Month: April 2013

It’s Gomez v. Markey in the Massachusetts Senate Special election.

Gabriel Gomez is a former Navy SEAL and current businessman; Ed Markey is a fairly cookie-cutter Massachusetts Congresscritter who has been in Congress for as long as my wife has been alive.  Markey’s probably best known for writing that ridiculous carbon tax bill Waxman-Markey that Harry Reid gulped and buried in a mineshaft; unless, of course, you score “comparing Citizens United to Dred Scott” as being higher, lower, or Just Plain Dumber on the scale of goofball ideas.

Can Gabriel Gomez win?  Sure.  Will he win, absent Massachusetts Republican support?  No.  It all depends on how hungry people are for the seat. And what their priorities are. ‘Course, I’m in Maryland these days, where the problem is, if anything, more acute…

Moe Lane

Status check on various gunmakers’ flights from various states.

Let’s look at the practical results of gun control, shall we?  Three states have recently signed into law some hefty gun control laws; what were the results?

  • Colorado: Magpul is now making some magazines and sights outside of the state.  They’re also working on a new HQ.
  • Connecticut: PTR Industries will be moving out of the state shortly.  It’s rumored that other companies will follow.
  • Maryland: Beretta’s pretty much just waiting for Martin O’Malley to sign a new gun control law next month*.

…and that’s pretty much it.  Good-bye jobs, good-bye tax revenue, good-bye money circulation from the first two categories, and here’s the important point: there will be nothing to compensate for those losses.  As usual, the new rules will do nothing to curb mass shootings; also as usual, the people who are patting themselves on the backs about forcing gun manufacturers out of particular states are not the sort of people who create new revenue-producing ventures.  Put another way: they’re busy-bodies, not businessmen.  Many of them would be vaguely insulted to be mistaken for businessmen. Continue reading Status check on various gunmakers’ flights from various states.

The original Daily Beast post itself is unworthy of direct comment, of course.

Two passages from this hysterical (in a good way) Reason article by Matt Welch stand out:

Disgraced ex-sock puppeteer Lee Siegel, whose cranky-old-man cultural criticism and woe-is-me whining have led to a fruitful career writing for every single liberal publication you’ve ever heard of, has landed, like these people do, at The Daily Beast, where he has just coughed up one of the lamest hairballs of a political semi-humor column you will ever read: “Memo to the South: Go Ahead, Secede Already!“

I was trying to remember why this Siegel guy was pinging my memory.  Thanks, Matt! And then there’s this:

A ban on carbon emissions. How many living-wage jobs do you expect to produce through bicycle power, President Gilligan?

This reminds me – also in a good way – of one of Sam Kinison’s infamous comments about Dr. Ruth.  Said comment is far too filthy to repeat on such a refined website as this one; I guess that you’ll just have to look it up.

A post that will probably make immediate sense to parents reading it…

…while still being able to be accessible to non-parents:

  • Bad news: my youngest still thinks that the best way to make it clear that he desires juice is to get the three gallon jug out of the fridge, lug it up the stairs, and plop it down in front of me while saying “Juice.”
  • Good news: at least now he’s shutting the goram fridge door behind him.

That’s it.

Tweet of the Day, When They Say “With All Due Respect…” edition…

…you know that they never, ever actually mean it:

Continue reading Tweet of the Day, When They Say “With All Due Respect…” edition…

Sorry: I’m being distracted by this trainwreck of a press conference.

Barack Obama needs somebody who can take him aside after this and tell him, point blank, You screwed that up.  You had New York Times reporters – NEW YORK TIMES REPORTERS – tweeting that you were saying things on Obamacare that just weren’t so.  You need to learn to talk less, listen more, and take this seriously.

Barack Obama does not have that person available to him.

The Koch brothers should totally buy those papers.

It’s apparently freaking the right sort of people out.

Let me show you the following quotes from this USA Today article by Michael Wolff on the Koch brothers’ rumored desire to buy them some print newspapers. See if you can spot the internal contradictions: all bolding mine.

  • “The Koch brothers, the unimaginably rich and combatively conservative oil heirs, are telling people that they might like to buy the newspapers owned by the recently bankrupt Tribune Co.”
  • “…there are many simpler and cheaper ways to get attention for your view than buying troubled newspapers… All of which the determined Koch brothers have done. But that has not, apparently, been enough.”
  • “[The Koch brothers] may believe, with some justification, that media, and by that they mean mostly liberal media, is the real government — the cultural advance guard that is changing this country.”
  • “Curiously, most of the papers they are proposing to buy are in cities that voted overwhelmingly for the president — cities that have not had a reliably conservative base in a generation or two… Why you would go into a business trying to sell things that your customers don’t seem to want is hard to understand.”
  • “Have I mentioned that the news business is not very good?”

Continue reading The Koch brothers should totally buy those papers.