We will be assaulting the Shady Acres Retirement Village just before sunrise, men. Some of us will not return. The geezers know of our presence, and are prepared. They will meet us with phalanxes of walkers; with Scoot-A-Bouts massed for defense; with checmical warfare (primarily Mentholatum and Dr. Sprott's Deep Heating Salve); with pureed peas and mashed potatoes and prune juice. They will conduct psyops missions -- grey-haired grannies will plaintively ask you why you don't visit more often, and some grand-dad with high-water chinos will tell you that kids these days aren't worth a damn. They will play Glenn Miller tunes at ear-splitting volumes. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, men. It will be the toughest fight of your lives. But I can say that this is the most important battle that you will ever fight! The future of the world depends upon your success! Now get in there and BRING THE PAIN to those geezers! Crush them, or they will surely crush you! more...

Posted by: Monty at 03:04 AM | Comments (167)
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Welcome all to the most depressing day of the week.

Introducing the The Rent Is Too Damn High Party

So New York had a gubernatorial debate last night open to all candidates for governor including Jimmy McMillan of the - well see if you can figure out which party he represents. And as a karate expert he can rock you with his gloved fists as well as his epic beard. If Samuel L. Jackson ever plays Claus in a Christmas special, I'm guessing he'll owe Mr. McMillan some royalties.

Now I've always thought the 'Tea Party' was an o-kay name for a political movement but The Taxes Are Too Damn High Party has a certain ring of clarity to it as well.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:28 PM | Comments (924)
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I'm mentioning this to offset the polls showing Boxer ahead.

Total Fiorina 46%
Total Boxer 43%
Total Other Candidates 5%
Undecided 6%

...

GovernorÂ’s Ballot
Total Whitman 45%
Total Brown 44%
Total Other Candidates 4%
Undecided 7%

I don't really care about who's leading, honestly. Any GOP candidate who's "tied" or MoE will almost certainly win.

Posted by: Ace at 03:18 PM | Comments (278)
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I always have to offer a point of caution about stories like this -- yes, this is encouraging, but bear in mind an enthusiastic, eager, well-before-deadline vote counts just as much as a dissatisfied, reluctant vote cast ten minutes before the polling places close.

In other words, this doesn't prove we've got more votes; it just proves we're more eager to vote.

Still, it's certainly not a bad thing. Oh, and Be the Wave you dicks.

Posted by: Ace at 02:51 PM | Comments (122)
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Finally a write-in campaign we should get behind.

That's right, no one bothered to even run against Martha Coakley, last seen being trounced by Scott Brown, for her currently-held AG seat. They figured she was just too much of a political dynamo to even bother contesting.

Jim McKenna saw things differently. Since the Republicans, literally, ran no one at all -- the ballot slot would be blank -- he figured he'd run write-in. He needed 10,000 signatures; he got 27,700.

When I was up in Massachusetts, while people seemed pretty high on some of the Congressional challengers, it was Jim McKenna drawing most of the talk.

Correction! Jim McKenna is on the ballot now, thanks to his write-in campaign, which put him there. Apologies; I thought I understood the situation from chattering with people but I didn't.

Some other cool news:

Anna Little within one (1!!!) of Frank Pallone in NJ-6? Frank Pallone is an 11-term incumbent, but Chris Christie won his district -- and was recently seen campaigning for her (in which a moron's sign makes an appearance, at the 8:45-9:45 mark). And Christie's gained support, of course, since then.

Can she win then? She can!

Nick Popaditch, Fallujah hero (and he has the scars to prove it), is running against some jackass career politician in CA-51.

Another likely gain in Massachusetts as Jeffrey Perry's within a couple of incumbent Keating in MA-10. and only needs a little help to win.

Posted by: Ace at 02:06 PM | Comments (87)
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Well, that's the number of Democratic seats in play; and therefore pretty much the outer limit of possible Republican gains. (But I don't think he's crediting people like John Dennis with a real chance of unseating Nancy Pelosi, either, so the absolute max might be five or seven higher.)

117 isn't anything like a prediction. Just something to think about, and maybe do more than think about.

More on those 117 potential new untainted, Tea Party representatives here.

Posted by: Ace at 01:53 PM | Comments (80)
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So funny. So f'n' funny.

