Moe Lane

I participated in a conference call yesterday with Senator Alexander (R-TN) about his “Auto Stock for Every Taxpayer” bill; not to mention his “Car Czar” awards for government intervention in the car industry (his first one was to Barney Frank, for spreading intervention largess among his subjects). The general themse of the call was to discuss the problems inherent in making the government (in the abstract) an owner of a specific type of business; I don’t recall the word ‘nationalization’ being used in the call, but the word loomed there throughout. Not to mention its connotations.

The whole call is available here: my only – rather garbled, alas – question was on whether the general atmosphere of government intervention (and the specific one of Frank’s interference) gave credence to allegations of partisan Democratic interference in Chrysler dealership closings. Senator Alexander did not go so far as to endorse this theory, but he raised the important point that when you have an ‘incestuous relationship like this’ (his term) – which is to say, a direct relationship between the dealership and the government – allegations like these are credible. Even the appearance of impropriety is in fact a problem (I agree: it erodes trust in the government as being a reasonably impartial referee), and the only way to fix that is to get ownership out of the hands of the government.

And I really don’t have anything even semi-witty to say to end this, sorry.  We just have to get the government out of the car industry.  Simple as that.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

You know the Geraghty quote by now.

[UPDATE]: Shorter Obama administration: “We’re just doing what Bush did!” Which is: a), a direct contradiction of the video below; and b), a direct contradiction of the LA Times article below. Impressive: you would have thought that they’d pick one or the other.

Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) has a serious problem with our new GWOT strategy in Afghanistan. Specifically, the way we plan to read captured, foreign illegal combatants their Miranda rights:

…the Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. “The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here’s the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today – foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them…and they’re reading them their rights – Mirandizing these foreign fighters,” says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy. “I was a little surprised to find it taking place when I showed up because we hadn’t been briefed on it, I didn’t know about it. We’re still trying to get to the bottom of it, but it is clearly a part of this new global justice initiative.”

(more…)

As I promised here, I watched this throughout (via Michelle Malkin), and I’ve decided that I don’t believe you.  It’s because of the constant mugging for the camera, the frequent pausing for laugh lines, the phony forgetting of the husband and child’s name, the neglecting to mention that the first joke you recited – the one where you called a 14 year old a prostitute – was made the day after you called her mother a slut and cracked a joke about the 14 year old getting raped.  And there wasn’t even a “sorry that you were offended” – which is the standard fake-apology that your type usually resorts to when someone complains.  Instead, we got a “This is what I do.”

Yes.  I suppose that it is.

Moe Lane

PS: The hate apologetics that I’ve been getting from this episode have been fascinating: by all means, I invite people wanting to excuse this behavior to keep them coming..  So far I’m pretty sure that I’ve identified at least one impending divorce and two wrecked relationships from the subtext.

PPS: Dan Riehl has some more thoughts on the subject.

Crossposted to RedState.

Blame @Lileks.

St. Elmo’s Fire, John Parr

IT WILL NOT LEAVE MY HEAD NOW.

…featured by Reason, I’m going to have to go with this one:

…if only because the article (click the image to read) combines a such a heaping level of nonsense about contemporary occultism with what was actually a decent review of historical occultism*. Plus, as Reason notes the occultism hysteria eventually gave us the Dungeons & Dragons hysteria… which produced some truly spectacular additions to the arts, like Mazes and Monsters. The reality, of course, is that it was all more like The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, but try telling that to a worried mom.

I should also note that if, after reading that article, you want to actually GAME 1970′s-style bad occultism – and why wouldn’t you – you absolutely need Mythic Vistas: Damnation Decade. The filmography section alone is worth the purchase price; it does a marvelous job at separating out the Crap Seventies Films Worth Watching from the Just the Crap Seventies Films.

Moe Lane

*Mind you, back then journalists ripped off actual encyclopedias, not Wikipedia.

…so that I don’t have to.

I’m not even remotely surprised by the gambit; as I privately emailed somebody last night, he had no other options than to claim that he didn’t know the true situation (although that was before it came out that he came back and made a similar joke the day after).  I also promised that I’d give the response a fair hearing; which means that I’m going to hold off until I hear what he actually says, because right now the response that’s been leaked is both wholly inadequate and self-evidently incomplete.

But fair’s fair; maybe he’ll be believable when he says “I’m sorry.”  Which is a sentence completely missing from the response to date.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

His name is Stephen Tyrone Johns.

(Via Hot Air)

He died doing his duty.

Please also read this (via Instapundit). People like James von Brunn don’t know why the Holocaust Memorial Museum matters to Americans; they just know that it does matter to us, which is apparently enough.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Mostly because I’m going to go rent it now. So, we say goodbye to Forbidden Planet, and say hello to Gran Torino, which will probably be Clint Eastwood’s last significant feature film.

