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Jonah Goldberg is tired of the vicious hypocrisy of these people…

…for that matter, so am I.

‘These people’ being the media, and their contemptible willingness to accept a double standard when it comes to violent rhetoric.  After screaming for so long about every possible hint of a suggestion of a possibility of violent speech from the Right, it’s amazing what will be forgiven when it comes from the Left:

Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. They are betraying the founders, too. Chris Matthews all but signs up for the “Make an Ass of Yourself” contest at the State Fair.  Joe Nocera writes today that “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.” Lord knows what Krugman and Olbermann have said.

Then last night. on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack six months ago, the Vice President of the United States calls the Republican Party a bunch of terrorists.

Regardless, No one cares.

Continue reading Jonah Goldberg is tired of the vicious hypocrisy of these people…

Reid Bill voted down in House, 173-246.

It needed a 2/3rd majority to pass: it didn’t get a simple majority. Final total coming up.

UPDATE: Yeas 173, Nays 246. No Republicans voted Yea ([UPDATE]: Although two originally voted yea, apparently).

FURTHER UPDATE: For those trying to keep track, this was the Reid bill that played some extremely fast-and-loose scoring games in order to try to make it look like a fiscally responsible piece of legislation.  It not only sparked Paul Ryan’s soon-to-be-infamous ‘moon covered in yoghurt‘ comparison; it also attempted to re-institute (translation: ‘sneak in’) some draconian tax hikes.  It’s going to be an open question now whether Harry Reid should even bother trying to pass it in the Senate tonight, seeing as the House has made it clear that it won’t pass and forty-three Republican Senators have made it equally clear that he won’t make sixty on a cloture vote.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

2nd NC redistricting map more pointed than 1st one.

When the first North Carolina redistricting map came out at the beginning of July,  Democrats of course bawled like stuck calves.  Speaking objectively, this wasn’t a surprise: the way that it was set up, it put four Democratic Congressmen – Larry Kissell, Mike McIntyre, Brad Miller, & Heath Shuler – at a serious disadvantage in the 2012 elections.  Put simply, the map threatened to flip NC from 6/7 GOP/DEM to 8/5 GOP/DEM, or even 10/3. If you examine the previous map, you’ll understand why such a dramatic shift; the Democrats went notoriously overboard in gerrymandering in 2000, when they controlled the process.  In short, we had a humdinger of a karmic adjustment going on in North Carolina.

But then something interesting happened: Rep. GK Butterfield (D, NC-01) started complaining.  Rep. Butterfield is a beneficiary (along with Rep. Mel Watts of NC-12) of the racial gerrymandering system set up in response to the Voting Rights Act; and he made some rather pointed objections to the first map, arguing that it ‘disenfranchised’ some of his former constituents by moving them into majority-white districts.  North Carolinan Republicans thought about it – and must have decided that they agreed, because they went into the maps again and redrew both Butterfield’s and Watt’s districts to make them more in line with the VRA’s perceived guidelines.

Of course, that meant that they had to… make some unavoidable choices: Continue reading 2nd NC redistricting map more pointed than 1st one.