Dennis Henigan finds this self-congratulatory article appealing? Both sides are guilty of the exact same things they accuse the other side of, they just manifest themselves in different ways. People are, for the most part, irrational emotional beings. As much as some might want to claim their side is full of thoughtful, rational, people, can I promise you if your movement isn’t composed of Vulcans, that’s not the case.
I just realized my blog e-mail has been broken for several days because I had the wrong machine in my MX record. If you sent me an e-mail to which I did not respond, I apologize. Of course, I’m terrible about responding to e-mail to begin with.
Using Tax Dollars to Promote Bad Pizza
Clayton Cramer looks at how the USDA program to promote cheese has used our tax dollars to help make bad pizza worse. We’re not gifted with much in the Philly area, but we were fortunate enough to develop a decent local pizza culture. Pizza here is New York style. Chicago pizza is an abomination in the eyes of God. In our area, there is definitely some mighty bad local pizza, but they don’t measure up to the chains in terms of horribleness. Papa John’s and Dominoes are blah. In fact, they are bad pizza, really. Pizza Hut is the worst. If you’re looking for a good chain pizza, this one is my favorite, and beats much of my local selection. I particularly recommend the Margherita pizza.
I am happy to hear my tax dollars have been contributing to the ruining of pizza across this great country. It gives me one more reason to hate the government.
How Brady Manipulates Its Win Percentage
Howard Nemerov takes a detailed look at how Brady manages to twist the numbers to declare victory even after disastrous elections. The truth is that both sides endorse quite a large number of safe seats each election year. The big difference is NRA took a lot more chances this year than the Brady Campaign did. NRA lost in 50 elections this year, 33 of them Democrats. Only twenty of them constituted any loss for gun owners. And finally:
Five new House Republicans earned NRA grades of C or D, and two were Brady-endorsed. It’s curious that “GOP operatives†complain about the NRA’s lack of loyalty to them, while ignoring their own betrayal of the Second Amendment by supporting anti-rights politicians within the party.
Read the whole thing. Gun control took a beating this election, regardless of what issues may have actually motivated it. The Second Amendment has won this election.
Election Results from NRA’s Perspective
John Richardson takes a look at NRA’s assessment of this past week’s election. They maintained an 85% win percentage in the House. I would note that this was with the incumbent friendly policy. This reflects closely our incumbent re-election rate for 2010, which was, last I checked, about 85%. This is historically quite low. In fact, the last time it was this low was 1970. Even when people are as pissed off as they are now, incumbents still win elections.
Ask Our NRA Lobbyist
On Friday we had some interesting comments in my thread about Castle Doctrine being dead. I spent a few hours at the end of the day on Friday and on Sunday talking to some folks at NRA about how they could communicate better with opinion leaders in this issue. Not wanting to just hurl criticism, I offered to do a Q&A session with John Hohenwarter, NRA’s Pennsylvania Liaison, and they agreed.
The way is will work is I’ll open the comments for readers to ask questions, and I’ll compile the best ones, add a few of my own if need be, and send them to John. My only request is to keep the questions limited towards issues we’re facing in Pennsylvania, rather than federal or general issues. Other than that, the field of questions is wide open. I’ll let this thread go for a few days before compiling the questions.
Twitter Issues Fixed
For those who follow this blog on Twitter, I have finally gotten around to updating the plugin so it works again. Generally speaking I won’t tweet every post, but try to do about three or so a day, in addition to any other things that might come up that I don’t think warrant a whole blog post. If you’d like to follow us on Twitter, the link is on the sidebar.
Health Care Hurt the Dems
Megan McArdle links to a well-researched piece that basically makes that argument, despite what a lot of other pundits are saying about health care not being the big issue. I have to wonder how much of a role polls, showing Americans are most concerned about the economy are playing into this. I myself have been polled in regards to issues this election, and also answered the economy was my chief worry. I’m always reluctant to answer this way because I don’t think government is a magic jobs fairy, that can correct our economic woes if they would just do X, Y, and Z. A better question might be “What has Congress done this session that’s pissed you off the most?” My answer there would definitely be passing the health care monstrosity.
Anecdotally, the Health Care issue would seem to be a big issue in Pennsylvania. It was a bloodbath for Dems that voted for it. Sestak, Dalkemper, Carney, Kanjorski, and Murphy all voted for it, and all went down to defeat. Demcorats Jason Altmire and Tim Holden voted against it, and all held on to their seats. Pennsylvania Democrats also tried to make Corbett’s joining the lawsuit against Obamacare an issue in the election, and Corbett won overwhelmingly. I think people were more angry over health care than pundits are giving them credit for. I think this was an anger driven election rather than a concern driven election.
You Either Trust the People, or You Don’t
Bill Whittle opines on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms:
Quote of the Day
Cemetery, upon attending a high-end antique gun show:
One thing that annoyed me, was the sense of elitism. I’m not talking about the hoity-toitiness of balls out antique collector’s, but the sense that somehow *they’re* safe, since they’re not involved with scary *assault weapons*. Sorry to tell ya bub, they were assault weapons in their day, and if gun was to come, those $50k rifles would be heading to the smelter to become rebar.
It doesn’t matter what you shoot. The real question is whether you can be drawn away from the pack and preyed upon individually. That’s what the whole “assault weapons” business was about. Antique gun aficionados should recall that back before the last redistricting, around 2000-2002 timeframe, the GOP redistricted Congressman Joe Hoeffel out of a seat. Hoeffel was a proponent of a bill that would treat antique firearms the same as any other firearm. Let’s not also forget New York State’s attempts to do the same.
Anyone who shoots anything, that projects anything downrange at paper breaking velocities, thinks they are safe at their own peril. We are all most decidedly in this together, or our opponents will try to break us apart and kill us separately. That includes hunters too.