A mess in Mississippi

Mark Mayfield, vice chairman of a Mississippi tea party group , apparently committed suicide after being arrested and charged for conspiring to help Clayton Kelly photograph Thad Cochran's senile wife in her nursing home.  I'm not sure what the specific charge is; I'm no lawyer, but I'm not sure how taking that kind of picture can be illegal, let alone merely conspiring to do it.  Was it classless?  Sure.  Politically stupid?  Definitely.  But illegal?  That one seems like a bit of a stretch to me.

So now a man is dead, and for what?  I can't even imagine what his wife and kids are going through right now.

Rightly or wrongly, people already upset about the underhanded tactics used by the Cochran campaign to eke out a win against Chris McDaniel are going to see Mayfield as some sort of martyr.  I've already heard people accusing Cochran of having Mayfield's blood on his hands; I've even heard some really outlandish conspiracy theories about Mayfield being murdered.  I don't think this bodes well for Republicans in November.  I'm hearing way too many people tell me that they are completely done with the GOP over all this.  It's possible that some of them could just be blowing of steam; I hope so, because I'd really like to see Harry Reid gone, and that won't happen if every tea partier casts a write-in vote for the Sweet Meteor of Death in 2014.

Happy Presidents' Day!

Senator Ted Cruz took to Twitter to ask his followers who their favorite Presidents were... so of course lots of folks started flipping out and calling him a birther for no reason.  (Protip: Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th in office, so don't freak out too much when someone says we've only had 43 presidents... that's technically true.  FDR was a couple of months into his fourth term when he died, but he only gets counted as one president... Cleveland only served two terms, it just so happens that those terms were interrupted by Benjamin Harrison's single term.)

Last Ounce of Courage

I keep seeing ads for the movie Last Ounce of Courage showing on FNC over and over again, but the ads don't really tell me much of anything.  At first I thought maybe it was some Truther nonsense or something, so I looked it up and found this interview on the movie's website:

And even now I'm still not sure what it's about.  A guy's son dies so then he gets himself arrested for trying to put a cross up on a building?  Huh?  But it does come with the Chuck Norris seal of approval, so there's that.

RIP Andrew Breitbart

I didn't know Andrew Breitbart, but I certainly knew of him... it seemed like whenever the vile nature of the radical left was being exposed, he was always standing right there in the middle of it with a big smile on his face.

I was very sad to learn that Andrew passed away the other day.  His death came as quite a shock.  Much less shocking, unfortunately, was the left's disgusting reaction to it... twitter exploded into an orgy of vitriolic hatred, with some of Andrew's friends retweeting the hateful messages being left for him, as he surely would have done himself if he were still here.  How appropriate that, in death, as he did in life, he still manages to sucker so many of those despicable creeps into showing us what kind of monsters they really are.

Here's a tribute to Andrew from his friends at Red Eye:

Running the numbers on OWS

Using some of Nate Silver's crowd size estimates as a starting point, Eric over at Classical Values got out his calculator and crunched a few numbers of his own:

OK, so there are about 15,000 in New York (all of whom cannot fit into Zuccotti park), but let’s be liberal go with the highest possible figure of 100,000 protesters.

What is that in terms of percent? The United States population is 312,441,000, so Occupy Wall Street is less than a third of one percent.

0.032006042740869475, to be exact.

Their claim of 99% seems either a bit high or a bit arrogant. Or both.

If these filthy OWS hippies really represented 99% of the country then you'd think they could manage to gather more people together than the Tea Party movement could, right?  By most accounts, there were well over 100,000 people just at the Restoring Honor rally alone.  And that was just one event... I'm sure if you added up the numbers for all the tea party events it would really put the OWS numbers to shame.  Yet the media constantly fawns over the OWS protests and denigrates the Tea Party.

Update:  Eric updated his post to point out that 0.032006042740869475 percent is actually less than one thirtieth of one percent, not just less than one third of one percent.