Month: September 2009

The Washington Post catches up with me on the fundraising story. Yes, *me*.

And I didn’t lose a buck-ten on every post that I wrote on the subject, either*.

A regular reader of mine might be forgiven for wondering why there’s any sort of surprised tone in this Washington Post article.

Democrats Are Jarred by Drop In Fundraising

Democratic political committees have seen a decline in their fundraising fortunes this year, a result of complacency among their rank-and-file donors and a de facto boycott by many of their wealthiest givers, who have been put off by the party’s harsh rhetoric about big business.

The trend is a marked reversal from recent history, in which Democrats have erased the GOP’s long-standing fundraising advantage. In the first six months of 2009, Democratic campaign committees’ receipts have dropped compared with the same period two years earlier.

After all, the people reading this post already know all of this.  The ongoing fundraising situation has been regularly reported on here, here, here, here, here (all of which also compared points in this cycle to the equivalent points in the last one), here, and here – and also here for the state of the parties’ financial status at the end of 2008.  Readers of both RedState and my own personal website have been kept apprised that Democratic fundraising has been consistently below last cycle’s expectations, and that the GOP has been overperforming (compared to largely media-driven expectations) – and that the amount of debt that the Democratic party has chosen to retain is warping its cash-on-hand numbers (which is something that the above article neglects to mention).  So why is the Washington Post apparently discovering this now?

Oh, right: because I’m not a ‘journalist.’  Just somebody who was paying attention.

Moe Lane

*Thank you, Virginia Postrel.

PS:

Crossposted to RedState.

Jesse Walker wrestles the pig.

(H/T Instapundit) The pig being not David Neiwert himself – he’s more of a Equus asinus asinus – but instead Neiwert’s instinctive and inherent need to believe that evil rightwingracistfascist militias are coming to get him.  I’m linking to it for Jesse’s sake; it’s an interesting corrective to a particularly nasty strain of left-wing propaganda.  A sample:

A final thought. Suppose, for the same of argument, that Neiwert is right about the militias’ origins — that they were invented by militant racists aiming to recruit mainstream Americans “by appealing to their ‘libertarian’ ideals and their fears about guns and government power.” If that were true, the bigots’ plot was surely a failure. Whatever its origins, the militia movement of the ’90s had a life of its own, and the chief issues that commanded its attention didn’t have anything to do with race. Indeed, its cause celebre was the confrontation at Waco, where roughly half of the 80 Branch Davidians killed were not white. (The body count included five Asians, six Hispanics, and 28 blacks.) To make one last ’60s comparison: Students for a Democratic Society began as the youth arm of a far-from-militant band of social democrats called the League for Industrial Democracy. With time SDS exploded in both size and activity, breathing new life into several political perspectives — but not into the League, which embodied the Old Left the kids were rejecting.

Which brings the discussion full circle. You can’t predict what autonomous audiences will do with the signals they receive: not an Ozzy Osbourne song, not a Glenn Beck broadcast, and not a call to form citizen militias.

Having made that corrective, though, I think that Jesse should drop further attempts to penetrate Neiwert’s self-interest.  After all, this is his blogospheric niche.  That’s why people read him; he scratches a very particular and very specialized itch, so you can’t really expect him to acknowledge that he’s essentially providing fetishist services.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

So, there’s a kid’s video called All About Big Red Fire Engines.

I thought that we’d give the series a shot; the kid likes trucks. Heck, the daddy likes trucks.

The daddy does not like having to deal with multiple previews of shows and movies that he has no intention of either buying, or letting his kid get in the habit of wanting; particularly when the “skip past” and “skip to menu” functions on the DVD have been disabled. The daddy will thus not buy any more of the series.

The studio for this series is Gaiam Americas: You Have Been Warned.

Moe Lane

PS: I don’t object to advertising, per se. NCircle Entertainment does it smart, though: they put examples of other shows that they distribute after the main program, where you can ignore them if you want. Which is why we went out and bought a bunch of Pocoyo videos; an example was on the Mighty Machines video that we bought for the kid, and it met our criteria for acceptable entertainment.

