Stephen Hunt, British steampunk author (I’m reading The Rise of the Iron Moon
A Hugo can be swung by an actively voting population of less people than can squeeze into my local McDonalds, and the people who really vote for my work do so with little slips of paper bearing Her Majesty’s head on them (shortly, said ballot to be widened to include illustrations of US Presidents).
OK, that part was really more tangential to his larger response. Still a good quote.
Jay Cost, as part of his article on the DOOM that came to DC:
Arlen Specter was effectively booted from the Republican Party nearly a year before the primary election. The conventional wisdom at the time was that the Republican electorate in Pennsylvania had become too conservative. This tendentious interpretation has been exploded by the fact that he’s about to be ejected from the Democratic side, too.
(Via Geraghty) Jay used a Dylan song as his pop culture reference, but I much prefer this one:
Eugene Robinson is very aggrieved about the new Arizona law:
Legal immigrants will be required to carry papers proving that they have a right to be in the United States.
So aggrieved, in fact, that he’s apparently mixing up his tenses. It is already federal law for legal immigrants / visitors to carry their green cards and/or other relevant immigration information with them at all times. It’s been that way for years. [UPDATE: See also here.]
Mr. Robinson, if you don’t even know the basics of what is legally required and what is not, please keep out of the conversation until you’ve caught up with the rest of us. I ask this as somebody who favors immigration reform: you’re making my life more difficult.
So stop that.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
Hope springs eternal, I guess:
One of our passengers in the van opened the door to engage them and asked them if sex was a human right, to which they shouted “Yes!” Maybe they’d like to explain how that works when one can’t find a partner f0r that kind of activity, but that would presume that they understand the concept of human rights at all. Since they’re arguing that health care and housing are “rights,” I doubt they would grasp the dilemma.
This is from the SRLC, whose counter-protests were apparently… lacking. Mind you, given the way that the Left’s faux-populism has been shown up lately by actual grassroots activists, possibly I am merely judging progressives by a standard that they are simply inherently incapable of meeting.
Ed Morrissey, on the news that 327 Members of Congress have felt the urge to put daylight between themselves and the administration on the latter’s decision to try to bully Israel:
Accidental, latent, or overt, Obama’s hostility towards a key democracy in the most strategic part of the world has raised eyebrows of both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill — perhaps belatedly, but not too late to put some serious pressure for this administration to grow the hell up.
It takes a good bit to make Ed swear (however mildly), ladies and gentlemen. Although in this case I suspect that he was tempted to use a somewhat stronger word. I am.
Moe Lane
On the odd nature of rebellious Americans:
I’ve been saying for months that the difference between America and Europe is that, when the global economy nosedived, everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria mobs took to the streets and besieged Parliament demanding to know why government didn’t do more for them. This is the only country in the developed world where a mass movement took to the streets to say we can do just fine if you control-freak statists would just stay the hell out of our lives, and our pockets.
He ends a little depressed, although I don’t see why he should be. After all, he lives in a country where Mind Your Own God-Damned Business is a venerable battle cry…
