Book of the Week: America by Heart.

Mostly because America by Heart : Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag is not even out for the next two days and it’s already #23 on Amazon: my readers are probably going to buy it from somebody, so it might as well be me.  Not to mention the fact that the latest book by THAT WOMAN is promising to be the centerpiece of a sharp lesson to Gawker about why you Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Print Conglomerates.  Something about how Harper Collins would very much enjoy putting a New Media icon’s head on a stick as a warning to the rest…

And on that cheery note, farewell to Bring the Jubilee.

Moe Lane

#rsrh POTUS ‘surrenders’ to Chamber of Commerce.

Honestly, though, when it came to President Obama and the Chamber of Commerce it was always, if you’ll pardon the pun, just business.  He needed to come up with a believable villain for the over-educated, would-be elitist rubes that makes up the other half of his current coalition; and since said rubes hate business with the kind of baffled resentment that you’d expect from a band of Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherers facing an electrified fence, the CoC was perfect.  Well, not perfect, given that the demonizing project didn’t actually work, but the amped-up rhetoric and funding probably saved the Democrats a House seat or two.

But that was then, this is now, and Obama’s going to make nice with the Chamber of Commerce in January.  Not that the CoC is going to put too many screws in, given that a). Presidents have quite a bit of executive and regulatory power when it comes to business issues and b). the CoC retains an interest in remaining an independent player.  The latter reason is probably the more important one; after all, the recent history of the Democratic party reads as practically a how-to manual on the best way to geld special interest groups which rely too heavily on one political party for power.  No sane group wants to emulate the fates of the NAACP, NOW, or MoveOn.org…

Moe Lane

No more kicking the tax hike can.

The fascinating thing about the upcoming Obama tax hikes – and I imagine that the irony that if the Democrats had just made Bush’s tax cuts permanent in the first then they wouldn’t be in this mess right now hasn’t been lost on the Democratic leadership* – is that they’re hardly inevitable.  The current ratio is 255/180 Democrat/Republican in the House; 58/41 (Kirk needs to be seated, still) in the Senate.  The Democrats can easily pass a bill that will ensure that people’s taxes will not automatically rise in January; and they can pass it whenever they like.

And, really, the Democrats know this.  They’re just being petulant about the fact that the Republican party is disinterested in indulging the Democrats’ desire to not face the consequences of their party’s actions earlier in the decade.  Because this is what happens when you adopt a strategy of ‘kick the can down the road:’ eventually, you meet up with the can again.

And sometimes people won’t let you have another kick.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading No more kicking the tax hike can.

Why ‘Tolkienesque’ is a word.

The rest of the essay is, frankly, crap – China Mieville is one of those writers who only rarely has anything to say that I find particularly interesting, and I suspect that he allows his self-perception as a quite clever fellow to get in the way of the material he produces – but this is a pretty good paragraph.

But Tolkien’s most important contribution by far, and what is at the heart of the real revolution he effected in literature, was his construction of a systematic secondary world. There had been plenty of invented worlds in fantasy before, but they were vague and ad hoc, defined moment to moment by the needs of the story. Tolkien reversed that. He started with the world, plotted it obsessively, delineating its history, geography and mythology before writing the stories. He introduced an extraordinary element of rigour to the genre.

It is instructive to compare the first edition of The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth (which appeared to have been written before The Silmarillion was readily available) with the second; it’s startling to see how much of the cultural and linguistic backstory can be found in Tolkien’s text.  Not quite visible to the casual observer, but embedded in the work and giving it strength.  Which is probably one reason why… no, that’s an unkind thought.

Via Charlie Stross, in the middle of a grumble on Steampunk.  Which I found to be a little odd, because the horror aspects of the genre have been familiar to at least roleplaying gamers since Day One.  It’s part of the genre’s charm, for a given value of ‘charm.’

Moe Lane

PS: I’d also like to note that any discussion of Tolkien’s purpose and goals with LotR that only includes the word ‘linguistic’ as an adjective modifying a sneer is not really an informed discussion.

#rsrh Interesting thought re TSA.

Glenn Reynolds, on the news that the TSA is probably contributing to more accidents on the road:

“Of course, a few thousand extra highway deaths don’t produce the national trauma of a 9/11, and that’s a reasonable thing to factor in somehow.”

It’s the qualitative difference between ‘tragedy’ and ‘atrocity,’ Glenn.  There is no organized conspiracy to kill American citizens via car crashes, so each death is an separate tragedy, and even in the rare cases where actual malice is involved in the crash it’s an individual malice.  But 9/11 was the result of an organized conspiracy; and a failed one, at that.  They were trying to kill 50,000 people, after all.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Odd thing with the spam.

It’s been mostly generating extremely angry ‘comments’ about Charlie Rangel being merely censured for doing stuff that would get most of us in thrown jail.  Apparently spammers are as ticked off at Dizzy City Democratic games as the rest of the country; go figure.

#rsrh Interesting Cracked messaging article (NSFW).

No, really.  It’s more or less about why a particular humorless pro-Obama site isn’t going to work:

I may be only a simple Internet writer, but I know how not to argue online. It’s like trying to prove to a troll why your stuff is funny. People laugh or they don’t. They might not laugh because the words you use are too big, or because they don’t understand the concept of satire or, possibly, because they’re intimidated by the obvious girth of your manhood which even your comedic eloquence cannot hide. But the point is, if someone’s not laughing, you can’t convince them you’re funny. And stay at home moms forced back into the workplace, or office professionals working at 50 percent their prior salary or soldiers still waiting to come home don’t care about What The Fuck Has Obama Done So Far.Com’s list of accomplishments. If you’re not giving them a voter erection (or “voterection” tm) you can’t explain one into their pants.

He’s got a point about not arguing online, at least.  I personally don’t bother, myself: I’m here to point out inconvenient realities about and to the Left, not to waste my time trying to convert them.  It’s rarely c0st-effective, anyway.

Rep. Steve Israel gets his payoff.

Back in the day, it was pretty strongly alleged that the Democratic party unceremoniously threatened Rep. Steve Israel in order to keep him from running against appointed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in her primary this year.  Strenuously denied at the time, of course – remember, this was before the Sestak and Romanoff scandals erupted – but plausible, very plausible.  Both the threats (loss of donor money, active campaigning by the President, deliberate organizing of the African-American vote against Israel), and the promises (the gratitude of the Democratic party for not going up against a weak candidate, and maybe even a promotion to the inner circle).  And after all of that, oddly enough: Steve Israel didn’t run for Senate.

And now look here: “Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday named Representative Steve Israel of New York to lead the House Democratic campaign committee into the next election, putting him in charge of the party’s effort to regain the majority it lost in November.”  Which certainly qualifies as “inner circle” – and which keeps him from even thinking about a Senate bid until 2016.  Guess the Democrats learned their lesson from the Blanche Lincoln debacle: lock up the primary challengers early, and all that.  A little too smart for my liking: I prefer the Democrats to have the kind of thinking that causes them to keep the same House leadership team that threw away sixty-two seats and counting. Continue reading Rep. Steve Israel gets his payoff.