Month: January 2010

Marion Berry (D, AR-01) cuts and runs.

Somebody call up Stu Rothenberg and Charlie Cook (ooh, Charlie had this one as Likely Democratic): they need to adjust their Democratic DOOMWatch lists again.

Arkansas Rep. Marion Berry to retire

Arkansas Rep. Marion Berry is expected to announce his retirement tomorrow morning, according to three sources briefed on the decision.

Berry will become the sixth Democrat in a competitive seat to leave in the last two months but the first to announce his retirement since the party’s special election loss in Massachusetts last Tuesday.

Speculation was rampant after his comments a couple of days ago; note that politicians routinely deny that they’re going to retire until they actually do.  Presumably, there’s always the hope of a convenient asteroid strike or something as a game-changer.  It’s a shame, in its way: we were all going to really enjoy watching Berry lose that race. As the video at the link shows, the man was seriously off of his game.  When you can’t even remember your own farm subsidy shenanigans…

Moe Lane

PS: It looks more or less like Rick Crawford for AR-01, on the GOP side.  Check him out.

Crossposted to RedState.

So, I’m complaining to my wife about engineers…

…because they have this annoying habit of making stuff that works; unlike, say, English majors who can never quite turn the ingenious ideas in our their heads into some sort of objective reality (I’m saying this to her as I’m pulling our firstborn around on the sled that my wife improvised out of an Amazon.com shipping box and some ribbon*).

So she looks at me and says “Three words.  Tacoma. Narrows. Bridge.”

I wittily go “Huh?”

She says “Get thee hence to Google.”

Concrete shouldn’t do that.

Moe Lane

*As you probably have gathered, my wife is an engineer.

These ‘I regret my 2008 vote’ pieces are going to be excruciating…

…entertainingly common, but excruciating.  Anyway, my takeaway from the Jill Dorson piece (via Hot Air Headlines) in which she regrets her Obama vote:

  1. Not to be unkind, but I really don’t care if you’re just sorry for you, not me.  I have to live with the consequences of your vote, too.  As does my family.  And the country, for that matter.
  2. You admit that your first impression of George W Bush was incorrect.  You admit that your first impression of Barack Obama was incorrect.  You admit that your first impression of what an Obama administration would entail is incorrect.  And then you spend an amazing amount of precious apology time revisiting your unfavorable first impression of THAT WOMAN.  Have you considered following the trend line, there?
  3. While we’re on the subject: you are aware that THAT WOMAN made many of the same objections about Obama’s experience and future plans, yes?  I mean, really: there was no reason for anybody to be surprised at what happened.
  4. I’d like to quote your closing:

Like many others, my view is narrow. I vote for the candidate I think will be best for me. I often define myself as a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. But above all, I want to feel safe and I don’t want to feel that I am being ripped off. I want a president who inspires me and cares about my contribution to the fabric of the country. I want a president with experience and savvy, a Commander in Chief who puts our country and its citizens first.

I only hope the Republicans can find him the next time around.

If your outrage isn’t enough to make you actively want to work to find that supposedly better candidate, by all means: stay with the Democratic party.  You’d just get in our way anyway.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Which should be the takeaway quote to this anti-Obama screed?

Should it be:

Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime.

Or should it be:

Of course, I don’t give a [expletive deleted] about Barack Obama anymore, other than my desire that really ugly things happen to him as payment in kind for the grandest act of betrayal we’ve seen since Benedict Arnold did his thing.

The first is inaccurate (we still have a ways to go before James Buchanan, Warren Harding [UPDATE: Ken Hite raked me over the coals for this one; and Ken’s got a point.  Particularly about how I should have used Woodrow Wilson, instead], and/or Jimmie Carter), while the second is frankly vile (if you want the President dead, just come out and say so so that the United States Secret Service can get on with investigating you to a fare-thee-well). So it’s hard to categorize which is more representative of the idiocy which is this article…

Moe Lane

PS: What? Oh, sorry: the quotes are from a piece by Lefty professor David Michael Green, for CommonDreams.org. Via Newsbusters, via Instapundit.

