Month: February 2012

First reports of Wisconsin recall petition fraud?

Could be, could be:

The Racine County Sheriff’s Office is continuing to investigate possible fraudulent recall signatures collected by Mark Demet, a Racine man whose brother’s signature was found four times on petitions to recall Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine. His mother’s signature was also found twice.

But both say they didn’t sign, said Capt. Thomas Lamke of the Racine County Sheriff’s Office.

This is, by the way, a felony: and if this guy is convicted of it then I recommend the full fine and jail time.  If that sounds overly harsh, well, nobody is out there forcing people to fraudulently sign other people’s name to official election documents.  For that matter, it’s long since past time that somebody got it through Wisconsin progressives’ heads that their petulant collective refusal to accept that they lost an election doesn’t actually give them an excuse to do whatever damage that they like to civic structures in their home state.  It’s a heck of a thing to have to use felony convictions to drive that point home, but then, if you want to train a jackass the first thing you have to do is to get its attention…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Well, folks, it was nice knowing all of you…

…because the Russians finally drilled through to that damnable lake lurking under the Antarctic ice. Oh, goody, here’s another detail: the site’s being bathed in the eldritch geomagnetic energies of the magnetic South Pole!

Well, maybe it’ll be a while before whatever was under the ice gets to here.

Moe Lane

PS: Yeah, obviously they got back in touch with the Russian site.  Which is no doubt explaining in very simple Russian that da, everything is fine, no problems, everything is fine, no problems, everything is fine, but please send more dogs…

#rsrh Structurally speaking, this GOP primary system has a problem.

Tell me again why we let certain states go early?

  • The results from Iowa’s caucuses were within the state GOP’s margin of incompetence, leading to a result where Mitt Romney was able to claim the largely symbolic win over Rick Santorum (truthfully, it was a tie either way, but headlines don’t care).
  • The South Carolina establishment reminded us, yet again, that they smear raw sewage on the knives before they put them in candidates’ backs.  Every year we think: Gee, they can’t go any lower.  Every year, they surprise us.
  • And now we have Nevada.  Nevada has a caucus.  Nevada had less than 33K votes to count in that caucus.  It took them a day – and if you’re wondering what the delay was, save yourself some trouble and just pick a random plausible-sounding screw-up, because it probably happened anyway.

Continue reading #rsrh Structurally speaking, this GOP primary system has a problem.

RedState Review: The Lost Majority.

Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics is one of the better analysts of basic political trends out there, so I was looking forward to his new book The Lost Majority: Why the Future of Government Is Up for Grabs – and Who Will Take It.  I was fortunate enough to snag a review copy for RedState, and found it to be a fairly persuasive argument that our general assumptions about the implications of any given election are usually wrong.  It was not exactly a groundbreaking argument for me, but then I’m already familiar with Sean’s writing on RCP.

Sean makes three claims in The Lost Majority:

“First, that the 2010 midterm elections were a result of Barack Obama and the Democrats misreading both their mandate and how they had been brought to power, imagining a realignment in 2008 when, in fact, none had occurred.  Second, that the emerging partisan majorities described by theorists from both parties are mirages.  Third, that the entire concept of realignments/permanent alignments, which underlies much of the misbegotten analysis of the 2008 elections, is bankrupt and should be abandoned.” (page xiii)

The first claim is not exactly going to be controversial to anybody who isn’t a Democrat; the second and third are perhaps more likely to be matters of some controversy to ideologically-minded readers.  They should not, however, be dismissed out of hand; after all, there were a lot of very book-smart people advising the Democrats in 2009 and 2010 who based their opinions on the belief that long-term partisan majorities are inevitable and that alignments are possible  The collapse of their models should at least be seen as cautionary.

Continue reading RedState Review: The Lost Majority.

Bureaucracy triumphant, San Franscisco ice cream parlor edition.

I’m not sure that Cory Doctorow quite understands the true message of the video below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QOreHYVTHGA

…although I’m pretty sure that Glenn Reynolds does. Doctorow linked to this as part of his rapid-blink reaction to the number of hoops (both in terms of time and money) that small businesses have to go through in order to start a business in the iconic-Blue city of San Francisco.  To summarize: would-be small business operators can expect delays of years and several hundred thousand dollars in costs.  It’s so bad that the San Francisco planning department itself hates the process: yes, that video is from an official city government office.  But changing it… well.  They’re considering changes to streamline the process. Continue reading Bureaucracy triumphant, San Franscisco ice cream parlor edition.

New Avengers trailer.

 

I have… good hopes about this film.  Then again, I liked Thor (it should have been a miniseries, but that’s life) and thought both Iron Man and Captain America rocked on toast.  In particular, I think that Robert Downey’s portrayal of Tony Stark is going to be one of the highlights of the movie, particularly if the director used him to play off the other Avengers.

Well, we’ll see.  New footage in the trailer, so check it out.  Movie comes out in May.