sisu

Stolen moments

Pa-purr-azzi shots of stolen moments between Tiny holding court like her mother before her in The Little House and her gentleman caller, Earl Grey, who came by for a nip late morning.

We snapped these gauzy shots through the kitchen window, knowing full well that were we to step outside for close up and personal, the romantic tryst would quickly end.

Earl was sporting a fresh red-in-tooth-and-claw wound just below his right eye. Alpha-male status isn't free. Like Tiny driven by her complementary female territorial imperative, he must ever defend his turf against the intruder.

Update: Defending God's creation against the flood, Modulator's Friday Ark now boarding.

Why the chicken crossed the road: To twitter on the other side

In the wake of the legacy media's use of Twitter as a key source of frontline information on the Chile earthquake, not to mention "The First American Twitter Revolution" that was Scott Brown's People's Seat victory, for anyone who still doesn't get the Twitter thing, this just in from Twitter_Tips:

Why the chicken crossed the road (above).

Also of interest, "Top 5 Ways Not to Be Annoying on Twitter.

With no access to the internet, our endorphin levels dipped dangerously low

Over seven hours without electric power starting around 3 in the wee hours this morning. First the good news: We'd planned to catch reruns of what Thad McCotter called Obama's "ShamWow Summit," but no electricity, no C-SPAN. We hear tell the much ballyhooed proceedings ended Republicans=1, Obama=0. Even CNN's David Gergen and Gloria Borger had to admit it. Thank you all who watched so we didn't have to.

And now the bad news. Restively wakeful in the hour of the wolf before dawn, "when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful" and "all you can see is the troubles and the problems and the ways that your life should've gone but didn't," we were deprived of our usual 24/7 opiate, the ironically soothing background noise that television with remote provides. Added to that, when Tiny came to bite our nose and claw our face at her usual breakfast time, it was still too dark for us to see well enough to administer her insulin shot on schedule. Finally, and perhaps most devastating, with no access to the internet, our endorphin levels dipped dangerously low.

On the cell phone once it was light, we suffered through the tinny Musak and automated messages from NStar assuring us how much they cared about us and were finally informed that yes, much of Chelsea was without electric power — a casualty of high winds after midnight — and no, they couldn't say when the power would be restored. When the affable, professional NStar team finally arrived a couple of hours later in a caravan of three spiffy white vehicles, they stopped just a few yards from our house and set up their orange cones to warn oncoming traffic to proceed with caution. We strolled over to see what was what. Pointing upwards, their diagnostics man showed us the source of the outage, a disconnected transformer atop the telephone pole in front of our next-door neighbor's house. They went right to work, stabilizing the truck with jacks and lifting our hero in the cherry picker high amongst the tortured branches of a venerable Silver Maple. We went back inside for a moment to see if power had been restored, but not yet. Then back outside, where one of the team was walking towards us, gesturing thumbs up. We shouted "My hero," but he said no, the guy in the cherry picker is the hero. We returned thumbs up and hurried back inside, where the computer studio and kitchen were alive with the music of our social-networking sphere.

Update: Out of contact with the outside world, we'd missed the bigger picture:

Power failures were severe and widespread, ranging from more than 330,000 in New Hampshire, to over 200,000 in Connecticut and New York and more than 100,000 in Maine and Massachusetts at the storm's peak.

The highest wind reported was 91 mph off Portsmouth, N.H. - well above hurricane force of 74 mph. Gusts also hit 60 mph or more from the mountains of West Virginia to New York's Long Island and Massachusetts.

An ill wind.

Read my lips: No more Bush. Jeb disses Sarah.

"I mean, I don't know what her deal is. My belief is in 2010 and 2012, public leaders need to have intellectual curiosity," Northeast Corridor Conservative Jeb Bush gratuitously dissed Sarah Palin and thereby all her fans in a Newsmax interview this afta. As far as we're concerned, he's toast. Besides. We're more interested in truly intellectually curious politicians. Thaddeus McCotter is the only one who comes to mind.

Scott Brown: How online grass-roots movements can be a double-edged sword

"We read into things, therefore we are human?" we wrote in the comments to Dan Riehl's "The New Missile Defense Agency Logo Looks Familiar." It seems folks are getting all in a tizzy about the logo's resemblance to both the Obama 2008 icon and the Muslim crescent and star. The hysteria over the unfortunately named 'Crescent of Embrace' design for the Flight 93 Memorial design (above) came to mind. Much the same could be said of how Scott Brown supporters are reacting to his young voting record (see below). 

