The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Hey, Lefties, It’s Sunday: Are You Finding Joy In Life?

Posted on | March 25, 2012 | 66 Comments

by Smitty

Bluegrass Pundit points to CNS News:

The more often a person attended religious services, Gallup discovered, the more often they experienced positive emotions and the less often they experienced negative emotions.
The less a person attended religious services, the more they experienced negative emotions and the less they experienced positive ones.
People who attended religious services at least every week reported experiencing an average of 3.36 positive emotions the day before Gallup called them.
People who never attended religious services told Gallup they had experienced only an average of 3.08 positive emotions the previous day.

Having rejected faith, and sought solace elsewhere, people seem to have a relatively harder time. Now, here is an interesting, possibly related, result:

But Obama’s highest approval came among those who say they seldom or never attend religious services. Among these Americans, 51 percent said they approved of the job Obama is doing.

What you do faith-wise is a big input into that self-actualization thing.
Here is a big hint, folks: rejecting the possibility of Truth is a really, really Bad Thing. Also, the State really sucks, as gods go.

Update: via Gerard, this one went a completely unexpected direction:
Very, very well played, Justin Flom.

Category: Culture

You’re Darn Right I Bought A VW TDI Diesel Jetta

Posted on | March 25, 2012 | 62 Comments

by Smitty

The TDI diesel is reliable, gets great gas mileage, has decent power, and is available in a manual transmission. Automatic transmissions are as exciting as government entitlements to me. Your mileage may vary. Also, I would certainly have preferred to buy a Ford, except that Ford doesn’t seem to care fig #1 about the commuter market, not offering a diesel below the F350, for my scant research before shopping. I am the customer. Hear me roar on my blog about your need to target me, Ford.

Via Instapundit, those nice vampires of the UAW would like to give VW the suction treatment.

It’s hard for bailed-out GM to compete using $28/hour legacy auto assemblers when VW and other non-union transplants are paying $14-19/hour and (more important) don’t have to deal with UAW-negotiated work rules.

The UAW’s regulations, in 2008, resembled ObamaCare, and for the same reason: both are about preventing the thing they claim to facilitate.
Would #OccupyResoluteDesk and the Abominable Joe-man unleash the NRLB to screw over VW? Hm. The Toyota fracas of a couple years ago, and the Boeing kerfuffle in South Carolina: why, yes: yes, they might. They have to take time off from selling T-Shirts, but yeah.

Update: Best Social Program has linked and abused me at length for Un-American Activities. Sniff.

UPDATE (RSM): Welcome, Instapundit readers!

UPDATE III: linked by Dustbury.

Category: Barack Obama, Economics, Joe Biden

FMJRA 2.0: Pretty Girl Hate

Posted on | March 24, 2012 | 9 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Once upon a time in the not too distant past, there was a blogger who linked furiously to The Other McCain, and made frequent note of this in the comments. Unfortunately, this blogger used Blogger, and as we all know, WordPress hates Blogger and doesn’t recognize its links. Which is why I encourage people to e-mail me their links – because sometimes WordPress doesn’t even like WordPress. Sadly, this blogger never quite got around to sending in their links, and their furious linking went unacknowledged in the FMJRA.

Don’t be that blogger.

Romney’s ‘Etch-a-Sketch’ Platform: Santorum’s ‘Act of God’ Moment?

MISSOURI GONE WILD: Caucuses Disrupted by Ron Paul Supporters

LIVE AT FIVE – 03.16.12

The NRA Has 10 Reasons To Worry About BHO Re-election

They Told Me If I Voted For McCain, Politicized Economists Would Engage In Class Warfare Instead Of Speaking Truth To Power, And They Were Right!

Why Do You Hate Italians?

Come On, Bill: Newt Has Always Been An ‘Ideas Guy’

Two Reasons VP Rand Paul Isn’t A Bad Idea

Did Somebody Hear a Dog Whistle?

Darleen Click Hasn’t Lost Her Touch

Public Radio Liar: ‘I Wanted to Tell a Story That Captured the Totality of My Trip’

Why Does DC Fund TX?

His Newtness and His 176,000 Donors

Breitbart Scholarship Fund

28 Years Of Obama? All Too Conceivable

Is Frances Fox Piven Irregular?

#Occupy St. Patrick’s Day: The Wearing of the Green and the Clearing of the Scum UPDATE: Did ‘Police Brutality Victim’ Cecily McMillan Attack Policeman?

FMJRA 2.0: Throw Your Hatred Down

Humor-Deficient Charles Johnson Sides With #Occupy Movement vs. NYPD UPDATE: NYPD Investigates Occupier’s Twitter Death Threat Against Police

Guess Who Loves Him Some Cable Porn?

