Bye, Dede

This isn’t so much about the Scozzafava suspension, as about Ace’s reaction to it.
He contrasts Limbaugh’s pragmatism with Beck’s purism (Glenn, not Billy…who really is a purist), and sides with Limbaugh. As usual with slaves of the Duopoly, he misses the point.

The Hoffman thing is a fluke, because it happened in one of the few states with a functional 3rd party system, because of the possibility of multi-line candidacy. It’s not going to happen somewhere like Ohio. Nobody was insisting on ideological purity in a Republican; a bunch of people just decided to vote ideology instead of party, in a rare situation where that was possible.

The way forward is not to arguable about successful electoral strategies within the Duopoly. That’s a non-starter, because the battle will always be about power instead of ideology. What we need is a free and open electoral system in this country, and instead of lobbying for short-term goals, Republicans and Democrats both need to work for a system where every party plays by the same rules. If a minor party needs 40K petition signatures to get on the ballot, so do the Democrats. If they can lose ballot access by getting too few votes, so can the Republicans. And get multi-line like in NY (you know, that right of free association?) Now, that will be a hard sell, because it isn’t in the interest of the Duopoly to do it. but if we make it in the interests of the individual politicians to make it happen, it could happen. At that point, with a lively spectrum of options, the Left will “split the vote” as often as the Right, and pragmatic, “what’s in it for me” voters will be choosing different folks from we ideologues.

John Adams is blogging

Yes, that John Adams.

And he’s even allowing comments.

Zelaya’s back!

It looks like he’ll be pretty impotent, but you never know.

Heck of a job there, Obie.

Chanta Claus came to town!

Sr. Mary Electa (Madeline Columbro) is going to Rome and has things she can neither leave here nor take with, and since she got her doctorate here, we were gifted with (last week) a number of microfilms of early manuscripts and early music dissertations, and (today) books on and of chant. This is one of the 3 shelves in my office…a crappy picture taken with a crappy camera by a crappy photographer. The chant books go as far back as 1853. Most so far are only held by a half-dozen or so institutions (mostly Catholic), though I’ve found one unicum so far. 1 1/2 shelves are chant; the books are generally cool things that we already own. I’m hoping this will not only be of use to early music people, but to Catholics, once we get them catalogued and on the shelf.

The Levi snake at it again

Oh. he has “huge” dirt, eh? Like this?

Johnston also told Rodriguez he’s been hearing a lot about his saying in a recent first-person tell-all in Vanity Fair magazinethat Palin routinely referred to her baby, Trig, who suffers from Down syndrome, as “retarded.”

“I was just in shock for the first time I heard it,” Johnston recalled for Rodriguez. “And then she’d say it regularly. And I think she was joking, but it doesn’t make it right.”

So why do you have trouble with Mom calling a spade a spade? Because you’re afraid of what she could call you?

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns

An interesting article, thanks to Balko.
For most of his working life, Fitzgerald was one of the “evil rich”, at the upper 1% of income earners, paying a hideously extortionate effective tax rate of 5.5%.

It would be instructive to compare these returns with those of John Harbison from around the time of the premiere of his opera The Great Gatsby.

QatD Electoral recommendations

Nobody from around here reads this blog anyway, so my making recommendations is rather silly. But for those interested in my thoughts on The Great Issues Facing Our State Yada Yada, here goes:

Ohio Issue 2: creation of Livestock Care Standards Board

Hell no!

First, because I have no natural right to do such a thing. If I were to walk onto the farm of one of these guys who got the yard sign  from Farm Bureau, waving a gun around and saying things like, “Get these cattle off this feedlot NOW and onto pasture. You don’t have any pasture? Sell the cows!”, I’d be very lucky to leave there vertically, and rightly so. Nobody in their right mind would argue that I have any right to do that. If I don’t have such a right, how can I validly delegate that right to the government? Not only have I no right to vote “yes”, but I have an affirmative duty to vote “no” to cancel out the asshat who thinks that, because he hid in a voting booth, it wasn’t really him sticking it to his neighbors’ farm.

