The first four are going to get primaried because of their frequent departures from anything resembling conservatism. Ensign will be challenged due his personal ethics problems, making him a weak candidate at best in 2012.

Here's hoping they all do get challenged, and beaten, by strong candidates. And not weak ones put up just to "teach the establishment a lesson." There is a diminishing-returns quality to that and we've hit that point.

But we have two years to find good challengers, and they've already begun declaring.

On the whole, the 2012 map looks extremely promising for the GOP. After posting a six-seat gain in 2010, Republicans are in a position to pick up even more seats in the 2012 cycle, with 21 Democratic senators up for re-election, including two Independents who caucus with them, compared to just 10 Republicans.

But the possibility of multiple fractious primary challenges casts a shadow over the 2012 cycle after an election season marked by two GOP Senate incumbents who were denied renomination, a third who switched parties to avoid a tough primary and several other messy primaries that likely cost the party a chance at winning a majority.

Actually I think the primary process doesn't "cast a shadow" on prospects for victory, in and of itself. Superficially, creates drama and interest in the race. More substantively, it connects actual voters to government policy -- that is, it increases democratic engagement, and that's always a good thing.

The problem isn't that these old hucksters are being challenged. That's to the good -- how could it be otherwise? Do we believe in democracy, competition, accountability to the voters, and the clash of ideas, or not?

The problem comes when defeating an incumbent becomes the only important factor for a party. The Democrats are working hard enough on that; we don't need to help them too much in that regard.

Again, it's about candidate quality. With two years to figure this out, we'll get some good ones.

Particularly in Texas and Utah -- there is simply no excuse whatsoever for bright red states putting up weak-tea Republicans more interested in cordial relations with the Democrats than conservative principles.

Having witnessed the primary election carnage, some GOP incumbents have already begun their preparations to appease the conservative elements of their local parties—modeling their reelection efforts after Arizona Sen. John McCain, who easily won a primary over a former GOP congressman.

And that will not be terribly successful, as we all watched John McCain begin his maverick ways again the day the primary was over.

No one is going to believe that after compiling a long, long record of stabbing Reganism in the back that Olympia Snowe suddenly "gets it" because she attends a few Tea Party meetings.

...

Snowe, Lugar, Ensign and Hatch are the senators who seem most at risk at the moment. Hutchison has not said yet whether she will run for another term, but has already attracted at least one competitive primary challenger—Texas Railroad Commissioner Elizabeth Ames Jones— who is actively campaigning, plus at least two other prominent statewide Republicans who are said to be planning to run against her.

Meanwhile, there's movement away from Steele at the RNC.

As he contemplates running for a second term, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele is on the verge of losing his coalition of supporters. Even some of those closest to the controversial chairman have begun urging him to step aside.

Strategists familiar with the RNC who both support and oppose Steele agree there are between 40 and 50 of the 168 voters who will back Steele for a second term. Another 40 to 50 members will definitely vote for someone else. The remaining members, numbering between 88 and 68, are undecided.

Meanwhile, a group of prominent Republicans led by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie are searching for a consensus candidate capable of defeating Steele.

Steele's an interesting case. On one hand, you have a free-spending semi-competent who sees the RNC primarily as a vehicle for raising his own profile at the expense of others, and whose stewardship so undermined confidence in the RNC that it saw very low fundraising totals and in fact had to abandon the traditional 72-hour boots-on-the-ground GOTV efforts before the election (they say they found it wasn't cost effective; I say: they didn't have the money and had to rely on cheaper means such as the call 40 friends from home program).

On the other hand, he's made some noises that the Tea Party appreciated. Whether he was doing this out of conviction or survival instinct I don't know.

I really hope that people aren't going to go with a failed chairman just because he offered up some pleasing rhetoric.

Posted by: Ace at 12:22 PM | Comments (156)
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Drew noticed yesterday that the Simpson/Bowles plan actually locked in 2010 spending as a baseline, and only later (in 2012) did it begin to reduce from there.

That's unacceptable. Rush Limbaugh thinks so too.

Essentially this nonstarter of a plan codifies the 22%-of-GDP spending Obama achieved and calls that the new normal, then "cuts" from there. Sometime down the road. maybe.

Our average spending has been between 18 and 20% of GDP (with Reagan spending up to 21% during his military build-up). We've never seen some kind of assumption of 22% of GDP being "normal."

Posted by: Ace at 11:39 AM | Comments (124)
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He was arrested for burglarizing a home, during which arrest he attacked officers and attempted to bite them. He was eventually subdued with Tasers and batons.