"The fracas served as a reminder of how online grass-roots movements can be a double-edged sword," writes James Oliphant in the LA Times, reporting on the funny thing that happened when politician Scott Brown shocked the devout by following his political instincts three weeks into his tenure as junior Senator from Massachusetts. Conservative icons Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck were not amused. Oliphant explains:

Literally overnight, the fledgling Republican senator who ended Democrats' filibuster-proof majority by winning a special election in Massachusetts has gone from being the darling of America's conservative activists to being their goat.

Monday night, Brown announced that he would join four other Republicans in voting to block a GOP filibuster and move forward with a $15-billion jobs bill designed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Almost immediately, the political blogosphere exploded.

We watched the drama unfold on our desktop in TweetDeck yesterday, as folks we normally agree with on just about everything became outraged that the man they helped send to Washington had not met their personal litmus test. The Anchoress was a voice in the wilderness, as Instapundit observed:

THE ANCHORESS IS GLAD SCOTT BROWN IS VOTING FOR THE WATERED-DOWN JOBS BILL, says it wrecks the “party of No” and “broken government” narratives at comparatively low cost.

We couldn't help but love reading our own words [!] expressing much the same thing in Oliphant's column this afternoon (We'd granted him a phone interview yesterday afternoon. It seems we're his go-to Bay-State reliable source since the election.):

Sissy Willis, a tea party blogger from Chelsea, Mass., who supported Brown's candidacy, said many of her compatriots in the nascent anti-big-government movement were "overreacting.""They expected him to be a conservative when he's always been an independent," Willis said. "He's representing his constituents," she said.

Willis said she expected Brown to follow through on trying to block the Democrats' healthcare plan, a signature issue of his campaign.

She compared the mania over Brown to that which surrounded President Obama's campaign, saying that with both, there was an inevitable letdown.

Supporters "weren't using their brains, they were using their hearts," she said. "When he didn't turn out to change the world, they felt betrayed."

Yes. Like that. As we twittered this morning in the wake of Brown's rousing rejection of Obamacare II:

Inoculated by his canny jobs-bill vote yesterday, Scott Brown "rejects Obamacare II as ‘nuclear option’ that will increase taxes."

Related: Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection offers a most concise, terse, pithy explication of the nightmare that is Obamacare 2.0 in his must-read "Now Is Not The time For Weakness.

This just in (via Norsu on Twitter): Scott Brown in his own words on Howie Carr's Boston radio talk show.

Thad McCotter: The problem with a government takeover of health care is not the GOP

"Will the Republicans Post their Health Plan … And When?" is memeorandum's top story, linking to a who-me? suggestion on the part of the White House that the GOP has published no plan for Thursday's "bipartisan" meeting on the subject. We guess the President's people aren't following our favorite Congressman, Thaddeus McCotter (R, MI) on Twitter. Just a couple of hours ago "Young Thad" twittered this link to the House GOP Health Care Reform Bill via his own FaceBook page. The tweet:

The problem with a government takeover of health care is not the GOP. It is the American people do not want it. http://fb.me/KuebKP29D.

First a couple of paragraphs from the White House complaint, and then a few excerpts from the GOP.gov plan:

The President believes strongly that Thursday’s bipartisan meeting on health insurance reform will be most productive if both sides come to the table with a unified plan to start discussion – and if the public has the opportunity to inspect those proposals up close before the meeting happens.

That’s why yesterday [Monday, February 22, giving us 2-3 days to read and digest -ed] the White House posted online the President’s proposal for bridging the differences between the Senate- and House-passed health insurance reform bills.

What you can’t do just yet is read about the Republicans’ consensus plan – because so far they haven’t announced what proposal they’ll be bringing to the table … As we said today, we’ll be happy to post the Republican plan on our website once they indicate to us which one we should post.

Well, we don't know what they mean by "which one we should post," but the House GOP HC plan twittered by Congressman MCotter, "Common-Sense health care reforms our nation can afford," sounds pretty good to us. [Update: Not to mention that it's been online since November!] It includes a summary, full text, "Ten Reasons to Support" and a side-by-side policy comparison with the Pelosi bill. From the intro:

Americans want a step-by-step, common-sense approach to health care reform, not Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s costly, 1,990-page government takeover of our nation’s health care system. Republicans’ alternative solution focuses on lowering health care premiums for families and small businesses, increasing access to affordable, high-quality care, and promoting healthier lifestyles – without adding to the crushing debt Washington has placed on our children and grandchildren.

