Moe Lane

Or what did she do, I suppose.

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

I think that the answer will tell you something about yourself.

Via AoSHQ Headlines.

Moe Lane

PS: I don’t know what the director thinks that the man did next, and I care less.

[UPDATE] It’s Greg Gutfeld, sorry. Shout-out to Little Miss Attila for the correction; hit her tip jar, and all that.

I am almost going to miss MSNBC, once it goes away. Which I suspect that it will: ‘white guys screaming incoherently’ is less demographic gold than you’d think, unless you’re Greg Gutfeld and mocking it savagely.

Via The Other McCain. Seeing as I only watch MSNBC when somebody catches them doing something dumb – OK, I guess that that does mean that I watch MSNBC, then – anyway, I’ve never seen this Dylan Ratigan guy before, I think.  Presumably, I won’t have the opportunity for too much longer, either.  Unless they score a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, of course.  Contra Reason (and via Instapundit), we’re always going to have the NEA around anyway, if only because the Left would whine so about cutting it; and at this point subsidizing MSNBC as performance art almost makes a crazy kind of sense…

The problem is that they don’t want to have to read ten thousand indignant emails, so they hid that as well as they could. The title (“State polls show gathering storm“) is nicely non-specific, the only actual politician quoted is a Republican, and then there’s this paragraph:

The dismal polling doesn’t reveal much about which political party will pay the price in November. And it’s hard to pinpoint how voters will react, since places like California, Connecticut and Rhode Island currently have Republican governors and Democratic legislatures. In Pennsylvania, the governor is a Democrat while control of the legislature is divided between the two major parties.

That was the paragraph that made me decide to go look up the state legislatures on Wikipedia, in fact. And, lo! Of the seven states mentioned in the article:

…the Democrats control all of the state houses/assemblies, and all but one of the state senates. Often by a lot.  And while gubernatorial races will certainly have an effect on state legislature ones this fall, it remains that anti-incumbent sentiment will tend to hurt more the party in power.  Particularly when the party in power favors the policies that are generating the anti-incumbent sentiment.  To give just one example: we’re not seeing a mass movement out there calling for more governmental interference in the health care system – and believe me, the Left has been trying to generate one.   While a Republican candidate or office holder may or may not be able to tap into the mass movement that is calling for less interference, it’s not precisely easy for a Democratic candidate to do so… and not very likely at all for a Democratic incumbent.

But, again: if the Politico actually wrote all of that out they’d get a ridiculous amount of hate mail.  So they didn’t.

Moe Lane

PS: If that’s not enough to make you vote a party-line ticket in November, consider this: redistricting will be coming up, soon.  Some of these legislatures are looking forward to the opportunity to eliminate troublesome Republican Congressional Districts.  Hard to do that if they don’t control the legislatures…

Crossposted to RedState.

I’m sure that this is a metaphor for something:

…but it seems almost a shame to have to pick and choose.

On Speaker Pelosi:

Today her way of handling the problem of the rebellion of Bart Stupak and the other pro-life Democrats was to declare, “Let me say this: This is not about abortion!” Ma’am, to them it is. And until they get language that assures them that federal money will not be used to facilitate abortions, they’re not going to sign on. This can’t be as hard to grasp as you make it seem.

It’s not, but there are certain things that the Speaker of the House does not dare say, and ‘We have to at least pretend that we concede pro-lifers to be actual human beings’ is one of them.  This can lead to interesting verbal gymnastics.

(Via Instapundit) The Hill’s Congress Blog asks a question which has a very obvious answer:

Should Obama get tough with Congress?

or

Should President Barack Obama be more assertive in pushing the rest of his legislative agenda?

…and the answer is, of course, “Yes.” Presidents always need to get tough with Congress.  They particularly need to get tough with Congress when both the legislative and executive branches are held by the same party; when that happens, the former is prone to using the golden opportunity to do something extravagant and stupid… like, say, trying to pass two insanely expensive, ill-thought, transformational pieces of unpopular legislation right after passing a recklessly high, pork-laden spending bill on a party-line vote.  First-term Presidents doubly particularly need to get tough with Congress, assuming of course that they want to also be second-term Presidents.  So, it’s the wrong question.

The right question is:

Can Obama get tough with Congress?