If you don't know what happened in 1773 (and I didn't know for certain, but I had a pretty damn good guess), make sure you read through all the Very Intelligent Liberals' tweets mocking her (duh, like nothing happened in 1773! What a dunce!) before coming to the (rather obvious) answer.

Again, gun to my head, I wouldn't have been able to call out the year this particular somethin'-somethin' happened. Would have been able to guess within 3 years though (I know it was before 1776, for example, but not too long before it).

But if you tell me "Partly like it's 1773" I would be able to hazard a guess at what historically-significant event occurred then, especially one that has a particular resonance in today's politics.

But it never occurred to Kos or all of his idiotic minions.

But Palin's dumb and they're ever so smart, eh?

Thanks to Slublog and LauraW.

Posted by: Ace at 10:47 AM | Comments (669)
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Actually I'd say it's "really bad," except I know what she was getting at.

But even though I know what she was getting at, she doesn't give much evidence demonstrating the truly important thing: Does she know what she's getting at?

Maybe she does. Sure would be nice if I knew for sure, though.

Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell of Delaware on Tuesday questioned whether the U.S. Constitution calls for a separation of church and state, appearing to disagree or not know that the First Amendment bars the government from establishing religion.

The exchange came in a debate before an audience of legal scholars and law students at Widener University Law School, as O'Donnell criticized Democratic nominee Chris Coons' position that teaching creationism in public school would violate the First Amendment by promoting religious doctrine.

Coons said private and parochial schools are free to teach creationism but that "religious doctrine doesn't belong in our public schools."

"Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked him.

When Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion, O'Donnell asked: "You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"

Her comments, in a debate aired on radio station WDEL, generated a buzz in the audience.

"You actually audibly heard the crowd gasp," Widener University political scientist Wesley Leckrone said after the debate, adding that it raised questions about O'Donnell's grasp of the Constitution.

There is no doubt the Constitution bars the "establishment of religion." Says so. And O'Donnell did not, in fact, challenge that.

There is considerably more doubt whether it imposes a "wall of separation between Church and State" -- that notion is doctrinal, not textual, and comes not from the Constitution, but from (IIRC) Thomas Jefferson's letters about it.

Now, Jefferson is certainly an important commentator on the Constitution, but his word is not dispositive. The Constitution, by its own terms, prohibits the establishment of a state religion -- anything beyond that is gloss and interpretation.

This is what Christine O'Donnell was getting at -- an important and quite-legitimate argument offered up by conservative-leaning (usually religious) constitutional scholars.

And nothing she actually said betrays a mistake on this point.

But, of course, it does sound as if she questioning that which cannot be questioned, that yes, in the First Amendment, it does prohibit a state religion. It should be pointed out, though, that the moderator and Coons and O'Donnell kept speaking of different terms -- O'Donnell kept asking about the separation of church and state, and Coons spoke of the establishment clause (plus his unstated assertion that this does in fact create the "wall of separation" Jefferson spoke of).

I don't know if she's wrong here, really, or uninformed. But yes, she could have made it very clear and removed all doubt by offering the sort of detail I just did, conceding yes, the establishment clause prohibits the establishment of a state religion, but a state religion is very different than vouchers for private schools (including religious schools), and one cannot take the former to mean the latter.

I don't know. You're supposed to be careful in these areas, and make sure people get what you are saying, not just so you don't look foolish, but so that you can perform a truly critical aspect of politics -- persuasion. Education. Advocacy.

I feel like people keep blowing off this crucial element when looking for leaders. If a leader can't actually persuade the hostiles to your side, is that leadership? Does that advance the cause or retard it? Does that increase acceptance of these views or decrease acceptance by making them seem foolish or outlandish?

This gets into my beef with the idea of True Conservatives. Yes, I'd like True Conservatives in office too. But a True Conservative who fails at the persuasion function of politics isn't helping the cause at all. In fact, it often hurts it.

Oh: It occurs to me I am not respecting the 24 hour rule and what the media quoted might not be all she said -- the media is now simply a partisan enterprise, unofficial worker-bees for the DNC, and it no longer surprises me at all that they simply lie. It could very well be she offered a more expansive answer which they truncated in order to make her look foolish.

