After two back-to-back cycles of disappointment, I'll admit I'm feeling a bit disillusioned. Technically 2014 should give us a lot of hope, with a lot of easily winnable races up for grabs. So let's take a look.

So far, so good.
Republicans have two very, very winnable races in Alaska and Montana, with incumbents Begich and Baucus sweating bullets. In the event former governor Schweitzer decides to primary Baucus, that race will become a tough get, but for now Baucus' scandals and popularity nosedive puts him in a far, far more vulnerable position than Tester was last November. Senator Begich had the 6-year gig of occupying an Alaskan Senate seat he won by beating (barely) a man who loved internet tubes marred in a scandal. Up for re-election in a midterm, and with several strong Republican options on the table, he isn't likely to survive.

Other potential gets are in Arkansas, Louisiana, and South Dakota, seats currently held by Pryor, Landrieu and Johnson who each enjoyed comfortable re-election in 2008 but with health care votes under their belt and strong contenders in each of their states, not to mention the shifting tide of red over blue in each of them, none of them will enjoy the same trip next November.

The seat vacated by Jay Rockefeller in West Virginia is now Capito's to lose, and lose she may if there is a contentious primary, the sky is blue, and West Virginia Democrats shoot a target in a commercial. A toss-up for now.

North Carolina positions itself nicely as the sixth major pickup opportunity for the GOP, with Hagan up for re-election, sans Lizzy Dole as her opponent, and Obama at the top of the ticket. The Tar Heel state was one of the few to switch back to red in the Presidential race despite turnout nearly matching 2008. Next years' electorate will likely mimic something akin to 2002/2006/2010 more than that. With state-level gains by the Republicans continuing last November, the GOP needs to consolidate behind a candidate quickly but has a very good chance at snagging and restoring the Senate delegation to all-red.

Lastly we have the seat vacated by John Kerry and open for a special election, which means Scott Brown has a second chance at life. In an off-year race, Republicans stand some sort of shot, and as Brown has proved, special elections boost that further. With positive ratings, solid name recognition and no clear Democratic challenger, he has an excellent chance to win, and taunt Warren as a result.

Taking all this into account, I can see a 2-3 seat gain for the Republicans.

Why so low when there are eight potential gets? more...

Posted by: CAC at 07:31 AM | Comments (588)
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... rise and shine edition.

Posted by: andy at 02:37 AM | Comments (282)
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Apparently we're still permitted some democratic process in an alleged democracy.

One of the judges did dissent, of course, and vote to knock it down.

Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (189)
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Going through some older posts, I was a bit shocked to see just how many submissions the original version of this had. Even the late Andrew Breitbart dropped by to submit a few, one of which I almost picked (Devo's debut album).

So, have at it. Name the best. And no best-ofs, we are talking straight studio albums. Best-ofs are glorified mix-tapes. Live albums are ok. Because. Anyway, I really expanded my collection off the 2011 version, and would love to do that some more. After a bit I'll check to see if one really stands out and update the post. My submission below the fold.

Above the fold update, and the morons are restless.
150 200 250 350 400 450 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100 comments in, and counting: #1 Dark Side of the Moon, #2 Back in Black, #3 Led Zepplin IV, #4 Who's Next, #5 Joshua Tree, #6 London Calling, #7 Van Halen, #8 The Cars, #9 Purple Rain, #10 Appetite for Destruction,, with Honorable Mentions to: Quadrophenia, Synchronicity, Making Movies, Los Angeles (X), Bloodletting, Pet Sounds, Armed Forces, Yellow Brick Road, Revolver, Holy Diver, Paulie's Boutique, Hysteria, OK Computer, Violator, and In the Court of the Crimson King. Hundreds more great submissions below.
more...

Posted by: CAC at 02:18 PM | Comments (1551)
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Here's hapless Martin Bashir, never confused with an intellectual except by himself, falling for a hoax about "the Satanic Temple" rallying for Florida governor Rick Scott.

MSNBC

Straight from leftwing blogs to you, without the delay of fact-checking or thinking too much about it.

Posted by: Ace at 12:42 PM | Comments (142)
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Uhhh... I guess I like the attempt at forcing the issue but we know the Democrats will not comply. Reid doesn't want a budget; Obama doesn't want a budget. They don't want to make it official how many trillions they've increased spending by. Not having a budget helps them hide this.

So the whole gadget-play is really an effort to drum up media interest -- the media absolutely refuses to cover why a law demanding a budget has been ignored four years running.

And we also know how that's going to work -- the media will ignore it, because they are no longer hiding the fact that they're Democrats and working for Reid, Pelosi, and Obama. (Well, they hide it in the sense that they'll lie and deny it if accused of it; but otherwise they make little pretense.)

So... it results in nothing. Cute idea, but it makes false assumptions about the Democratic Party and the media (but I repeat myself).

But our thought-leaders seem to be giving up on the prospect of actually winning anything. Charles Krauthammer stated:

“Don’t force the issue if you don’t have the power.”

Quoted at Hot Air. Krauthammer actually suggested this stratagem (or else he was leaked the plan in advance).

And Rush Limbaugh said today -- I hope I am not taking him out of context -- that we should not expect much by way of determined, real resistance to Obama's spending plans for this whole year. So apparently people have decided on some kind of Zen Martial Arts strategy here, like "when your opponent is hard, be soft" or whatever.

