Moe Lane

Once upon a time, Kate Marshall looked like she could go the distance in the NV-02 special election against Mark Amodei: now the distancing is being done by the DCCC, which has left her by the stern rail listening to the band play Nearer My God To Thee.  Not that I know how that movie ended.  Or started.  I think that I’ve seen no more than five minutes of Titanic, actually.

And… that’s all that needs to be said, really.

Moe Lane

PS: Mark Admodei for NV-02.

Glenn Reynolds asks, tongue-in-cheekily, “Where’s Kevorkian when you need him?”

Answer: Dead and buried, thankfully.  Hopefully the morticians took the time beforehand to cut off his head, stuff the mouth with garlic, then hammer a hawthorn stake through Kevorkian’s chest cavity.  It all depends on whether they were part of a chain, or not: these modern fellows don’t really keep to the old ways.

Moe Lane

PS: No, I’m not upset about the invocation of Kevorkian generally: it was part of a pious wish to hasten the odious Righthaven’s removal from the annals of history.  We* may find it necessary and useful to treat corporations as legally equivalent to people, but that doesn’t extend to treating the deliberate destruction of one as murder.  No matter how gleeful the destruction is.

*As in, “Western society.”

Having my gall bladder out tomorrow means that today is going to be running-around-day.  I’ve spent most of it in the car, actually.

This post is going to be probably the closest thing to what I laughingly call real work today, so savor it.

I can no longer tell automatic spam mail from Just Plain Dumb trollers on first glance!

No, seriously, there must have been a conceptual leap recently: I just spent five minutes trying to figure out which Lefty site got all vein-popping upset about this Texas wildfires post before I noticed the… well, never mind what I noticed.  No sense in teaching the spambots better tricks.

Spanish Ladies, Paul Clayton

Hey.  It’s a direct quote, OK?

Alternate title: Jay Carney is starting to crack under the strain.

Two thoughts about this:

1. Apparently – and contra Andrew Cuomo – you can shuck and jive at an Obama press conference after all.
2. I do not look forward with some interest to seeing how Pam Spaulding of Pandagon (and the above Huffington Post/Talking Points Memo writer, and every other person who freaked out about the Cuomo thing during the 2008 election) manages the mental readjustment necessary to simultaneously excuse attacking a white Hillary Clinton supporter for using the term then, while forgiving a white Obama staffer for using the term now. That’s because I can’t see how such a readjustment can be done without some form of trepanning.

Hey. Live by the hardline attitude on language, die by it. Not my fault.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Yes.  You are shocked.

Very quickly, and to get this out of the way: the Online Left is babbling about supposedly-cut Texas firefighting budgets, mostly because they lack the research skills – or possibly, the native intelligence – to tell the difference between a $109 million Forest Service/Wildfire Fighting budget in 2010/2011, and a $196 million Forest Service/Wildfire Fighting budget for 2012/2013 (the 2012 fiscal year started at the beginning of this month). Fortunately, Battleswarm Blog can both think and do research – as seen here and here – which means that I don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting this time. Bottom line: never, ever stop just because you got the answer that you wanted.

[UPDATE: Via WILLisms, via @bdomenech, comes another reading error from the netroots.  Tthat some of the n-dimensional geniuses over on that side of the blogosphere looked at last year's Forest Service budget and inexplicably failed to notice that it included a one-time new equipment allocation: which caused them to mistake this year's budget as a reduction.  What makes it particularly funny is that the allocation was due to stimulus funds... which meant that in their haste to go negative, the netroots completely messed up the opportunity to make a positive argument about their policy positions.  And they wonder why nobody respects them...]

But. Since we’re talking about supposed derelictions of duty, how about we talk about some of the stuff that the federal government is doing? – Or, more accurately, what the federal government is not doing. (more…)

Walter Russell Mead, while in the process of idly kicking around feckless radical environmentalists:

Snail darters beware: green political cluelessness is about to rock your world.

The context – although it’s plenty good without it, really – is that Mead (who is almost certainly fibbing when he says ” I don’t actually enjoy tweaking the greens*”) is commenting on the quote-unquote ‘strategy’ of the professional environmental movement.  Said strategy?  Finding as many different ways as possible to have the excuse to line up in a row, scream “Bonsai!,**” and charge. (more…)

We’re in day two of the three day qualifying period for the gubernatorial primary, you see.  Another reminder: the only person that the Democrats have had so far who is willing to stand up and publicly oppose Bobby Jindal is… Tara Hollis, schoolteacher.  She is not particularly expected to win – but there’s nobody else right now, and that situation is being repeated all the way down the ticket.

I want to make this clear: this is not a knock on Ms. Hollis, whose most egregious crime seems to be retaining the charmingly naive belief that the Democratic leadership actually cares overmuch about their oft-stated principles.  But it is a fairly comprehensive knock against the Democratic party of Louisiana, which has taken multiple body blows for the last half decade.  It’s curious to note: for all the verbiage written about how devastating the Katrina response supposedly was to the GOP (particularly Bush), I can’t help but notice that in the state where the devastation was strongest the most obvious change was that Louisiana went from a largely Democratic-run state to a largely Republican-run one.  It’s also curious that this hasn’t been reported on more.

Well, OK, so it’s not curious.  Thou Shalt Not Question The Media Narrative, and all that.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Bobby Jindal for Governor.  Better safe than sorry.

Democratic pollster PPP reports that Republican Bill Maloney is now trailing acting Governor Earl Ray Tomblin by only six points (46/40, poll data here).  Compare that to the May (45/30) and April (56/23) polls from the same pollster and suddenly we apparently have a race on our hands.

Yes, I know.  It’s early days yet to justify the title, but let’s see how the next couple of months go month goes.

Bill Maloney’s site is here.

(Via @streiffredstate)

…yeah, I heard about that Tea Party Zombies game thing.  I got as far as looking at the zombies that you could fight, noted from the visuals/descriptions that the fine old tradition of game designers never having gotten laid in high school was apparently still in full force*, got tipped off that the gameplay sucked ass, and went to finish my Dragon Age 2 playthrough so that I can get started on the first Deus X.  Because, really, life is short.

(failed Will roll)

But the years are long.

Moe Lane

*Which happens to most nerds, frankly.  It’s just that most of us get over it eventually.

There’s a part of me that is kind of glad that I missed the original controversy over the World War Z movie – essentially, that the studio threw out the perfectly good script, original premise, timeline, …and everything else except the title, really.  I’m glad because this way I get to have that horror added to the Liveliest Awfulness that @allahpundit and @Slublog found:

The movie will have fast zombies.

(pause)

FAST ZOMBIES.

Don’t get me wrong: fast zombies are a great addition to the genre.  28 Days Later? Zombieland? Great stuff.  But fast zombies just doesn’t fit into any part of World War Z, and honestly?  If they’re trying to rope into theaters the people who loved the book, possibly they should consider showing the film version of the stuff that made people love the book?  And if they can’t do that and still make money, well, it’s OK not to make a movie out of a book.  Really.