Key elements include lowering premiums, ending junk lawsuits, encouraging innovative state programs and allowing Americans to buy insurance across state lines. Click here to read the whole thing.

Update: New post by Congressman McCotter just posted at Red State: "The Crisis of Consent: Republicans Must NOT Abet Obama's ShamWoW! Summit."

Tea Partiers to GOP: "Just saying 'I am not the other guy' isn’t good enough"

"Could anything be more delicious than the thought of replacing New York's unctuous, out-of-touch, all-about me Senator Schumer with the fresh-faced voice of reason and boyish enthusiasm that is former Reagan economics advisor — and early Sarah Palin fan!" — we blogged a couple of weeks back in "The Brown Revolution: Term limits by other means? If you share our enthusiasm, head on over to help "draft Larry Kudlow to knock out Chuck Schumer!"

"We were expecting more anger, and there isn't any," a CBS interviewer covering CPAC last weekend told our fellow Taxachusetts tea partier Carol Ward, who was there. She's agreed to share her impressions with our readers:

Carol Ward, Watertown, MA. It is tough to summarize three days of CPAC, an interesting and heady combination of ideas, politics, media and aspiring contenders.

Anyone who wants to be anyone in Republican national politics makes at last a drive-by through CPAC [with a few notable exceptions like Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Mark Levin, who kept the talkers talking with their "regrets"]. Is it heavy on the “establishment” conservative? You betcha. It is probably the only place in the world where both Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich could get standing ovations just for walking in the room:

Note to Newt: You are a politician, not a lesser god. The orchestrated appearance from the back of the room to the “Eye of the Tiger” was way over the top. Way, way, way over the top. To a nation looking for a little humility and graciousness, that act personified hubris. If Dick Cheney could walk onto the stage from the side, so can you.

And let's not forget Scott Brown, who had a special cameo appearance introducing Mitt Romney. He was funny and gracious, just the way he was during the campaign.

On Friday I was stopped by two reporters and a cameraman from NBC who were looking for a few sound bites. What I said ended up on the cutting room floor. What I wish I had said is in brackets below:

NBC: Why did you come to CPAC?

Carol: I was interested in hearing the ideas — ideas of freedom and the importance of the Constitution. [That, and taking the measure of the men and women who would lead us. Though I was fooled by Mark Sanford last year.]

NBC: Any speakers who have impressed you?

Carol: No, not really. [Drat — I should have said Marco Rubio, but there had been just too many speeches in 36 hours.]

NBC: Not anyone?

Carol: Well, George Will. [It was a good speech, but at this point George probably has enough accolades. Should have said Rubio.]

Somehow the Tea Party came up, and I confessed that before last April I had never in my life been to a protest, but I had gone to the April 15 Boston Tea Party:

NBC: What was that like?

Carol: I learned I was not alone. There may be a few crazies on the fringes, just as there are with all groups, but most people were like me, interested in freedom. [I talked to a lot of people and we all felt the same — we were not alone. There are more of us than you can possibly imagine. The consequences will be something you cannot believe.]

NBC: Have you been to CPAC before?

Carol: Yes, I came last year. This is my second.

NBC: What is the difference between CPAC last year and this year? Is there a difference?

Carol: Yes, last year was slightly moribund. This year there is a more positive sense.

NBC: Do you think you have a chance to take back Congress?

Carol: I am less concerned about labels; it is really about the ideas and commitments to principles. I'm interested in what individual candidates stand for. Other than that it is like team sports. If they are all the same, then it is not any different than different color uniforms. Just saying “I am not the other guy” isn’t good enough.

NBC: But do you think you have a chance to take back Congress?

Carol: Really, I don’t know, and that is not what is important to me. [Like I am the Republican party? Okay, I know there is a real world of difference between being the majority and minority party, but I am not that interested in a repeat of the Congress of 2003 – 2005. Really.]

They were polite, engaging and professional — and after the cameras were off I asked for their impressions:

Carol: Is there anything that you have learned so far?

NBC: Yes, that Mike Pence is running for president. [I laughed and agreed.]

