HuffPo drones think that they’re people!

…Which they are, of course: just not to HuffPo. Which is why that the “strike” that some of them are invoking because they aren’t getting paid for their freely-provided content is so… well, it’s kind of cute.  Diagnostic of a sad mass delusion of the relative worth of their provided free content, when contrasted against the difficulty in acquiring new free content of equal or greater value, but cute.

More seriously, when you have a site of HuffPo’s size, then you will get people who are happy to trade free content in exchange for free publicity.  Some of those people will be good enough at what they do to be usable.  You cannot compete with those people unless you first accept that they are in fact being compensated for their work, and adjust your pitch accordingly.  Just the way it goes, folks.

Moe Lane

Wisconsin: Democratic Senators losing unit cohesion?

There’s some confusion going on with regard to the intentions and plans of the fourteen AWOL Democratic state senators from Wisconsin who have been hiding from their job responsibilities for the last two weeks. They are or are not or are or are not or are or are not* about to give up and just come back in; what is actually going to happen is still to be determined.  On the other hand, it’s easy enough to see what did happen over the weekend: the fourteen AWOL senators lost whatever unit cohesion that they might have had in the first place.  Two weeks of living on the lam and being politely chased by private citizens with video cameras will do that to a group, after all.

You see, we tend to forget that politicians are not identical, like potatoes: these fourteen men and women are just that – men and women – and it’s easy to believe that they’re getting tired, sore, and fuming about how they’ve somehow become the surrogate whipping boys for a national debate on public sector unions.  Some of them might even be thinking that they didn’t actually sign up for this, that this wasn’t in the job description, and that the people urging them to exile in Illinois might not really give a tinker’s dam about them or their problems.  And that this situation that they’re in is getting old.  Oh, sure, no doubt a few of the AWOL senators are having a ball… but some of them are not, and the loss of message discipline in the last few days shows that.

And it only takes one AWOL senators to end this nonsense. Continue reading Wisconsin: Democratic Senators losing unit cohesion?

The Matter of Ghouls.

Specifically, Lovecraft’s ghouls.  I hate to say, but… they just ain’t that scary to me, sorry.  Or mind-blastingly evil.  Mi-Go?  Sure: brains-in-a-can and deep space frightfulness.  Deep Ones?  No problem, especially since Delta Green: Targets of Opportunity did a revamp.  Great Race?  Yeah, those SOBs are pretty freaky-deaky when you realize that they’ve got a real problem with personal head space.  But… ghouls?

OK.  You eat dead people.  Hold on, am I dead?  No?  Well, then, you just keep on with gnawing on that head then, buddy:  he’s obviously past caring and it’s nobody I know. I mean, seriously: read “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath” again.  You can recruit those guys as a ally race in that one.

They got real nuanced after “Pickman’s Model,” is all I’m saying.

Moe Lane

#rsrh QotD, Dagnabbit, Rep. Weiner… [NSFW!]

…I am exceedingly comfortable with despising you.  Don’t make me change my opinion (no matter how slightly) because of what you told Mayor Bloomberg to his face:

“When I become mayor, you know what I’m going to spend my first year doing? I’m going to have a bunch of ribbon-cuttings tearing out your fucking bike lanes.”

New York City politicians.  Love them or despise them, but at least they generally make things clear.  Aside from Bloomberg, of course.

Via @SonnyBunch.

Moe Lane

TN Democrats go, charitably, nuts over teacher reform bills.

The alternative is ‘deliberately inflammatory in a very literal sense because they want to see Tennessee burn.’  Which is a bit of a mouthful.

Based on their latest email blast, the Tennessee Democratic Party seems to have a problem understanding what “fascism” is, not to mention “terrorism.”  Apparently, Tennessee Democratic chair Chip Forrester and House Democratic chair Mike Turner seem to think that these terms are appropriate for describing several reform bills currently being considered by the Tennessee legislature.  Presumably they mean HB 2012 and HB 0130; the first is a tenure reform bill that introduces merit into the tenure process and the second is a collective bargaining reform bill that removes the Tennessee Education Association’s privileged status as the only permissible agent for bargaining with school boards.

Or perhaps Forrester and Turner don’t mean those bills, given that neither actually does anything like set up a system for mass murder of inconvenient minorities, create a totalitarian state that controls every aspect of life, and/or start aggressive wars of conquest.  It’s a bit of a puzzler – unless you assume that this is just a cynical ploy to get money, which is a notion that Jim Geraghty is cynically suggesting and I am just as cynically endorsing.

Continue reading TN Democrats go, charitably, nuts over teacher reform bills.

#rsrh David Brooks feels alone.

That’s the message of this Daily Beast article – apparently Brooks feels estranged from it all – but there’s another, hidden message: no-one on the Daily Beast knows any conservatives professionally. Seriously, take a gander at this passage:

“What’s interesting about David is the part that’s not on the right or the left,” says the liberal author Paul Berman. “He’s a social critic, with a talent for wry, fond criticism of the American bourgeoisie.” But he lacks “a kind of indignation,” Berman notes. He’s insufficiently shrill for Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative welfare state promoted by Washington think tanks—what the writer Andrew Sullivan refers to as “the financial-industrial complex.”

Sullivan goes on to blather about the Iraq liberation, but contemplate this: the best that the Daily Beast could do to find a balanced assessment of Brook’s philosophy was a liberal interventionist hawk and a brain-addled conspiracy theorist.  Don’t get me wrong: Berman’s sound on the essentially fascist nature of radical Islamist philosophy, and the guy did do his part on getting Michael Moore placed on a career path of making ineffective left-wing propaganda.  But surely the Daily Beast could have called up somebody who might have bothered to explain what their problem was with Brooks as a conservative, from the conservative point of view*?

Yes.  I am quite the comedian.

Moe Lane

*It’s very simple: Brooks is a tireless defender of conservative principles.  Right up to the point where the hostess of the dinner party he’s attending looks like she’s about to raise an eyebrow.

#rsrh NYT’s cynical Union-busting post.

And it is cynical, in a fundamental way: the New York Times recognizes the need for getting public sector unions under control… in New York (where it will affect the New York Times).  Wisconsin can apparently take a short walk off a long pier, for all that the Old Grey Lady cares.  This is, by the way, a major reason why institutions of the Left are mistrusted by agents of the Right: the former goes out of the way to slander, libel, and dismiss the motivations and actions of the latter even when they agree with them.

And… that’s it, frankly.  Personally, I don’t see why New York gets to have its governor smack back an out-of-control public sector union crisis while Wisconsin can’t, but then I’m not precisely the audience demographic that the New York Times is trying to reach.  Which is a mistake on its part, but never mind that right now.

Moe Lane

(H/T: Instapundit)