Jul

Clearing the Browser Tabs - Getting Our Act Together Saturday Edition

Let’s do two stories above the bullets today, what do you say? I figure I owe you an extra juicy link today since I failed to delivery a Clearing the Browser Tab post yesterday. I took a bit of an unscheduled day off and caught up on sleep and some other non-internet work I needed to get done.

Okay, so there’s this special election set to happen in California to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Democrat Jane Harman. Her hand-picked replacement, Janice Hahn, is a member of the Los Angeles City Council and a bog-standard left-winger. She loves her some big government and rich unions and, at one point, thought the answer to gang violence was paying a bunch of gang members to tell other gang members to stop being in gangs. Ladd Ehlinger, working on the behalf of a group opposed to Hahn, made an ad that immediately caused most of Hahn’s allies and more than a few right-wingers, to recoil in disgust. See, Ehlinger decided to make a point of Hahn’s gang program in a way that would be both unmistakeable and unforgettable. He succeeded wildly. As it happened, the particulars on which Ehlinger based his ad were dead, solid correct and the race, which experienced professional politicos who denounced Ehlinger thought was in the bag for Hahn, is now very nearly a tossup. Vindication? Oh, you bet.

And while we’re speaking of knee-jerk reactions from people on the right who should know better, let me point you to this piece by Sister Toldjah on a fabricated hit-piece against Michele Bachmann and how a fake meme can hit the MSM almost instantly. I spent some time on Twitter yesterday nearly yelling at quite a few people on the right who decided, on the strength of only TP’s characterizations of the pledge Bachmann signed, that she had gone entirely around the bend and they would not vote for her under any circumstances, even if that meant choosing to sit out the election in 2012. I’d like to think we on the right are smart enough to see where anti-Republican stories originate before we grab the pitchforks and torches but obviously that’s not always the case.

Hopefully we’ll get our act together in time for the election next year.

And now, links.

I sincerely hope someone gets this open letter into the hands of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. They need to read it.
After months of demagoguery and outright lies about the Republican stance toward the debt limit, the President and his allies have not only not carved any Republicans away from the pack but they did manage to lose an important Democrat. Good going, guys!
With every passing day, the evidence mounts higher that the ~~Vote Buying Act~~ Stimulus Bill was nothing but a colossal, expensive failure.
I love the Ricochet Podcast, but I hate when they have political consultant Mike Murphy on the show. EJ Hill noticed that Murphy tends to bring out “the claws” among Ricochet readers and wants to know why. I think the answer is simple: he’s an arrogant jerk whose chief political allegiance is to whoever is paying him at the time.
Rut roh. Apple’s OS X Lion release may not be the operating system we’re looking for (via Techmeme)
If you’re an author (especially if you do horror or fantasy fiction), this reprint of H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book should supply you with quite a few ideas.
This may be NASA’s photo of the year. Take a good look because you won’t see it’s like on American soil for a long time.