Author: Moe_Lane

#rsrh QotD, Scott Brown edition.

Heh.

This much is worth remembering: When he entered the national consciousness, he was considered something of a lightweight. Sure, he was camera-ready – a handsome, fit guy surrounded by an attractive family. But as someone asking the people to send him to conduct the serious business of the United States Senate, he had little in the way of a legislative record. On the podium, he was more than a bit wooden, delivering halting lines like a high school jock going through the motions in his run for student council. And the jock label fit. Even though he graduated from a competitive college, he had distinguished himself on campus as an athlete, not a scholar. In the special election to fill the seat of Massachusetts’s most famous senator, his main obstacle was a credentialed Democrat who had earned a reputation for competence as the state’s attorney general. The prospect of this neophyte ascending to the Senate threw members of the intellectual class into fits of apoplexy.

Yet in the art of retail politics, the agreeable guy with the handsome face was a star, quickly establishing himself as the superior candidate. It was more than just the stamina he showed in shaking hand after hand after hand. It was the pleasant doggedness and smiling ease with which he did it. He clearly liked campaigning because he clearly liked people. And people clearly liked him.

Trust me.  Click through the link and keep reading.

Via RCP.

#rsrh Cummings ‘ready’ for Issa. (snicker)

Rep. Elijah Cummings* says that he’s “ready” to face down Rep. Darrell Issa when the latter takes over as House Oversight chair this week.  For those who don’t know him, Rep. Cummings is a fundamentally uninteresting Congressman who has been taking full advantage of racial gerrymandering for the last fourteen years to do… nothing at all, really.  His most noteworthy accomplishment in that time period, in fact, has been to yell at Mark McGwire over steroid use – which I am sure is all very nice, but it’s not exactly what I’d call consequential.

More importantly – and it’s the major reason for this post in the first place – I’d like to take this opportunity to remind the Democrats that they confidently announced that they were ‘ready’ for the 2010 elections, too.  They didn’t do a blessed thing to slow the avalanche down, but by gum they were ‘ready’ for it…

Moe Lane

*Who has the good fortune to be my Congressman, alas.

#rsrh The Dave Barry 2010 year in review…

…is out, and it’s (as usual) good.  A taste:

Let’s put this year into a full-body scanner and check out its junk, starting with…

JANUARY

…which begins grimly, with the pesky unemployment rate remaining high. Every poll shows that the major concerns of the American people are federal spending, the exploding deficit, and — above all — jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs: This is what the public is worried about. In a word, the big issue is: jobs. So the Obama administration, displaying the keen awareness that has become its trademark, decides to focus like a laser on: health-care reform. The centerpiece of this effort is a historic bill that will either (a) guarantee everybody excellent free health care, or (b) permit federal bureaucrats to club old people to death. Nobody knows which, because nobody has read the bill, which in printed form has the same mass as a UPS truck.

I miss his blogging.

Greg Mankiw advises the Obama living in his head.

I feel sorry for Greg Mankiw: I really do.  Here he is, living a life that allows him to place articles in the New York Times – which is not a bad place to be – and he publicly mucks it up by publishing a piece that crashes and burns on the first word of the title.  The title is “How to Break Bread With the Republicans,” and as advice goes it is… not bad.  Absolutely useless, but not bad.  But it’s still absolutely useless, primarily because it assumes (as the “How” in the title shows) that the President simply doesn’t know how to reach out to his Republican opposition.  Trust me, President Obama knows: he simply doesn’t want to.  Obama doesn’t want to because… well, there are multiple reasons. Continue reading Greg Mankiw advises the Obama living in his head.

Dismayed Pareene?

Not to be unkind – OK, that’s a big, fat, juicy lie; it’s all about being unkind – but if MSNBC is interested in finding out why Decision Points is a bestseller, possibly they should solicited the opinion somebody who’s actually written a book? – Because I went over to Amazon, actually; and while I was able to find the author page for George W. Bush readily enough, this is what comes up when you punch in “Alex Pareene.”  Which I suspect is diagnostic, in its way*.  Although I suppose that I shouldn’t take this entire exercise in futility on MSNBC’s too seriously: even Pareene looked like he was phoning in the snark (and I’m being generous in scoring it as ‘snark’).  Ach well: as (I think) Stephen King said that (I think) Bob Dylan said, when they give you forks and knives, you have to cut something.

Via Hot Air Headlines; see Newsbusters for more scorn towards Pareene and MSNBC.

Moe Lane

*Although I will agree with this Pareene person that the Kindle does make it easier to buy books.  I’m actually reading Decision Points on the Kindle right now; but I was planning to buy it anyway.  It’s a pretty good read, not to mention a good tool for refreshing my memory about the events of the last decade.  We did go through a lot back then, just didn’t we?

#rsrh Manatees give Big Coal a thumb’s-up!

(Via POWIP) …OK, manatees don’t have thumbs.  But if they did, they’d be using them to show their support for the outflow water from the Big Bend coal station in Tampa, Florida.  You see, it’s gotten rather cold in the Gulf of Mexico this year – we will now pause while the fundamentalist Greenies solemnly declare this to be the fault of the dark god Globalwarming* – so the manatees have been going places that are generating more heat.  Such as the Big Bend coal plant, which is apparently such a [popular manatee destination spot] that the plant has a manatee viewing center for the benefit of tourists and/or marine biologists.   It’s apparently been a bad year for manatees freezing to death – which leads one to the conclusion that if you hate coal in Florida, you hate these guys:

And if you do… you ought to be ashamed [of] yourself, Gaia-cidist. Continue reading #rsrh Manatees give Big Coal a thumb’s-up!

Hey, that’s what she said!

You may recall from last week that Ms. Carol Shea-Porter got herself in a bit of hot water over the following quote about the secret cabals out there trying to destroy our democracy, or something: “They’re in the halls of Congress everywhere, and it means, for example, that you sit on a committee and you say something about concern about Chinese influence or something, you don’t even know if in the next election, somehow or another, they manage to send some money to some group that now doesn’t even have to say where they got it.*”  This gem was from a ABC News article wherein the news group interviewed four politicians who had their heads handed to them in the last election, so as you can imagine, there was some bitterness involved.

Now, WMUR has decided to chime in on this, indicating that Ms. Shea-Porter** is attempting to ‘clarify’ the story, which was widely seen as at least implying that the former Congresswoman was blaming her election loss on rampaging Chinese hordes.  The claim is that Shea-Porter was speaking generally, and that she had not intended to suggest that said Chinese influence had had anything to do with her election.  This argument will probably work for anybody who thought that Ms. Shea-Porter was a shining example of Congressional majesty – which is to say, the class of people who are often impolitely designated as having ‘room temperature IQs.’  For the rest of us: read on. Continue reading Hey, that’s what she said!