Second, because it will fail in its declared intent. HSUS has already announced that this will not be sufficient to stave off a ballot drive, so we are likely to have California farming rules PLUS a useless bureaucracy. If the CAFO and egg factory guys can’t make a moral and economic case to the public for what they’re doing, maybe they shouldn’t be doing it.

Third, any such board can and will be captured by the big money players, and your home chicken flock will be forced into cages because letting them free-range leaves them vulnerable to predators. You ever see what a stray Black Lab can do to a flock? I have, and it’s not pretty. Downright cruel, in fact.  And no killing your spent hens unless you have a multi-thousand dollar machine to euthanize them. You don’t hand over a loaded gun to just anyone.

Ohio Issue 3: Casinos

Don’t vote!

If this were a vote on principle, a constitutional amendment saying, “The General Assembly shall make no law respecting gambling”, I would be so there. It’s not. It’s a vote on giving another sweetheart deal to big gambling interests. On one hand, we have people who think that Ohio’s economy can be saved by encouraging Ohioans and a few out-of-staters to piss money down a slot. Casinos produce nothing. Sure, it would be a miniscule liberalization of Ohio gaming law. But on the other hand, we have Christianists anxious to save sinners from the vice of gambling. A plague on both their houses, I say. I don’t have the right to stop people from gambling, so I sure don’t have the right to establish a monopoly.

Judges

David Brode

Tommie Jo Marsilio

It’s very hard to choose judges on the substantive issue: do they actually believe in the Constitution and natural rights? My belief is that association with either of the two criminal conspiracies against the Constitution is circumstantial but persuasive  evidence that they do not…which leaves the above as the outsider candidates. Both appear to be as qualified if not more qualified than their opposition.  And Marsilio deserves a break : she was fired by the prosecutor because he didn’t like her style of campaigning, plus her parents really really wanted a boy.

Twp. trustee:

Damned if I know

Neither has distributed any substantive campaign literature, and Rusty, who has met at least one of them, is not enough of a policy wonk to ferret out their positions. We’ll probably go with Todd Phillips, as the same people who supported the odious Kevin Knight last time are supporting Jesse Wirick. If either of you search-engines this up and want to tell me what you won’t do, I’ll consider it carefully. (Beckie Dean could do it; why can’t you?)

 

3 narcs bite the dust

Since the DEA is an American civilian “law” enforcement agency, would somebody mind telling me what they were doing in Afghanistan? Were they “advisors” sharing their invincible expertise on ending drug production?

Apparently, the agency has been strong-arming their pilots into going over, with threats of demotion, and sending their “problem children” out of the country. I have a little sympathy for those who thought they were getting a domestic job.  But fundamentally, I have no more sympathy for the DEA than I have for your typical Waffen SS member, and for the same reason.

In the past year, the DEA has launched an ambitious plan to increase its personnel in Afghanistan from about a dozen to nearly 80, greatly expanding its role, particularly in military actions against drug traffickers.

So were these guys counted in yesterday’s “14 casualties”? Are they soldiers?  Sorry, I will never celebrate the death of an American soldier….but I’m celebrating now.

Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s final revelation

She knows the truth now.

As a Christian, I should take no pleasure in this. As cults go, it was a pretty penny-ante operation, and people wouldn’t much care had they not been stockpiling GUNZ! OH NOES!!! They ended up losing the guns in exchange for getting their tax-exempt status back, which should bother me, I suppose, except that an organization that becomes a State Church deserves what it gets. I certainly don’t think they were wrong about TEOTWAWKI, but their timing was off. Like Moses, she won’t set foot in the Threatened Land.

Elizabeth Prophet, who died on October 15, is survived by three daughters and two sons, one of whom is spiritual leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant. For some years she had been suffering from dementia.

As the left asked about Reagan, for how long?

OMG! I agree with Cass Sunstein on something

Marriage. And here, predictably, is WND getting their tits in an uproar over it.

Of course the organ-donor and abortion stuff is way out there.