Month: August 2010

#rsrh NC-11: Heath Shuler in deep [redacted].

Crude of me, but when SuSA informs an incumbent Democrat that his R+6 district is only giving him a 45/44 advantage over opponent Jeff Miller* among registered voters, crude is pretty much the proper response.  The poll isn’t up yet, but Jim Geraghty** has the details. Shuler’s underwater both generally and with independents; Miller’s not as well known, but apparently a lot of voters are fine with him not being Heath Shuler.

Which makes sense, really.  Still proud of that job-killing cap and trade bill you voted for, Heath?

Moe Lane

*And, if you check out the NRCC’s Big Board, you can get to Jeff’s website within seconds! Thanks, Big Board! [Or… not: link fixed. Well, how many Jeff Millers are going to run for Congress, anyway?] Continue reading #rsrh NC-11: Heath Shuler in deep [redacted].

The NRCC’s Big Board.

The NRCC has drawn up a map of all 435 Congressional Districts, separated them out by state, and linked each district to the website of either the incumbent Republican that represents it, or the Republican that will be challenging the incumbent Democrat in November. 

Note that in cases of contested primaries without an incumbent (like, say, FL-05’s) the NRCC is explicitly not taking sides by picking any particular campaign to highlight; they’ll put up the website of a candidate who is the only one in a primary, which makes sense.

I’ve been playing with this feature for a bit, and the NRCC came through on this one: it’s straightforward, easy to use, and it’s going to save me a good deal of work.  I suggest that folks use it, particularly if they feel the need to concretely express their disapproval of the latest Democratic Member of Congress’s shenanigans.  And with 430 of 435 races being contested, folks usually can.

Moe Lane

“Indian music video with guns and dance moves and explosions.”

This comes to us via AoSHQ, and it is so totally moosh-sweet that I’m passing up the chance to put in a cheesy Amazon.com link.

Really, I don’t know whether to apologize to India for the cultural contamination, or to politely insist on them thanking us for it.

Book of the Week: “The Affinity Bridge.”

I just finished The Affinity Bridge: it’s slightly later-period steampunk (1900s rather than the 1880s, which seems to be the default period for this sort of thing) that combines the detective genre with some fairly subtle horror. It’ll be interesting to see whether the series that it’s a part of will go farther into the supernatural: even so, GURPS called this sub-genre ‘Screampunk,’ and it fits.  Good grasp of the time period and a good read, but I’m not sure that I would buy the later books in the series in hardback. Still, it’s the first book in a series which is worth looking at further.

So good-bye, The Evolutionary Void. You had a good run.

Obama to Democrats: you may deny Me.

Hey, remember when the White House thought that they were going to be a help for vulnerable Democrats running on all those tough, unpopular, unprincipled, and job-killing votes that the White House insisted that said vulnerable Democrats make?  Yeah, well, that’s gone by the wayside.    The White House is now telling said Democrats that the President understands if members of his party have to run for re-election without him ‘helping’ out.

Just savor that for a moment: imagine that you are a Democrat from a district whose Republican-leaning constituency has been looking at you funny for your votes on the stimulus, cap-and-trade, and/or Obamacare.  You know darn well that these were going to be unpopular votes, and when you brought that up with your party’s leadership you were given what South American drug dealers call the plata o plomo response.  That’s Spanish for ‘silver or lead;’  it means, ‘take a bribe or a bullet.’  In this case, the ‘silver’ was the promise that the President would be there for your election campaign if you played ball with his administration now… and the ‘lead’ was the promise that the President would not be there to help you out if you did not play ball.  You knew that you’d need the draw if you wanted to win, so you gulped nervously and voted against your district – and now that it’s done, the President is telling you that you have permission to deny knowing the One. And no doubt thrice, if necessary. Continue reading Obama to Democrats: you may deny Me.

Mr. Snider on Mr. and Mrs. Gore.

(More or less via Vodkapundit) This would be Mr. Dee Snider, of the band Twisted Sister: the Gores, of course, are Al and Tipper. You may remember that Snider and the Gores had a run-in roughly a quarter of a century ago over quote-unquote ‘family values.’ Mr. Snider revisited this controversy recently, mostly to compare his and their long-term marital/parenting strategies:

I have two responses.

First, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*. Continue reading Mr. Snider on Mr. and Mrs. Gore.

Rasmussen: 9% of USA in coma.

I’m frankly impressed that Rasmussen was able to poll them anyway on tax policy. I’ve known for a while that pollsters would dearly love to be able to bypass the brain’s censor circuits and find out what the American voter really thinks; I’m just mildly surprised that research along those lines has paid off so early.  Then again, if you’re in a coma you probably will see a tax decrease, at that – so are they even wrong?

Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters still expect their taxes to increase under President Obama, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Just nine percent (9%) think their taxes will go down, and 39% expect them to stay the same.

Better and better, the percentage of people who have made a rational assessment of this administration’s tax policy has risen by a third in just a year and a half (in 2008, only 31% thought that our taxes would go up). Nice to see that we’re having an impact.  Or that the administration’s antics are.  Hard to say, really.

If you drill deeper down, you’ll find that a majority of Mainstream (Rasmussen’s term for ‘normal’) class voters think that their taxes will go up, while a majority of Political (Rasmussen’s term for ‘self-identified elitist’) class voters think that their taxes will stay about the same. Hopefully, this will make you feel better about the 39% generally who expect their taxes to say the same; a large number of them are actually still reachable.  The others… are not.  Don’t worry about it over-much, mostly because there’s no point anyway.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

#rsrh Cop-killing trend in Chicago?

(Via Instapundit) The pseudonymous “Jack Dunphy” has just wrote a fairly alarming article on the breakdown of law enforcement in Chicago. When he wrote this:

Three Chicago police officers have been murdered in the last two months, the most recent of whom was Michael Bailey, who at age 62 was only weeks away from retirement. On the morning of July 18, Bailey had finished an overnight shift guarding the home of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and was in front of his own home cleaning his new car, which he had bought as an early retirement gift to himself. He was still dressed in his police uniform when someone tried to rob him. Police officers everywhere accept the risks to life and limb attendant to the job, but it’s generally taken for granted among cops that the uniform will serve as a deterrent against being robbed on the street. What level of depravity has a city reached when a uniformed police officer is no safer from a street robbery than anyone else? More important, what is to be done about it?

…I suspect that he would agree with me about what something will be done about it, whether officially or unofficially.  The police’s ability to function on the street is predicated on criminals fearing them – at the very least, fearing the consequences of killing them – and the police know it.

This is a depressing topic: I will now address something else.