Humor as we slouch toward. . .

An entertaining aspect of Perry’s entry has been commentary explaining Aggies (even in Texas, one says, Aggies are considered hicks;yuh think). As the t-sips describe the yell leaders and Aggies boast of National Merit scholars, true outsiders may not realize the Corps was compulsory for much of its first century. Today Perry was ably (or at least energetically) commended by a t-sipper (Plan 2) and poliltical rival. Perry’s a mensch Kinky Friedman concludes. Friedman’s style is discursive; he never edits a good one-liner. And he acknowledges that at this point he’d choose Charlie Sheen over Obama. Still the piece is affectionate and, in the end, forceful: “A still, small voice within keeps telling me that Rick Perry’s best day may yet be ahead of him, and so too, hopefully, will be America’s.” (With Kinky irony & sentiment are often paired.)

Mark Steyn, too, is a nail that hasn’t been hammered down – he, too, argues “that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats.” (It’s about an hour.) He, too, sometimes sacrifices coherence for humor. But, in the end, his arguments for human rights and self-reliance, the core of After America, have a steady aim. His historical context is not the southwest but northeast; he chose the granite state and citizenship. And Steyn reminds us why someone – someone who thinks and someone who is a nail too stubborn to be hammered down – would choose what we too long took for granted.

Quote of the Day: John Robb

Global transition points like this are so rare, it’s a great time to be alive.

John Robb

Right on. Yes. Yes.

More of this type of thinking, please.

If I could live at any time in history it would be now.

(If you are not a regular reader of Mr. Robb’s Global Guerrillas, get that way.)

(Also check out Mr. Robb’s way cool new Wiki MiiU, which is all about resilience. I eagerly await his book on resilient communities.)

(Here is an xcellent John Robb talk about open source ventures, but full disclosure, a lot of it sailed over my head.)

(And if you have not read his book, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, go get it.)

Friends, please let me know in the comments, on a scale of 1 to 5, strongly disagree to strongly agree, how you respond to this quote. Put me down as a 5, obviously enough.

This is What Democracy Looks Like

GOP Retains WI Senate.

Dems picked up 2. They needed 3.

(Next week: 2 of their fleebaggers are up. Looks like we will get 1. )

$30 million of union dues down the rat hole.

An all out effort by the unions, by the Left, by the media, to undo an election, by all means fair and foul.

Fail. Massive fail.

The people have spoken. Again.

Get used to it.

Next: More rollback.

Here, there and everywhere.

Today Madison, tomorrow DC.

Today Wisconsin, tomorrow America.

I can see 2012 from my house.

Hope and Change? Meet the snake.

UPDATE: Michael Barone crunches the numbers. Despite everything, the Ds are weaker in Wisco than they were in 2008. This bodes well for the recall elections next week and any recall effort against Gov. Walker.

UPDATE II: Lots of good detail here. One of the GOP defeats was candidate-centric: The guy cheated on his wife and made an ass of himself. A loss is a loss, but that particular race was apparently not a referendum on much of anything substantive. The overall vote was 53/47 GOP/Dem. That is solid.

An excellent method for wholesale job creation (please note the slight sarcasm)

Instapundit linked to this Walter Russell Mead blog post, leading me to stumble across the following item (from the Chicago Journal):

The project has had a tumultuous ride to get to this point, Fioretti said. Lease negotiations between Costco and the Illinois Medical District (a state-controlled body that owns the Costco site) were rocky, but a deal was reached earlier this year.
 
“When negotiations began in earnest, the medical district wanted to make 982 changes to the lease — and I called the governor to intervene on it,” Fioretti said. “The governor’s office was very eager to assist. They understood what it meant to have almost 250 permanent jobs.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Go ahead: rub your eyes, read it again, do a Looney Tunes or Bugs Bunny-like double take, and then read it a third time. THIS is why some of us were so deeply skeptical about transporting greater Chicagoland and Illinoisian, er, “political concepts” to DC, however well-meaning….

Tea for Texas

 

In the spring of 2009, I was asked by an old military blog-friend, a retired Air Force officer, if I would join his local Tea Party Committee to plan the Tax Day protest. We all assumed at that point that we would have an event involving five or six hundred people; with luck, we might even nab of bit of attention from our local media. We’d do it in a park someplace, listen to some speeches and hey, I was a former broadcaster, and he knew that I could write, and could I come along to write news releases?  Pretty please? S’help me, that’s all that I thought it would be, and it would have been, save for a series of fortunate involvement by people who had bigger ideas and useful connections. So, our simple, humble home-made Tax Day 2009 Tea Party protest turned into a massive blow-out in Alamo Plaza, an all-day and into the evening extravaganza with Ted Nugent, at least 15,000 people from all over Texas and the United States, and Glenn Beck of whom at that point I had never heard. (Candidly, I had him mixed up with Jeff Beck and thought; oh, cool another conservative rock musician besides Ted Nugent.)

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