I always thought that was stupid but it worked like the dickens for Caine.

Rush also went off on a riff that sounded super-familiar to me. I'm not even saying he read my piece; ideas are cheap, people thinking about the same set of facts will tend to talk about the same limited universe of conclusions, and even yesterday I acknowledged that what I was writing was in no way some novel idea.

But still, it was nice to hear sort of the same thing I'd said from Rush.

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (263)
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Sorry. It's a minimal ONT. I'm still at work and sequestration is a pain in the ass. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 06:25 PM | Comments (360)
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Cult? Moi?

I think "Pull for Content" is the new "Your Mouth."

Twitchy also posts Newsweek's photo of Bush for his second inaugural -- it's a tad less heroic.

What bothers me a bit about the media is that they're so dumb. This bothers me, because it demonstrates we conservatives could easily do this, but we mostly don't.

Tina Brown is supposedly some kind of guru who totes gets Teh Zeitgiest. But her magazine is just one silly carnival-bark after another. What, we can't do that?

Posted by: Ace at 11:28 AM | Comments (251)
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This Whole Foods guy is not what I expected the Whole Foods guy to be.

choing his statement yesterday that he regrets using the word “fascism,” Mackey explained, “That was a bad choice of words, but traditionally socialism means that the means of production are run by the government and in fascism the means of production are still owned by private individuals but they’re controlled by the government. And what’s happening. Our health care system is moving away from free enterprise capitalism towards greater governmental control. That was a poor choice of words due to the baggage and associations that go along with it. So now I’m just calling it ‘government-controlled health care.’”

An unsatisfied Costello then challenged Mackey, saying, “You realize when you say ‘fascism,’ it brings up Nazi Germany and all sorts of things. And we really want that kind language out of our public forum at the moment, don’t we?”

“Apparently you can’t use that word in America any longer, it’s taboo,” Mackey fired back.

I'm sure we all remember the media constantly objecting to "fascist" comparisons for George W. Bush.

Posted by: Ace at 09:00 AM | Comments (386)
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It's a day of shocks. Again, I mean.

Via @benk84: the same people who claim that Christians are plotting a "Quiverfull" military takeover of the United States also claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood was a moderate group which was "mostly secular" in outlook.

The prognosis is exceedingly grim. Two years after the ouster of long-serving strongman Hosni Mubarak, Egypt is in the throes of a full-blown economic crisis. Government reserves have dropped by more than half, plummeting from $36 billion in 2011 to just $15 billion today. ThatÂ’s enough to cover just three months of imports of vital commodities such as food and petroleum. GDP growth has slowed to under 2 percent, and the countryÂ’s national currency, the Egyptian Pound, is in freefall. At the same time, unemployment has surged, now estimated at nearly 13 percent and rising...

These statistics are all the more tragic because they could have been avoided. The February 2011 ouster of Mubarak was followed by a pronounced fiscal downturn, leading many to conclude that the country’s new, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government—for all of its bluster to the contrary—wouldn’t impose radical changes on the country’s political direction. Instead, conventional wisdom held that the new powers-that-be in Cairo would, for both economic and political reasons, opt for a process of “creeping Islamization”—a slow, gradual changeover of the country’s civilian bureaucracy and legislature which wouldn’t rile international markets or spook jittery investors.

The conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong. In recent months, the Brotherhood has thrown caution to the wind and set about remaking the Egyptian state in its own image with a speed and ferocity that has surprised most onlookers.

Even though they got this one (and the last one, and the one before that) wildly wrong, they'll be very arrogant and demanding that you trust them on the next one.

The central gravamen of the leftist worldview on foreign policy is that the right spends far too much time "hating" and "fearing" external enemies, imagining those external enemies to be very different from themselves, and thus alien and threatening.

To combat this supposed failing, leftist worldview pushes the idea that those in other countries are "really no different from ourselves," and they base their prognoses on this idea. The idiots at Davos imagine that the Muslim Brotherhood types might talk tough, but deep down, in their truest heart, they'd... all rather be at Davos, too. They too would like to sip champers and chomp on shrimp.

They then peacock around, showing off their Morally Superior feathers, noting how -- unlike those Xtianists in the US -- they don't "hate" and "fear" what they don't understand.

Now, simultaneous with pushing the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is "just like us" and comprised of Davos-loving Men of the Enlightenment, they push the idea that the Christian right in the US is in fact to be be both feared and hated -- the Muslim Brotherhood would never, ever impose a radical new social order on Egypt (even though they've proclaimed their desire to do so for years), but Focus on the Family, on the other hand, does indeed plot just such a takeover of the US.

But what -- I thought we weren't supposed to "hate" and "fear" what we don't understand? I thought it was base to feel threatened by people and think of them as strange and alien simply because they're not similar to you culturally and religiously?

Shut up, they explained.

Leftism isn't really a worldview which even attempts an evenhanded and universal application to similar situations. It's merely a goal, an agenda, and any means, including blatant dishonesty and laughable hypocrisy and inconsistency, are fair means for pursuing its ultimate end.

Supposedly they are high-minded in refusing to accept that we might have any external enemies. They might seem more high-minded if they weren't constantly finding internal enemies which they would have us fear and despise.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (334)
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