Moe Lane

It wasn’t until I read this AoSHQ post about the delay in the detention report (preliminary details here) that I started counting off the months on my fingers.  Six months from July 21st makes… January 21st, more or less.

The work of a Justice Department-led task force, which had been scheduled to send a report on detention policy to President Obama on Tuesday, will be extended for six months, according to senior administration officials. A second task force examining interrogation policy will get a two-month extension to complete its work, which had also been due Tuesday.

[snip]

The officials said the administration remains committed to closing the prison in Cuba by January 2010…

I fail to see how.  After the fold is the relevant text of the original Executive Order: note that it is dated January 22, 2009. (more…)

According to Mike Hendrix, it’s the people who don’t want to talk about things like this at all, at all:

In The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted that the “relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation’s mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime.”

Let me repeat: Control for single-parent families and there are no differences between the races when it comes to crime.

It’s hard to argue that there isn’t a reluctance in this country to discuss the possibility that some of our cultural choices are maybe not working out so hot. Even alluding to it feels kind of strange, really. Kind of taboo – and not in the kinky way; in the ‘we do not speak of this matter’ way.

Jake Tapper over on Twitter was raving about this “typically awesome Robert Krulwich story” (no embed, sorry) over on NPR, so I checked it out – and darned if it isn’t pretty awesome. It’s a nice little popularization of some research on why crows can recognize humans when humans can’t recognize crows – and before you ask what’s the point of research like that, I should note that there’s a bunch of roboticists out there who’d love to hear how the trick’s done, starting with my wife. Nice illustrations, in a non-glitzy sort of way.

There’s also this quiz on crow-identification, which is embarrassingly difficult.

Moe Lane

PS: And thank God, but the remake of The Birds
seems to have stalled. I mention this merely because I got there in my head after musing that the term for a group of crows was a murder.

Good short story, though.

(Via Deceiver) Those wacky Inspector Generals. Always noting inconvenient truths:

Boy, the Energy Department is really having trouble practicing the energy efficiency it keeps preaching: The latest inspector general’s report found that the DOE often neglects to turn down the thermostat, wasting millions of dollars in energy every year.

The latest report found that “the Energy Department failed in many cases to use controls on heating, ventilation and air conditioning that are a primary means of conserving energy during non-working hours,” as Dow Jones Newswires put it. That could have cost the DOE more than $11 million.

Small potatoes, considering that we’re facing the wasting of trillions of dollars every year, for the forseeable future?  Sure.  Could the Department of Energy been even worse?  Undoubtedly.  Is it still obnoxious that, yet again, a government agency isn’t doing itself what it’s delighting in telling us to do?  Ya, you betcha.

Moe Lane

*I swear that this popped into my head before I saw the WSJ title.

Crossposted to RedState.

My RedState colleague Francis Cianfrocca will be doing a daily podcast over at The New Ledger called, obviously, ‘Coffee and Markets.’ Today’s edition is on the current status of the economy, specifically the recession: and how we’re going to discover that ‘ending the recession’ is not the same as ‘things are better now.’ Check it out.

Crossposted to RedState.

(H/T: Instapundit) He does a discreet amount of I-told-you-so in this bit about just how useless that ‘stimulus’ package was for the economy:

…which is perfectly within his rights to do so, given that he turned out to be correct. But it’s actually not too late to do something about that; as Senator Kyl (R-AZ) notes, we’ve not even spent 10% of the money allocated as of yet. We could stop, reset, and try again with something that’s something more than merely a vast payoff for Democrat-friendly groups and factions.  Something efficient, cheaper, and targeted with specific goals in mind.  Easiest thing in the world to do, really.

All the President has to do is get up there and admit that he was wrong, and that we were right, and he needs our help to fix his mess.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

This comment by Jack Dunphy over the entire Gates brouhaha resonates with me:

So, since the president is keen on offering instruction, here is what I would advise he teach his Ivy League pals, and anyone else who may find himself unexpectedly confronted by a police officer: You may be as pure as the driven snow itself, but you have no idea what horrible crime that police officer might suspect you of committing. You may be tooling along on a Sunday drive in your 1932 Hupmobile when, quite unknown to you, someone else in a 1932 Hupmobile knocks off the nearby Piggly Wiggly. A passing police officer sees you and, asking himself how many 1932 Hupmobiles can there be around here, pulls you over. At that moment I can assure you the officer is not all that concerned with trying not to offend you. He is instead concerned with protecting his mortal hide from having holes placed in it where God did not intend. And you, if in asserting your constitutional right to be free from unlawful search and seizure fail to do as the officer asks, run the risk of having such holes placed in your own.