Then it got weird.

. It was in the hospital emergency room where a “physician noticed a mouse [cord] hanging from male subjects rectum. X-rays shown part of the [computer] mouse was lodged in the male subjects rectum.”

It's one thing to stick a mouse up your butt when you want to spend a pleasant evening at home drinking Schlitz and watching Degrassi Junior High. That I understand.

But it's another thing to stick a mouse up your butt when you're going out burgling.

Sure, I get how nice it is to have the comfort of a peripheral lodged inside you. But, like, time, place, and manner, dude.

You laugh but you've never had a
trackball on your prostate.

Thanks to Dr. Spank, via DPUD.

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 AM | Comments (212)
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Why do people listen to maniacs who suggest buying gold during periods of economic uncertainty.

Posted by: Ace at 10:10 AM | Comments (94)
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Lots of talk of Hitler, and of Bush's sociopathy; wishes from Mike Malloy that the foreign services of a hostile foreign country (such as Venezuela) will "snatch" the "murderous" George Bush and put him on trial. (And you know the typical sentence given to the murderous, right? Wink wink.)

But remember: It's racist and toxic if you speak about Obama with 10% of this vitriol.

Despite the fact that you're not being paid a salary by a leftist business to transmit this hatred to tens of thousands of people. (I'd say millions but come on, with this crew. Tens of thousands is as high as I'll guess.)

A sign held by a Tea Partier in Duluth at one rally is of course far more dangerous than Mike Malloy's daily broadcast rants.
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Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (181)
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At Hot Air, Enter the Cocoon.

If hyperinflation arrives, Time Magazine wants its readers to know who the real culprits are. It wonÂ’t be the federal government that hiked annual spending by 38% in three years and began running trillion-dollar deficits. It wonÂ’t be the Congress that kept raising debt limits to allow for that spending spree. And it wonÂ’t be the Federal Reserve that, in desperation over the governmentÂ’s spending and debt spree, began printing money to artificially keep interest rates low. No, the real culprit will be the political movement that opposes all of the above, according to The Curious Capitalist...

And here is "The Curious Capitalist:"

Sarah Palin is concerned that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may cause inflation to shoot up and stay there. But could the greatest potential culprit of wealth-destroying, Germany-1930s-type hyper-inflation be, not the central bank, but Palin and the Tea Party? That in part is the conclusion of some recent research by Indiana University professor Eric Leeper and Wall Street economist Troy Davig of Barclays Capital. In a recent paper, called Temporarily Unstable Government Debt and Inflation, which can be downloaded from this website, Leeper has a chart that he unofficially calls the Tea Party shock graph, on page 25. Before the Tea Party, inflation is rising slowly. But in the first year the Tea Party or a group with similar views wins the Presidency or takes over Congress, whamm-o. Inflation doubles, and keeps going up. He wrote the paper in October, so he puts the potential date of Tea Party takeover as 2019, but after this election Leeper concedes Tea Party induced hyper-inflation could come much sooner than that. So is Palin riding the Hyper-Inflation Express? Maybe. Here's why...

The "why" seems to be that this liberal analyst really, really wants to raise taxes -- as a check against inflation, I think -- and the Tea Party is very anti-tax-hike so, you know, the Tea Party will cause inflation, by bitterly clinging to its anti-tax-hike stance.

Inflation comes from the government printing more money, and the government prints more money when its books are dramatically unbalanced, and they get that way from a mismatch of high spending and low taxes, and this is Time Magazine we're talking about, so of course it is simply not even inquiring as to whether the culprit could be that "high spending" part. Of course it's the "low taxes" part.

Ipso facto, presto chango, and the Tea Party is now responsible for the coming inflation they've been warning of and in fact came into existence precisely to speak out against.

Meanwhile, President Kickass and his trillion-dollar deficits and quantitative easing (it's not his policy per se, but he offered words of support and encouragement for it) are entirely blameless.

Unbelievable.

Meanwhile: Also at Hot Air, Axelrod now saying that Obama would except a temporary extension of the Bush tax cuts for the highest income brackets as the price for keeping the rest of the tax cuts.

This is especially interesting given Time's theory that low tax rates will be the one and only culprit if inflation spikes -- so, then, Obama's to blame, I guess?

Of course not; Obama is merely bending to political reality; he remains blameless.

This is a cutesy paradigm liberals always deploy. Liberals want gay marriage, of course; so who is to blame for the current prohibition?

Republicans politicians? Of course-- they oppose it, in the main.

