Month: June 2014

Eric Cantor is being an adult about losing.

Bit of a relief, honestly, after some of the stuff that some quote-unquote Republicans have done after losing a primary.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says he has no “regrets” after a crushing primary loss that cost the Virginia Republican his job.

Instead Cantor says he’s looking forward to helping Republicans keep the House and take back the Senate, saying he even planned to vote for the tea party challenger, David Brat, who unseated him.

Continue reading Eric Cantor is being an adult about losing.

The ‘paralyzed President’ ain’t moving that needle, by the way.

This is the point in the National Journal’s “How Does a Paralyzed President Move the Needle?” that I started murmuring There you go again:

Boxed in by events largely beyond its control…

As God is my witness, one of the best things about 2017 will be that the media will suddenly be embracing again the precept that Command Takes Responsibility.  It may be teeth-gratingly infuriating that they only give this kind of cover to Democratic Presidents – which tells you everything that you need to know about how competent the media thinks Democrats are at running the country – but I can grin and bear it if it means having a Republican in the White House.  Besides: I got kids, and they need to hear that particular message all of the time, not just half of it.

Moe Lane

ISIS reportedly engaged in mass murder, other war crimes in Iraq.

I do not know whether the pictures found at this link [have been] authenticated, but if these pictures do end up being authenticated so then it needs to be stated for the record that ISIS (or ISIL) is engaged in war crimes and that its members are most emphatically not lawful combatants.  Barack Obama and the rest of the Left aside, this means that if local authorities decide to have a quick (as in, that afternoon) trial and hang any ISIS member they catch, they actually can do it.  And frankly, they should.

And even more frankly?  If we had hanged some of these people when we had the chance, ISIS wouldn’t be doing as well now.  A lot of Iraqis are going to die for the sake of a lot of European/American antiwar-liberals’ delicate sensibilities.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: I see no particular reason why anybody fighting ISIS should accept any surrender offered by ISIS’s rank-and-file. Because God help whoever ISIS captures, apparently.

The New Republic pretends that Scott Walker is racist and fringe about Voter ID.

Ann Althouse reviewed what promises to be a hacktastic The New Republic obedient hit-piece against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.  The TNR article promised revelations of a “toxic strain of racial politics” running through Governor Walker’s career, only Ann couldn’t find any of it:

I can’t link to the article, but I can read it on my iPad. It’s titled — creepily — “The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker.” Sub-head: “A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star.” It’s written by Alec MacGillis.

AND: I have now read the long article, and the closest thing to anything racial coming directly from Scott Walker is his support over the years for voter ID laws.

Continue reading The New Republic pretends that Scott Walker is racist and fringe about Voter ID.

Before I start rolling my eyes at the World Cup…

…do any of you actually care about it?  Generally speaking, my attitude about soccer is that we should continue to suck at it, because it’s a harmless way for countries to triumph over us in something; but if people actually like the game and care about the results I don’t want to be intentionally rude.  …Well, in this at least.

I’m going to go with ‘Mitt Romney is not an idiot,’ myself.

Not ‘time travel:’ and note that that’s the answer that Ryan Williams favors. Shoot, Justen Charters (the originator of the ‘time travel’ argument) would agree: the reason that Mitt Romney accurately called in 2007 what would happen in 2014 if somebody was so stupid as to let Iraq collapse is because it was so bloody obvious what would happen.

Choice of adjective deliberate.  I’d never thought I’d see a President so unwise as to defecate in his own blankets, but apparently that’s just a thing that Barack Obama does.

Moe Lane

PS: Of course Mitt Romney would have made a better President than the current one.  This is fairly self-evident, no?

The future of journalism? Probably neo-feudalism.

Megan McArdle’s right to be worried:

…advertising dollars are shrinking. We just can’t charge as much for Web advertising as we used to for print advertising. A decade ago, when I entered professional journalism and began earnestly discussing its financial future, there was a reasonable case that, eventually, digital advertising would be worth more than print advertising — you could precisely target it, after all, and measure its effects. As soon as we got better at building digital ad products and educated advertisers, in theory we’d be in better shape than ever.

That theory has, alas, been pretty well destroyed by the last 10 years. Advertisers still won’t pay print rates for digital. Worse, the money that does get spent on digital advertising increasingly isn’t going to news outlets; it’s going to Google and Facebook and Yahoo.

Continue reading The future of journalism? Probably neo-feudalism.

Embattled Gov. John Hickenlooper apologizes to sheriffs about gun control law implementation.

I wonder what John Hickenlooper’s internal polling is telling him?

Governor John Hickenlooper is offering an apology to some of his fiercest rivals on the issue of gun control: Colorado’s sheriffs.

[snip]

A Hickenlooper spokesman confirms that the Governor apologized to the sheriffs for not meeting with them prior to the passage of gun control bills they opposed. Hickenlooper also said his administration didn’t do a good job anticipating pushback on gun control. According to his spokesman, Hickenlooper pledged better communication in the future.

9News goes on to mention that the Montezuma County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page made an additional claim that Hickenlooper’s spokesman declined to confirm; 9News neglected to actually mention it, though. Fair enough, since it’s single sourced and news organizations don’t like to risk get burned – but I’m happily partisan, so let me quote the Sheriff’s office:

 Governor Hickenlooper said he didn’t realize it was going to cause such controversy and had he known he would not have endorsed the new gun laws without more research.

…That internal polling must be downright awful.

Moe Lane (crosspost)