Month: April 2011

The Righteous Indignation Book party.

Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! is, of course, Andrew Breitbart’s latest book; and I had the opportunity to schmooze meet up with folks from The Daily Caller / Americans for Tax Reform at a book party that they threw for Andrew yesterday.  I finished  the book itself today: it’s very accessible, and while it told me a lot of stuff that I already knew (from both an outsider’s and an insider’s perspective*) it should be a good deal of help to people who want to get into the political arena and start swinging.  And, incidentally: “go out there and start swinging” (in a purely metaphorical sense, of course) is the central message of the book.  Good advice, too.

Videos below the fold: the first is Andrew’s general speech (which has some profanity in it, so be prepared), and the second is the minute I was able to gouge out of his time to get him to answer a question for RedState.  It was a busy book party for Andrew, in other words. Continue reading The Righteous Indignation Book party.

There are ‘Stupid Criminals,’ and then…

…there are REALLY Stupid Criminals:

Gang tattoo leads to a murder conviction

Inked on the chest of a Pico Rivera gang member was the detailed scene of a liquor store slaying that had stumped an L.A. County sheriff’s investigator for more than four years. It leads to a jailhouse confession from Anthony Garcia — and a first-degree murder conviction.

(pause)

I got nothing, sorry.

#rsrh Salon hammers the Trig Troofers.

Yes, I know, shocking: but it’s a damned stupid conspiracy theory even by the standards of conspiracy theories, and no doubt Salon.com would like to stop being embarrassed by those people before said people start babbling about how Sarah Palin had her/Bristol’s baby/babies artificially transplanted by the Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooos*.  In the process, Salon asks:

So why dive into this old conspiracy theory now?

Because Trig Troofers are CRAZY**, Salon.com.  And they never got out of the fever swamp to begin with.

Moe Lane

*That’s how all conspiracy theories end up ending, if you’re not careful: with it all being the fault of the Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooos.

**Crazier than the Birthers, not as crazy as the Moon Landing Hoaxers.  I am excluding the 9/11 Troofers from this spectrum because of the aforementioned “all being the fault of the Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooos” thing that some of them embrace, which does put 9/11 Troofers on a different plane of conspiracy theorizing.

SEIU’s populist Cargo Cult plans.

It takes a national union to build a Potemkin Village.

[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers.]

Ben Smith reports that “the Service Employees International Union plans to use its giant political operation to try to build a grass-roots movement of public protest and organization” – which is pretty much all that you have to read of that article, frankly.  This is not a slam on Ben; Politico probably doesn’t look kindly on one-sentence articles, and writers need to eat.  If your employer wants multiple paragraphs, you give your employer multiple paragraphs.

Still, the use of the phrase “plans to use” and “try to build” gives the whole game away.  The tacit admission here is that the SEIU (and the rest of Big Labor) doesn’t actually have the populist support that the Left routinely [claims] to have; something that was glaringly put on display in the last few months in Wisconsin.  While groups like these do have the ability to dump large numbers of its members into various anti-reform demonstrations (and near-riots), the results were neither successful in accomplishing any sort of meaningful change, nor in becoming self-perpetuating.  For an example of the failures in the first category, note the Prosser/Kloppenburg election – particularly, the interesting fact that Kloppenburg received both less outside money than Prosser did, but more big-donor outside money in proportion.  For an example of the latter, note the drastically-reduced protester footprint in Madison, now that they are no longer being artificially stimulated. Continue reading SEIU’s populist Cargo Cult plans.

Barack Obama dooms Nancy Pelosi’s career.

But before we get to the snark, let me correct both President Obama and The Hill, for the record: WE DID NOT HAVE A ‘DIVIDED’ HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES LAST YEAR. The tally was fluid, but was somewhere around 258 Democrats and 177 Republicans for most of the term of the 111th Congress; that works out to around 59% Democrats, 41% Republicans.  If that is ‘divided,’ then so is the 112th (55% Republicans, 45% Democrats).

But back to the matter at hand: Barack Obama has just doomed Nancy Pelosi’s career.  At least, I think that he did: like the Hill, I think that the below means that Barack Obama is saying that he thinks that Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker of the House again.

“What can I say about Nancy Pelosi?” Obama told members of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco on Thursday. “I think [she] will go down in history as one of the finest Speakers that we have ever had, and she is going to continue to be, in the future, one of the great Speakers that we’ve ever had.”

Hard to say, though: President Obama is notoriously inarticulate when he’s not in front of a Teleprompter. “[S]he is going to continue to be, in the future, one of the great Speakers that we’ve ever had?”  That’s not a quote, that’s a passage translated into English via Babelfish.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: It is hardly necessary to note that betting against President Obama’s predictions is, as one might say, a somewhat viable long-term strategy.  Fun to note, but hardly necessary.

#rsrh Video footage of Andrew Breitbart tomorrow…

…he did a book signing/event today for his new book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!, and I’ve got some video of his speech and a quick minute of question-and-answer regarding why people should buy it (it was a busy book signing/event, and Andrew’s a bit, ah, enthusiastic).  I’m about halfway through my copy now; it’s fast, engrossing reading – and there’s a certain not-quite-nostalgia going on.  I mean, the First Blogosphere War (2003-2004) sucked. It purely sucked.  By the time it was over I was having screaming nightmares.  And yet, it’s interesting to remember events from back then; it’s amazing how much bile got stirred up over the Democratic base simply not getting the seats that it expected to in a midterm election…

Anyway: processing and reproducing tomorrow.  Some pretty good stuff in Andrew’s speech.

Moe Lane

RCP’s Sean Trende: Obama’s not in great re-election shape.

He ain’t so tough.

Mind you, Sean’s not saying that Obama’s in bad re-election shape, either: he’s currently scoring the President at essentially 50/50, with the slightest edge against the man.  But he’s definitely out to demolish some of the current Democratic talking points.  Short version (and this is only Part One):

  • The popular correlation between incumbency and re-election falls apart if you look at it too long;
  • If the economy is rebounding, it is not rebounding quickly enough to give the President sufficient wind at his back; and
  • Even the favorable polls for the President are not showing hard support for him – and certainly not for his policies.

Continue reading RCP’s Sean Trende: Obama’s not in great re-election shape.