Carol: Anything surprise you?

NBC: We were expecting more anger, and there isn’t any.

I know the old saying that politics is the art of the possible, but it seems that is used to excuse almost unfathomable self-serving behavior by a lot of the political class. With determination and a few strong principles, we have a chance to turn this thing around as we go about engaging our fellow voters. Determination, principles, and an absence of rage. Leave that to the other side.

Note: Much thanks, Carol, for your astute on-the-ground observations.

Related thoughts from two blogger/tweeters who were there:

Melissa Clouthier: "It isn’t about the established DC insiders who put together these sorts of things, it’s about the people who attend them.

Dan Riehl: "The Tea Party movement,not the conservative establishment that hosted CPAC, is most likely our last best hope for an America that has for too long continued to slide Left under both Democrats and Republicans. And it's through the Tea Party movement I believe we can retake the Republican party. I am by no means buying into any third party ideas.

As Carol Ward meant to tell that NBC interviewer, "There are more of us than you can possibly imagine. The consequences will be something the powers that be cannot believe."

Obama clearance sale: As the t-shirts go, so goes the nation?

"Intuition 3" from Xen Mode Custom Art. See also our own similarly suggestive Photoshopped image of cauliflower as glacial landscape. 

If the business of America is business, sagging souvenir sales of Obama vs Bush t-shirts and mugs may be an encouraging sign of a changing politico-cultural climate:

The cheery image of former President George W. Bush appeared on a billboard in Minnesota earlier this month, next to the words, "Miss me yet?" It appears a lot of people think it's a fair question.

The online store CafePress saw a spike in demand for items featuring the same image as the billboard, the New York Daily News reports. Ten "Miss Me Yet?" items were on the company's list of its top-selling designs, CafePress spokeswoman Jenna Martin told the Daily News.

"There were no Obama-themed designs on the list," she said.

Not that most of us on the right side of the aisle would really want GW — with his own big-government baggage and lingering if unfair aftereffects of Bush Derangement Syndrome polluting the political waters — back in the White House, but Dubya had what Michael Barone calls "one crucial ingredient, intuition":

Great leaders have it, though it sometimes fails; failed leaders don't, though their plans sometimes succeed …

Barack Obama, so far seems to belong in the second category. Like everyone who gets elected president, he entered office brimming with confidence, convinced he could end the hostility of the Iranian mullahs, Islamist terrorists, the leaders of China and Russia, and the likes of Hugo Chavez. At least so far, that confidence has proved to be dreamy …

Obama's two predecessors also suffered from failures of intuition. Bill Clinton recovered and got deserved credit for the 1996 welfare reform and the 1997 balanced-budget deal. George W. Bush recovered and deserves credit (though Joe Biden is claiming it now) for the success of the Iraq surge strategy.

Obama "so far seems" to lack intuition? Barone is more generous than we are inclined to be. You either have it or you don't. With his tin-eared failure to respond to the Tea Party/Brown Revolution tsunami or understand average citizens' "bitter clinging" to our Shining-City belief in American exceptionalism, the current occupant of the Oval Office has proven to us again and again that he just doesn't get it. Hillary herself said it best in the heat of primary season two years back: "Americans don't need a president who looks down on them."

Thad McCotter: We fit our mind to the world, not the world to our mind.

"Congressman, does this make marriage more or less appealing? More marriages where you toss the 'I'll be faithful' vow?" Greg Gutfeld teased an impassive, pink-tied Thaddeus McCotter on Red Eye a couple of weeks back. The MIchigan Congressman's answer nonplussed the assembled guests of Fox News's fast-moving NSFW wee-hour gabfest.

"Love is a very ephemeral, it is a very delicate flower, and you never know when it's going to bloom, not," deadpan comic/philosopher king Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter shocked Greg Gutfeld's bleeding-edge irregulars on Red Eye the other night with an unexpectedly thoughtful and drawn-out answer to the host's toss-away question about celebrity marriage vows in Fox News's wee-hour theater of the absurd. The topic was what possible effects dropping the fidelity vow might have on marriage. McCotter expostulated:

And so I would think when you go into this, you go into it with your eyes open, and you take the person as they are, and you try to go from there …

In many ways we've become a generation or a nation that has traded romance for relationships, and this goes down the way where this is some scientific equilibrium you can keep between two people, and that's not how human beings work. And I think that the removal of that type of vow is an indication that somehow you have less than realistic expectations about [whether] human beings, sentient beings with hearts and with dreams and aspirations, can bond together or not."

