Vandals are torching pro-Walker yard signs, and now homeowners and neighbors are worried the crimes could escalate.

Someone set fire to at least five Walker campaign signs here in Fox Point.

Via Hot Air.

Moe Lane

PS: It’s not going to work, by the way.

To some degree, [the Occupy movement] was killed by its “friends.” The tiny left wing groups that exist in the country jumped all over the movement; between them and the deranged and occasionally dangerous homeless people and other rootless wanderers drawn to the movement’s increasingly disorderly campsites, OWS looked and sounded less and less like anything the 99 percent want anything to do with. At the same time, the movement largely failed to connect with the African American and Hispanic churchgoers who would have to be the base for any serious grass roots urban political mobilization. The trade unions picked up the movement briefly but dropped it like a hot brick as they found the brand less and less attractive.

It is as if the Tea Party had been taken over by the Aryan Brotherhood and delusional vagrants while failing to connect with either evangelical Christians or respectable libertarians. The MSM at one point was visibly hungering and thirsting for exactly that fate of marginalization to happen to the Tea Party, and the MSM did its klutzy best to tar the Tea Party with that kind of Mad Hatter extremism. The Tea Partiers by and large (not always or cleanly) escaped the fatal embrace of the nutters and the ranters on their side of the spectrum; OWS was occupied by its own fringe, and so died.

The whole thing is a good read, with a helpful reminder that this country works best if we’ve got two healthy generators of political/economic/social policy to choose from.  Which is true: I can’t wait for the Left to develop one.

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, I know that the Left says that about the Right, too.  That’s an interesting point… hey, real quick: how is Detroit doing again, these days?

I mean, yes: we’ve had it noted that Obama only racked up 59.4% of the West Virginia primary vote; 80.9% of New Hampshire’s; and 79.2% of North Carolina’s.  But here are some other primary race vote totals, thus far (all via The Green Papers): Rhode Island, 83.4%.  Louisiana, 76.5%. Alabama, 80.8%. Massachusetts, 81.2%, Oklahoma, 57.1%.  To give you a baseline… if you remove places like American Samoa or Guam, if I read this right in 2004 George Bush never dipped below 89.5% (Idaho) of the primary vote in states he won and 79.6% (New Hampshire) in states that he didn’t.  Other states of note in 2004, to give you an idea: Alabama, 92.8%. Kentucky, 92.5%. Massachusetts, 90.6%. Rhode Island, 84.9%.

I note the Bush comparison not to make a direct one – I do not think that we can really quantify the respective partisan enthusiasms of 2004 Republicans and 2012 Democrats.  I do bring it up because it’s becoming clear that the Democratic voters in various states are getting restless. Or perhaps ‘volatile’ is a better word; while most of the Democrats voting in protest in the primaries will vote for Obama in the general, they’re generally not showing that they’re particularly happy about having to do that.  And unhappy voters just… vote.

I would be interested to see how the media will report this if the trend continues, but unfortunately I don’t live in the alternate universe where mainstream media sources provide that kind of analysis on Democratic candidates.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: I really do want to caution people about reading too much into these numbers; a lot of these states have long histories of using the primaries to spout off.  But if it’s legitimate to talk about North Carolina and West Virginia and New Hampshire, then it’s legitimate to note that the additional examples of Massachusetts and Rhode Island and Louisiana suggest that this is all not a series of unfortunate coincidences, or however that phrase goes.

Ach, well, the WWF needs to eat, too. I mean, have you seen the price of fair-trade coffee, lately?  That lifestyle ain’t cheap to maintain…

Moe Lane

We have cookies.  More importantly, we have voters who will vote for African-Americans on a statewide level.

Walp.

Honestly, we have no kick coming.

Moe Lane

*Note: this is not actually ‘bad.’

Alernate-alternate title: DOOM.

You know, when I saw this secondhand whine from Wisconsin Democrats upset that the DNC apparently wasn’t prepared to throw half a million dollars at the general recall election, I assumed that this would be resolved.  I mean, really: the Left has  already thrown away tens of millions of dollars; what’s a bit more?  Admittedly, not throwing utterly horrible money after bad (we’ve passed the ‘throwing good money after bad’ stage already) would be the right answer, in a strictly utilitarian sense; but the state party is in a bad way right now.  They sort of need an indication that the President cares for more than his own election, right?

