Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Bashing Meghan McCain

While I don't doubt that her book is completely daft, some of Leon Wolf's scathing review is also startlingly ill-researched. For instance:
I defy Meghan McCain to identify a conservative candidate who acted or behaved in this way towards the party after a primary loss.
Peg Luksik in the PA governor's race in 1994. Both Ridge and Single were total centrists and after losing to Ridge in the primary, she ran as a Constitution Party candidate. For that matter current Tea Party darling Christine O'Donnell ran a write-in campaign in 2006 after coming third in the Senate primary to both Jan Ting and Mike Protack. And these were just two I could think of off the top of my head, they can't be the only ones.
Insofar as I can even tell what that sentence means, I am pretty sure it indicates that Meghan McCain does not know what white noise is, or that it has nothing to do with oversaturation.
McCain's statement is that "these days, the name Ronald Reagan – as well as his legacy – has become oversaturated, just white noise." Yes her metaphor is a bit mixed here. But her point is that devotion to Reagan is pure political rhetoric and formality. It's is everywhere and in everything, therefore it is devoid of meaning. Even liberal Democrats do it. Meghan even does it in an example Wolf cites a few paragraphs later.

But if Wolfs excerpts are accurate, I can't dispute that Meghan McCain isn't especially smart, has a weak understanding of politics, and an even weaker understanding of proper sentence construction.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

9/11

Nine years ago I retired to my hotel room to practice my presentation for the conference I was attending at Virginia Tech. It was on some variant of Resin Transfer Molding I think. I turned on the TV to take a break and found out the world had changed. I went downstairs and everyone was just standing in the lobby watching the news.

Suffice it to say I didn't practice after that and my presentation sucked. No one particularly cared though. I think the biggest collective tragedy in my lifetime probably takes the cake for worst intro act ever. Public speaking got a lot easier after that.

Oh and I'm with most of the gunblogosphere, why the hell is there still a huge hole in Lower Manhattan? The best tribute we could give those people is putting up something on that site.

Delaware Primaries

I've been receiving multiple robocalls per day from the O'Donnell and Castle campaigns for the last week. We're really sick of them and they are not convincing anyone in my family to vote for a particular candidate. I'm already voting for Castle. O'Donnell doesn't have anything to recommend her other than conservatism. Conservatism won't win her the general election. On the other hand my politically neutral wife is pissed off enough that she probably won't vote in the primary. If the Republicans keep it up, she might vote Democrat to spite them.

It has me wondering if the Delaware Republicans even know how to campaign properly. Two years ago, my long-incumbent state representative Vince Lofink lost the election to Democrat Earl Jaques. This is largely because Jaques and his wife did their legwork. They went door to door. He hit every HOA meeting in the district. People knew who he was and voted for him. Two years later and Earl has already knocked on my door and will almost certainly be at my HOA meeting. The Republican candidate? Still haven't met him. I expect Jaques to win re-election quite handily unless things change after the primaries.

Campaigning requires real legwork. Robocalls are fake legwork. This is why people are annoyed.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Quick Changes

I thought this video of people swapping engines on a HMMWV was pretty cool the first time I saw it:

Then I saw this video of 6 Canadian guys field stripping a '52 Jeep:

Via Jalopnik.