Moe Lane

Salt, too.

Let me just add my name to the list of people visibly itching to bounce a salt shaker off of the FDA’s collective forehead:

The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.

…because, of course, the FDA has nothing better to do with its time.  Look, I understand that the nanny-state Left doesn’t trust its own judgment and ability to make informed decisions, and that’s fine.  In fact, I agree with them: I don’t trust their judgment or ability to make informed decisions, either.  But why do they insist on trying to interfere with my judgment or ability to make informed decisions? – Aside from them generally being annoying neo-Puritan gloom-magnets, of course.

At any rate, I can’t wait to see the FDA explain to the American people why they can’t have proper bacon anymore…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

How awkward for the Democrats.

Buoyed by an electorate that is exceptionally sour on national Democrats, Republican Tim Burns has a 44-41 lead over Democrat Mark Critz in the special election to replace John Murtha in the House.

[snip]

…Burns is winning over 22% of the Democratic vote compared to Critz’s 10% of the Republican vote. Burns also has a 51-31 lead with independents, although there are fewer of them in this district than most.

Critz is currently pretending to be against the health care debacle, just like Bill Owens over in NY-23 did before Owens started warming the seat.  Critz will, of course, not be permitted to take that stance, assuming of course that he somehow manages to take the seat…

Moe Lane

Have you contributed to the Tim Burns moneybomb yet?

Because surely you don’t think that getting Establishment Democratic support from the mainland comes free, do you?

With corruption running rampant through the ranks of the Democrat party in Washington, Hawai’i Democrat candidate Ed Case looked the other way when he hired Washington political consultant Fred Yang of Hart Research to do his polling. Yang has previously worked for disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.

Before you dismiss that language (ultimately from the HI GOP) as being just a bit overheated, check out what the well-known right-wing mouthpiece Huffington Post said about Yang, back when he was better known as ‘Advisor B:’ (more…)

This has been just an awesome fund-raising strategy for the DNC, hasn’t it? Via Gateway Pundit, our latest brain-dead dupe of the Democratic party is one Lawrence Pidrman, 2008 donor and 2010 threat-maker:

FBI agents and representatives with the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office said they arrested a Spring Hill man on a charge of threatening harm against U.S. Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite.

The Brooksville Republican’s office received a “telephonic threat” on March 25 from an unidentified male, authorities said.

Late Sunday, FBI agents and Hernando deputies arrested Erik Lawrence Pidrman, 66, in connection with the threat. The charge involves “threatening to assault or murder” a U.S. official, according to FBI Special Agent Dave Couvertier.

So we got this. We got the New Orleans thing, which is looking a lot like some of the Left’s blackshirts deciding to get some pro malo work in (vicious assault on a woman thrown in, free of charge*). And, hey, via @stoo11 it turns out that somebody threw a Molotov cocktail at Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s (R) spokesman’s house today.  Although the police are still working out who specifically did that one, so no word yet on how much hypothetical money the hypothetical attacker hypothetically gave to Napolitano’s last gubernatorial campaign.

Yes. This angers me.  Because it’s not stopping, and it probably won’t stop until something happens that makes it impossible to ignore nationwide.  And the people who are encouraging it don’t seem to care that they’re playing with mercury fulminate.  Because they want to raise money, and all of this is just an unfortunate by-product of the procedure.

Moe Lane

*They got a taste for it in the 2008 elections, you see.

…not that you can tell from this link; anyway, because of that I ended up watching this.

Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?, She & Him

It was frankly better than the ‘official’ video.

He’s running in the CT-04 primary; his general election opponent would be freshman Jim Himes, (Cook rates the district as in play as Likely Democrat).

Dan’s site is here.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) And the guy who found it did what any self-respecting geek would do; he sent it in to Gizmodo, which then proceeded to subject it to a verification/analysis program that would do credit to a technology assessment team sent in to survey a flying saucer crash.  Seriously, I was wishing that we had had these people around during the Cold War, reverse-engineering and analyzing Soviet equipment; and then I realized, Hell, we probably had.

I found this seriously weird: it was the camouflage case that threw me.  Somebody was worried that people would notice that this iPhone was different from everybody else’s iPhone.  And they were apparently right.

Moe Lane

PS: Note: I own neither a JesusPhone nor a Crackberry, thus making me agnostic on this issue.

Because if you are, you have a destiny.

Congress may be fined tens of millions of dollars a year under its own health-care law, in part because the bill dumps members of Congress and their staffs from their current health-care plans.

[snip]

Before Congress incurs any fines, a complex series of events would be required to happen under the law. Generally speaking, an lower-tier aide — one not making a six-figure salary like some 2,000 House employees — would have to apply for government subsidies. The way the law works is that employers incur a $2,000 or $3,000 fine for each employee, depending on the circumstances, if only one of their employees obtains the subsidies.

So one lowly staff assistant could think he’s just getting some health-care help, while actually triggering a $50 million annual fine for Congress.

Embrace your destiny.  Start the ball rolling.  Force the Obama administration to demonstrate – once again – that their slipshod and slapdash approach to legislation requires constant intervention to keep even themselves from the consequences of their actions. Here is your monkey-wrench.  There is some exposed machinery.

You know what you need to do.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Background here, for people who haven’t been paying attention.  Anyway, I have really one more observation to make on the subject: if you want to know who is taking the POTUS’ Shilling, look to see who is trying to explain away the White House’s entirely unforced error, by any means possible.

That is all.

[UPDATE]: Instapundit readers.  And you know?  I think that I was referencing this.  The series, certainly; and I remember reading the interview.

(H/T: Instapundit) Let me note this paragraph of this post, which has by the way probably one of the most subtly depressing pictures that you’ll see today:

It is also worth pointing out that there are likely well over a billion people on earth who currently don’t interact with formal economies or technological society at all. They will be very well adapted to a post collapse world, you should find some and make friends. They will likely be far more helpful than a manual on restarting the internet, because they know how to gut a deer.

Unfortunately… no. I think that it was SM Stirling who noted that preservation of archaic skills and techniques occur in rich societies, not poor ones: rich societies are the ones who can afford to have hobbyists who can make and sell, say, spinning wheels to other hobbyists. Poor societies go with cheap, mass-produced crap made elsewhere. In other words, poor people do in fact interact with technological society, and in some ways are more dependent on it than the inhabitants of rich ones; they just can’t manipulate it to their benefit.  Which is why they’re still poor, frankly*.

Ironically, if we do have a worldwide collapse the groups most likely to survive will be communities more than 200 miles from a major North American city.  Who will then probably not need the highly elaborate information preservation systems that the post is advocating, and who will certainly have individuals in it who already know how to gut a deer.

Moe Lane

*I make no judgments or pronouncements about why they can’t manipulate it, merely that they can’t.

2008:

“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”

2010 (bolding mine):

…since any Social Security plan would probably preserve benefits for those nearing retirement, it would not help the administration achieve its goal of reducing the deficit to 3 percent of gross domestic product, from 10 percent, within a decade.

One way to reach that 3 percent goal, by the calculations of Mr. Obama’s economic team: a 5 percent value-added tax, which would generate enough revenue to simultaneously permit the reduction in corporate tax rates Republicans favor.

(more…)

I met him at the last CPAC, and he’s a good guy and a good blogger: and he’s going through a rough patch right now. Hit his tip jar if you were going to hit mine. Heck, hit his tip jar even if you weren’t going to hit mine.

Technically via Instapundit, although I figure that I would have seen it in the morning.