Month: August 2012

#rsrh Good thing that Obama supporter in Iowa didn’t have a knife, huh?

You know, the one who – according to multiple accounts – broke through the Secret Service cordon at today’s Paul Ryan rally at the Iowa State Fair, rushed the stage, then assaulted someone in the crowd on her way to jail.  Now, heckling is fine – and if you watch the video here, you’ll see why* – but if you’re sufficiently unhinged as to take a swing at somebody when they’re removing you from the stage, guess what?  They’re right to remove you from the stage.  By definition.

Now, I’m not going to make this a full-fledged snarl, but let me clue in Obama for America: you idiots dodged a bullet today.  Whoever it was that sent that woman out there – and let’s not pretend that OfA isn’t encouraging counter-protests – screwed up by winding up and setting loose a potentially dangerous obsessive.  Fire whichever particular idiot did it, review and revamp your entire procedure – or it will happen again.

You may not be so lucky next time.

Moe Lane

*Short version: people that unhinged don’t move the needle for the side that they are putatively on.  Thankfully.

RS Interview: Aaron Bean (R-CAND, FL State Senate 4 PRI)

This is the other state-level interview (Florida) that I’ve done recently (more or less because of the RedState Gathering): again, I encourage people to interview their own state-level candidates and politicians.  These races matter.

Here we have Aaron Bean, who is running in Florida’s Fourth Senate district: we chatted about the race, and state-level races generally.

Aaron Bean’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

RS Interview: Cord Byrd (R CAND, FL State House 11 PRI).

This is one of two interviews about state races – in this case, Florida – that I did as more or less because of the RedState gathering.  I thoroughly recommend that people interview their own state legislators and candidates; 2010 taught us that every race has importance, and it’s on the state level that a lot of the day-to-day political decisions are hashed out.

At any rate: meet Cord Byrd, who is running in Florida’s new 11th state house district: we talked for a bit about that, and state-level races generally.

Cord Byrd’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh QotD, I Had Some Excellent BBQ once in… Middlesboro? Edition.

(H/T: @jstrevino) The Wall Street Journal is having considerable fun eviscerating some goofball named Chuck Thompson, who has apparently written a book whose thesis, writing style, and indeed favorite anecdotes can be deduced from the title (“Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Case for Southern Secession”), but I’d like to note this paragraph, just for the purposes of character assassination.

You begin to sense that something is seriously awry when the author, evidently unable to find enough cranks and simpletons to fill out a whole book on the South, keeps looking beyond the Confederacy’s borders for material. First he zings House Speaker John Boehner for some offense. Isn’t Rep. Boehner from Ohio? Yes, from Cincinnati, but that’s just across the Ohio River from Kentucky, so he counts as a Southerner. We hear about a public-school teacher who urges his students to believe the Bible infallible. This takes place in Cleveland, but because the teacher had once attended a seminary in Kentucky, it’s an instance of Southern “biblical literalism” infecting the entire country. Mr. Thompson derides U.S. Rep. John Shimkus for citing Genesis as a reason not to worry about global warming. Isn’t Mr. Shimkus from Illinois? Yes, but he is from “an area of southern Illinois settled almost entirely by farmers from Kentucky.” By the book’s halfway point, it’s clear that Mr. Thompson’s problem with Southerners isn’t that they are insular, angry or prone to illusions. It’s that, with exceptions, their political views are insufficiently left-wing.

Or else Thompson’s problem may simply be that the South includes Kentucky, which is apparently the state where the girl/boy/other* that broke Thompson’s heart originally hails from… what?  I am being polite.  Why, I haven’t once suggested that the situation that soured Thompson on Kentucky forever involved an aborted financial transaction…

#rsrh Politico lies about Romney-Ryan Wisconsin turnout. Yes, you’re shocked.

You know, Politico does itself – or, more to the point, its readership – no favors when it does stupid nonsense like this:

‘Greeted by a crowd of hundreds.’  Hmm. What does a ‘crowd of hundreds’ look like, anyway? Why, apparently like this (credit: Drudge, care of Gateway Pundit):

Continue reading #rsrh Politico lies about Romney-Ryan Wisconsin turnout. Yes, you’re shocked.

#rsrh QotD, Paul Ryan The Wisconsin Ninja edition.

The most entertaining part of this story about Paul Ryan’s journey to the VP nomination: the candidate’s evasion of the media, the night before.

Ryan returned home in the early afternoon and went inside through the back as he was locked out of his side door, telling reporters who stood watching on the sidewalk he must have forgotten his keys. That would be the last time anyone saw the congressman in Janesville, because sometime after 3 p.m., he exited his home into the back yard (where reporters couldn’t see) and went into the woods.

“I grew up in those woods. The house I grew up in backs up to the house I live in, so I know those woods like the back of my hand. So it wasn’t too hard to walk through them. So I just went out my back door, went through the gully in the woods I grew up playing in. I walked past the tree that has my own tree fort I built back there,” Ryan said.

Hey, Democrats, don’t feel so ashamed: why, I hear that Joe Biden once had to stand in line for the Amtrak dining car for a whole hour.

Continue reading #rsrh QotD, Paul Ryan The Wisconsin Ninja edition.

Assessing the effect of Mediscare on the 2012 election cycle.

One of the more… interesting… beliefs that seems to have spread along the Online Left lately is that their forthcoming campaigning against Paul Ryan’s budget reforms (henceforth to be sneeringly dismissed as ‘Mediscare’) is a clear winner for them.  And if you ask them why, the members of the Online Left who are smart enough to avoid saying “Because we think that the population of the USA is made up primarily of idiots*” will instead say “Because we’ve been winning special elections with that issue.”

…Really?  OK.  Let’s look at the special elections for the 112th Congress, then.

Continue reading Assessing the effect of Mediscare on the 2012 election cycle.