#rsrh QotD, friendly advice edition.

(Via Instapundit) I almost agree with this:

Obama came into office drunk on his own hype. He thought that he was bigger than the job; that his charisma and cool alone could shape history. (“This campaign is about you,” his campaign’s website said. That’s a good tip-off: whenever someone says that it’s not about them, it’s always, always about them.) Now, he’s a human being: nobody — not me, not you, and not Barack Obama — can be anesthetized from the egomania that must come with reading about how his words and deeds can shape a generation’s legacy. But whose idea was it, after all, to send a man with such an astonishingly thin paper trail to lead Western civilization during a period of war and recession? Well, it was his. It was Obama’s idea. The thing about our system is this: you don’t inherit the job. It doesn’t fall into your lap. In the final analysis, you nominate yourself for the job. Obama kicked off his own campaign from Illinois in January 2007. He’d been in high office for two years, and already he’d decided that he was such an important figure that he really ought to be president.

Continue reading #rsrh QotD, friendly advice edition.

Book of the Week: Dead or Alive.

Yes, yes, Dead or Alive is a 850 page Tom Clancy novel, and it’d probably stand to be cut down about three hundred pages because nobody wants to tell Tom Clancy that he shouldn’t write 850 page novels. Including, apparently, me, because I’m going to read the blessed thing. I’m obviously weak that way.

And so ends the reign of The High King of Montival.

I made a mistake in yesterday’s post on House races.

When I went along with calling what the Democrats are doing in the House ‘triage.’ Triage implies a situation where an overwhelming number of people have been injured and absolutely must be sorted out by severity of injury, in order to save as many as possible.  What we have here instead is a situation where “sick” individuals are being sorted out not by the severity of their (political) illnesses, but by a combination of the absolute cost of the patient’s treatment, cost-effectiveness of that treatment, and the perceived overall value of the patients themselves.  Those that make the cut get treated; those who don’t, get a palliative.

In other words, House Democrats have set up their own personal death panel.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

#rsrh I like Byron York’s stuff…

…but I have to take some umbrage at this point in an otherwise excellent piece on why the vaunted pivot to the economy is too little, too late for this administration.  While discussing the way that the President has… well, voted ‘present’… on jobs and the economy, Byron wrote:

It’s hard to overstate just how surprised Republicans have been by Obama’s performance.

I’m actually not surprised at all.  The man’s been a member of the legislative branch all his political life; he has no executive experience worth mentioning, and it shows.  Isn’t this largely why we don’t usually elect Senators President anymore? – And it’ll be a long time before we elect another one President, huh?

Moe Lane

PS: Via Hot Air Headlines.

Welcome to the 2010 Election campaign cycle!

Yes, everything that has happened up to this point has been the overture, prologue, or whatever other metaphor is most suitable for the reader. This is the time when the rest of the people who will be voting in the midterms will start looking around and paying attention to everything that’s going around them. Which is, of course, their privilege; besides, there’s probably less of them this time around. And they’re going to see the following: Continue reading Welcome to the 2010 Election campaign cycle!

#rsrh What’s as permanent as a temporary entitlement?

A temporary tax cut, apparently. Peter Orszag has decided that the party doesn’t need to go down with the ship – or, more accurately, the ship’s captain:

In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it.

I’d feel bad about the way that the administration is grinding metal on this, if only… actually, I cannot conceive of a situation where I’d feel bad about watching the administration squirm as it realizes that it has to break yet another badly thought-out and hastily-made campaign promise. Although I suppose that we haven’t plumbed the depths of stupidity, at that: the depths of stupidity would be to impose a new tax of roughly the same amount to the average taxpayer and claim that this wasn’t breaking the huge albatross around his neck his most famous badly thought-out and hastily-made campaign promise:
Continue reading #rsrh What’s as permanent as a temporary entitlement?

Introducing Concord Project.

It’s a website dedicated to promoting grassroots GOTV for the Right, on a practical level: how to do it, how not to do it (particularly if you’re an employer), advice on why you need to do unglamorous, tedious and non-sexy tasks like walking the district to recruit voters and donors… things like that. Of particular interest to conservatives is the emphasis on precinct committeemen (which is something that RedState has brought up in the past, but bears repeating):

Concord Project is up and running today, and they’re looking for people to be involved on the state level. From what I’ve seen and read, this election cycle there’s an existing and welcome interest in GOTV by the Right – a polite way of saying that ‘conservatives are ready to crawl across broken glass in order to vote this year’ – but enthusiasm may be outstripping organizational awareness and skill. Hopefully, this will help in that regard.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

QotD, Minion advice edition.

From Cracked.com, of course:

[The villains of Gotham] keep charging at Batman one at a time, even with 13 of their cohorts lying on the ground with broken collar bones. We’re not suggesting they just walk away and give up their life of crime–we understand that anybody who’s signed up to be a henchman for The Joker probably isn’t qualified to do anything else. But maybe you should fall back and try a new strategy. You’re not going to be the first guy in history to punch Batman into submission. Leave until you can come back with some dogs.

Of course, Batman will have a plan for that.

Because he’s Batman.