We Must Support Our Attorney General

Jonah Goldberg On Voter ID

I Never Heard of a ‘Fair Fight’

#OccupyResoluteDesk Conducts A War On Women?

LIVE AT FIVESIX – 03.19.12

If Tyranny Moves Slowly Enough, Then Americans Might Not Notice

Is Newt’s Campaign Bankrupt?

Bristol Palin Blogs!

A Political Platform That Sizzles

LIVE AT FIVE – 03.20.12

I See What Romney Did There

Illinois Primary Today; Rick Santorum Schedules Rally in Gettysburg, Pa.

Go, Paul Ryan!

Rule 5 Tuesday

LIVE AT FIVE – 03.21.12

LIVE AT FIVE – 03.22.12

Pity Or Contempt For Jay Carney?

LIVE AT FIVE – 03.23.12

It’s Past Midnight In Lousiana, And We’re Already Knee-Deep In Craziness

What Santorum Said, What He Meant, and What Romneybots Want You To Think

Rick Santorum In Cavuto Interview: “This Is The Hatchet Job Of All Time”

Top linkers this week:

  1. His Serene Majesty, The Emperor Bloghoricus Maximus (15)
  2. Daily Pundit (12)
  3. Da Tech Guy (8)
  4. (tied) Don Surber and Lonely Conservative (7)
  5. Katy Pundit (6)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! There will be no FMJRA next week (unless Smitty can take a break from his feverish posting pace to pinch-hit) as I will be in the arctic wastelands of the Great American Desert for about a week.

 

Category: FMJRA Award

LOUISIANA PRIMARY RESULTS HQ: Santorum Wins by Wide Margin

Posted on | March 24, 2012 | 111 Comments

HARAHAN, Louisiana
UPDATE 9:29 p.m. CT: While the exit polls had indicated a double-digit margin for Rick Santorum, few suspected that he could beat Mitt Romney here by more than 20 points but, with 65% of precincts reporting, it’s Santorum 49% to Romney’s 26%. Santorum staffers here say they don’t expect that margin to shrink much.

UPDATE 10:05 p.m. CT: The Harris sisters, who sing the Santorum campaign song “Game On,” just arrived at the victory party. And, via Talking Points Memo, here is video of Santorum’s victory speech in Green Bay, Wisconsin:

“We don’t believe, as the pundits have said, that this race is over. We didn’t get the memo . . . We’re still here. We’re still fighting. . . . I’m not running as a conservative candidate for president. I am the conservative candidate for president.”

UPDATE 8:10 p.m. CT: The suspense didn’t last long. The networks called it for Rick Santorum as soon as the polls closed. The key now will be the margin of victory.

UPDATE 8:48 p.m. CT: Fox News is currently showing Santorum winning by 16 points, 44% to 28% for Romney, with 19% for Gingrich and 6% for Paul with 15% of precincts reporting.

According to the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office, it’s 45%-28%, and also currently: 335 votes for Buddy Roemer, 157 votes for Rick Perry, 72 votes for Michele Bachmann and 29 votes for Jon Huntsman.

Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Here is Father Allen with Santorum super-blogger Lisa Graas at tonight’s Louisiana victory party. Lisa loves priests.

UPDATE 9:15 p.m. CT: The lead widens: With 57% of precincts reporting, Santorum leads by 23 points, 49%-26%, Gingrich trailing in third at 17%. Also: Buddy Roemer remains firmly in fifth place.

UPDATE 7:50 p.m. CT: We have exit polls via Fox News and it looks like an easy double-digit win for Santorum. He beats Romney 54%-22% among evangelicals, 46%-30% among Tea Party supporters, 47%-30% among conservatives.

PREVIOUSLY (7:30 p.m. CT): We are at the Fox & Hound pub here for the Rick Santorum campaign Louisiana victory party. Polls close at 8 p.m. CT (9 p.m. ET), and it’s expected to be a big win for Rick. Fox News will immediately provide the Team Mitt spin, minimizing the significance of this Santorum victory.

People have asked me why so many people in the media — including many in the conservative media — have joined the “Roll Over for Romney” crowd when, despite all the spin about “inevitability,” Mitt’s still got less than 600 delegates and Santorum keeps winning primaries and caucuses. It’s mainly bandwagon psychology. Once the political press corps gets an idea into its collective hive-mind, the Conventional Wisdom congeals quickly.

Team Romney has been pushing the “inevitability” argument ever since the Florida primary Jan. 31, and on March 7 — the Wednesday after Super Tuesday — they rolled out their delegate-count calculus (which involved some dubious assumptions about apportionment of delegates) to assert that Mitt had already effectively clinched the nomination.