Scott Ott does not talk down to people when running for office.

Scott (of Scrappleface fame) is running for Lehigh County Executive, and he’s explicitly avoiding the soundbite in this video. You can read the summary if you’re in a hurry.

At the end of 2010, the reserve funds are gone. Don Cunningham spent all of his predecessor’s 69.5 percent tax hike. At this spending rate, you face a property tax hike of at least 20 percent. Cunningham’s administration refuses to answer questions about the looming 2011 tax hike, but the image above speaks for itself. County Executive candidate Scott Ott will prevent the tax hike, by making the tough decisions to bring spending in line with revenue.

Scott’s coming up on the end of the quarter for fundraising, just like a lot of other candidates out there. Now would be a good time to let our opponents know that we care about more than the federal races when it comes to elections. Donation link here.

Crossposted to RedState.

Don’t Mess With Old People Watch: Milwaukee, Michigan.

There’s always something entertaining about watching a criminal get his ass handed to him by a guy three times his age.  Particularly when it involves multiple camera angles.

I understand, by the way, that the aforementioned criminal’s name is something like ‘Sinister Smith.’ I don’t believe in acrophonology, Qabalah, or gematria generally – but I do believe in Just Asking For It, and whoever gave this poor schmuck that name was Just Asking For It.

So don’t do that, OK?

Moe Lane

(A modified form of this post can be found here.)

Yet another slightly panicky call for POTUS to bring his A-game.

I love reading articles like this (and for this one, all you need is the title):

It’s time for Obama to take off the kid gloves

Not that my love of articles like this reflects anything except a stain on my character, given that I enjoy them as the political equivalent of drunken hobo fight videos*.  I may not have learned much in the last six years, but once thing that I have taken away from my observations is that people who are losing political battles tend to fight as hard as they know how.  Which is not the same as ‘as hard as one would like,’ or ‘as hard as they can.’  So, when somebody has a problem with energy and/or skill levels of a particular candidate, at some point the possibility should be addressed that the actual problem lies in the actual candidate, and not in his or her methods or strategy.  Which is what I think the case is here.

Put another way: the President can’t take off the kid gloves.  They’re already off.

Moe Lane

*Admittedly, I’ve never actually watched a drunken hobo fight video, but I can extrapolate from the commercials.

Crossposted to RedState.

About time the Wii started coming down in price (plus, a blunder on my part!)

By about 20% in the US.

Not that I’m buying a Wii any time soon: if I did, it’d suck up all the free time that I have, plus the time that I spend blogging, plus probably some other time, too.  So it’d be a real shame if some enterprising Democratic party operative took advantage of this confessed weakness and bought it and the Mario Kart Wii with Wii Wheel off the Wish List for me.

A real shame.

Breaking: Yosi Sergant fired in NEA payola scandal.

ACORN/OFA crony Buffy Wicks unaffected.  Of course.

Another win for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government. Jake Tapper has the details:

Embattled former National Endowment for the Arts communications director Yosi Sergant is out of a job. Late this afternoon, the NEA released a short statement saying, “This afternoon Yosi Sergant submitted his resignation from the National Endowment for the Arts. His resignation has been accepted and is effective immediately.” The agency provided no further details.

Sergant had been under scrutiny after leading a controversial conference call on August 10, where he encouraged artists to create work to promote the Obama administration’s agenda. Sergant was initially removed from his post as communications director, but continued to work at the NEA.

See also here for more, including a link to new guidelines for the NEA.  The firing is not surprising, considering the way that Sergant was hung out to dry by his superiors. No word yet whether ACORN / Obama for America crony Buffy Wicks will suffer a similar sanction – or, indeed, any punishment at all for attempting to set up a shadow Ministry of Propaganda within the American governmental system.

It’s supposed to look ominous when written out like that. That’s because it is.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.