Montana AG Tim Fox shoots down gun-shaming* attempts.

This should not be surprising.

Montana’s Attorney General Tim Fox has taken a stand against revealing the identities of concealed weapon permit holders.

[snip]

Montana’s AG Fox, a Republican, said he had received numerous requests recently, mainly from media, for the names and addresses of those legally authorized to carry concealed weapons in that vast Western state. The requests sought all available information on the permit holder, including date of birth, employer, Social Security and state driver’s license number.

In a legal memo, Fox came down on the side of denying all those requests, ruling “that the privacy of permit holders exceeds the public’s right to know.”

Basically, AG Fox noted that the media likes to take this information and turn it into projects that try to gun-shame people who own firearms.  It doesn’t really work, of course; but then ‘working’ may not be the primary goal for advocates of the practice.  ‘Lashing out’ is probably more accurate.  Kudos to Fox for telling the Media to go take a hike…

Moe Lane

*Yeah, that description was picked with malice aforethought.  Hopefully, I’ll either get some incredibly huffy responses, or some extremely tortured attempts to flip it back on me.  Either will be good for a laugh.

PPP: Oh, crud, Mark Begich is in trouble, isn’t he?

They bury the heck out of that lede by first throwing up a lot of ink about Sarah Palin, who I sincerely doubt will end up running for Senate next year.  After doing that, PPP gives its readership the bad (to them) news:

The best Republican hope for this seat is Lieutenant Governor Mead Treadwell and the good news for the GOP is that if Palin sits it out he, and not 2010 nominee Joe Miller, is the next choice of the party base. In a three way primary Treadwell gets 33% to 25% for Sullivan and 24% for Miller. And in a head to head with Miller, Treadwell leads 53/30. Even among Republican primary voters Miller has a dreadful 26/53 favorability rating.

Treadwell still trails Begich, but only by a 44/40 margin. That’s narrowed from 47/39 on our February poll. Treadwell has a +6 favorability rating at 35/29 and has room to grow with 36% of voters still not knowing enough about him to have formed an opinion.

Continue reading PPP: Oh, crud, Mark Begich is in trouble, isn’t he?

Nancy Pelosi must resign from the House over Bob Filner coverup.

I usually try not to put things that starkly, particularly since a Republican saying that a Democrat needs to resign is going to be (justifiably) taken with a grain of salt, but… this is ridiculous.

“I blew the whistle on [Bob Filner’s sexual harassment] two years ago to the Democratic Party leadership,” former Assemblywoman Lori Saldaña said.

Saldaña said that in summer 2011 six prominent women in local politics, business and education told her that Filner had physically or verbally harassed them. Saldaña had been exploring what turned out to be an unsuccessful bid for Congress and the conversations came in the context of the 2012 elections.

Saldaña said she contacted former [California] party Chairman Jess Durfee with the allegations and Durfee was among a group of Democratic leaders who met with Filner to discuss them that summer. She said nothing happened.

Continue reading Nancy Pelosi must resign from the House over Bob Filner coverup.

Washington DC’s Green Paint Vandal found?

Maybe:

Police have arrested a woman in the splattering of green paint inside two chapels at the Washington National Cathedral and are trying to determine if she has any connection to two similar incidents on the National Mall.

Police say 58-year-old [redacted] was arrested Monday inside the cathedral shortly after the paint was found and charged with defacing property. Assistant D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham said investigators were hoping to question her about the vandalism on the Mall, including at the Lincoln Memorial, but a language barrier was complicating those efforts.

The [East Asian] name redacted because if this is the vandal then she’s homeless and, on first glance, suffering from mental illness.  It’s looking unlikely that this was domestically[*] politically motivated, in other words.  Which, truth be told, is what I suspected; there isn’t an organized political group in America that would welcome the insane feces-storm that would have descended upon them if one of them was caught green-handed dumping paint on the Lincoln Memorial.  No, not even that one.  Or that one.  …Are you kiddingThat one would be the most terrified of all.

Moe Lane

[*It is possible that she’s a foreigner who doesn’t really get that things are done differently here.  Which is not incompatible with the ‘mental illness’ thing.]

“Right Here Right Now.”

Not to editorialize or anything – oh, I am quite the wit – but I should note that this is currently not as bad as it’s ever been for the USA. Hell, this is not even as bad as it’s been in my lifetime. From what I (dimly) remember, the late Seventies sucked hella more than now.

And that all worked out all right in the end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z6dxQVhE8o

Right Here Right Now, Jesus Jones

Just finished Shadowrun Returns.

More accurately, I just finished the core adventure.  Well worth the twenty bucks that I shelled out for it; it wouldn’t let me stop playing, which is always a good indication that I liked the game.  It’s a very old-school sort of game; no spoken dialogue, 2-D, a lot of text, not much in the way of character appearance customization… but the storyline was engrossing and it’s definitely cyberpunk (whether it’s old-school pen-and-paper Shadowrun is something I’ll leave to the people who played that game).  I look forward to playing new adventures, once they’ve shook out all the bugs and whatnot.

Moe Lane

PS: If I’m going to buy the RPG itself, should it be this one?

Democratic Hubris Watch, 07/29/2013.

Let me demonstrate why this is a dumb statement:

For Republicans to build a massive Internet presence, [Former Obama digital strategist Joe Rospars ] said, they would have to abandon opposition to issues with popular support like expanding background checks on gun buyers and allowing illegal immigrants to earn citizenship.

Or, rather, let me Mad-Lib why this is a dumb statement:

For [Democrats] to [keep] a massive Internet presence, [RedState digital activist Moe Lane] said, they would have to abandon opposition to issues with popular support like [banning abortion after the 25th week] and [getting rid of Obamacare].

Continue reading Democratic Hubris Watch, 07/29/2013.

This Ronald Reagan video is hysterical for the first eleven minutes…

…and then really, really aggravating for the last one.

It’s amazing how far standards for public speaking have fallen in the last three decades. It’s even more amazing how much they’ve fallen since 2009… and who thought that I’d be saying THAT in 2013, huh?

Via email.

Why the government cannot social-media the young into signing up for #Obamacare.

This morning, while running errands with kids in tow, I did something that I try not to do (and usually regret doing): I listened to CSPAN radio when they were taking comments. Normally, this is a mistake of epic proportions: CSPAN callers typically are like Youtube commenters who have been hit with an Evolvo-Ray, only it’s a prototype and there’s still that pesky stress atavism problem. In other words, you have to switch things back to classic rock pretty darn quick – only before I could, the poor panelists who couldn’t escape the onrushing black tide were gamely trying to work out how to get young people into the Obamacare exchanges. I believe that the consensus was: lots and lots of social media.

No. Continue reading Why the government cannot social-media the young into signing up for #Obamacare.