Redstate

Posted at 7:05pm on Dec. 14, 2007 Mr. DSCC Blog Inspector Guy

By kmaher

For Bud Light's next commercial:

Bud Light presents ... Real Men of Genius!

(Real Men of Geeeeenius!)

Today we salute you, Mr. DSCC Blog Inspector Guy.

(Mr. DSCC Blog Inspector Guy)

With your poli sci degree from Harvard's Kennedy School, you could've joined a K Street consulting firm, but you wanted to make a difference. So you took that internship with the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee.

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Posted at 6:08pm on Nov. 9, 2007 There's oil in them thar rocks

By kmaher

You've probably heard of oil shale. It's basically limestone infused with goop that you can extract and turn into fuel. It's been a strategic resource for the United States since the Taft administration. The Navy needed a secure source of fuel, so in 1910 Congress set aside a big chunk of Colorado and Utah where shale is plentiful.

Extracting oil from shale is contoversial, because in the past you had to strip-mine it and dispose of a lot of waste. Shell Oil has come up with a process that's much more environmentally friendly.

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Posted at 10:29pm on Nov. 6, 2007 Protection racket

By kmaher

Labor news from Colorado: Gov. Bill Ritter, elected as a moderate with substantial business support, issued an executive order late Friday afternoon granting state employees collective bargaining rights.

Regarding the move, the Denver Post, the city's liberal newspaper and the biggest publication in the state, ran this blistering editorial on Sunday. On the front page. Go read it. Really, read it. I mean this is blue on blue regicide of the highest order. Then come back and wonder with me why Ritter did what he did.

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Posted at 2:32pm on Oct. 16, 2007 Nowhere to hide

By kmaher

I'm sure everyone reading this knows about Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Ricardo Sanchez's speech the other day, from which the traditional news media excerpted a few desperate-sounding lines that could be used to bash Bush.

And I'm sure you've also probably seen the immediate blog follow-ups in which the speech was examined a little more closely, and in which it was discovered that the entire first half of the speech was a blistering critique of the news media, delivered to a media audience: a luncheon of military reporters and editors. And that most of the second half of the speech was a blistering critique of partisan political games.

All of which, of course, went unmentioned in the major news outlets, which pretty much proved his point.

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Posted at 2:19pm on Oct. 1, 2007 Udall v Limbaugh

By kmaher

At Schaffer v Udall this morning, I saw that Mark Udall, Colorado's Democratic Senate candidate, will apparently introduce a resolution today condemning Rush Limbaugh for his reference to "phony soldiers."

I can't add anything to the phony soldiers story, but it strikes me as odd that news of Udall's sponsorship of this resolution appears in neither the Rocky Mountain News or the Denver Post. Yet a Google News search turns up a mention of it on a lefty website on Friday.

The Rocky's kinda conservative and the Post is liberal, so I doubt there's any concerted effort to bury the story. Did Udall's office not tell the papers about this hard-left pander? (And do the papers' political reporters really not have Google News alerts for Udall and Schaffer?)

There's no reason for anyone outside Colorado to know this, but Udall has been catching a lot of grief from the anti-war left lately: He represents one of the nation's most liberal congressional districts, yet he's had protesters arrested at his office, had protesters take over his media events, and been the subject of withering criticism for voting to fund a war he continues to say he's been against all along.

So he needs to throw the base a bone. Does he really expect to do so without the rest of the state finding out?

Cross-posted at Can't See the Center.

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Posted at 7:49am on Sep. 18, 2007 Mark Udall, meet Google Cache

By kmaher

Promoted from blogs, with a screen shot after the fold. - Moe Lane

I was at Mark Udall's House of Representatives website the other day and was taken aback at his description of the War on Terror. Taking a page from Reuters, his position statement said:

I am deeply interested in helping Colorado and our nation win the so-called "war on terrorism."

Udall's the Democratic candidate for Colorado's open Senate seat, and that's not an attitude I want in my senator. So I printed it out then and blogged it today at Can't See the Center, where a lefty blogger challenged me on it. I went back to Udall's website, and the quote was gone.

Which doesn't surprise me: I had several hits from the House server today from people googling Mark Udall. You don't think ...

Anyway, Mark apparently didn't know that one of the tubes on the internets is used to hold cached page copies.

And there it was. Thank God.

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Posted at 6:59pm on Sep. 13, 2007 About that NYT MoveOn discount

By kmaher

This is a modified version of my original post at Can't See the Center.

1. The "General Betray Us" ad in the New York Times was paid for by MoveOn.Org Political Action.

2. Moveon.Org Political Action is a Political Action Committee.

3. PACs are regulated by the FEC and MoveOn.org Political Action seems to fit the FEC's definition of an Nonconnected Political Committee. That's a link to a pdf of the FEC's Campaign Guide for Nonconnected Committees.

