Month: April 2010

Unpacking the Rasmussen partisan numbers.

I had read the latest Rasmussen examination on the topic (short version: health care debate increased both the GOP and Democrats’ partisan identification) when I noticed that they had provided a handy table of their polling results over time.  I personally feel that this material is more accessible in graph form; so I pulled the results, averaged them by quarter, and graphed the whole thing out.  So:

The vertical bars represent the last three federal elections.  Using somewhat primitive analysis methods (‘squinting and looking’) 2005-2006 seems to show that Independent voters increased at the cost of Republican ones; and 2007-2008 seems to show Democratic voters increased at the cost of Independent ones.  And since then… Republican voters are more or less holding steady, while Democratic voters are dropping at about the same rate that Independent ones are growing. Continue reading Unpacking the Rasmussen partisan numbers.

Naomi Novik should send Penny Arcade a fruit basket.

See, this is why Tycho has his big honking website, minions, and probably volcano lair, and I don’t*:

I spent the entire return trip from St. Louis – floor to ceiling, beginning to end – reading a book called His Majesty’s Dragon. That shouldn’t be a good book, His Majesty’s Dragon. It should be a flimsy, invertebrate creature, ill-bred and scrabbling. It is (in truth) a pitch-perfect tale of empire, where His Majesty’s Aerial Corps protects England on the backs of dragons. Again: this should not be good. The book I just described could go wrong in so many ways. I would have written this book very badly. Naomi Novik did not, and the world is the better for it.

…he has a knack for summing up stuff like this. His Majesty’s Dragon could have been horrifically bad; and the way that they marketed it (they released at least the first two books in the series simultaneously) was not exactly reassuring. But the series has been saved by both a knowledge of the time period and its sensibilities, as well as a willingness to portray such sensibilities both accurately and sympathetically. The combination can be a bit rare occurrence in historical fiction.

so… yeah.  What Tycho said.

Moe Lane

*Which is fine.  Oh, I wouldn’t say no to a volcano lair, if I got offered one; but they don’t offer them through Amaz… huh.  I didn’t actually check.

:checking:

Nope, although ‘supervillain lair’ pulled in some odd stuff.

Impressed not with this day of April Fools’, I am.

Just didn’t have the same oomph to it that it has had in the past.

On the other hand, I managed to finish both Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls (Quirk Classics: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and Dragon Age: Origins Awakening: the former was actually well put together as a story and the latter’s inevitable gameplay bugs did not overly infuriate (although my second run is going to wait for a patch).  That, plus the sunny and warm day, makes up for the lack of good japery this year, I suppose.

Please upgrade Phil “I read the bill 3X” Hare’s (D, IL-17) status, Mr. Cook.

Because after this performance surely ‘Safe Democrat‘ is too generous. Phil Hare did everything wrong:

…from claiming that he didn’t worry about the Constitution, then proving it by mixing it up with the Declaration of Independence; to bragging that he read the bill three times, after falsely claiming that said bill protected uninsured children; to running away at the end, only to have to sit there embarrassingly because he had to make a left-hand turn out of the parking lot. Really: that last bit was what did it for me. Democrats tend to be much better at the panicked fleeing of inconvenient questions.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE] In my haste to get this up I omitted mentioning Hare’s opponent: Bobby Schilling.

#rsrh VDH: Obama now Bush III?

Well, yes and no.

So here we are back at the beginning — the Nobel Laureate is a continuance of George Bush on the war against terror; he has sized up both his domestic and foreign supporters and understood that their former outrage was not principled but largely emotional, driven by short-term political considerations, and thus centered on the caricature of a white, male, Christian, Texan cowboy, conjuring up all the easy tropes of anti-Americanism. Obama, to his credit, figured out that the Western world wanted to be kept safe, and that Bush had figured out how to do that, and that his own messianic presence could square that circle by being the un-Bush Bush.