Assuming they got the quotes right, which is a dubious 40% proposition, I expect now that Rush and Levin and all of them will now explain to their viewers how her answer wasn't that bad (as I did above).

But it's not the job of a candidate's supporters to do the backfilling and dot-connecting necessary to make an answer work. That's the candidate's job. She's the man in the arena (well, woman).

Reagan was The Great Communicator. He wasn't The Great Half-A-Good-Answer-Giver-Whose-Answers-Could-Be-Rescued-By-Supporters-icator.

This is not a blow-off consideration. It's not enough to just vote right or have the right conclusions; a candidate needs to be able to explain those conclusions in such a way that people with half-baked opinions might be persuaded.

Posted by: Ace at 09:34 AM | Comments (379)
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I was bothered by Kurtz's last point, and wasn't sure why.

The biggest media blunder, in my view, was the walk-on-water coverage that Obama drew in 2007 and 2008. The only real debate was whether he was more like FDR (Time) or Lincoln (Newsweek). The candidate obviously played a role in creating his own myth, but it was the breathless media that sent expectations soaring into the stratosphere. Once Obama had to grapple with two wars, a crippled economy and reflexive Republican opposition, he had no place to go but down. The press has long since fallen out of love with the president, but the overheated hyperbole did him no favors.

First of all, note how that is put: the overheated hyperbole did him no favors. It's interesting that Kurtz lapses into this sort of Freudian slip where he laments the press' having done Obama a bad turn -- that is, he proceeds (unknown even to himself, I'd bet) from the premise that the press was supposed to prop up Obama, but, by claiming he could walk on water, overpromised, which now leaves their Precious in a bad spot.

Kurtz would claim he's merely being descriptive and not prescriptive; I think he'd be wrong in claiming that. When we're not being careful we give away what we really believe.

But that's minor.

The more important failure of the press wasn't to claim he could do all these amazing things -- okay, that's bad, I grant him -- but to utterly fail to vet him as a candidate.

The public was promised -- by the press, which swore to this on a stack of Bibles -- that Obama was post-partisan. That he was everything good about liberalism mixed with everything good about conservatism. The press allowed him to run both to McCain's left and McCain's right, even on the same issue. Obama, for example, was both more of a terrorist-killing warrior than McCain and also more of a man of peace and soft power; he was both going to raise taxes and lower them.

Part of the public's revolt against Obama is the late-coming realization that he's just a very, very liberal president, and intensely partisan to boot, and not anything at all like the unifying post-partisan post-racial (post-human?) healer the press swore he was.

And this of course was all crystalized in Obama's not-at-all-fateful encounter with Joe the Plumber, a common citizen who dared to ask The One a perfectly legitimate question which the press had not bothered to ask, something along the lines of whether it was in his interest to have his taxes raised.

And Obama was not careful, and gave away what he really thought: We needed to "redistribute the wealth," he said, a central tenet of full-blown socialism.

The press' reaction? Did they inquire further about Obama's socialistic mindset? Look into his membership in the socialist New Party? Ask more questions about the bevy of hard-left radials who were his friends, champions, patrons and even most likely his ghostwriter?

No. They insisted the answer meant nothing, it was a crazy question to begin with, and then intensely vetted.... Joe the Plumber, who wasn't running for anything.

Within two days we found out he wasn't a licensed plumber (as if this means he wasn't a plumber at all), had liens against him, was divorced (wink-wink, we know what that means), etc.

Instead of vetting the man voluntarily seeking the most powerful office in all the world, the media instead chose to fix its full investigatory power upon a plumber who had dared to ask the Little King a question.

And so it was throughout 2008 -- Did Obama's long-time association with racist radical Reverend Wright give any insight into his actual politics? No, the press insisted, it did not. It embargoed the story for a year (despite it being pushed to them by the Democrat Hillary Clinton) and then when they finally broke down and reported it, they proclaimed it no longer a story after a vapid, vacuous speech. (The greatest speech since Lincoln, in their estimation.)

And then anyone who brought the subject up was vetted again, or, not vetted really, just called a racist.

The media refused to look for anything negative in Obama, or even anything neutral -- any policy choice he was pushing that that might not appeal to all voters was ruthlessly blackholed.

But, you know... none of this was intentional. I would certainly not say the media mangled the coverage of the 2008 elections.