The President obviously can be more assertive – that’s not particularly hard – but whether he’s actually able to make Congress do things has yet to be determined.  There’s been no indication that he even knows how.  And the primary carrot/stick that the administration was going to use for compliance (“I will campaign for Democrats who follow my lead.”) looked a lot more credible as a promise/threat in January 2009 than it does today.  Just ask Governors Deeds & Corzine, not to mention Senator Coakley.

All in all, at this point it may simply be too late for President to acquire any control over the 111st Congress.  And the future leaders of the 112th Congress have been busily taking notes.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

“PLAY SOME SKYNYRD, MAN!”

God, but cover bands on the Jersey Shore hated my crowd.

Sweet Home Alabama, Lynyrd Skynyrd

(Via Liber Ex Machina) Am I weak?

Yes, I am weak. This isn’t the trailer – it’s a good mashup of the 2005 movie trailer – but there is going to be a real one.  It’ll be starring Natalie Portman, who appears to be also a Jane Austen fan; and they seem kind of enthused about sticking with what made Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fun.

Meanwhile, The Whisperer in Darkness movie continues apace.

How nice of the White House to tell us how long they can hold out.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is ratcheting up the pressure on Congress to complete health-care legislation, setting March 18 as the deadline by which a final bill should be passed.

[snip]

The White House deadline means Congress would have exactly two weeks to pass a version of the existing Senate-approved bill in the House of Representatives and then pass a second bill filled with “fixes” in both chambers.

Two weeks. Fourteen days. Three hundred and thirty-six hours. When we run out the clock, the White House will either have to embarrassingly declare that the health care discussion is over for now; or even more embarrassingly admit that they were irrelevant to the health care discussion in the first place. Either way, the longer this is delayed, the more (justifiably) scared and anxious wavering Democrats get.  Already they’re unsure of how much support they’re going to get from the administration on this; and now that it’s been made clear that there’s a firm timetable for withdrawal in place, that’s only going to make the precariousness of their positions even more clear*.

So… we run out the clock.  For the good of the country, and by the will of its people.

Moe Lane

*Unilateral timetables are like that – Wow!  Deja vu!

Crossposted to RedState.

You’ll all be pleased to hear that apparently we no longer have any pressing domestic problems. At least, none that are more important than the need to squash recognition of the Armenian genocide.

White House Rebuffed In Effort to Kill Vote on House Bill Recognizing Armenian Genocide By Turks

The Obama administration asked the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to cancel a vote scheduled for today on a bill recognizing the Armenian genocide. The chairman of the committee, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., is going forward with the bill “mark up” and vote regardless.

The bill, H. Res. 252, recognizes as genocide the “systematic and deliberate annihilation of 1,500,000 Armenians” as ordered by the Turkish government from 1915 to 1923.  It’s the kind of statement then-Sen. Obama supported; as a candidate for president, he said, “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to be that President.”

Please note: this is technically not any more of a broken campaign promise than the broken one that it was before. I’m sure that the President intended to do a lot of things, once in office. Just like I’m sure that the President often means well.  That being said: you do realize that if you voted for this man on this issue you more or less threw your money away, yes? – Which is something that you should really take into consideration, next go-round.

Moe Lane

SO DON’T LISTEN TO ANYTHING THAT HE HAS TO SAY.

Are we clear about that?

Lieberman.

Lieberman.

That means that you can ignore him completely.  Really.  I mean it.  Discount him utterly.

Thanks in advance!

Moe Lane

PS: H/T Hot Air Headlines.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Via Instapundit, Berkeley students are revolting.

A somewhat more measured take on the situation (God knows it wouldn’t be hard) can be found here. Essentially, the students are up in arms because UC-Berkeley students have to pay a whopping 20% of the average tuition for a private, comparable school like Stanford (to use the MercuryNews.com example). They’re having to do this because California keeps spending money that it doesn’t actually have, which makes things like fully-subsidized college educations a thing of the past, at least if your family makes more than seventy grand a year.

Personally, I’d handle this situation by expelling everybody who participated in this thing. Not because it’d solve the fiscal crisis*, but because it offends me that these people so blithely toss around the phrase ‘police brutality.’ We have standards by which to judge that, these days.  Or did we start executing students for protesting these days, and I just missed it?

Moe Lane

*Although if said expulsion didn’t come with a refund, that’d be a good one-time fix.