RINO Sightings are up

The latest RINO Sightings are up at The Southern California Law Blog.

Hello, Dalí: Surrealist RINO Sightings

There's a new batch of RINO Sightings, hosted this week by Eric at Classical Values, in which Eric attempts to channel Salvador Dalí, but instead (I hate when this happens) Dalí winds up channeling Eric.

Considering Dali's hatred of politics, why drag him into the RINO carnival? For several reasons, the first of which is that Republican politics have become so surreal, and what could be more surreal than dissenters from surrealism? As a dissenter from surrealism (expelled from the Surrealist movement for being too surreal) Dali is the perfect symbol. Moreover, there's Dali's paranoiac obsession with all things rhino -- which this essay sums up pretty well:

Artists, all through history, have been tormenting themselves to grasp form and to reduce it to elementary geometrical volumes. Leonardo always tended to produce eggs ... Ingres preferred spheres, and Cézanne cubes and cylinders. But only Dalí... has found truth. All curved surfaces of the human body have the same geometric spot in common, the one found in this cone with the rounded tip curved toward heaven or toward the earth ... the rhinoceros horn!

After this initial discovery, Dalí surveyed his images and realised that all of them could be deconstructed to rhinoceros horns.

Which means that we RINOs are onto something.

Indeed.

Here's my Fun RINO-Related Dalí Fact for the day: when he made an appearance on The Tonight Show, "Dalí carried with him a leather rhinoceros and refused to sit upon anything else."

RINO Sightings Carnival -- Surrealistic RINOCEROTIC Edition! @ Classical Values

Related: Dalí Gallery

RINO Sightings are up...

RINO Sightings are up over at Digger's Realm.

RINO Sightings - We're on ur blogz, linking ur posts

Well, the GOP ran into a little spot of trouble at the polls last week, but it hasn't slowed down the Raging RINOs one bit.

In this first post-election RINO Sightings, enrevanche has got the duty, and there's a veritable passel of fine posts this go-round.

JimK of Right Thoughts leads off this week's edition and gives us a theme: an update to the "Im in ur base, killing ur d00ds" Internets meme (which meme is explained authoritatively here):

Indeed.

Hmm, I guess this strategy didn't work out as planned:


(image courtesy GoSleepGo.com)
(Memo to the American left: Can we all drink a tall, frosty glass of STFU about Diebold now? kthxbye.)

"Im in [E]ur[ope], watching the foreign press comment on ur elections": A pair of posts from Pigilito, who first reports on the giddy reaction of the Swiss press to the Democrat triumph in the midterm elections:

The Swiss newspapers are pretty happy with the Democratic victory. They view the outcome of the elections as a repudiation of Bush's decision to invade Iraq. Which completely misses the point. The Dems did well because of Bush's post-invasion mismanagement of Iraq. Had that gone well, the Republicans would still hold the House and Senate.

Almost certainly correct.

And for lagniappe, Pigilito offers us some good news from the midterm elections: most so-called Intelligent Design advocates on the ballot went down in flames, which bodes well for the teaching of actual science in American classrooms. ("Im in ur schoolz, telling the truth to ur kidz.") Good news.

"Im on ur border, keepin an eye on ur illegal alienz": Digger of Digger's Realm checks in with news of four successful anti-immigrant ballot initiatives in Arizona; although immigration-related issues did *not* result in boffo ballot-box business nationwide, as Republicans were hoping, at least on the statewide initiative level, they carried the day in AZ:

Arizona voters have spoken and they did it with a scream. Four [immigration-related] Propositions on the Arizona ballot passed with ease in yesterdays election.

"Im in ur library, readin about Ur": Bloodspite of Techography burned the midnight oil last week, exhaustively researching the history of the Mesopotamian region and authoring a multipage post that meditatively considers the history of conflict in the area and asks, in essence, what the hell were we thinking?

It is much too late to place the long overdue troops on the ground that I have called for. I have long said we need at least an additional 300,000.

But because of realpolitik it will never happen. Too many mothers' faces on national television. The will to win is no longer with the American people. The desire to be something better, and more than we are was lost with our grandparents generations, I am afraid.

It is not Our governments failure.

It is ours.

"Im in ur face, eyeballing ur shifty Democrats": Don Surber reminds us that absolute power isn't required for absolute corruption, and enumerates the rogue's gallery that's about to take power in 2007:

Nancy Pelosi will be the richest House speaker ever. She will appoint as head of intelligence a federal judge who accepted a $150,000 bribe. Alcee Hastings was impeached, ran for Congress and sat on his behind long enough to gain the seniority necessary to be the next intel head.

Her Ethics Committee chairman could be Alan Mollohan, who is under federal investigation for a kickback scheme in which he created five nonprofit orgs back “home” (well, in West Virginia) staffed by friends and former staff members. He fed those orgs a quarter-billion in federal money. They contributed to his campaigns.

As Don observes, "21 years in West Virginia have convinced me that a politician is guilty until proven innocent."

(Ten years in New York City will drive you to the same conclusion, Don. Plus ça change...)

