Moe Lane

Raise your hand if you’re surprised by this.

If you have raised your hand, real quick: why are you surprised?

…while the online question portion of the White House town hall was open to any member of the public with an Internet connection, the five fully identified questioners called on randomly by the president in the East Room were anything but a diverse lot. They included: a member of the pro-Obama Service Employees International Union, a member of the Democratic National Committee who campaigned for Obama among Hispanics during the primary; a former Democratic candidate for Virginia state delegate who endorsed Obama last fall in an op-ed in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star; and a Virginia businessman who was a donor to Obama’s campaign in 2008.

(Via Hot Air Headlines)

I mean, you are aware that this administration pre-screens all journalists’ questions asked of it, right? It’s not exactly surprising that they might do the same for what is an ostensibly more ‘unscripted’ venue. Or that they’re picking softball questions. Or that they’re being extra-careful to minimize the possibility of a chance of a hint of the suggestion of an inkling that there may be any discernible change to our War on Some Drugs policy. It’s just business as usual, in other words. Business as usual, and only disappointing if you had unreasonable expectations in the first place.

Moe Lane

PS: “Right now.”
The correct statement to make here is that he’s getting away with it right now.

Crossposted to RedState.

Short for the “Shut Up and Go Away Reform act of 2009.” As creator Vodkapundit notes (H/T Ed Driscoll), it’s very simple:

We as a nation will pay Obama and Geithner 1% off the top of any and all stock market profits. In exchange, they’ll shut up and go away. They’ll keep their jobs; they just won’t do anything. Surely, Treasury couldn’t do any worse with 18 of 18 top positions vacant, than it has with only one position filled. And after 75 years of presidential overreach, it might be a nice change of pace to have a chief executive whose chief goal is to enjoy a nice cocktail.

If you think that this is actually not that great an idea… no, it’s probably not. As Stephen Green himself admits; but the idea still resonates with him, and Ed, and Glenn Reynolds, and probably a whole lot of libertarian-friendly types.

Crossposted to RedState.

Hey, how did I miss Kingston Trio videos on Youtube?

Thanks, Assistant Village Idiot.

Moe Lane

PS: It shames me that I had to have my wife explain to me the elaborate joke found in GURPS Warehouse 23 (which is very useful, for all you conspiracy roleplaying game player/GM types out there). Particularly the pitying look in her eye when she did…

Well, that may be unfair: as Andrew Malcolm notes, if Obama hadn’t spent the last month trying to convince people that his 3.6 trillion dollar budget was a good idea it might have slipped even further than the recent Gallup poll shows that it has. Which means that he’s saved or created – what? Five, six points on the polls?

Looking at the poll itself, it’s interesting to see how an outside-the-margin of error result can be framed as ‘holding steady.’ 46/26/30 for/against/don’t know enough last month versus 39/27/33 this month, and support for it has slipped down the Republican/Democratic/Independent line. Although possibly the most embarrassing part of this whole thing for the administration is that the aforementioned media blitz – personal, online, televised, radioed, phone called, and for all I know, messenger pigeoned – didn’t have a better than a margin-of-error effect on the American public’s awareness of the issue. Admittedly, they were already pretty aware, but the Obama administration was looking for a win here, not a no-decision.
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Thirty-nine today, and darned if I know how that happened, either. It just sort of… did.

What the heck: R.S. McCain does this all the time, and it doesn’t seem to hurt him in the readership department. If you like the site, feel free to hit the tip jar.

See also: the Rocky Horror Muppet Show. Which is everything it promises to be, and more.

(I originally wrote this when I heard about the P&P&Z book, and tried shopping it out to Big Hollywood.  Alas, no luck: but since I just pre-ordered the book with some birthday gift certificate money, I might as well put this article up here.  I was pleased with the way it came out, after all.)

The buzz today is over the greatest development in movie synergy since Hollywood decided to puree 134 films to make Independence Day.  I refer, of course, to news that studios are fighting to option out Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is coming out April of this year.  What makes this exciting is that if successful, this movie could begin a trend:

Other talent agencies are pitching their own slate of monster-lit titles. They include a version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, where Catherine, the deceased heroine, returns as a Japanese-style ghost not only to haunt but also to terrorise Heathcliff.

In a reworking of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Mr Rochester has something more terrible than an insane spouse in his attic, and a version of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss is powered by human sacrifice.

The worry here is that the above might reflect the limits of said talent agencies’ creativity.  In light of that, I offer five concepts for those looking to interweave the genres of mainstream literature and horror.  I assure you that people would watch these films… and that literature critics would climb over each other’s dead bodies in order to attack them. (more…)

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.  Yes, this is a real story.

…then it’s pretty clear: you have a vampire problem.

Headmaster: No Vampires At Our School
Boston Latin H.S. Tries To Quash Rumors

BOSTON — The headmaster of one of the city’s most prestigious exam schools is dealing with an unusual rumor sweeping student classrooms.

There are no vampires at Boston Latin School, says headmaster Lynne Moone Teta.

Seriously.

Yeah. Damn right you saw this movie. We all did. And we all know what happens next: there’s going to be a few more people gone, and then there’s going to be a couple more, and there’s going to be some conveniently-upcoming big shindig and the bloodsucking fiends are going to be converging en masse on the conveniently-stake-free walking smorgasbord. Just like clockwork.

Well, I’m here to properly help. Not to try to tell you why there are no vampires, really: if there aren’t any, why bother telling you? No, I’m here to tell you what to do when one of the gore-lusting leeches comes smashing through the walls looking for your precious bodily fluids.
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Apparently I’m Conservative Grapevine‘s Blog of the Day.  Which is probably confusing the heck of all the people seeing posts about lobster naughty bits and poisoned pigeons and alternate timelines and so forth.  To say nothing about the next couple of posts.

I have to admit, I’m not really all that upset about it.  But I will be blogrolling CG and Right Wing News anyway.  I’ve been meaning to.

Or paperclip design WIN?

You make the call!

Moe Lane

PS: There’s no way this was accidental, though.

This Quantum 5 world diverged from Homeline's on March 28th, 1911, 7:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time. This date is not actually known to Infinity's researchers; they have at this point only narrowed the divergence point to somewhere in the spring...

Although the picture is a bit more reassuring in that regard.

The giant lobster of Plantation Key found its new home Friday morning in the Florida Keys. Betsey, who stands three stories tall, is now out in front of the Rain Barrel Artisan Village shopping complex at mile marker 86.7 of U.S. 1.

Betsey is made of metal and fiberglass. She is a detailed, biologically accurate depiction of a female spiny lobster.

Mostly because it drives home the lesson that just because a lobster may have female naughty bits doesn’t mean that you’re going to recognize them on sight. Which is a very strange sort of lesson, but then: it’s Key West. Those guys have turned secession into a The Mouse that Roared-style tourist attraction, so none of this is precisely out of character.