what will later be revealed to be related news – it turns out that the sweetheart last-minute pre-election deals that the old Madison city administration made with Big Labor will result in higher property taxes AND lowered services this year for Madison residents!  Including the elimination of the crossing guard program!  Hope those kids are good at broken-field running!

Anyway, I mention this to set up some snark, here: (more…)

…by Chris Badeaux over at The New Ledger.  It’s impossible to properly excerpt, so I’ll just give the first two paragraphs and assure you that the rest of them live up to the promise found therein:

It is safe to say that were there a direct correlation between Jon Huntsman’s standing among national Republican voters (or his chance at winning the Presidency) and the words expended on his behalf by dreamy-eyed middle-aged newspaper columnists who would sooner eat their mothers’ corpses raw than vote for a Republican, then even the good citizens of Utah would have forgotten by now that the man was ever their governor. Instead, we are treated to one round after another of Huntsman announcing that he has one of the most incompetent campaign teams assembled since McCain08.

That former Governor and former Ambassador (but not former heir) Huntsman has no chance at the Presidency is for some reason stated less openly than soon-to-be-former-Congressman Ron Paul’s identical chance for the same office. There may be a dozen good reasons for this, ranging from Huntsman’s superior hair, his apparently absent tendency to suggest that Israel actually controls American foreign policy, his better taste in hair styling products, his superior looks, his better choice in barbers, his more nuanced speech, or any other aspect of his personal grooming more in line with that of a male model than a homeless fellow found wandering under a bridge, muttering to himself about the gold standard. But while his superior looks and lesser air of absolute nuttiness undoubtedly help hide his absolute lack of a chance of getting a single electoral vote, let alone the Republican nomination for the Presidency, the better explanation lies in the fading memories of the Baby Boomers as they enter their collective Alzheimer’s phase, and torture our country with memories of a world that never was.

Chris will forgive me for that, I’m sure.

Moe Lane

PS: The title is never explained, by the way: and while I know what he’s referring to I am going to be cruel and tell you to just look it up.

PPS: Jon Huntsman should run as a Democrat – and that’s not really meant to be mean of me; as a Democrat he’d be a goram paragon.  He’d certainly be better than the front-runner that the Democrats are planning to run at the moment…

It goes like this.

• Brooks presumes to give Mitt Romney advice on how to run a campaign.
• By the way… Romney’s not my guy, but he – unlike Brooks – is an honest Republican, so let me give some helpful advice: do not trust David Brooks on anything.
• Brooks’ passive-aggressive, deniable advice in part advises that Romney bring up the fact that twenty-three years ago Perry was a Democrat who ran Al Gore’s Texas campaign.
• This despite the fact that Brooks – who, bizarrely, still defines himself as a conservative – three years ago went out and did everything that he could to get an urban Democratic elitist liberal elected President, short of a formal endorsement (‘perfectly creased pant’ probably doesn’t count).
• You know what the difference is between Rick Perry & David Brooks is?
• OK, OK, so there’s a list as long as my arm.  Do you know what the difference between Rick Perry & David Brooks that I was thinking of is?
• Perry later admitted that he screwed up that particular judgement call.  Brooks has, to the best of my knowledge, never admitted that he acted like a callow, naive, and generally blithering idiot when it came to the 2008 Presidential election.

Hey, remember that advice that I gave Romney?  Now that I think of it… yeah, everybody should follow it.

Moe Lane