Month: August 2010

Why the White House needs to worry about Proposition C.

Read up on reports of the results of Tuesday’s vote on Missouri’s Proposition C* and you’re going to notice what James Taranto did: there’s an urge to declare the vote ‘largely symbolic‘ (amusingly, this includes Taranto’s own Wall Street Journal, or at least the portions of it that aren’t part of the opinion section).  This is generally political-speak for ‘the voting public just kicked our rears on a policy issue:’  ‘largely symbolic’ votes where you agree with the results are instead ‘stunning reproofs’ or something else equally evocative of the Will of the People. Continue reading Why the White House needs to worry about Proposition C.

Meet Morgan Philpot (R CAND, UT-02).

Morgan is running in Utah’s Second District, which is known primarily for being the only district in Utah whose Democratic incumbent has managed to avoid suffering from his national party’s reputation. Morgan would dearly enjoy correcting that, and he spoke with RedState today:

Morgan’s site is here.

Crossposted to RedState.

Meet David Castillo (R CAND, WA-03).

David’s one of the candidates running for the open seat at WA-03 (as you remember, current incumbent Brian Baird cut and run last year). The primary hasn’t happened yet, and as Washington state has the top two primary candidates advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation, the race is not yet really settled. We talked about that – and phosphates – today:

David’s site is here.

Crossposted to RedState.

Meet Tom Ganley (R CAND, OH-13).

Tom is running to overturn Betty Sutton in OH-13, which is not particularly enjoying the industrial downturn. One thing that I’ve noticed: there are a lot of people running this year who have gotten sick and tired of our Democratic self-appointed would-be elites, would-be technocrats. Tom is one of them, and he spoke with RedState today:

Tom’s site is here.

Crossposted to RedState.

#rsrh #[9] on the signs of DOOM?

[UPDATE: Moe can’t count. Thanks to wolfwalker in comments.]

There’s so much wishful-thinking, hard-data-notable-by-its-absence, full-orchestra-past-the-graveyard nonsense available in this Hill piece that I’m tempted to judge it #[9] on my List of DOOM.  If you don’t have time: apparently, Democrats are going to keep the House because Republicans are big poopyheads who hate puppies, and because George W Bush is going to have a book published just after the election.

Yup.  Special crazy.

Anyway, said Hill piece is generally mercifully free of the ravages of intelligence*, but there was one bit that was especially funny:

House Democrats run far better campaigns than House Republicans. This is why Democrats won three major off-year elections.

I love this meme.  I want to take it home and give it a big red bow.  The reason that I love this meme is that it means that Democrats are treating NY-20, NY-23, and PA-12 as signs of their super-genius.  The reality is: NY-20 got lost because (the appointed) Tedisco didn’t reject the stimulus quickly enough to reassure the Republican base; NY-23 got lost because the NY GOP picked precisely the one candidate that the Conservative party could not support, and the activist base decided to teach the NY GOP a lesson in response; and PA-12… eh.  If the Democrats want that one they can have it; contrast it to the way that the DCCC thoroughly mucked up HI-01 (and the delayed LA elections in 2008) and the story looks very different.  Here’s a brutal truth: the GOP doesn’t need to sweep New York to get the House back.  So unless the DCCC can simultaneously install fusion voting systems and an exquisitely dysfunctional opposition party system** in every state of the Union, it’s probably not a good idea to generalize…

Continue reading #rsrh #[9] on the signs of DOOM?

All I did was make dinner reservations…

…at an Italian chophouse and put on a suit.  Although, to be fair, it was a really good Italian chophouse.  For some reason, I had never associated Italy with steaks, despite the entire ‘Tuscan rib-eye’ thing…

Anyway, this is oldish, but kind of impressive:

Yes, that’s a real card.  You get that kind of perk when you’re Richard Garfield (the guy who created Magic: The Gathering).  Although I never would have let that card stay in my Patriot Deck*…

Moe Lane Continue reading All I did was make dinner reservations…

White House to bailout underwater mortgages?

You know, sometimes Paul doesn’t want to be paid, if it means robbing Peter.

Today’s hot rumor comes from James Pethokoukis: essentially, the White House (which is becoming increasingly frantic about the way that their Super Magical Unicorn Genius economic plans  aren’t working) is scheming to partially bail out people with underwater mortgages.  I know, I know: the government was not supposed to acquire Fannie/Freddie just to completely rewrite their balance sheets, but the existing scheme to let the mortgage industry gradually repair itself was apparently… a Super Magical Unicorn Genius economic plan.  This new plan won’t do a thing for F/F’s value as companies, but then this wouldn’t be an economic strategy.  It’s pretty blatantly a political one.

The mortgage Hail Mary would be a last-gasp effort to prevent this from happening and to save the Obama agenda. The political calculation is that the number of grateful Americans would be greater than those offended that they — and their children and their grandchildren — would be paying for someone else’s mortgage woes.

You know, I happen to have an underwater mortgage: we bought our house at exactly the wrong moment in time. Do you know what we’re doing about it? WE’RE MAKING OUR MORTGAGE PAYMENTS, that’s what we’re doing about it. Because we sat down and worked out how much we could afford to spend beforehand, then we stuck to that number like glue.  In other words, I don’t need a handout to pay my bills, and I really don’t need to spend another insanely large sum of money (Hot Air thinks that it could reach 100 billion, which is a large sum of money, even today) that my kids are just going to have to repay later, after the President retires to the global cocktail circuit.  And I know that people are going to argue that the majority of Americans can be short-termed bribed in this fashion, but you know something?  I don’t think it’ll work.  Particularly when it comes to people who have kids.   Continue reading White House to bailout underwater mortgages?

#rsrh QotD, Ace of AoSHQ edition.

Heh: I said pretty much the same thing as the below, during Fausta’s BlogTalkRadio program this morning.

Know this: When a Republican takes office in 2013, he will be compared unfavorably to Bush, who will be held out as a “conservative who at least had some heart and some sense of compassion” and the current Republican President will be, as each Republican President is called in turn, the worst President in all of history.

No, Ace didn’t rip me off.  He’s simply just as aware as I am that the activist Left has the collective imagination and creativity of a three-toed sloth in the middle of a five-day heroin jag*.

Moe Lane

*Note that I make no comments about their hygiene.