Posted by: Ace at 09:01 AM | Comments (133)
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Howard Kurtz occasionally writes media bias pieces, but in the end, he can't bring himself to actually criticize the MFM. Here, though, he goes right up to the line of being interesting and accurate before once again shying away. Via Hot Air's headlines.

he media narrative by now is set in concrete: The voters are teed off, rising up, mad as hell and ready to wreak havoc.

There is a whiff, if you read between the lines, that the expected outcome is somehow unjust. The Democrats are going to get their backsides handed to them, in this telling, because the Obama administration has clumsily failed to explain what itÂ’s done for the folks, and because of slightly scary passions unleashed by the Tea Party crazies.

The journalistic tone was somewhat different in 2006, when exasperated voters handed the House and Senate to the Dems, and 2008, when Barack Obama sold himself as a post-partisan savior.

IÂ’m not saying this is intentional, or that the MSM are mangling the midterms.

See what I mean? He has the right premise to come to a useful conclusion -- the media praised the voters for being exasperated and angry about Bush, but now pummels them for the exact same feelings about Obama -- but can't say it's intentional. Or even that the MFM is mangling the midterms (it is).

After that, he spends a couple of paragraphs excusing the media, before nearly becoming interesting yet again:

For Jano Cabrera, a Democratic strategist, the subject strikes a nerve. “My wife and I were having this very conversation,” he says. “When we were trying to seize power, we had justified anger, and now we talk about uninformed voters.” Obama inherited unprecedented challenges, Cabrera says, but in politics “you can’t go back and say it’s the other guy’s fault.”

Yes, let's go forward with this idea -- this is the second time it has been mentioned.

PREMISE: The media praised not-gonna-take-it-anymore voters when they turned against Republicans and Bush.

PREMISE: The media demonized not-gonna-take-it-anymore voters -- as stupid, crazy, and racist, and even unamerican -- when they turned against Democrats and Republicans.

CONCLUSION: ???

Howard Kurtz continues sitting at his computer scratching his head trying to puzzle this all out.

This is a year in which facts—the preferred currency of the reality-based media—often don’t seem to matter.

Ah-hah! Now we're cooking, right? Perhaps the MFM is not as "reality-based" as it thinks?

No, Kurtz uses this as a taking-off point to explain that facts don't matter to tea party candidates, that they invent their own realities on the fly (citing Paladino, O'Donnell, and Angle), and that's why the MFM is having such a Dickens of a time understanding them. See, the MFM is reality based, and the Tea Party is unreality based, so you can understand the failure of the MFM to comprehend these stupid, crazy, and racist (and sorta unamerican) people.

He then goes on to do this sort of one one hand, on the other hand nonsense, refusing to grasp the simple reality which isn't merely in front of his face but sitting on his face. He hails ObamaCare, for example, as a "huge achievement" and journalists are right to point out that this huge achievement has been "minimized" by voters. (Certainly it wasn't minimized by the MFM, who still think it's Fucking Awesome.)

But after that crap, he does flirt with getting it right once more:

The biggest media blunder, in my view, was the walk-on-water coverage that Obama drew in 2007 and 2008. The only real debate was whether he was more like FDR (Time) or Lincoln (Newsweek). The candidate obviously played a role in creating his own myth, but it was the breathless media that sent expectations soaring into the stratosphere. Once Obama had to grapple with two wars, a crippled economy and reflexive Republican opposition, he had no place to go but down. The press has long since fallen out of love with the president, but the overheated hyperbole did him no favors.

WhoÂ’s to blame for the coming electoral tsunami? We ought to be careful about dumping on the most convenient scapegoat, those moronic voters. In politics, itÂ’s not that complicated: you either deliver or you pay the price.

Ah. Gee, seems if that insight were more internalized all this crap about the tea party being unreality based would be seen as the rubbish it is.

Who'd've thought? Voters want results, not rhetoric.

But in Howard Kurtz's liberal media bubble, that's still a controversial proposition. Good intentions ought to count, apparently, but only, of course, with liberals.

And even having hit upon that simple insight (which is only an insight to the stupid), he still can say the MFM is "reality based" and the Tea Party is a movement of fanatics, fascists, and fantasists.

Posted by: Ace at 07:36 AM | Comments (185)
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