Democrats? Like Obama, who says he's anti-gay-marriage? No. Obama gets a pass because "political reality" is forcing his hand.

The liberal media always does this to excuse away positions they don't like in politicians they do. Republicans are never given a pass for also being reflective of, and captive of, public will. Republicans are assigned full blame, as if they are entirely above and beyond considerations of political reality and have an entirely free hand in selecting their position. Therefore, if they select a position liberals don't like, they are fully morally culpable.

It's only Democrats, apparently, who are ever influenced by public opinion to take positions liberal commentators don't like. Democrats are innocent as lambs because they have good intentions. (Which the media assumes -- they assume, for example, Obama really wants gay marriage, despite the fact that he never says so. So, they assume he's lying. It's a fair assumption-- but then please note he is lying to the public, huh?)

So once again Obama will take a position liberals claim is repugnant and/or disastrous but that's okay, after all, he's just doing what he needs to do to be elected.

Like when Robert Byrd started his own Klan chapter.

Posted by: Ace at 07:45 AM | Comments (138)
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To our readers who are veterans and all those who served our nation...thank you.

Don't forget there are other ways you can show your thanks...supporting Project Valour-IT is certainly one of them.

The Disabled Veterans of America have some thoughts on how we can serve those who served us all.

If anyone else has ideas, projects or organizations that they've worked with to support vets feel free to mention them in the comments.

Also, there's an interesting and moving post at Blackfive chronicling the change in attitudes in America about veterans from Vietnam to today. Never again can or will we allow these brave men and women be disrespected.

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Posted by: DrewM at 07:27 AM | Comments (54)
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[UPDATE] GAH! My bad. I was trying to delete comment-spam and killed the post by mistake! The comments are gone! Feel free to call me an idiot.

The President's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform released its report early. Surprisingly (to me), the panel addressed the absolute necessity of cutting Social Security and Medicare, which of course means that no Democrat who values his job (including Bammer) will support the plan. And Republicans are likely to shit on the tax hikes and ObamaCare extensions from a great height. So the whole thing was -- again, as expected -- a futile exercise in ass-covering. The report will be sent into committee, where it will be humanely shot in the head. (You can get a PDF of the draft report by following this link.) I think Rep. Paul Ryan's "roadmap" is a much more realistic path to solvency, but it has even less of a chance of being passed into law than this thing. Here's Ace's post from yesterday.

In fact, the report was still warm from the copier when the shrieking from the usual leftist suspects commenced. A sample of the well-reasoned discourse we can expect from the left in the coming months:

The sharpest reaction came from Pelosi. [Editor's note: I had to sit down, my knees were that weak from the surprise.]

“This proposal is simply unacceptable,” she said. “Any final proposal from the Commission should do what is right for our children and grandchildren's economic security as well as for our nation's fiscal security, and it must do what is right for our seniors, who are counting on the bedrock promises of Social Security and Medicare. And it must strengthen America's middle class families — under siege for the last decade, and unable to withstand further encroachment on their economic security.”

I've said it over and over again: if you're not going to address Social Security and Medicare, you might as well not bother, because nothing else really matters. It's going to be an ugly fight. The end of a Ponzi scheme is never pretty.

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Posted by: Monty at 04:36 AM | Comments (348)
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Welcome to yet another semi-half-assed hump day ONT.

Hollywood Reporter: Pleasing Republicans Necessary For TV Success

Apparently there's TV for red states and TV for blue state, and red state TV is much more successful. So the question is - will greed win out over reflexive Hollywood leftism?

[I]f you look at the list of broadcast shows that are Republican favorites, it closely mirrors the Nielsen top 10 list, whereas Democrats tend to gravitate toward titles likely to have narrower audiences.

To Hollywood, the data suggest a potentially disquieting idea: The TV industry is populated by liberals, but big-league success may require pleasing conservatives

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:41 PM | Comments (767)
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Michael Barone notes:

Republicans look to have a bigger advantage in this redistricting cycle than they've ever had before. It appears that in the states that will have more than five districts (you can make only limited partisan difference in smaller states), Republicans will control redistricting in 13 states with a total of 165 House districts and Democrats will have control in only four states with a total of 40 districts. You can add Minnesota (seven or eiht districts) to the first list if the final count gives Republicans the governorship and New York (27 or 28 districts) to the second list if the final count gives Democrats the state Senate.

And on that topic: Zombie writes on Gerrymandering 101, and shows the power of the politically-oriented gerrymander.

Posted by: Ace at 01:13 PM | Comments (326)
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