Moe Lane

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers. The video that the quote’s from is at the bottom, and via Hot Air. And it’s why we love ‘Zo so.

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While the GE shareholders meltdown is interesting – see here for the basic story (H/T the Rhetorician), Ace of Spades for an observation on how the market is voting, and Hot Air for what was either a prescient or instigating Bill O’Reilly segment – we’re going to segue over to Little Miss Attila instead. Mostly because she has what was really the proper take on the Garofalo interview that might have spawned this mess for GE:

Janeane Garofalo is absolutely right: the tea parties are racism straight up. Because if it had been racism on the rocks, PJM would have gotten someone else to do interviews that day, instead of asking Zo to do two jobs. And if it had been racism-and-water, the organizers of the event wouldn’t have imposed upon Alfonzo by asking him to the podium. If it were racism-and-soda, they wouldn’t have recruited Zo to work for PJTV at all, but would have allowed him to continue commenting on events from his living room in the SoCal desert.

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Apparently Fidel Castro doesn’t quite understand that the best thing that he could do for Cuba right now is, well, die:

Fidel Castro: Obama ‘misinterpreted’ Raul’s words

HAVANA – Fidel Castro says President Barack Obama “misinterpreted” his brother Raul’s remarks regarding the United States and bristled at the suggestion that Cuba should free political prisoners or cut taxes on dollars people send to the island.

Either that, or he just doesn’t care. It’s probably ‘just doesn’t care’: as has been noted before, Fidel Castro has been a skilled player in the game of embarrassing American administrations for decades now. It’s apparently now President Obama’s turn, and he can hopefully take some comfort in knowing that it’s just business, nothing personal. Except, of course, that to Fidel Castro it’s one and the same…

Moe Lane

PS: The traditional phrase to mutter in these circumstances is “That [expletive deleted] can’t live forever,” Mr. President. Although one hears stories…

Crossposted to RedState.

This ad comes from Grover Norquist’s Americans For Tax Reform, and it’s aimed squarely at the Florida legislature’s attempt to emulate the Obama administration’s recent lower-class tax hike:

The argument here is actually very simple: cigarette taxes are in fact taxes, not ‘user fees’ or any other kind of bureaucratic nonsense. People like to pretend otherwise because it’s easier to pass something that’s not called a tax, and because in this particular case the the average member of the group that Rasmussen likes to call the Political Class probably doesn’t smoke anyway. In other words, if it’s not affecting them personally, it’s not their problem. This is not a particularly inclusive attitude, but then nobody was accusing the Political Class with an excess of empathy anyway.

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It’s actually almost over, thanks to the generosity of several individuals. Good thing that I got that button working, huh?

Speaking of which:

As noted before, the sooner this is over the sooner I can go back to writing zombie haiku:

Grey cherry blossoms
Exploding in the spring air -
Head shots are messy.

Which may or may not appeal, of course.

It was originally expected to pass, no problem. But then a bunch of people showed up and… well. 6-1 for became 4-3 against.

WOONSOCKET — Faced with a heavy outpouring of opposition from property owners, the City Council last night narrowly defeated a supplemental tax bill to wipe out a School Department deficit of $3.7 million.

[snip]

The measure would have given the city authority to hike all classes of taxes — residential, business and business equipment — about 10 percent. The average homeowner would have paid roughly an extra $231 this fiscal year.

Though the hike would have been about the same on small businesses percentage-wise, they would have paid significantly more since they are already taxed at a higher rate.

(H/T: Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, and check out this Jim Geraghty piece). (more…)

Obviously, I’m feeling better. Weakish, though.

Personal Jesus, Depeche Mode

In case you were wondering, the “MTV” thing isn’t a typo: this is sufficiently old enough to be from the period where you could click on MTV and have some hope of seeing an actual music video.  Strange and unnatural as that might sound.

Moe Lane

Details here, and the main site is here. There’s still a month to go for the contest (deadline is May 25, 2009), so get your video editing juices flowing and get your own, personal bailout.

Moe Lane

PS: They do want to hear from Democrats tired of the bailouts too, by the way. This doesn’t have to be a partisan political issue.

Crossposted to RedState.

Why I love America, Reason #4654908:

In Defense of West Point: A Cadet Responds to Thomas Ricks

My fellow cadets at West Point, in moments of overwhelming stress and cynicism, often compare our “rockbound highland home” to prison. Like inmates, cadets are regularly deprived of a wide range of social freedoms that “normal college students” would see as constitutional rights—we are told when, what, and where to sleep, eat, and wear. Our campus is secured on all perimeters by gates and security guards and entry into and out of West Point is tightly regulated. Most of the time, West Point feels more like the Panopticon than it does Harvard Yard. Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post voiced the sentiments of many of my classmates (myself included) during periods of utter exhaustion and pessimism when he declared this weekend that “we should get rid of West Point.”

So why do my classmates and I still stand proudly in the Long Gray Line? Because we think it’s worth it.

…it produces military personnel who can clearly, effectively, and courteously rebut an ‘argument’ that was (to paraphrase a colleague) extended more for notoriety’s sake than out of any real conviction. The last is probably the most important point, really: Rick’s condescending, parochial dismissal of a military tradition stretching back more than two hundred years is everything that we’ve come to expect from CNAS-style liberals. Particularly one who has graduated from Yale, a school that bans ROTC.

Personally, I’m growing tired of having to take seriously the narrow-mindedness of the Political Class.

Moe Lane

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Something I ate, no doubt. Sufficiently bad that I had to summon my long-suffering wife back from work.

Posting will be light today.

Given the entire fiscal aspect of the site today, and everything:

Mercedes Benz, Janis Joplin

I can never remember the last verse.

Moe Lane

That would have been one fascinating Cabinet meeting. Up to the point where RFK Jr screamed ‘TRAITOR!’ and tried to murder the President.

That wasn’t a joke.

So let’s start off by reviewing the basic statement:

“Clean coal is a dirty lie,” says environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who calls President Barack Obama and other politicians who commit taxpayer money to develop it “indentured servants” of the coal industry.

Let us stop here, for a moment. This isn’t about clean coal, per se. That debate is actually irrelevant to this post. Also irrelevant – for this post – is whether Kennedy meant anything racial by use of the term ‘indentured servant.’ You can decide for yourself whether that was a code phrase for ‘slave.’  But what we have to establish here is that Robert F Kennedy referred to the President of the United States as an indentured servant to the coal industry.  So conceded that it happened?

Good.  Let us move, as they say, on. (more…)

I hope that you threw up a little in your mouth when you saw this, Malcolm Hoenlein.

I have an evil thought in my heart now. I need to go remove it.

Crossposted to RedState.