Well… that’s apparently not going to happen.  MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked Obama’s deputy* campaign manager Stephanie Cutter whether the DNC would be sending money earmarked for the recall, and Ms. Cutter said… nothing in particular. And definitely nothing that would commit the DNC to giving out money.

TODD: The last time you were on the show we talked about the Wisconsin recall. I’d asked whether the president would be supportive, if the party was going to be supportive. You said that it’s possible. Obviously there’s a stake, that you “have stake in the election; we believe that the governor has penalized working families across the state, so it’s possible. We certainly want to see a good outcome there.” This is the idea of the DNC helping out. Wisconsin state party says the DNC has not ponied up any money. You guys control the DNC. The Obama campaign and DNC are one in the same. Are you going to pony up money to the recall election in Wisconsin?

CUTTER: I don’t know the answer to that question, on the money.

I’m still looking for the video of this… but as Jim Geraghty notes: “If the answer is not ‘yes,’ it is ‘no.’”  And the answer is almost certainly ‘no,’ given that not even PPP/dKos/SEIU can really find good news for the Democrats with regard to recalling Scott Walker.  50/45  Walker/Barrett (safe link), no change in a month, and everybody they talked to was EAGER to go out and vote in June.  The DNC will have enough trouble as it is with trying to get the Anti-Elvis elected; they don’t need this complication.

I’d say ‘Sorry about that,’ except that it’d be a lie of such magnitude that I might actually fear for my soul.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Take a good look at Ms. Cutter, by the way: because that’s as about as high a position in the Obama campaign team as a woman is likely to reach.

…and an indication that I have the Coolest. Wife. EVER.

Moe Lane

PS: Barack Obama really does have no Elvis in him.

That’s it.  This is just me being a pain: as the philosopher once said, it’s my hobby.

…which is why, of course, I am asking it.  The background… comes in three parts:

• Vice President Joe Biden, when he was Senator Joe Biden, happened to be a sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act.  We’ll pass to one side for a moment the current (as in, this week) controversy over the latest iteration of the law – it’s up for reauthorization – to specifically note, again, that this was Biden’s baby, as it were.
• Charlie Wilson is known mostly for three things (four, if you count the fact that he’s often confused with the infinitely better Democratic Charlie Wilson from Texas); he was the former Congressman from OH-06; Charlie Wilson of Ohio is an admitted wife-beater; and Charlie Wilson of Ohio is unaccountably running for Congress again.
• Guess where Joe Biden will be stumping for the President, this week?  That’s right! OH-06! Also OH-17 (Youngstown), but Thursday Biden will be making a speech Thursday at an auto dealership in Martin’s Ferry.

Which, as has been privately pointed out to me, leads to a fascinating set of questions.  Will Charlie Wilson be making an appearance at this event?  If Wilson does show, will we be treated to the spectacle of seeing the Vice President and sponsor of anti-spousal abuse legislation praise a guy who was a poster child for why we might have needed the legislation in the first place?  If Wilson does not show, will the administration come clean about why the wife-beater wasn’t invited to his party’s own in-district campaign event?  In either case, will the press bring up the inherent rhetorical contradictions that this entire scenario represents?

No, wait, I know the answer to that last one already.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Hey, you know something?  Bill Johnson (R, OH-06) STILL doesn’t beat his wife!

Many of President Obama’s fervent devotees are young enough not to have much memory of the political world before the arrival of The One. Coincidentally, Obama himself feels the same way—and the White House’s official website reflects that.

The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography on www.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick. My first thought was, he must be joking. But he wasn’t—it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).

God, if this is what adolescence looks like from the outside then I will be hating life a decade from now.

Moe Lane

PS: I’m going to guess that the Ford exception is because the most significant thing that happened during Ford’s administration is that the Democrats stabbed South Vietnam in the back and left it to the Commies, then promptly tried to forget that Vietnam ever existed (except as an opportunity to create a new victim class).  You can imagine that the administration probably would not want to bring that up…