A quick observation on the 8-K Fun.

Drawing on streiff’s excellent post: there has been at least one nice repercussion that has come from the entire sordid 8-K affair.  Thanks to it, you can pretty much filter out the ‘geniuses’ with no practical business experience; they’re the ones who have never seen an 8-K in their life, don’t know what one is for, don’t know when one needs to fill one out (or even why), and are especially startled to discover that there have to be fairly stringent penalties in place in order to convince corporations to fill out nitpicking paper-trail bureaucratic clap-trap without having to be nagged constantly for it.

You know.  Idiots.

Megan McArdle is not an idiot – and miracle of miracles! – neither is most of her comments section, for a change.  Gives you an idea of just how comprehensively Waxman – who has apparently never seen an 8-K in his life, doesn’t know what one is for, doesn’t know when one needs to fill one out (or even why), and is especially startled to discover that there have to be fairly stringent penalties in place in order to convince corporations to fill out nitpicking paper-trail bureaucratic clap-trap without being nagged constantly for it – mucked up this one.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Brent Budowsky and the poll-watcher’s delusion.

I don’t normally fisk, but let’s unpack this passage, shall we?  This article – called, amusingly enough, “Matt Drudge and the Republican delusion” – was dated March 25th, 2010 (today is March 30th, 2010):

Recently a Gallup poll, of course highlighted on Drudge, found that Obama’s numbers had (then) turned more unfavorable than favorable.

Presumably this one: 46/48 favorable/unfavorable.

This has (now) dramatically changed, unreported by Drudge, with Obama’s favorables now well above his unfavorables.

Presumably this one: 51% favorable.  March 25th, 2010.
But not this one: 47/50 favorable/unfavorable March 29th, 2010. That’s USA/Gallup: the current regular Gallup three-day has him at 48/46 favorable/unfavorable; check back again at 1 PM EST, but I don’t expect a massive jump.

The generic Democratic vote is leading the generic Republican vote in the last Gallup congressional election survey.

He means this survey: 47/44 Dem/Rep.  March 16th, 2010.
Not the latest one: 44/47 Dem/Rep. March 30, 2010 (no story yet).

The healthcare bill has passed and the president’s polls have moved up. Democratic numbers have crept up.

And, as you can see, they have crept right back down again.  Let’s add two more from Gallup, since we’re here: when they polled on reactions to the bill on the 23rd, the poll numbers were 49/40 in favor… and when they polled it again on the 29th, the numbers were 47/50. Continue reading Brent Budowsky and the poll-watcher’s delusion.

Not precisely the Quote of the Day, William Murchison edition.

More like the From Your Fingers To God’s Eyes of the Day, William Murchison edition:

Every Easter/Passover ABC returns the old DeMille semi-classic, “The Ten Commandments” for renewed viewing. We all could benefit by watching the Egyptians try to build a city by flogging the Hebrews half to death. It works only up to a point: The point at which the taskmasters reduce the work force to stuporous failure or rebellion. Along comes Charlton Heston. We know the rest of the story.

The pharaohs of the Beltway have a comparably odd way of inspiring ingenuity, inventiveness, vision, sacrifice and risk. It amounts to telling the risk takers, thanks, good work, now hand over. An intuition arises concerning the federal method: Namely, that the risk takers won’t be taking much risk before November in the way of new hiring, business expansion, etc. They will sensibly wait to see the American people’s judgment, delivered at the polls, on their government’s half-baked formula for putting Americans back to work.

We’ll see what the Republicans offer by contrast. It helps to remember that Charlton Heston was a Republican.

It’s all about the jobs this cycle.  A lot of people have been calling the health care debacle a ‘Hail Mary’ pass, which is nonsensical: nobody sane expects a program that takes that much earned wealth and sequesters it away into government purdah to somehow create more wealth.  Government never creates wealth.  It ‘merely’ provides the security – both external and internal – needed for others to create wealth.  A lot of people seem to miss this distinction, possibly because they’ve gotten distracted by the ongoing spectacle of the government using up wealth.  The government’s good at that, and it’s usually personally profitable for an inefficiently small portion of the population… so it sometimes looks like wealth creation.  If you’re not paying attention. Continue reading Not precisely the Quote of the Day, William Murchison edition.

Am I the only one who cares about whether the beer’s good?

I can’t excerpt a single paragraph of this without bowdlerizing it; suffice it to say that a minor linguistic oddity (that some perfectly innocent words in German are very dirty ones in English) has been enthusiastically embraced by a British beer company in order to move product.

Which is fine, if a ‘Dude‘ – but what of the beer?  Is it good, or did it lose something going through the horse’s kidneys*?

Moe Lane

*Thank you, S.M. Stirling.

#rsrh Cynthia Yockey enmeshed further in the VRWC…

she did a call-in interview for the Rush Limbaugh show this morning (Mark Steyn guest-hosting: topic was gay conservative bloggers). Via Little Miss Attila.

I’m going to guess that there may have been just the faintest touch of surreality going on, there: speaking as a former Democrat I have to admit that having Rush merely mention one of my RedState pieces caused me to blink, the first time that it happened…

Moe Lane

DNC risks dead GOP Congressman… for $505.

Even the amount is insulting.

As you have undoubtedly heard by now, the FBI has arrested one Norman Leboon for death threats made against Congressman Eric Cantor, in the wake of the Democratic National Committee’s fear-mongering fundraising drive regarding… threats of organized GOP violence. This is not, by the way, the first time that Leboon has fallen for the Democratic’s party cynical agitprop; he was one of the plaintiffs in an anti-FISA lawsuit a few years back. So there’s a history there of him believing whatever nonsense that the Democrats fed him.

Well. Turns out he’s an Obama contributor from 2008, too. See here for the H/T, and see here for a video where he identifies himself as “Norman Leboon Sr.”  Sounds good enough to avoid the question mark I had in the title, so I’d like to ask Brad Woodhouse of the Democratic National Committee something (seeing as he was the guy who so publicly dismissed the need to ratchet down the rhetoric): what are you going to do to get rid of this blood money, Brad?  I mean, personally.

And another question: what were you going to say to Eric Cantor’s wife if the FBI hadn’t caught this guy in time?  Assuming that it wouldn’t have been a moot point anyway.

Brad.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.