4. PACs may not receive corporate contributions, nor may they receive contributions exceeding $5,000.

4. On page 16 of the FEC Guide is this admonition:

DISCOUNTS

If a corporation or labor organization sells goods or services to a political committee at a price below the usual or normal charge, a prohibited contribution results in the amount of the discount. 100.52(d). A reduced price is not considered a contribution, however, if it is offered by the vendor in the ordinary course of business and at the same amount charged to nonpolitical clients. See, e.g., AO 1989-14.

5. The New York Times, a corporation, gave MoveOn, a PAC, a discount exceeding $100,000 for a full-page ad.

Talk among yourselves.

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Posted at 1:05pm on Sep. 11, 2007 Why did the Times run the ad?

By kmaher

I'm sure you've heard about the MoveOn.org ad in the New York Times. I found it sad: Sad that the Democrats and news media have done such a good job of destroying the credibility not just of George Bush but of the presidency itself and the U.S. military that such an ad would find any audience at all. And the audience that finds this ad unremarkable is quite large.

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Posted at 5:59pm on Sep. 6, 2007 CO Senate: Schaffer (R) 38, Udall (D) 40

By kmaher

If you don't think that's good news, you haven't been reading what the lefty blogs have been saying about this race (see the Senate line at ColoradoPols, for example).

The survey was done by David Hill's firm, with a sample of 603 likely voters. A couple of other interesting notes:

-- Coloradans prefer a conservative to a liberal by 44-38.

-- Sixty-one percent can identify Mark Udall as a liberal.

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Posted at 5:02pm on Sep. 5, 2007 Down the memory hole

By kmaher

Doing a little research here in Denver about the Iraq War. And I'm sure this is something historians will be looking at a lot.

Well, one of the seminal documents, I guess you'd call it, is the text of the Congressional debate over the war. I wanted to see how a particular congressman voted and what, if anything, he contributed to the debate.

So I go to thomas.loc.gov ...

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Posted at 12:46pm on Sep. 1, 2007 Voters get a shot at Iowa judge

By kmaher

In the wake of the Larry Craig unpleasantness, we have a state judge in Iowa tossing out the state's Defense of Marriage Act. Mitt Romney had this to say about that:

The ruling in Iowa ... is another example of an activist court and unelected judges trying to redefine marriage and disregard the will of the people ... .

Well, no, it isn't.

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Posted at 1:40am on Aug. 14, 2007 Is Paris Burning?

By kmaher

I, like Al Gore, believe that global warming is the biggest threat civilized man has ever faced. Worse than Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Che T-shirts combined.

I don't know why, or whether, Al Gore actually believes this. But here's my take on it: Global warming hysteria could lead to a massive overreaction on the part of Big Government, and Big Government Overreaction, as our forefathers could tell you, is just about the worst Worst Case Scenario you can imagine. I mean, when you talk about Big Government Overreaction, you're talking about Hitler, Stalin & Mao. Che, in my opinion, is grossly overrated.

But here's the deal, as Newsweek puts it: If you doubt man-made global warming, you're part of the problem. Well, I doubt man-made global warming. I also doubt that even if man-made global warming was real -- yes, I'm consciously avoiding the subjunctive "were"; it might be true! -- that there's anything we could do about it, as economist Robert Samuelson explains -- in Newsweek! -- except move to higher ground.

You might think that I don't think global warming is a big deal. You're right. I don't. Weather moves in cycles. I think we're at the high end of a cycle. I think that if we do absolutely nothing -- or better-worse yet, if every one of us goes out and buys a Hummer tomorrow and drives the hell out of it (I know that's unfair to Hummers; the H3 actually has a lower lifetime energy-use total than the Prius) -- that we'll soon tip over into the trough of the cycle. Five or 10 or 50 years from now, Newsweek's cover headline will be "Damn it's cold!"

I'm taking a while getting to the point, but I just think we all ought to lay our cards on the table. Knowwhatuhmean?

So while Newsweek was going to press, this guy was reverse-engineering NASA's temperature trends. He was reverse-engineering because the NASA dude principally involved -- one James Hansen, who makes news every time he claims the Bush Administration is trying to silence him -- won't release his data. Just as hockey-stick-guy wouldn't release his data. (This is a mortal sin in science-land. If you don't release your data, other people can't try to replicate your results. And if your results can't be replicated, you're basically selling cold fusion.)

And he found that NASA had a Y2K software bug. And that after the bug was fixed, we weren't as hot as we thought. 1998, previously advertised as the hottest year in the last millenia, was actually No. 2 to 1934. So it wasn't even the hottest year in the last century.

