Moe Lane

Background: As all of you know, it’s not a true critical Obama speech without at least one howler of a historical error in it somewhere, and last Thursday’s was a beauty of one: did you know Lincoln founded the Republican party?  Of course you didn’t know that: after all, you’re almost certainly better-versed in actual American history than the Harvard-educated n-dimensional genius who is currently President.  And, no, this wasn’t the speechwriter’s fault this time: that Lincoln bit wasn’t in the original.  Hence the kerfluffle: as The American Thinker noted, PBS used the original embargoed speech transcript, while the New York Times used the actual speech itself to generate its transcript.  All of which is not really all that newsworthy… except that apparently people are trying to point this little detail out to PBS, and PBS is refusing to either change its transcript to reflect objective reality, or even publish the calls for correction.

Assuming this is true… oh, my.  Screening comments.  Tsk, tsk, tsk… what’s that?  “You do that all the time, Moe?”  Well, yes.  Cheerfully, in fact.  But that’s because I know how to do it properly.  Direct-to-spam protocols for querulous whines, bitter profanity, and inchoate-rage-presented-as-dispassionate-truth-telling is one thing; but, really.  I watched the speech.  Here, you can  watch the relevant part of the speech, too:

PBS mucked up.  There’s actually nothing really wrong with providing a copy of an embargoed speech the moment it’s no longer embargoed; and a simple Update: the transcript has been corrected to reflect changes made to it in the delivery would have been a reasonable thing to do.  All that they’re doing with this strategy is to take partial ownership of President Obama’s ignorant gaffe.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

The formal capitulation took place yesterday, and signals an end to Gov. Dayton’s ill-conceived, ill-timed, and ill-executed attempt to dominate the Minnesota legislature in the same way that predecessor Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R, MN) did during his term in office.  The very short version, for those not following along: Minnesota Republican legislators wanted a $34 billion dollar, two-year budget with no new taxes; Dayton wanted $3 billion in business-killing tax hikes.  Republicans told him no, and sent him a budget, which Dayton vetoed.  The Minnesota government shut down – which meant, among other things, that Minnesotans were in critical danger of running out of beer and not being allowed to fish.  Faced with such proven evidence of abject incompetence and idiocy on Dayton’s part, eventually the Governor was brought to heel like a whipped dog; his formal capitulation soon followed.  Final score: $35.7 billion over two years with no tax hikes – and legislators in Minnesota have to pretend that Gov. Dayton was not savagely politically beaten.  No, seriously… apparently this is supposed to be framed as being a ‘compromise.’

Interestingly enough, post-capitulation news articles on this don’t seem to mention Pawlenty nearly as much as they did, pre-capitulation.  Although that may just be a sort of terrible pity towards Dayton, who did turn out to be a very slender, and trivial to break, reed…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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I think that this quote below from a New York Times article on whether the GOP will allow themselves to be stampeded on irresponsibly raising the debt ceiling might just be fairly representative of attitudes among our freshman class. More to the point, I think that the New York Times is coming to the same conclusion:

“Re-election is the farthest thing from my mind,” said Representative Tom Reed, a freshman Republican from upstate New York. “Like many of my colleagues in the freshman class, I came down here to get our fiscal house in order and take care of the threat to national security that we see in the federal debt. We came here not to have long careers. We came here to do something. We don’t care about re-election.”

In fact, the New York Times may – I repeat, may - be even sufficiently concerned about this issue that it’s prepared to do some actual journalism on the subject. The quotes from Republican legislators were all on-point (including a rousing one from Sen. Lindsey Graham, of all people), and there were much fewer attempts to argue the Democratic talking points for them. The NYT even went so far as to not just remind its readers that Democratic rhetoric now doesn’t match their rhetoric from 2004; it actually noted that “[t]he increase then was $800 billion. The White House is now seeking an increase of at least $2.4 trillion. That would lift the limit to at least $16.7 trillion, about twice the level set in 2004.”

Yes, I recognize the irony of praising a newspaper for writing something that looks like actual news. This is the world we live in.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

It’s hardly a surprise – Pawlenty has been arguing since January that automatically raising the debt ceiling without exhausting other options (read: spending cuts) first is a bad idea – but the video below shows that the former Governor of Minnesota continues to want Republican legislators to not back down on this issue:

As GOP 12 noted, this statement by Pawlenty…

Now is the time. The hour is late, and these problems are big, and the only way you’re going to get people to do something tough is to put their backs up against the wall.

…sounds a lot like what Erick Erickson was saying this morning: (more…)

I suspect that the Democratic party probably doesn’t want to ever see this sentence from a Harvard statistical survey appear in a news story:

Taken together, the results indicate that Fourth of July celebrations in the United States shape the nation’s political landscape by forming beliefs and increasing participation, primarily in favor of the Republican party.

…for fairly obvious reasons .  Short version: going to Fourth of July celebrations (using a statistical rule of thumb* of good weather = participation) as a child results in an increased possibility of voting Republican as an adult (it apparently doesn’t move the needle at all when it comes to voting Democratic).  Oh, and progressives are why the Fourth became a public secular holiday in the first place**.  Lastly: if you want to zap your kids into patriotism and/or Republicanism, the key dates to get them to a parade are from 7 to 10 for later partisan identification, and 15 to 18 for increased voter participation. (more…)

Ace of Spades HQ sums up wonderfully (if originally profanely) the destruction of that 100 billion dollar (and 30 billion deficit-increasing) waste of tax money* known as a ‘jobs bill:’

Democrats: Give us $30 billion. GOP: Um….no. Democrats: Come on! GOP: Nah. Democrats: How come? GOP: One, I don’t have it; and two, you’re already into me for more than a trillion already. Democrats: So what’s another measly $30 billion? Please? GOP: Man, just [expletive deleted] off. Seriously. Democrats: WHY DO YOU HATE THE POOR! GOP: I don’t hate the poor. I just hate you.

