Moe Lane

Why not? It’s not like this would affect them any.

WASHINGTON – The Senate’s top tax writer said Tuesday he is considering limits on the tax-free status of job-based health insurance to help pay for President Barack Obama’s plan to cover all Americans.

Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., described his idea as senators began to grapple with how to pay for the costs of the plan, which independent experts put at about $1.5 trillion over 10 years. There are no easy options.

Baucus is carefully not saying at what income level this would start at, which is of course Senatorese for “a lot lower than you’d expect from earlier rhetoric.” Which should come as an unpleasant surprise or two to folks entering the workplace after it comes into effect; well, the ones who aren’t union employees or government workers, at least. Your standard ‘kids out of school, with first real white-collar job’ types, in other words; if this passes, it’s going to be reduced health benefits for new hires, less take-home pay to cover the taxes, or the joys of negotiating with the central government for elective health procedures. None of which is going to be very fun for them.

No, avoid schadenfreude. We want them voting their class interests, remember?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Speaking as somebody who is actually for same-sex marriage: has my side mucked things up enough, or do we want to really go for the gusto and alienate still more people?  She’s not getting tossed, her detractors are not going to get a social conservative crusade declared against her (mostly because the social conservatives that they think that they were aiming at don’t actually, you know, exist), and now we get to be reminded that the current President is prepared to do anything for same-sex marriage except actually stand up for it.  Let’s quit while we’re behind, OK?

Moe Lane

PS: Do you know what would help?  Going out and working to pass actual SSM legislation such as Maine’s (via Slublog).  That doesn’t bother people like judicial fiat or ‘shut up, he explained’ does.  Strange but true.

Crossposted to RedState.

It sort of stops working after the third try, you know.

The Speaker of the House has come up with yet another reason for why she didn’t say anything about waterboarding at the time:

Pelosi defense: couldn’t object in ’03

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned in early 2003 that the Bush administration was waterboarding terror detainees but didn’t protest directly out of respect for “appropriate” legislative channels, a person familiar with the situation said Monday.

The Pelosi camp’s version of events is intended to answer two key questions posed by her critics: When, precisely, did she first learn about waterboarding? And why didn’t she do more to stop it?

Because, apparently, “All along” and “because it didn’t poll well at the time” won’t satisfy anybody at this point. Both Cold Fury and AoSHQ have a good deal of righteous scorn on this one; I’m just going to touch fairly briefly on what this means, going forward. (more…)

(Via Little Miss Attila) No, really: F U, Penguin: Telling Cute Animals What’s What comes out at the end of August.  FU, Penguin is quite pleased about it, too.

I’m appalled.  Which is to say, I’m deeply envious.  Although I still want to believe that this picture of the Tibetan fox is photoshopped.

…no, probably not.

Anyway, Ace of Ace of Spades HQ has an interesting review up – OK, he has two interesting reviews up, but I’m working under the assumption that I’ll see Doubt more or less by accident* – of Changeling, which looks like it just came out. Ace liked it a lot, but it clearly lacks the exploding starships and/or gun fu that I normally associate with Good Movies; anybody else who saw it have an opinion?

Moe Lane

*I assume that what will happen is that it’ll be on or about to be on, somewhere, just as I’m wandering by; and then I’ll watch it. And then I’ll agree that it was a good film, and that I enjoyed it.

But you can’t afford a flight, these days? Well, Jack Murtha is ready to help! – At least, the NRCC takes the attitude that he should be making the offer, and it’s hard to fault their logic. Actually, it’s impossible to fault their logic: Murtha did funnel all that money to ‘his’ airport for his own convenience, so the least he can do is give you some, too.

(See also The Sundries Shack for more background)

Crossposted to RedState.

They call it ‘bubblegum dance’.

I’m sorry.

Girls’ Generation

I’m so terribly, terribly sorry.

And I don’t even want to know if it’s fake. Honestly, I’d rather that it was real.

I was originally going to run with the joke, but as this article points out there are some graphic images associated with it, and it’s not very nice to pull that on somebody without warning. Check out Blue Crab Boulevard for more…

Moe Lane

PS: Could somebody who has read Barnum!: In Secret Service to the USA tell me whether it’s any good?

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.

When a newspaper is associating pictures like this:

……to stories about said politician’s nephew: well, articles like this are almost redundant.

Nephew Mentioned Rep. Murtha in Dealings as Contractor

Robert C. Murtha Jr. has made a sizable living for years working with companies that rely on Pentagon contracts over which his uncle, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), holds considerable sway.

He has maintained that his uncle played no role in his defense-related work, much of it secured without competition. Newly obtained documents, however, show Robert Murtha mentioning his influential family connection as leverage in his business dealings and holding unusual power with the military. The documents add to mounting questions about Rep. Murtha, whose use of federal earmarks to help favored defense companies and his relationship with a former lobbying firm are under scrutiny by federal investigators.

The visual cue is fairly obvious, after all. (more…)

That was my wife’s immediate response to my mentioning that Rush Limbaugh responded to Ms. Sykes‘ rather tawdry – and absolutely typical – attack on him by… not commenting on it at all.  Bear in mind that my wife isn’t particularly political, doesn’t listen to talk radio (then again, neither do I), and more or less smiles and nods when I start blathering on and on about this sort of thing.

But she is smart.  Smarter than me, in fact; I had already worked out that Limbaugh has bigger fish to fry, but she connects the dots very quickly, sometimes.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Depressingly, this song is old enough to buy me booze. Given that I was not old enough to buy cigarettes when it came out and swiftly became our ‘clean up the Mickey Dee’s after we chased out the last drunk and closed the store’ song, well.

You Be Illin’, RUN-DMC

My wife reported that she thought that she heard this song in a McDonald’s ad, actually. I am happy to report that if so, I have not yet found it.