Moe Lane

I would have confiscated the phone, too.

Crossposted to RedState.

This is funny for two reasons:

Three Potential Challengers Jointly Rap Gillibrand on Guns

The three House Democrats who are talking openly of challenging Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) next year joined together Wednesday to tout gun control legislation that they said highlights the appointed Senator’s shaky record on the issue.

Reps. Carolyn McCarthy, Carolyn Maloney and Steve Israel teamed up for a Capitol Hill news conference on the No Fly, No Buy Act, which would bar people from buying guns if their names are on the Transportation Security Administration’s “no fly list” of suspected terrorists.

While none would confirm that they are running for Senate, their willingness to appear together and tweak Gillibrand suggested that they could put together a potent coalition if one decides to run against her and the others endorse the challenger.

The first reason is, Gillibrand’s getting a really quick lesson in the field of Just How Much Heresy Is Acceptable For A Democratic Senator. Answer? Not all that much. Certainly not when it comes to the field of gun rights, which should be a comfort to whichever GOP candidates we run next year*. As for the second reason… imagine how these three particular Musketeers are going to act towards each other next year if it ends up that Gillibrand is as vulnerable as Murtha or Dodd. They’ll make Kilkenny Cats look like symbiotes.

That’d be dumb of them?  So would accidentally sending your primary opponent an inadvertent notification that you’re going to be an obstructionist.  So what’s your point?

Moe Lane

*Two Senate elections in NY, thanks to the replacement. I can’t imagine that the NRA’s going to be so chintzy as give to one and not the other. Even if the other is facing “Do what you have to do” Schumer.

Crossposted to RedState.

This is actually a little more impressive than you’d think on first viewing:

It’s also completely true, but that’s a different story.

Via @CalebHowe.

Moe Lane

PS: You know you want one.

It’s OK. Nobody has to know. I’m not going to tell; you’re obviously not going to tell; and Amazon won’t tell. It’s perfectly safe.

It being Wednesday, we remove The Final Countdown and replace it with the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Because it’s still the best one of the bunch, in my opinion. Besides, I’m starting to get a hankering for some black-and-white Classic SF movie-watching…

Moe Lane

As Jim Geraghty notes, all of Obama’s promises come with an expiration date. All of them.

Obama Opposes Releasing Photos of U.S. Detainee Abuse
President Obama has decided not to release photos which the Pentagon had planned to released by May 28 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

President Obama has decided not to release hundreds of photos potentially showing U.S. military personnel abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

A senior administration official told FOX News that Obama met with his legal team last week and told them that he did not feel comfortable with the release of the photos because he believes they would endanger U.S. troops, and that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.

Last week.

President Obama Reverses Course on Releasing More Detainee Abuse Photographs

President Obama met with White House counsel Greg Craig and other members of the White House counsel team last week and told them that he had second thoughts about the decision to hand over photographs of detainee abuse to the ACLU, per a judge’s order, and had changed his mind.

The president “believes their release would endanger our troops,” a White House official says, adding that the president “believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”

They decided this last week. One wonders why it took them this long to mention it. Even the usual “new polls came in” excuse won’t fly, this time: we knew Friday that the Democrats were losing the initiative in this argument.

All very odd.

Crossposted to RedState.

No reason that he should, of course. Anyway, for your amusement, watch this deeply symbolic, iconic, and thoroughly entertaining exercise in antiwar impotence:

(via HotAirPundit)

I’d note that the antiwar activists seen here had fallen from their high place, except that they were never particularly high up to begin with. And thank God for that, huh? Imagine the disaster that we’d be facing today if we took people like those in Code Pink seriously.

Moe Lane

A pair of stories (HT: Hot Air Headlines, here and here) illustrate the sudden appearance of troubles for the Speaker of the House rather neatly. First, the general:

Democrats: CIA is out to get us

Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.

and now, the specific:

Source: Aide told Pelosi waterboarding had been used

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A source close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now confirms that Pelosi was told in February 2003 by her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah.

This appears to contradict Pelosi’s account that she was never told waterboarding actually happened, only that the administration was considering using it.

Which is a nice way of putting it*. (more…)

I refuse to believe that Matt Welch doesn’t already know all of what I’m about to write already.

Obama Loses His “Cool”
With his glib dismissal of pot legalization, the president looks less like the man, and more like The Man.

When the generation of Americans under the age of 30 gets around to realizing that this handsome young president might not be nearly as cool as they’d hoped, it won’t be hard to affix a date on when the milk began to sour. It was March 26, 2009, when Barack Obama conducted a live town hall press conference featuring questions submitted online.

Near the beginning of this hip and mildly groundbreaking interaction, the president said this: “We took votes about which questions were gonna be asked.…Three point five million people voted. I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high, uh, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve, uh, the economy and job creation. And, uh (chuckles), uh, I don’t know what this says about the online audience (laughs), but I just want—I don’t want people to think that—this was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered. Uh, the answer is, no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.”

The live audience laughed and applauded. The kids online? Not so much.

To those in a hurry, let me summarize my response: If you’re surprised, you have no right to be. (more…)

She’s not happy about the Mark Davis thing. I can see why – I wasn’t too happy about it, either – although I will note that it’s going to be a cold day in Hell before Sykes apologizes for making roughly similar comments.  I think that Paglia’s underestimating just how nasty the other side’s being these days, but it’d be a boring world if we agreed with her all the time. After all, she is a liberal.

Besides, the bit about Scare Force One’s on the money. How the White House press pool keeps from throwing shoes at Gibbs on a regular basis I’ll never know.

Crossposted to RedState.

…but this one is nice.

Song: Fanny Power, O’Carolan
Harper: John Kovac

Doesn’t have any other reason to be, except being nice.

[longer pause]

Oh, screw it: what Lileks said.

Moe Lane

PS: Were the first ten minutes ‘emotional?’ Not at all! I merely had my allergies flare up. Happens all the time, to lots of people. Never to you, you say?

Really?

Uh-huh. (more…)

It is being stripped for action even as we speak.

Thanks again to everyone who helped out with that; I’m not done with all the sonnets*, but hope to be so fairly soon.

Moe Lane

*I’m still selling them for $20/sonnet:

Nothing political that I wouldn’t agree with anyway.