But I would like to remind my readers of one thing: this blow for fiscal sanity?  Brought to you by Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins (via Instapundit), much to the consternation of Democratic partisans… which apparently includes the author of the Politico article.  Or possibly Politico was just supposed to be in on the stimulus, somehow? – It’s all kind of murky these days.

Moe Lane (more…)

Yes, Ezra Pound’s from Idaho it’s actually Walt Whitman, and I’m an idiot.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.

It must be admitted that when I read this particular article:

In a move that seemed to surprise many members of Maine’s Republican Party, a group of tea party-style activists redefined the party platform at the convention Saturday.

After the vote, in which a vocal majority supported a wholesale replacement of language worked on by the party establishment since at least January, a string of delegates congratulated Horatio “Ted” Cowan III, a retired marine electrician from Rockland who wrote the adopted amendment.

…I mostly snickered at The Outrage over what happens to be a fairly straightforwardly party platform that should have a good deal of appeal to conservatives, libertarians, and populists. I personally would have argued the hard line on illegal immigration and same-sex marriage, but the former is an argument over tactics and 53% of the voting population of Maine disagrees with me on the latter anyway.   So, really, business as usual, nice to see that the Ron Paul people were actually participating in local party structures like we had been asking them to do throughout all of 2008…  and, yeah, Maine’s lost to conservatism, so let them have their fun.

Then I read a few more details of what actually happened. (more…)

Way to bury the ledes there, WaPo.

I suppose that I should be nicer. After all, the Washington Post bothered to actually report that there has been a heavy surge in female recruitment by the GOP this cycle (H/T: The New Ledger):

Nearly two years after Sarah Palin became the Republican Party’s first female nominee for vice president, record numbers of Republican women are running for House seats, driving the overall count of women running for both the House and the Senate to a new high.

The surge in female candidates has taken place largely under the radar. The previous high came in 1992, the “Year of the Woman” that pushed the percentage of women in Congress into the double digits for the first time. That year, 222 women filed to run for the House and 29 for Senate contests.

So far this year, 239 women are candidates for the House and 31 for the Senate, according to data from the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics.

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…when it takes me less than ten minutes to track down his Congressional District (VA-10, Frank Wolf) or his local party apparatus (Fairfax County GOP).  Neither of which is particularly mentioned in his bio page, although a link to his book slamming President Bush is.  Prominently.  Where it’s the first thing that you can see, really.

This is fronted (via Instapundit) because this is the problem: we have lists and lists of people who want some nebulous Little Red Hen to fix their pet problem with the GOP.  Fixing the problems themselves?  Not so much.

Moe Lane

PS: Sure, you can join the Tea Parties next year, Bartlett. Just don’t expect to be given a task more involved than “make a sign to bring”…wow.  Can you even imagine Bruce Bartlett standing on a street corner, waving a homemade sign around and encouraging people to honk if they’re tired of the government spending too much of their money?  No, neither can I.

Which is more or less my point.

Crossposted to RedState.

From last week’s article on the growing awareness of Democratic corruption, by the always-interesting Jen Rubin:

…with the growth of government and the enormous amount of cash sloshing through Washington, the corruption problem is about to get worse. The stimulus money could, according to the FBI, be the breeding ground for its own crime wave. If the experts are right and 10% of the $787B stimulus plan will be lost to fraud and abuse, then $80B worth of graft and the congressmen, officials, lobbyists, and donors with their fingers in the pie will make fodder for plenty of headlines — just in time for the 2010 races.

No wonder the MSM is nervously sounding the alarm. There is the prospect that the age of “liberal dominance” could come screeching to a halt before it’s even gotten up to speed. Not only does it portend an electoral train wreck and loss of a governing liberal majority, but it sheds doubt on the notion that government was the knight in shining armor needed to ride to the rescue when the free market “failed.” If bigger and bigger government gets us more and more crooks and tens of billions in fraud, then maybe there is a better way to go than inflating the size and scope of the federal government.

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[UPDATE]: Here are couple more links for you:
Rebuilding the GOP: The Committeeman Project
Get Your STORC On

I am not ordering anybody to follow this checklist. I’m not even going to nag about it. I am merely suggesting that you consider answering the questions on them before you go off on how the party isn’t listening to you.

• What is the name of your local GOP group, on the county / district level?
• Who is the chair?
• When do they meet?
• What was discussed at the last meeting?
• What happened at that meeting that you disagreed with the most?
• How did they address your concerns?
• When does the group or sub-group that would best resolve your concerns meet?
• Who else in that group or sub-group would you say is your best ally in resolving that concern?
• Who in your area is running for state, county, and local office?
• What did they say that they needed the most help with?
• Who is the greatest obstructionist in your group, and how do you get around him or her?

I’ll keep saying it until it sinks in: there’s no cavalry coming to save us, ladies and gentlemen. That’s because we’re the cavalry.

And we are perfectly capable of saving ourselves.

Crossposted to RedState.

Via Pat Cleary. The video is a little out of sync, but the sentiments are right there:

Plus, bonus points for the Rush reference; a band that was pretty much constant background music for me for most of my college existence. (more…)