When the officer has satisfied himself that it was not you and your Hupmobile that were involved in the Piggly Wiggly heist, he owes you an explanation for the stop and an apology for the inconvenience, but if you’re running your mouth about your rights and your history of oppression and what have you, you’re likely to get neither.

…because I was actually in a situation like this once. A couple of friends of mine and I were coming back from a play, and the cops pulled us over because a car just like my friend’s had been involved in an armed robbery; and my friend unfortunately looked a little like the suspect. Fortunately, we were all scrupulously polite, none of us had robbed a retail establishment, and we all had identification indicating that the three of us were two doctors and a library studies grad student, not an armed and dangerous criminal gang – which I’m sure was as much a relief to the cop as it was to us. Given that he was risking his life, and we weren’t.

That’s the point: the cop didn’t know that he was dealing with three people who meant him no harm. And at the time, we didn’t really think about how this entire situation (which ranged for us from annoying to funny) looked to him.
(more…)

Sultans Of Swing, Dire Straits

Because I keep hearing this darn song on the radio, and keep meaning to get it out of my head.

It being Sunday, we remove Harry Turtledove’s Hitler’s War – which I will figure out how to acquire in a week or so; and bring in S.M. Stirling’s The Sword of the Lady, which I have an entire month to figure out how to acquire. It’s good for me, really. Teaches me resourcefulness.

Really.

Moe Lane

*Not really. Buddy of mine sent this one along:

Obviously, it isn’t Clive Barker, and it isn’t Clive Barker doing Spider-Man, but if Clive Barker ever did do Spider-Man it would totally rock.

In a kind of disturbing way, of course.

If so, the New York Daily News is being rather artful about it:

Meanwhile, people have been speculating with vengeance since we told you about the former Davis escort who contends Spitzer wasn’t the only governor she romped with. On Friday, when Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell‘s spokesman Chuck Ardo resigned, Ardo insisted his retirement had nothing to do with Gawker and other sites putting Rendell on their short list of pols who may be Governor X. Ardo told The D.C. Write Up that Rendell is not the new luv guv – “no way, no how, no place, no time.”

Many seem to be aching for X to be Arnold Schwarzenneger. While we’re continuing to investigate the escort’s highly detailed story of her three “dates” with him, we won’t identify the chief exec with the prominent wife. But we will say this: it ain’t California‘s Governator.

So Gov. Rendell’s former PR flack’s denial that his former boss patronizes prostitutes gets reported without comment – while unnamed rumors that it was actually Gov. Schwarzenegger get firmly and unequivocally debunked.  Either way, absolutely deniable on the Daily News’ part. (more…)

Yes, I know what the Politico article said.  But this is what is actually happening.  Via Hot Air Headlines:

That spending has already begun, and its level is unprecedented, experts say, both in sheer volume and balance. According to data from the Campaign Media and Analysis Group, most of the ad spending this year has been to support initiatives pushed by Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.

“That has almost never been the case in any administration,” said Evan Tracey, CMAG’s chief operating officer.

Through mid-July, CMAG, which uses automated capture technologies to monitor the airwaves, identified $9.7 million supporting Obama’s recently unveiled health care plan, $4.7 million opposing it, and $19.7 million more in generalized spending by groups staking out positions either before Obama detailed his plan or not directly supporting or opposing it.

In other words, as the largely-imaginary deadline on passing a health care rationing bill looms, the Democratic party is planning to use the August recess to hammer at the opposition of… its own members.  Meanwhile, the Republican party is proving to be more than happy at reminding those members about why they’re in opposition in the first place; what makes it doubly entertaining is that, win or lose, tying ‘moderate’ or ‘conservative’ Democrats to health rationing will benefit the GOP in next year’s races.  As Jeff noted earlier, the American people are by and large not particularly upset with their personal level of care, and they are not going to enjoy having it taken over by the government.  (more…)