Month: February 2012

DC to release Watchmen prequels!

(H/T: Pejman Yousefzadeh) They’re calling it “Before Watchmen,” and DC is very eager and honored to have the opportunity to further milk the classic, beloved brand further.  Yup: classic.  It’s a quarter-century old, you know… and yes, that mean’s that you’re old, too! If it makes you feel any better, well, so am I.

What?  Did they ask Alan Moore?  Why, of course they didn’t: they have his signature on the original contract from lo, so many years ago, and that’s pretty much all that they need.  My sympathies are, by the way, muted: nobody forced Moore to sign those contracts, and DC is paying royalties on use of the characters that he and his associates created, and frankly Moore’s schtick of awesome crankiness about this sort of thing can get a little too self-consciously… dramatic.  Yes, Hollywood takes art and makes it commercial.  That’s what Hollywood does, folks.  People with a problem with that shouldn’t sell them art.

#rsrh I have been redistricted!

I got my new election card in the mail… and on the notice, there it was: an indication that my district has been changed, thanks to Maryland’s horrifically gerrymandered new maps.  WHICH IS GREAT.  I have no idea what Dutch Ruppersberger’s district’s new partisan numbers are, but they were D+7 last time; and Elijah Cummings’ (my pre-redistricting Congressman) was D+25.  There’s no chance at all that Ruppersberger did that well out of the process.

So: while the Democrats may have screwed over most of their constituents – particularly minority ones, who really should haven’t have had Montgomery County sliced up the way that it was* – at least I’m doing better out of the deal.

Moe Lane

*The question is, does the Supreme Court agree with me? Well, we’ll find out.

#rsrh QotD, Also: Take A Look At The Map edition.

Ace of Ace of Spades HQ, noting something that I wholeheartedly agree with:

I don’t know what kind of President [Mitt Romney would] make (or that any of them would make).

But there is something to be said just for driving President The Constitution Acted Stupidly out of office, and giving the People’s House back to the people. The real people, not Obama’s coalitions of red diaper babies, crytposocialists, black-bandannaed anarchists, academic parasites, union goons, and welfare state clients.

There is a lot to be said about it, in fact. I had no patience for teach-the-GOP-a-lesson even back in 2006 or 2008: and now that I’ve seen what the Democrats will do when they control the legislature and executive branches of government, I have even less.  It’s a great theoretical argument, but as a practical matter it puts the government in the hands of people who think that it’s constitutional to make you buy health insurance.  So until it doesn’t…

Moe Lane

PS: Third parties also put the government in the hands of people who think that it’s constitutional to make you buy health insurance.

PPS: Yes, well, if it was an easy problem to solve then we would have fixed it by now, actually.

Closing arguments in the TX redistricting case today.

And I wish that I had been there to see both the Democrats and the three-person judicial panel bug their eyes out at Texas’s lawyer when he calmly pointed out that any hypothetical screwing over of minority Democrats when it came to redistricting took place not because they were minorities, but because they were Democrats. I don’t know if that argument’s going to actually fly with the courts, but it must have at least rocked them back on their heels to have somebody simply admit that, yes, the Republicans dominate Texas right now, the Democrats don’t, and these facts have consequences.

As to how this will all play out… well, the USSC’s instruction to the San Antonio court trying to come up with interim maps still holds: show more deference to the state legislature’s maps.  Despite the fact that they’re probably going to be rejected anyway; and the deadline for new maps is going to be February 6th, on pain of delaying the primaries yet again.  I’m starting to understand why Michael Williams is assuming that there won’t be a primary in April…

Moe Lane (crosspost)