McCotter's like that. Stands out in a crowd. He has a quiet, almost introspective way of public speaking that makes listeners lean in to hear what he has to say, the total opposite of the hand-pumping, in-your-face Mayor-Shinn-like bombast of old-fashioned rhetoricians like President Obama. Take McCotter's CPAC speech yesterday, where he expressed the same idea about our effanineffable human nature — those "sentient beings with hearts and with dreams and aspirations" — in a larger context:

Now the question is, what is the state of the movement, even post the election of Senator Brown?

I would argue it is strong, it is healthy. I would argue that we remain philosophical, not ideological because as those who've read Russell Kirk understand, conservatism is the negation of ideology. We fit our mind to the world, not the world to our mind.

It's the tragic view of human nature vs the utopian, the very foundation of this Shining City Upon a Hill, flogged here early and often.

Update: Maggie's links:

Our favorite Congressman, Thad McCotter, on love and sex.

See also the Congressman's interview at Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, with thanks to Yehudit in the comments.

"Bayh lost his 'moderate' cover story and got flushed out into the open"

“My decision should not be interpreted for more than it is, a very difficult, deeply personal one," Indiana Sen Evan Bayh told the nation Monday as he announced he would not run for re-election next November. (Getty Images photo)

"One other reason that this story never goes anywhere is that Bayh's image here in Indiana is as clean as can be," writes HoosierHawk in the comments to our previous post, making the case that some Indiana voters who may have supported Senator Bayh in the past are anti-incumbent this year not because of any perceived appearance of impropriety on the part of Susan Bayh but because they are realizing their man in Washington doesn't walk the walk:

I had been planning on campaigning hard against Bayh this election (as I did against his father), but Susan Bayh's being on several corporate boards had nothing to do with it …

You can make the case that he is too liberal or whatever, but convincing Hoosiers that Bayh is corrupt would be a steep uphill climb.

It must be realized that when Bayh is in Indiana, he talks a good conservative line, but then he goes to Washington and votes the liberal party line. Hoosiers listened to his talk, and weren't really aware of his votes.

Once there were exactly 60 votes and important issues were being voted on, we could tell how Bayh was voting. The media reported on the few senators who were crossing over and determining the outcomes, it wasn't ever Bayh.

We heard him putting out the blue dog moderate democrat talking points, but every vote was with the Libs. Bayh lost his "moderate" cover story and got flushed out into open. Hoosiers wanted the admin's agenda stopped, and Bayh wasn't doing it.

Echoing commenter HoosierHawk's on-the-ground assessment, the editors of Investors Business Daily put things in larger context:

Bayh doesn't fit in Middle America.

Don't "bayh" too much of the line that Hoosier State's junior senator, whose father was a liberal senator who ran for president in 1976, chose not to run for re-election because of disgust with all the partisanship in Washington …

Pushing past the prettifications, the main reason Bayh will be leaving the Senate is that he can't get re-elected in Indiana. Like liberal Democratic Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Bayh has read the writing on the wall, and the color of the ink is a distinct Brown — as in Sen. Scott Brown, the Republican newly elected to the Senate from Massachusetts.

If only politicians — on both sides of the aisle — and their allies in academia and the media could remember the past, maybe they wouldn't be condemned to repeat it. Ronald Reagan laid it all out in a 1977 "pep talk about how the GOP loss would only be temporary if they learned from the party's mistakes and returned to first principles," as John Fund reminds us in "Why Bayh is Quitting the Senate":

Conservatives, [Reagan] said, should be of good cheer. Democrats win the White House when they campaign as moderates, but once in office they find it impossible to do so even if they want to "because the unions and their Congressional leadership won't let them."

But governing as liberals meant Democrats undermined the trust voters placed in them. They also enacted policies that increased economic uncertainty and retarded job creation. "When liberalism fails, people notice. They may even protest," Reagan told his aides, pointing to California's nascent Proposition 13 tax revolt — the "Tea Party" of its day. "And it's then they'll listen to you again if you have a clear set of ideas based on sound principle."

Once again, as we've done early and often from the start of our Great Tea Party Adventure last winter, we thank you, President Obama, for awakening the "forgotten man" in time to save the Shining City Upon a Hill.