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.

Sen. Grassley on Pres. Obama: He *means* well.

Which, as I’ve mentioned before, is probably the nastiest thing in English that you can say about a person.  Senator Grassley offered this superficially nice observation the other day:

“I think that he is a good person, and good-intentioned,” Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a radio interview. “But I believe he didn’t serve in government long enough to understand really how things work.”

“Remember, he was in the Senate four years, but effectively only two years because he spent two years where he was hardly ever here at all — he was campaigning for president,” Grassley said. “He really does not have an understanding of how Congress operates.”

…and, judging from the intemperate reaction from the Hill’s comments section, I’d say that he hit the target pretty dead on. There’s something darkly humorous about watching a group of people whose House leaders are all between seventy and eighty exhibit rank ageism…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

This is not the Red State / Blue State divide, in pure form.

It’s what Rasmussen calls the Political Class / Mainstream America divide, in pure form. Via the Corner:

I don’t know if I can adequately describe the total disconnect that takes place here between the guy who gives away AK-47s (which, by the way, are by law going to be strictly semi-automatic weapons) with every truck purchase and the woman who simply cannot comprehend why the guy is giving away AK-47s with every truck purchase. Or why he visibly doesn’t give a tinker’s dam about the fact that she’s surprised that his store motto includes a direct reference to God. Or why the Jesus reference didn’t work. It was supposed to work, right?

But it isn’t a Republican thing. My (Democratic, union president) dad would have gotten the point immediately. He wouldn’t have bought a truck from the guy – as far as I can tell, two years in Korea (starting with Inchon, and going rapidly downhill from there) left him with a profound indifference to owning a gun ever again – and he probably would have mocked him a little… but he’d have understood where the guy was coming from.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.