Author: Moe_Lane

The [epithet] and the redistricting knives.

If you do political blogging or reporting for a while, you end up hearing this question a lot: Why should I bother to come out and vote for the [insert epithet here meaning ‘not as ideologically sound as I am’]? This would be normally responded to with a polite “That’s a good question” and a variable-length stream of blather before the question is actually answered, but let’s cut to the chase.  You bother to go out and vote for the [epithet] because:

  • Voting for the [epithet] in the House helps get you a Speaker with control over the Rules Committee, and somebody friendlier as Chair of Oversight and Government Reform.  Look them both up.
  • Voting for the [epithet] in the Senate helps get you an atmosphere where half the judiciary/executive branch appointments that you would object to strenuously quietly die stillborn.

That’s the way it works* – but you’re thinking to yourself, Well, at least I don’t have to vote for an [epithet] for governor. – but alas, no.  You do.  In some ways that’s the most critical place where you would have to if necessary, in roughly half the races out there this cycle.  Why?

Redistricting. Continue reading The [epithet] and the redistricting knives.

#rsrh FDL concedes the House.

I normally more or less ignore whatever shenanigans that specific members of the Online Left get up to – you run your plays against the rival team, not their cheerleaders – but this news from Chris Good is too entertaining to pass up.

Jane Hamsher, the online progressive maven who heads the influential blog Firedoglake and its accompanying activist/political arm, Firedoglake (FDL) Action, is entering new territory today: she’s getting into the marijuana legalization game.

[snip]

[Hs launching a $500,000 (according to her estimate) coordinated campaign to support marijuana legalization on the whole and to influence a handful of propositions on ballots this November–California’s Prop. 19, which would allow counties to legalize and tax marijuana within certain guidelines plus medical marijuana initiatives in Colorado, Arizona, and South Dakota.

Continue reading #rsrh FDL concedes the House.

#rsrh Top Ten Signs of DOOM.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

We’re not there. Yet. But the election is three months away, and the Democrats never thought that things would look like this when they oh-so-confidently planned their strategy a couple of years ago.  Karma’s kind of fun when it isn’t you taking the hit, isn’t it?

Some of the below are serious, some are… less so; but if you hear enough of them, you’ll know that Election Night is going to be bad for the Democrats.
Continue reading #rsrh Top Ten Signs of DOOM.

Why we bought two extra ninja bunny-bears.

The loss of a pet stuffed animal can be traumatic, so we picked up two spares of the original ninja bunny bear that my eldest bonded to.  Just to avoid situations like this:

It was a fortnight ago that the toy, better known to his young owner as Bubba Cat, got lost during a family trip to Thorpeness in Suffolk.

When teashop owner Liz Everett was handed Bubba by a customer, she launched a Facebook group entitled ‘I’m lost. Help me find my family’ in a bid to reunite the furry feline with Ned. It soon attracted more than 9,000 fans.

[snip]

Ned’s family soon came forward and Bubba’s – so called because the toddler couldn’t pronounce ‘baby’ – journey back to Northiam, near Rye in East Sussex, began.

Sure, happy ending – but the article didn’t mention the screaming. And oh, my, yes, no doubt there was screaming.

Moe Lane

Palin and Reagan and bears, oh my.

Not to be mean-spirited about this, but it’s at times like this that Arianna Huffington demonstrates that she has a black-box approach to understanding Americans*.  In discussing the inexplicable (to her) attraction so many people have towards THAT WOMAN, Arianna wrote:

It’s not Palin’s positions people respond to — it’s her use of symbols. Mama grizzlies rearing up to protect their young? That’s straight out of Jung’s “collective unconscious” — the term Jung used to describe the part of the unconscious mind that, unlike the personal unconscious, is shared by all human beings, made up of archetypes, or, in Jung’s words, “universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” Unlike personal experiences, these archetypes are inherited, not acquired. They are “inborn forms… of perception and apprehension,” the “deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.”

…and then goes on to compare said mama grizzly video with this Reagan campaign video, which is apparently also ‘policy-free’ (that’s the latest progressive buzzword for ‘black magic’). And oh, yeah!  That has a bear, too!  That’s Jungian!  And it links Old Devil Figure to New Devil Figure, so that’s a plus!  Yes!  IT ALL COHERES!

Yes.  It makes Allahpundit’s head ache, too. Continue reading Palin and Reagan and bears, oh my.