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Poughkeepsie Journal endorses Jim Tedisco (R Cand, NY-20) for Congress.

The Poughkeepsie Journal – which endorsed Obama for President – has endorsed Jim Tedisco for next week’s special election:

The 20th Congressional District seat – which includes much of northern Dutchess County – has been without a representative for about two months now. In many ways, this could not have come at a worse time. With the economy teetering, Congress has been moving at a fever-pitch pace to make critically important and highly expensive decisions that would have far-reaching ramifications.

The district needs someone to jump right in and make a difference, and veteran state lawmaker James Tedisco has those abilities. District voters should give him the opportunity to serve.

Tedisco has considerably more experience than his opponent, Democrat Scott Murphy, who has never sought office before.

There is at least one misstatement in the endorsement, however: Tedisco is against the stimulus. Nonetheless, good news.

contribute:


Crossposted to RedState.

National Journal reporting tie on partisan identification.

(Via Ace of Spades) All tied up at 42/42.  The important paragraph is below:

Democrats still outnumbered Republicans in terms of party identification in this poll by 6 points, 45 percent to 39 percent. Democrats also favored their own party’s congressional candidates 83 percent to 7 percent. But voters who call themselves independents gave GOP candidates the edge by 14 points, 38 percent to 24 percent. And self-identified Republicans supported their own party’s candidates 85 percent to 3 percent.

That is a meltdown, from the Democrats’ point of view: unlike Ace, I’m willing to buy that this represents a desire to swing the pendulum back.  Either that, or they just want to see some ruthlessness directed constructively for a change.  The kind we’re getting now seems sort of counter-productive.

Crossposted to RedState.

PMA head used family members to pay off Democrat appropriators.

I’m not a federal prosecutor. That means that I don’t have to bend over backward to avoid making what is really a fairly obvious statement. Via Instapundit:

PMA Lobbyist, Relatives Gave Lawmakers $1.5 Million Since 2000

A defense lobbyist and his family made $1.5 million in political contributions from 2000 through 2008 as the lobbyist’s now-embattled firm helped clients win billions of dollars in federal contracts. A sizable chunk of those campaign dollars went to the House members who control Pentagon spending.

Paul Magliocchetti, founder of the PMA Group, and nine of his relatives — two children, his daughter-in-law, his current wife, his ex-wife and his ex-wife’s parents, sister and brother-in-law — poured contributions into the coffers of candidates, political action committees and national and state party committees, according to a CQ review of public documents.

Continue reading PMA head used family members to pay off Democrat appropriators.

President honored with coveted ‘Bilderberg lackey’ status.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Personally, I think that Politico should have made it clear that Bilderberg-watchers pretty much plug in each new President’s name into their pet theories; feel free to fix the deliberately-broken (h ttp://www.rinf.com/conspiracies/nwo.html) and check out the mindset of these sorts for yourself. Still, that just means that you aren’t anybody until you’ve been declared to be a tool of the Bilderbergers, Tri-Lats, CFRs, or anybody else in the NWO. Well done, President Obama; it’s an obscure sort of honor, but no less real for all that.

All that being said, I’m afraid that you will have to join the Freemasons. It’s… complicated.

Moe Lane

PS: If the topic interests – and it’s usually lots of fun, up to the point where somebody starts screaming about the Jews – I suggest that you start with Illuminoids: Secret Societies and Political Paranoia or A History Of Secret Societies.

Crossposted to RedState.

They’ve *finally* rereleased the revised Mazes & Minotaurs ruleset!

Link here.  It actually happened in 2008; I can’t believe that I missed this!  Then again, it was an election year.

Going through the books themselves, I note that they’ve corrected a bunch of the spelling errors and what not, but not the artwork, which is vintage 1987-style “we can’t afford anything better.”  I suppose that I shouldn’t complain – the damn things are free, after all – but it’s not like LGS can’t afford decent artists these days for M&M.  I guess that too many of my fellow-gamers would complain if they jazzed up the thing for the modern audience: cheesy art is as important for the nostalgia kick as is the taste of Fritos and Pepsi.

Many thanks to Call of Cybele guru Ken Hite for the head’s-up.

Moe Lane

PS: What did I play? One of these guys. Totally homebrew, of course. I loved M&M, but it never handled running variant races well. Well, that and the lack of alternative settings. I had this campaign that I wanted to run, based on the works of an English author named John Tolkien, but I never was able to make the rules set work…

[Update]: Heh, I would have thought that the “Everett-Wheeler-Graham Model” tag would have been diagnostic.

I have a few responses to UN SecGen’s ‘deadbeat’ comment…

…(via Jules Crittenden) it’s just that most of them are foul. Which, by a fascinating coincidence, is precisely the word that I’d use to describe the actions that the UN bureaucracy often finds itself involved in, usually involving children and teenagers.

I will promise this, though: if the President decides to go a little further than ‘unfortunate‘ I won’t stop him.  If he decides that our current economic crisis requires that we delay paying off the UN for a couple of quarters – or years – I promise not to say a word of criticism.  Heck, I’ll even unbend enough to say “Well done.”

Moe Lane

PS: Actually, I do have one semi-witty response: “Ban Ki Moon, do you know what the real estate value is for the land at Turtle Bay?  Because I bet that Mayor Bloomberg does.”

Crossposted to RedState.

Breaking: FBI Raided Obama appointee’s office.

(H/T Glenn) Did anybody have March 12, 2009 in the pool? Because if you did, Christmas just came early:

FBI raids office of D.C. CTO, Obama appointee

Federal agents this morning are searching the Judiciary Square office of Washington, D.C.’s Chief Technology Officer.

The search is part of “an ongoing investigation,” said a spokeswoman for the FBI’s D.C. Field Office, Lindsay Gotwin, said. She declined to comment further.

The outgoing Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Kundra, was appointed last week Chief Information Officer by the Obama administration. His last day at the city government office was February 4, a spokeswoman for D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Leslie Kershaw, said.

[UPDATE] Actually, I am going to speculate as a motive: Kundra’s apparently very Google-friendly, and there’s some indication that Google may not be entirely beloved by this administration. Of course, a government Google crackdown theory would have to assume that one part of the government (the part doing vetting of officials) wasn’t talking to another part of the government (the part doing raids on offices), but really, how likely is that?

Continue reading Breaking: FBI Raided Obama appointee’s office.

I have the Vaclav Klaus speech…

…from the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change; I’m just working on getting it up. In the meantime, my general impressions of the speech: President Klaus isn’t particularly shy about opining that the situation with environmentalists pushing climate change is not one of science, but of competing agendas, and that there is an economic dimension to the environmentalists’ policy platforms. He also had a few choice comments about how the typical response from climate change proponents to any kind of skepticism reminded him of the way the communists used to handle similar objections… which is, of course, not complimentary. Ending quote: “The environmentalists don’t want to change the climate: they want to change us and our behavior.”

His book Blue Planet in Green Shackles was distributed as part of the dinner comments; I’ll be looking it over during the next couple of days and let you know what I think of it.

Crossposted at RedState.