"Im in ur clouds, lookin 4 the silver lining": Cody Herche at legal redux thinks that it's an ill wind that blows no man to good (and that's Shakespeare I'm quoting, not Bill Clinton); while we're studying the election-result clouds, he's finding the silver lining:

Now that an opposition party controls one of the houses of Congress, it will be much more difficult for the government to shoehorn new spending proposals through. Gridlock may be just the thing to keep government growth to a minimum...

(His post was written before it was clear that Democrats controlled the Senate, too...)

"Im on ur hiway, tryin to keep u off the left shoulder": At Searchlight Crusade, Dan Melson has some good advice for the newly elected Democrats in Congress: govern as you ran, from the center:

If you look at the Democrats who won, they ran as centrists, not leftists. Calls for the impeachment of President Bush or another go-around of something like Iran Contra will not endear you to the American public. Most of your leaders are leftists, but it's the centrists who won on Election night, and if they don't want to be swept out in their next election, they are going to have to act like centrists, talk like centrists, and most importantly, vote like centrists.

"Im watching from the sidelines, dissing ur nascent third party": MW at Divided We Stand, United We Fall is not impressed with what he's seen of Unity08:

It is just so painfully obvious that the "unity" in Unity08 will last exactly as long as they support no actual candidates, have no platform, and have no opinion on any actual issues, and will not last one minute longer.

(MW has blogged about Unity08 before, but am I the only one who's never heard of these people?)

"Im out of the majority, but enjoyin teh schadenfreude": Gary the Ex-Donkey looks at the disconnect between liberal Democrat leadership and the newly elected centrist Congressmen and Senators, and concludes that rhetoric is easy, but governing is hard:

It's easy to be on the outside, lobbing criticism. It's easy to find fault. It's easy to Monday-morning quarterback.

What's difficult is governing. What's difficult is supporting and defending policies that may not be popular.

Now Democrats have the difficult tasks.

And Republicans have the easy ones, as do I.

It's a role reversal.

And finally, this week at enrevanche, "Im thinkin about the long war and bummin' about Da Bomb":

Nuclear proliferation, combined with progressively loosening controls over nuclear weapons due to the nature of the increasingly unstable states that acquire them, make it close to a statistical certainty that non-state actors (terrorist groups) will get their hands on one or more nuclear weapons in the near future.

From where I sit, I see very few options open to us that will keep that from happening.

---

Update, November 13: Some late arrivals have been sighted.

"Im watching ur old moviez, it's Macacalypse Now": Mog at Mind of Mog thinks George Allen finally showed some class in the campaign by not dragging out the Virginia Senate election through a series of lengthy and expensive court challenges.

(Hat tip to Wonkette for "Macacalypse Now," which was way too good not to steal.)

"Im in ur house, psychoanalyzing ur dog": At Classical Values, Eric's dog Coco is having nightmares about a Democrat-controlled Congress.

"Im on ur Internets, rounding up ur opposition": At DANEgerus, a summary of Democrat talking points culled from a variety of media.

RINO Sightings are up...

...over at Don Surber's place.

RINO Sightings at Inside Larry's Head

RINOs have been spotted in Mr. Bernard's Neighborhood.

Trick or treat!

RINO Sightings @ Searchlight Crusade

The October 23, 2006 edition of RINO Sightings is up over at Searchlight Crusade.

That's a great blog, by the way. In addition to the political and cultural stuff, if you dig into it and read some of the archives every day, you can get an excellent education on mortgage banking in a couple of weeks; if you ever intend to buy a house, you could do worse than give it a read.

David Brooks: Thinning The Herd

David Brooks (behind the TimesDestruct firewall, I'm afraid) explains to Republicans, one more time, one big reason that they're going to take a pasting in a few weeks: they've been so busy pandering to The Base that they've alienated the moderate, "empiricist" (his term, not mine, but a good one) branch of the party.

[Republican moderates] are looking for orderly places to raise their children. They are what you might call antiparty empiricists. They distrust partisans and can’t imagine why anyone would be sick enough to base an identity on a political organization. They don’t expect much from government but a few competently delivered services, and they don’t like public officials who unnerve them.

The Republicans used to do well in these areas, but now it’s as if they are purposely trying to antagonize the married moms at the pseudo-New Urbanist outdoor cafes. The deficits alarm them. Tom DeLay was a perfectly designed Northeastern alienation machine. As insular Democrats know little about what life is like in flyover country, so insular Republicans know little about how people think in the suburban Northeast, where blue New York Times delivery bags dot the driveways each morn.

The big issue is Iraq, but the core problem with suburban voters is not the decision to go to war; it’s the White House’s reaction to the mess afterward. As Robert Lang, the superlative suburban specialist at Virginia Tech, notes, when people mess up a project in an office park, there are consequences. But Donald Rumsfeld never gets fired. Jerry Bremer and Tommy Franks get medals.

This is not how engineers and empirically minded managers behave. The people in these offices manage information for a living, and when they see Republicans denying obvious trends, or shutting out relevant data, they say to themselves, “Those people are not like me.” [emphasis added - bc]

Thinning The Herd - David Brooks, New York Times, October 22, 2006

By the way, don't you find it interesting that "The Base" is how "Al-Qaeda" is typically translated into English? I do.

RINO Sightings: Crime and Punishment edition

RINO Sightings, the Crime and Punishment edition, are now up at Politechnical.

RINO Sightings

RINOs have been spotted over at Digger's Realm.