The media eagerly bought into that and, so far as Fox News and much of the conservative media are concerned, the attiude now seems to be, “Hurry up and get this silly nomination thing over with, so we can get on to the big Romney vs. Obama showdown.”

Team Romney has been trying to scare people with dire warnings about what a disaster it would be for Republicans if Romney comes into the GOP convention without the 1,144 delegates needed to win on the first ballot, and so Santorum has been getting dismissive coverage from Fox for the past couple of weeks.

When Santorum complained about this treatment last week, it seemed the bias at Fox actually got worse. For a few days, Santorum got almost zero coverage from Fox, and very few conservative bloggers have objected to what is clearly an unfair and unbalanced attitude at the network. Now let’s take this moment to count up Santorum’s victories:

That’s 10 Santorum victories so far over Mr. Inevitable. To this point, according to the Associated Press, Santorum has amassed 263 delegates, and now he’s poised to win the Louisiana primary.

Expect the talking heads on Fox News tonight to talk a lot about how only 20 of Louisiana’s 46 delegates were at stake in today’s vote. Louisiana has a two-step system, and the remaining delegates will be awarded at the state GOP convention in June. But like all the “non-binding” chatter we heard after Santorum’s Feb. 7 “trifecta” victories, this is just a bunch of bullshit Romney spin.

Nevertheless, that’s what you’ll hear on Fox News tonight. Rick Santorum will be watching the results tonight in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We’ll have news from here in Louisiana, where the volunteers know how to party.

 

RECENTLY:


Category: Election 2012, Louisiana, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul

BREAKING: Dick Cheney Refutes Rumors That He Lacked A Heart

Posted on | March 24, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Fausta pointed me to a WaPo article:

An aide to Cheney said he had been waiting for a transplant for more than 20 months and does not know the identity of the heart donor.
“Although the former vice president and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift,” aide Kara Ahern said in a written statement that was authenticated by several close associates of the former vice president.
Cheney was recovering Saturday night at the Intensive Care Unit of Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Va., after surgery earlier in the day.

Hopefully Cheney can recover and get back out on the road with Dread Zeppelin without breaking this heart too quickly:
Is that Troglopundit on lead guitar?

Category: humor, Republicans

Biden Follicle Deliveries

Posted on | March 24, 2012 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

Twitchy points out that #OccupyResoluteDesk is hawking T-Shirts on Twitter. One is briefly moved to sympathy, in the vicinity of the right clavicle, that the re-election campaign fundraising is going so poorly that the President of the United States is reduced to vending T-Shirts like somebody on the road with Phish:

If I wasn’t

  • Too worried about the economic future of the country, and
  • Focusing what spare contribution money I do have on non-sucktacular candidates,

I might nearly be moved to support the poor wee crypto-Marxist despoiler of our liberties. Because #ILikeObamaCare that much.

Category: Barack Obama

Lisa Graas: Santorum’s Secret Weapon

Posted on | March 24, 2012 | 13 Comments

Louisiana Santorum volunteer David with Lisa Graas in Central, La., March 24, 2012

CENTRAL, Louisiana
Mitt Romney’s got the big money and the big endorsements, but Rick Santorum has Lisa Graas who — with 6,835 Twitter followers and about 1,500 Facebook friends — has been a sort of social-media equalizer, helping lead an amazingly effective online grassroots campaign for her candidate. It was Lisa who urged me to cover Santorum’s campaign in Iowa back in August, when he was stuck in single digits in the polls and the media were ignoring him. When I showed up that Saturday in Roland, Iowa, at a barn in the middle of a cornfield, I called Lisa and handed my phone to the senator, who talked to her for more than 10 minutes — and that impressed me.

Rick Santorum talks to Lisa Graas in Roland, Iowa, Aug. 6, 2011

Ask anyone in politics: Nothing is more valuable to a campaign than the candidate’s time. The fact that Santorum was willing to spend 10 minutes on the phone with this Catholic blogger mom from Kentucky was an indicator that he understood the value of her online activism.

Lisa was 100% for Santorum at a time when almost no one believed he had a chance in Iowa — or anywhere else, for that matter.

Santorum understood the value of that kind of volunteer enthusiasm and he understood that encouraging volunteers like Lisa, at a time when there seemed to be so little cause for optimism, was an important part of his campaign. Read more

Category: Election 2012, Lisa Graas, Louisiana, Rick Santorum

ObamaVille From Buffet To King

Posted on | March 24, 2012 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Remember the good old days, when ObamaVilles were something of a Jimmy Buffet parody? Good times, good times. The sun has set on those times, however. Now it looks like we’re set for the ObamaVille Horror:

via The Corner

Update: linked at The Camp of the Saints

Update II: linked at POH Diaries

Update III: Sentry Journal loves the links

Category: Barack Obama, Rick Santorum
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