The conservative bloggers -- we move as a herd, you know -- have made a big deal about this. But I can see the global-warming-alarmist community saying, "So what? It's still pretty frickin' hot!"

But what really bothers me about this -- aside from the alarmists hiding their data -- is McIntyre's revelation, uncontested to my knowledge, that the United States, whose data I trust more than any other nation's, is averaging and adjusting temperature readings. That it's equating urban readings from 100 years ago with readings today from the same location. That it is, in other words, stacking the global warming deck with epidemiological imprecision.

If you don't know what I'm talking about here -- and really, why should you? -- suffice it to say that the U.S. government is manipulating its data and your emotions to the effect that you will agree to have your taxes raised by 50 percent over the next 10 years to address a problem that occurs naturally and is resistant to anthropogenic solution.

OK, maybe that was still a little cryptic. Let me put it this way: Man-made global warming is a hoax that could cost you 10 percent of your income over the next 50 years, if you live that long. Is it a price you're ready to pay?

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Posted at 7:28pm on Jul. 13, 2007 What's the hurry?

By kmaher

Check out this fascinating document, if for no other reason than the fact that it's a fascinating document. Fortunately, it supports the following:

There's consternation among many hawks that support for the war in Congress is going south just as the war itself is going north. The increase in U.S. troop strength does seem to be making a difference (see this New York Times story by John Burns, for example, on the same day the editorial page endorsed a withdrawal). Whether that level of commitment could be maintained, even with a supportive Congress, is another question. Let's just leave that issue for now.

So why are Democrats and a few Republicans in Congress in such a hurry to get out of Iraq when the strategy they endorsed and agreed to pay for just a couple of months ago shows signs of succeeding?

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Posted at 1:47am on Nov. 15, 2006 The death of editing

By kmaher

As we survey the wreckage that is Western Civilization today, let us not spare that great institution, the American Novel.

There was a time when an American reading a Great American Novel could move cover to cover and never notice the editing. When editing was a skill that enhanced art, and never made its presence known. When editors used to READ THE FREAKIN' BOOKS THEY'RE PAID TO EDIT WHEREAS TODAY THEY'RE CONTENT TO HIT F7, COLLECT A PAYCHECK AND HEAD DOWN TO THE TWO-ONE FOR A 25-YEAR-OLD SINGLE-MALT SCOTCH.

Ahem. Sorry. Nice work if you can get it, and I wouldn't complain if I did.

Anyway, Phillip Margolin is an author of some renown. One of those New York Times best-selling authors. The "Also by Phillip Margolin" page in Sleeping Beauty, published 2004, which I've just read, lists nine other "works," as some call them, or, if you will, potboilers, and I believe I've read one or two.

If you haven't read Sleeping Beauty and think you might, don't read the rest of this post, because I'll spoil it.

So you have one guy, Maxfield, in jail for heinous murders he didn't commit. And the guilty guy, Miles van Meter, at a book tour appearance, at which he is trapped by his unique knowledge of his crime. And at the height of the tension, the climax, the moment at which Miles knows the gig is up -- he is misidentified as Maxfield.

Mr. Margolin, you were ill-served by Dan Conaway, the HarperCollins editor you praise in your acknowledgements. And believe you me, the innocent Mr. Maxfield's misidentification was merely the most egregious of the editing errors that plague Sleeping Beauty. And I dare say that, in a different age with decent editors, HarperCollins WOULD HAVE A SPACE BETWEEN THE NAMES OF THE FOUNDERS.

This is the worst example of the death of editing since Peggy Noonan's editor allowed to slip through not one but two references to AWACS as bombers in her biography of Ronald Reagan. What made that error especially embarrassing was her assertion that the AWACS bombers were grounded because of the air traffic controllers' strike, when in fact the AWACS are flying air traffic control centers.

Well. I have been casting about for a cause after politics and I believe that I have found it. I plan a crusade to restore the Great to the American Novel, and I plan to start by removing spell check from HarperCollins computers. And I plan to stick with it until the job is done. Or until Jack Murtha admits to taking bribes from fake Arabs. Or until Wednesday. One of those.

But Conaway? YOUR ASS IS MINE!

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Posted at 5:43pm on Nov. 9, 2006 Expectations of a conservative

By kmaher

I don't know for certain what America was trying to tell the Republican Party this week. I'm sure that "Get out of Iraq!" was a big part of the message mix. The exit polls suggested corruption was important. Immigration policy and spending have alienated a lot of conservatives in recent years.

Well, I can't speak for anyone but myself. I voted, voted for Republicans where I had the chance, voted the conservative position on all the referenda. But I can't say that I was particularly enthusiastic about it, and I find myself not particularly distraught about the election results.

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