The donkey in the room that Victor Davis Hanson is not addressing is rendition: which the Bush administration abandoned, in favor of Gitmo; which we have started up doing again; and which will cause a major foreign policy firestorm when the first pictures get smuggled out of Pakistan (or wherever we’ve ended up sending suspected terrorists).  That’s the other major reason* why I don’t make the welkin ring on Obama’s plagiarizing of Bush’s GWOT strategy; in at least one major way, he hasn’t.

And, naturally, it’s the one place where he should have made sure to.  One wonders why the Secretary of State didn’t warn him off…

Moe Lane

*The first being that if you’re going to steal the ideas in private of a man who you habitually (and insecurely) deride in public, the absolute best that you’ll get out of me is silence.

[UPDATE] Glenn Reynolds raises an excellent point about hats.

#rsrh Not liking the analogy is not *my* problem.

Excuse me while I infuriate some lurkers by quoting this annoyed response to a NYT piece on Tea Partiers:

Ok, we get the point. Anyone mad at government is just acting like a spoiled hypocrite, ignorantly decrying the very thing that makes life worth living. Tea Party people are ungrateful wretches who will someday regret the effects of their protests. In the same spirit, we can imagine what the New York Times would be writing in the 1850s, reporting on new political movements in slave states.

When the middle-aged slave Jim developed a boil on his foot after a long day in the fields, he went crawling to the plantation to get it treated and bandaged. The master gladly obliged. Today Jim expresses a rising interest in the new abolitionist movement and is even demanding what he calls his freedom. This new freedom would mean an end to the amenities that are a mainstay of his life. He depends of plantation-provided food, housing, and medical care, but his living quarters are filled with pamphlets by William Lloyd Garrison and others agitating for a “new liberty.”

I imagine that it is… frustrating to some, the way that opponents to ballooning government interference adamantly refuse to just shut up and go die in fires.  The best ones are the ones that try to laugh it off…

*How* old is Jim Moran (D, VA-08), again?

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

…65, is it? Well, that’s a little early. Still, being in a condition where you have to have your aides physically intervene every time you get asked a perfectly reasonable question about government waste is a little, ah, problematical:

Hot Air has more; Jason Mattera, of course, is the new editor over at Human Events (and welcome, by the way). He also seems to have a bit of a talent at finding Congressmen who don’t want to talk about the health care bill…

Moe Lane

PS: Both Matthew Berry and Patrick Murray are eager to help Jim Moran reach some sort of closure with both his anger issues, and his self-evident sense of resentment towards those fools that will not recognize Jim Moran’s genius. I imagine that both would be equally eager to hear from you.

Crossposted to RedState.

#rsrh Yet more DNC-inspired threats…

…this time, against local police.  Via @cprater:

Saturday, Senator John McCain and Sarah Palin spoke at Mesa’s Dobson High School and as reported by the East Valley Tribune, about five minutes into Ms. Palin’s speech Ethan Elder a nineteen year old from Chandler began spouting anti-McCain statements. He was quickly apprehended, handcuffed and detained for questioning; no citation or arrest was made. On Sunday Mesa police received an e-mail that read:

Since the names of your pig scum that beat up the man at the (Sarah) Palin event just for exercising his free speech are not released, I’ll just have to pick out some Mesa pigs at random for pay back.”

Which is precisely what can happen when you irresponsibly incite your followers in order to raise money.  Some of them won’t turn themselves off afterward.

Moe Lane

Behold, the terrifying true nature of the Tea Party!

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Remember, this is the group that the President claims that “at their core” is all about opposition to and rejection of him (not that he wants to broad-brush, of course)*. Behold the Mob:


(Via Instapundit: more pictures from the Denver Tea Party here)

I have no idea whether the President would score the kid as part of the deluded crowd, or as one of the ones doing the deluding. Normally I’d say the former, but Obama seems to have weird ideas sometimes…

Moe Lane

*Since the President is so eager to bring this up: I agree that he’s a natural-born citizen, and so is thus the legitimate President of the United States.  My problem with the man is that he sucks at being both.

Crossposted to RedState.