PPS: Professor Green: the Charge of the Light Brigade consisted of several hundred men who actually managed to accomplish their primary purpose, despite taking almost 50% casualties. For comparison, the Battle of the Crater lost us nearly 3,800 troops in a single afternoon, with absolutely no result. Of course, the first set of military victims were mostly white British, while the second set were mostly African-Americans fighting for a government run by the Republican party; so it’s entirely possible that you think that the latter group had it coming.

Crossposted to RedState.

It’s a miracle Shea-Porter didn’t talk about cooking her colleagues’ dinners.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: when I read this title (“Shea-Porter: Send the men home and Congress could pass health care reform”) I assumed that it was just some garden-variety nonsense about the war. Rep. Craol Shea-Porter is a Democratic Member of Congress who was active in the antiwar movement, so she’s going to be saying stupid things about national security at pretty much the same rate that you or I emit carbon dioxide.  This is hardly acceptable, but it’s a situation that exists.  People get used to it.

But no.  No, Rep. Shea-Porter actually just fell out of the Stereotypes about Women tree, and hit every branch on the way down.

Apparently, the reason why we don’t have health care rationing is because all the MEN (from both parties) in Congress are keeping all the WOMEN (who are all automatically nurturing caregivers) in Congress down. And the WOMEN in Congress are being kept from doing anything about it because the MEN won’t listen to them. And the WOMEN don’t complain about it because the MEN… I’m not sure what Rep. Shea-Porter thinks that the MEN are doing to keep the WOMEN down, although I have my suspicions at what she thinks what it’d take. And how does Rep. Shea-Porter know all of this? Because she talks about it with other WOMEN. In the bathroom.

In. The. Bathroom.

162 years since Seneca Falls, and we’ve come this far.

Moe Lane

PS: Rep. Shea-Porter has two potential Republican opponents: Frank Guinta and Bob Bestani.

Crossposted to RedState.

Why FARK has a Florida tag. (This one involves monkeys.)

Although this comes to us via Lowering the Bar, which summarized as follows:

According to the report, which unsurprisingly involves Florida, Eli the chimp was in a Sarasota courtroom today because he is, yes, at the center of a custody battle between a man from Missouri who says Eli was born on his chimp farm and a Sarasota woman who claims he is really from California.  (In other news, there is apparently a chimp farm somewhere in Missouri.)  Today’s hearing reportedly had to do with a DNA test that may settle the question.

If you’re pressed for time, the LtB post is better than the original news article.

Moe Lane

PS: ‘Chimp farm?’  That the sort of business venture that can end… poorly.

The best sentence that I’ve seen on the Citizens’ United case.

Comes from Matt Welch over at Reason (although he wrote it for CNN), and it should serve as a useful answer for everybody who wants to play “Let’s try to scare the right-wing by talking about scaaaaaaary foreign corporations:”

“Let’s boil it down to the essential words: Political documentary, banned, government.”

You can safely assume that anybody not taking the point is probably not going to. One way, or the other.

Crossposted to RedState.

So I’m at the Target, and looking at the Wii stuff…

…and I’m specifically looking at Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which looks just like the reason why people like me would have a Wii, and I’m thinking If only I had a Wii…

Oh.  Right.

So all I have to do is wait until everybody’s asleep so that I can hook up the blessed thing in peace and quiet… then it’s going to be time for some Dark Side, baby.  Or Mario Kart.

Heh. Star Wars Mario…

Funny. ERIN didn’t seem to have a problem, Ms. Downtain.

I had pretty much dismissed this WSJ article complaining about the lack of a particular social class of women being able to marry on their level as being vaguely pointless and offensive (my response was, as I recall, “So marry a plumber”) – but it had its purpose, after all: it (via POWIP) alerted me to this.

I almost want to get married again, so that I could try to do something like this trailer.

Moe Lane