Getting in their faces.

Title inspired by @TheAnchoress.

A scene from the town hall meltdown in Ybor City:

[CHRIS ZUPPA | Times]
Karen Miracle pushes Barry Osteen, right, who was debating her husband, Garry. “We have the best health care system in the world and I’m completely happy with what we have,” Osteen said.
Actually, it gets… more typical: Ms. Miracle is a local Democratic official.  You can see the whole sequence here (#09 to #16): as @mkhammer notes, the guy getting slapped never moves in.
I wish that I was surprised by any of this.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

If you’re losing Ben Cardin (D-MD)…

…a Senator who is barely known for defeating Michael Steele in the 2006 election (honestly, Maryland does not have particularly interesting Senators; sorry about that) – anyway, if you can’t get Ben Cardin to sign off on your ‘astroturf’ rhetoric, well, you have a branding problem.  Watch as he manfully attempts to avoid sweating on national television over the mess that his higher-ups have landed him in:

Cardin probably saw this poll (via @RobertBluey). 71% of adults want to attend a town hall involving health care, and are currently pegged at 50% for, 45% against. Turn those numbers into likely voters… and now you know why Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) suddenly doesn’t think that health care rationing protesters are ‘un-American‘ after all. Not that she’s planning to actually face all those protesters; even if they are also 2010 voters…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

So, bees are getting drunk in Tennessee?

There are worse things to do on a nice mountain in the summertime then get drunk, not that I have actually done any of them. For that matter, have I ever gotten drunk on a mountain in the summertime? I’ve been to SCA events on mountains, so I’ve almost certainly gotten drunk on one once; but whether I’ve done it in the summertime is another question.

Anyway, it sounds more like the bees are doing the… apiary?… equivalent of chewing locoweed, which I have not ever done. That entire phytotoxin thing.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

This Drunken Bee song by the LoneTones doesn’t sound half bad, actually.

Behold those scary, scary swastika-bearing astroturfers.

(Brief summary for those lacking video: Dallas AARP meeting went wrong for organizers when participants refused to sit down, shut up, and applaud Democratic talking points. Organizers then left; meeting continued.)

Complete with their quoting Madison and their insisting that AARP worked for them and not the other way around and their refusal to believe that AARP isn’t sucking up to the administration on health care rationing. The sheer nerve of them, acting like they were real, live citizens of both the United States of America and the state of Texas. I mean: they’re all over fifty!

Terrifying, aren’t they?


(Via AoSHQ)

The young people trying to run the Dallas AARP meeting (while almost-successfully managing to hide their baffled contempt at the way that the audience refused to take direction) certainly thought so. Up to the point where they ran away.

Moe Lane

PS: Exit question: when one of John Sweeney’s union thugs messes up and smacks around some guy in a walker without checking for cameras – how do you think that will play in Peoria? Shoot, how do you think that will play in Chicago or Detroit?

Crossposted to RedState.

Let me be the first to suggest that Twitter’s DDOS woes are… geopolitical.

I have no absolutely evidence along those lines, but frankly I wouldn’t put it past the Iranian regime at all to pay somebody to cyber-bomb Twitter.  It’s certainly been comprehensive enough to fit the enhanced requirements of a nation-state.

…HAH!  It literally went up just as I wrote that!  Clearly, someone was monitoring my post.

Jeanne Shaheen *not* at Grafton ‘town hall’ meeting, DNC claims to the contrary.

The Senator was never going to be there, in fact – as this post from August 3rd shows. It happens; after all, the Senate’s not out of session quite yet, so if you have to use staffers, you have to use staffers. Announce ahead of time, and the only people adversely affected would be abject idiots, or the people who trust the abject idiots to give them true information.

And, really, how many of them are out there?

Organizing for America distributed an e-mail around midnight on Wednesday urging Democratic activists to attend a town hall meeting in Grafton, NH with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen at 10:00 AM on Thursday.

[snip of explicit statement that Shaheen is going to be there, fearmongering, fearmongering, fearmongering, fearmongering, fearmongering, and then – just for a break in pace – more fearmongering]

There’s just one problem. NowHampshire.com contacted Shaheen’s office who confirms that the senator is in Washington and will not attend the town hall meeting. Staff will field questions in Grafton instead.

If you’re going to astroturf a town hall, Mr. President, complete with premade signs with which to have supporters wave around and everything; anyway, shouldn’t you check to see whether the person who you’re trying to cover for is actually going to be at the town hall meeting in the first place?

Ed notes that these are the people who want to run your health care. I note that there were a finite number of people in New Hampshire this morning who came away from this escapade with the reaction that Organizing for America either lied to them, or else doesn’t have a clue about what’s really going on.

Much obliged!

Moe Lane

PS: GraniteGrok is giving some interesting coverage on New Hampshire generally. Check it out.

Crossposted to RedState.

Alternatively, it could be your next campaign.

You could actually run a pretty good Conspiracy X one off of this basic concept. Or maybe even Unknown Armies. Admittedly, you’d have to run either one more lighthearted than the average GM would, but that’s not so bad.  If nothing else, it’d be novel.

Via @allahpundit.

RedState Gathering – Marco Rubio interview.

As always, this isn’t the video of the speech and Q&A afterward (as you may have realized by now, reader Dave_in_Fla went above-and-beyond and taped large hunks of the proceedings); this was instead him taking the time to answer a few quick questions after the fact. Very determined man, and he has an impressive speaking ability generally.

His site is here.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.