Month: August 2012

#rsrh QotD, I Will Cheekily Change George Will’s Punctuation For Him edition.

He is perfectly welcome to yell at me for it, but it just looks better with the I capitalized and the semicolon grafted in.  Sorry about that. Anyway, Will in passing, while on the subject of Ted Cruz and James Madison:

In a republic, which is defined by the principle of representation, the people do not directly decide issues; they decide who will decide.

The Unintentionally Viral Chick-fil-A Drive-thru Schmuck video.

(Via AoSHQ) I’m in an airport bar right now – shaddap, I’m on vacation – so let me make this brief: see this video? (If you can’t, it was a YT video of a self-appointed crusader for same-sex marriage filming himself being a complete schmuck to a Chick-fil-A drive-thru cashier.)

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=thNqs9fPcgM

THIS IS WHAT WE MEAN WHEN WE SAY ‘YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.  First rule of activism: You know that guy? Yeah, that guy. Well, don’t be that guy.

 

I could teach a class on How Not To Do It, using only that video as a bad example.

…Is this really the electronics I need for a weekend New Media trip?

I’ve just gone over the list, and… huh.

  • iPad.
  • iPad keyboard/carrying case & stylus.
  • iPod.
  • Camera with video recording capacity.
  • Cellphone.
  • Tripod.
  • Back-up video camera.
  • Flash drive.
  • A handful of SB cards with as much digital memory as probably existed in 1990. Worldwide.
  • Kindle.
  • Voice recorder.

…And I’m packing light.

Moe Lane

#rsrh Breitbart.com remembers Ted Criuz at the RedState Gathering.

What can I say? Apparently every little bit helps.

Breitbart.com was kind enough to note that RedState had Ted Cruz show up at our 2009 gathering to speak, as well as interview with us after the fact.  At the time he was running for Texas Attorney General, of course.

And – normally I’d say ‘not to brag, or anything,’ except that I totally mean to brag: Ted Cruz’s win last night means that we’re poised to have had three future Senators (Cruz, Pat Toomey, and Marco Rubio), one state’s Attorney General (Ken Cucchinelli), and one future Governor (Nikki Haley) speak at our first RedState Gathering.  Which is… not very shabby, is it?  Mind you, the point here is to provide the attendees with access to the folks who we’d all like to see running the GOP and the conservative movement, not give people like me the opportunity to brag.  Bragging rights are merely a fortunate byproduct of being a successful activist site, and thus not a critical part of the exercise at all.

Still.  Not too shabby.

Moe Lane

#rsrh The Chinese want us to be harder on Israel.

I’m a little surprised that Allahpundit (I’m guessing) didn’t write that headline himself: it’s so blatantly obvious, right?  Anyway, heeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Tom Friedman!

I’ll make this quick. I have one question and one observation about Mitt Romney’s visit to Israel. The question is this: Since the whole trip was not about learning anything but about how to satisfy the political whims of the right-wing, super pro-Bibi Netanyahu, American Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, why didn’t they just do the whole thing in Las Vegas? I mean, it was all about money anyway — how much Romney would abase himself by saying whatever the Israeli right wanted to hear and how big a jackpot of donations Adelson would shower on the Romney campaign in return. Really, Vegas would have been so much more appropriate than Jerusalem. They could have constructed a plastic Wailing Wall and saved so much on gas.

Continue reading #rsrh The Chinese want us to be harder on Israel.

#rsrh Today’s Quinnipac University poll.

A helpful suggestion for Quinnipac University: there was something weird – and, worse, apparently inconsistent – going on with its last round of state-level polling.  Take a look at this chart:

Q-Poll Actual
M O Diff M O Diff Shift
Florida 40 53 -13 48 51 -3 -10
Ohio 38 53 -15 47 52 -5 -10
Pennsylvania 40 54 -14 44 55 -11 -3

(Originally noticed by @NathanWurtzel) Key: M is McCain, O is Obama.  The above compares the difference between the ratio of McCain/Obama voters in Quinnipac’s latest poll (which had Obama by six in Ohio and Florida, and by eleven in Pennsylvania) by the actual ratio of McCain/Obama voters from 2008.  As you can see… yes, Quinnipac at least found Obama voters.  But it wasn’t finding McCain voters in Florida and Ohio; and while I take Sean Trende’s point that people tend to ‘forget’ that they voted for the loser I have to note that they apparently didn’t forget in Pennsylvania. I would also suggest that the fact that Ohio and Pennsylvania flipped its state government (including governorships) to the GOP in 2010, while Florida increased its Republican majorities, suggests that the electorate in none of those states has gotten more Democratic in the last four years.  Continue reading #rsrh Today’s Quinnipac University poll.

#rsrh Is Harry Reid losing it?

No, I don’t know why I’m up this late, either.

Anyway, Dan Primack of CNN Money makes the case that the Senate Majority Leader is either blatantly making stuff up or passing along stuff that was blatantly made up about Romney’s tax returns (for those who haven’t heard, Reid rather bizarrely told people today that Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for ten years).  Primack points out that Bain investors wouldn’t have access to that kind of information about fund managers; Romney hasn’t been working at Bain for more than a decade; and that Bain doesn’t do its taxes in-house anyway.

To which I’ll add: Romney ran for Senate in the 1990s and Massachusetts governor in the 2000s.  Precisely how did Democrats manage to miss this amazing revelation, at the time?  I mean.  Seriously.  Doesn’t anybody in the Democratic party understand how business works?  People at Romney’s level are not permitted to simply wander away without paying taxes.  And the IRS isn’t going to forget to check.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Anyway… Harry Reid’s a little young yet to be having episodes, but at seventy-three he might be having the first flashes of them. Has he seen a neurologist lately?  Has he always been this irritable?  Even foul-mouthed? Or is this new?

Hey.  I’m just asking questions, right?

Moe lane

PS: I AM up late: I forgot to H/T Instapundit.