Ladd Ehlinger, Jr. is Pissed

And he has a right to be:

While good people in California were fighting their hearts out to try and stop Janice Hahn (including the former Democrat Zumadogg, who switched parties because of this race!), conservative media was having a party.

They were having a party the whole time.

While people like Stacy McCain, DaTechGuy, Ace Of Spades, Penguin Pundit and others were working their hearts out to shine a light on the corruption of Janice Hahn, these guys barely touched the subject. A tweet from Breitbart, an article on Big Journalism, a couple of retweets from Stephen Kruiser. Meh. I'm grateful for that but. Pretty lackluster, when it wasn't downright zombie-like or just plain treacherous. Fox News? Don't even get me started.

I don't care who you are. There were all sorts of ways to tackle the story, and with a dancing stripper and rappers thrown into the mix, there's just no damned excuse for ignoring it, and everyone knows it.

Some of these people I had drinks with. Some of these people I thought were at least cordial colleagues. Did any of them take a moment to notice the aforementioned death threats? Cyberhacking? Psych-ops? Anything? Buehler? Buehler?

I'm kinda perplexed myself. Why would anybody on the right fail to take this story and broadcast it long and loud? It's the Obama in miniature: feckless professional politician, in bed with unsavories, screwing the people she's supposed to be serving. What's not to trumpet?

Ultimately, all politics are local, and this election was lost when Craig Huey decided not to use the ammo that had been offered to him. He didn't have a campaign, he had an After-Party Planning Commitee. But where was the goddamn cavalry?

Consider this.

That ad got more hits from Huffpo than any conservative blog. I got more media interviews from liberal rags like Slate and Salon than any conservative media.

Secession of Southern California

The usual write-up in the LA Times (h/t: Memeorandum):

Accusing Sacramento of pillaging local governments to feed its runaway spending and left-wing policies, a Riverside County politician is proposing a solution: He wants 13 mostly inland, conservative counties to break away to form a separate state of "South California.''

This occasionally happens on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and for much the same reasons.

"Secession proposals are just ways of thinking about California, and are also ways for people who feel neglected get the attention that they deserve," said USC historian Kevin Starr, who has written extensively on California. "It's never passed, and it will never pass. It's been up to bat 220 times and struck out every time.''

Ah, but it only needs to work once.

California Tries to Make Amazon to Collect Sales Taxes...

...Amazon says "No thanks."

It's like Sacramento has a Death Wish or something.

Trains are For Nerds.

When I was a young fellow, I had a weekly commute from Philadelphia to Monmouth  by way of a particularly painful combination of AmTrak and NJ Transit. I did this because I didn't have a car, and I didn't have a car because I was still figuring out costs and other such things. It's all part of being 21 and out in the wide world for the first time.

On one particular Sunday rehearsal, I wasn't able to get off the NJ Transit train at my stop, because I sat too far back in the train, and the doors weren't opening. So I had to get off at the last stop, and try to figure out how to get to my corporate hotel room from there. This was 1998, before cell phones were attached to everyone's hip, so I had to use a phone card to get in touch with my hotel. I had to wait an hour before the hotel could manage to get a car and driver out to where I was.

Within a few weeks, I'd purchased a crappy old 1986 Lincoln Mark VII. I totalled it within a matter of months and had to buy another car, but whatever. I was never going to endure that agony again.

And that's why I roll my eyes whenever proggies get themselves all worked up over public trains. Trains work only when nothing else is faster or more convenient than they are. Such instances are as follows:

But At Least They'll Have the Spotted Owl.

Nothing in this world is secure. There is no such thing as an endless supply of anything. Environmentalists know this, but routinely forget it when it comes to shackling economics to serve their ends. Behold the results (Hat tip: Insty):