Day: April 2, 2013

Pew: Keystone pipeline supported by 54% of …Democrats.

There comes a time when it’s smart to throw in your cards.  This would be one of those times.  66/23 for it, overall, and just look at the crosstabs:

Support for the pipeline spans most demographic and partisan groups. Substantial majorities of Republicans (82%) and independents (70%) favor building the Keystone XL pipeline, as do 54% of Democrats. But there is a division among Democrats: 60% of the party’s conservatives and moderates support building the pipeline, compared with just 42% of liberal Democrats.

The 42/48 split among liberal Democrats on the question of Keystone is actually be the one that should really worry Barack Obama and the other Luddites running the Democratic party, though.  Being against Keystone isn’t just fringe; it’s perilously close to being a fringe position even among the existing fringe.  Mind you, if the Democrats absolutely want to take a cordially hated anti-energy position through at least two, and probably four, more gas hikes, I can live with that.  After all, there’s an election going on next year, and every little bit helps.

Via Hot Air.

Moe Lane

PS: For the record, Pew: a 48/38 split on whether fracking is a good idea is not a “mixed opinion:” it’s “a double digit lead favoring fracking.”  Again: for the record.

Whither conservative art? – Note the lack of scare quotes.

Gotta admit, I’m with my colleague and buddy Ben Howe on this one… with ‘this one’ being defined as A Movement on Fire, which is an upcoming film (maybe) that clearly wishes to be a Tea Party rallying cry, but instead comes across as… well.  As Ben put it:

Instead of pulling people into a story that espouses the underlying tenets of liberty, it slaps them across the face with all of the subtlety of a campaign commercial. Rather than taking the viewer along for a first-person view of how our present can develop into their future, the filmmakers opted to skip directly to the bottom of the slippery slope without describing the tumble with enough detail to create a real connection for the viewer.

Continue reading Whither conservative art? – Note the lack of scare quotes.

Chris Matthews: Imperial Japanese? TOTALLY not racists, bro.

I know, I know: it’s the talking head. But if you don’t smack it from time to time, the talking head simply gets worse:

Rev. Luis León presided over Easter Sunday services attended by President Obama recently, and has taken fire from the right for suggesting that racial hatred lurks in the hearts of conservatives.

During his radio show, Limbaugh agreed with a caller who suggested that León was merely following the president’s lead in accusing the right of latent racism.

“Actually, Rushbo, racism is the belief that one race – whites — should rule all others,” Matthews confidently declared. “Get your definitions straight.”

…I suppose that it’s a great retroactive comfort for various victims of atrocities to hear that the Bataan Death March was totes not due to racism.  Or the Manila Massacre.  Or the Rape of Nanking.  And Imperial Japan is just the most obvious example; pick a region, and you’ll find people who have enthusiastically gone after whoever the local definition of ‘other races’ is.  This is a less savory part of the nature of mankind: what makes Western society largely unique is that we tend to feel bad about it.

Via… I don’t remember, sorry.  Somebody on Twitter.

Moe Lane

Welp. It’s a banner day for New York politicians getting arrested.

(H/T: Jammie Wearing Fools) Geez Louise.

State Sen. Malcolm Smith and city Councilman Dan Halloran were arrested this morning on charges they were plotting to rig this year’s mayoral election through fraud and bribes.

The pols allegedly formed an alliance built on cash payments and fraud to get Smith — one of the state’s top Democrats — placed on the GOP mayoral ballot, sources said.

FBI agents arrested them both at their Queens homes shortly after 6 a.m.

You may remember Malcolm Smith from last December, when he half-broke from the Democratic party in order to join the Independent Democratic Caucus, which is the organization that is allowing the NY GOP to retain control of the state Senate.  I don’t think that Smith being thrown out on his ear will be enough to flip the state Senate back, but I guess that we’re about to find out! Dan Halloran is the neo-pagan guy (I mention this for identification purposes only: no, seriously, some of my best friends really ARE neo-pagans) who ran for Congress last year, and lost.  There’s a bunch of other people who got arrested, including some top NYC GOP party officials (Joseph Savino and Vincent Tabone) and the (Democratic*) mayor and assistant mayor of Spring Valley: which may explain why this story will be slow getting off the launching pad.  Everybody’s really busy checking first to make sure that none of their people are actually in the blast zone. Continue reading Welp. It’s a banner day for New York politicians getting arrested.

Hmm. Turns out Karl Marx was just as smelly and personally useless as his modern-day acolytes!

[Or: “So… John Edwards, minus the hair product.” – Private response]

Hey, you want a good laugh?  Figure out when I started to chortle… at the New York Times.

The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber’s absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain “slummy,” and who can be maddeningly inconsistent when not lapsing into elaborate flights of theory and unintelligible abstraction.

Still, it comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern.

…Actually, no, it doesn’t come as a shock at all.  Marxism is, as I have often noted, intellectualism for stupid people: it attracts third-rate True Believers and second-rate cynical opportunists, both of whom are eager to find an ‘intellectual’ movement that rewards memorization over reason, not to mention basic food production.  That Karl Marx himself was just as, as Tim Blair put it, “stinky, broke, and mad” as his ideological great-great-grandchildren is hardly a revelation.  The fact, though, that Marx apparently hated Jews just as much as some of the more vocal members of Occupy… no, wait, still not a revelation.  Continue reading Hmm. Turns out Karl Marx was just as smelly and personally useless as his modern-day acolytes!

Columbia University hires convicted terrorist as professor.

Although we’re in a bit of a pickle, here.

Former Weather Underground radical Kathy Boudin — who spent 22 years in prison for an armored-car robbery that killed two cops and a Brinks guard — now holds a prestigious adjunct professorship at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, The Post has learned.

On the one hand, Boudin went through the penal system and came out the other side; like it or not, the rules now say that she’s a free woman. On the other hand, I am not entirely convinced that her remorse is genuine: read this and you might be forgiven for thinking that the woman was involved in a robbery gone bad, and not an act of revolutionary violence committed by two domestic terrorist organizations. And on the gripping hand… this issue could have been avoided if we had just hanged domestic terrorists back then, you know.  I mean, I’m sure that Timothy McVeigh might have gotten into library management or something if we had given him the chance, but we rightly decided to give him the needle instead…

Via