Wow. I grew up watching this man.

I will hide nothing from you: I think that this theory is absurd, and I am prepared to believe it anyway.  Via @baseballcrank:

‘Whack’y Kung Fu

Wow, but the New York Post is good at headlines.

A secret sect of kung fu assassins could have silenced actor David Carradine as he delved into their shadowy activities, according to his family’s lawyer.

In a twist that could be straight out of one the “Kill Bill” star’s movies, attorney Mark Geragos suggested that Carradine may have been killed as he tried to uncover groups working in the martial-arts underworld.

I am prepared to believe it primarily because it is, in the end, a far more reputable end for David Carradine than the rather depressing, and embarrassing alternative*.  There are times when you have to embrace objective reality, and there are times when you probably shouldn’t.  I see no real harm in ‘probably shouldn’t,’ this one specific time – as long as it’s understood in advance and it’s aboveboard that that’s what happening.

So… secret kung fu assassins. No problem.  We’ll go with that.

Moe Lane

*Which all of you know by now, and which I am going to avoid bringing up, solely because it bothers Little Miss Attila a little when somebody does.

International Zionist Conspiracy heard to murmur to White House, ‘You’re welcome.’

You know, I always knew this about this guy.  He had the look.  The look that tells you, “If you just wait patiently, make an interrogative noise every so often, and occasionally let the silence loom a bit… why then, I’ll start telling you about the Jews.”

Asked if he had spoken to the President, Wright said: “Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me. I told my baby daughter, that he’ll talk to me in five years when he’s a lame duck, or in eight years when he’s out of office. …

[snip]

Wright also said Obama should have sent a U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Racism held recently in Geneva, Switzerland, but that the president did not do so for fear of offending Jews and Israel.

“Ethic cleansing is going on in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing of the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don’t want Barack talking like that because that’s anti-Israel,” Wright said.

And now you know why Barack Obama’s Speech on Race : A More Perfect Union – an at-the-time venerated speech where the then-candidate could no more disown Rev. Wright than he could the black community, a month or so before Obama went ahead and disowned him – currently ranks #50,841 on Amazon.

To give you a baseline: They Saved Hitler’s Brain clocks in at #32,438.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

So I was sent this, and I laughed, and I wondered to myself, Do I want to bookmark this site generally?

Then I read this:

Lawyer Charged With Billing During Sex

As I think I have mentioned before, surprisingly few jurisdictions actually have rules making it unethical for an attorney to have sex with his or her client.  It is never a good idea (okay, almost never), but often is not technically a violation of ethical rules.

Billing a client for work not actually done, however, is unethical, and combining these activities by billing for time spent actually having sex with the client is definitely frowned upon.  There is no question about that.

The Times Online reported last month that a woman in London had sued her barrister for allegedly billing her for time during which she had reason to know he was not giving her legal advice.  Ms. Anal Sheikh, about whose name I have nothing at all to say, except that this report did not come out on April 1, and also that it seems more likely to be the name of a movie about the incident than the name of a plaintiff, sued her barrister on the grounds that he had billed her inappropriately.  She had hired Marc Beaumont under an arrangement that was based on a fixed fee of 120,000 pounds, but also provided for additional hourly billing in the event of “unforeseen and urgent work.”  I think she concedes that he did engage in unforeseen and urgent work, but presumably argues that it has to be law-related to qualify for additional payment.

…and that convinced me that the answer was ‘yes.’

I had to look it up, too.

8,188.82 miles away from Washington, DC (if this site is to be believed), which is actually about 8,000 miles less than I expected. Then again, there probably isn’t anything there except empty ocean*, and if the administration was just going to dump terrorists into the water it would have said so.

Palau (Who?) to Take in 17 Uighurs

The obscure Pacific nation of Palau, one of the world’s youngest and tiniest countries, has agreed to take in the 17 Uighurs — Muslim Chinese — currently being held at Guantanamo.

President Johnson Toribiong announced in a statement to the Associated Press that Palau “agreed to accommodate the United States of America’s request to temporarily resettle in Palau up to 17 ethnic Uighur detainees.” He said their resettlement in Palau would be “subject to periodic review.”

[snip]

The US government has pledged $200 million in aid to Palau, but a White House official denied that money, for development assistance, had anything to do with the Uighurs going to Palau.

No word from Jake whether the official was able to say that with a straight face.  Well, that’s how the game is played.  See also Hot Air and AoSHQ for some healthy doses of cynicism; mine below the fold. (more…)