Moe Lane

After being raked over the coals by his own comments section for taking seriously his – girlfriend’s? I’m uncertain – fairly pointless observation that suspected traitor and terrorist Faisal Shahzad’s house was foreclosed, Ezra Klein huffed in a follow-up:

I thought I said pretty explicitly that speculating about why a terrorist commits a terrorist act is a mug’s game…

What he actually said was:

That said, you of course don’t want to speculate on why someone “really” did something. The hearts of men are opaque, and motives are complex.

Ah, ‘complexity.’  A favorite refuge of the intellectual who has realized, deep in his oh-so-opaque heart, that he once had to make a moral choice – and that he chose poorly.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Although we probably want the Gulf oil slick to churn more, if I’m understanding the experts properly.  Anyway, I believe that the term of art here is ‘oops.’

Though his agency was charged with coordinating the federal response to the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Department of the Interior chief of staff Tom Strickland was in the Grand Canyon with his wife last week participating in activities that included white-water rafting, ABC News has learned.

Other leaders of the Interior Department were focused on the Gulf, joined by other agencies and literally thousands of other employees. But Strickland’s participation in a trip that administration officials insisted was “work-focused” raised eyebrows among other Obama administration officials and even within even his own department, sources told ABC News.

Via AoSHQ, and there’s not much to say further about this specific situation – but it’s stories like this that make me essentially discount the meme that the Democrats are going to avoid a drubbing in November because they’re forewarned about the possibility of disaster.  They were also forewarned that the media will cheerfully focus on any hint that a public figure is dithering during a natural disaster, too – and yet Strickland still went whitewatering.  You see, it’s not enough to know.  You also have to do…

Loathe as I am to link to Mickey Kaus* until after the California primary is over, the fact remains that I saw this Fred Barnes WSJ article via his site (H/T: Instapundit):

Washington has never been held in lower esteem by Americans than it is today. Yet those in control of Washington—President Obama and congressional Democrats—are bent on enacting a series of sweeping domestic policy changes this year that have one thing in common: They are unpopular, in whole or in part.

This is unprecedented and a bit weird too. A revival of civility and an end to the ugly political polarization in Washington—goals stressed by Mr. Obama in his presidential campaign and again last Saturday in a speech at the University of Michigan—won’t be furthered by passage of an unpopular agenda. A more likely result is years of partisan resentment and bitter fighting over efforts by Republicans to repeal the unwanted policies.

Mickey calls this a ‘mad duck’ kind of situation, and while I give him points for partisan consistency (Mickey’s solution is to limit Republican wins, in order to keep the Democrats from being too insecure) he is nonetheless displaying partisan thinking. To put it simply: any Democratic Member of Congress who signs off on this in 2010 after winning re-election will have a very miserable 112th Congress. Any Democratic Senator who signs off on this while being up for re-election in 2012 will have to explain that to the voters, more or less constantly.

Are you paying attention to that, Jeff Bingaman? Sherrod Brown? Bob Casey? Kent Conrad? Amy Klobuchar? Herb Kohl? Claire McCaskill? Ben Nelson? Bill Nelson? Debbie Stabenow? Jon Tester? Jim Webb?  – Because we are.

Moe Lane

(more…)

It’s been that sort of day.

Iron Man, Black Sabbath

Not… bad. Just that sort of day.

It Happened Here is speculative: I’m trying to convince myself that owning it is worth almost a month’s allowance. There isn’t a local library that has it, you see (amazing how more useful a source that gets in general once you have kids).

And farewell to Firefox, which probably is at the library. I wonder whether that’s a reflection on my priorities, or its.

Hey, is this not Freddie Mac’s strategy?

Freddie Mac is asking for $10.6 billion in additional federal aid after posting a big loss in the first three months of the year. It’s another sign that the taxpayer bill for stabilizing the housing market will keep mounting.

Asking the government to keep you afloat as an alternative to actually operate under sound fiscal principles, that is. Of course, I neither:

• Hemorrhage money from every fiscal pore; nor
• Own my very own Congressman (Hi, Barney Frank!)

…so I suspect that my request is going to go precisely nowhere. But that’s OK: this situation is an excellent motivator.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

I had the opportunity to talk with Texas Railroad Commissioner* Michael Williams (R) today on the spill in the Gulf:

It’s a shame that he’s not a Senator right now, but it’s always a pleasure to talk with Mike.

Moe Lane

*For those unaware: the RRC doesn’t involve itself with railroads; it oversees Texan energy development. Hence the interview subject.

Listen in here.  Try to ignore cranky baby.

Elections have consequences for the other guy, too.

Could be, could be:

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is invoking a state anti-fraud law to demand the University of Virginia turn over years worth of documents related to climate scientist Michael Mann, targeting about $500,000 in grants that funded Mann’s studies.

Cuccinelli, a Republican who is separately suing the federal government over regulation of carbon emissions, issued the school a civil subpoena late last month probing “possible violations” of the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act by the former U.Va. professor. Mann, now a professor at Penn State, is famous for creating the controversial “hockey stick” graph charting a spike in global temperatures.

(more…)

Not ‘unfortunate’ because I think that it shouldn’t have been written: ‘unfortunate’ because I wish it didn’t have to be.

Have you ever tried to tell a petulant child to eat his spinach or he won’t get his dessert, and had the child respond by throwing flaming gasoline at you? If so, then you know quite literally how the Greek prime minister feels.

That’s from RS’s own Francis Cianfrocca… err, for The New Ledger.  And the news is… well, financial people tend to see opportunities in every situation that affects the market, up to (but not quite including) ‘multiple asteroid strikes in the Atlantic Ocean.’  I’m pretty sure that the rest of us are in deep trouble, though.

Via Instapundit, via Dan Riehl, your shocker of the day:

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. (AP) — A real estate broker says the Times Square bombing suspect told him years ago he disliked President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.

Igor Djuric (JOOR-itch) represented Faisal Shahzad (FY’-sul shah-ZAHD’) when he was buying a home in 2004. Djuric says he could not remember the exact words but said Shahzad made clear he didn’t like Bush or his policy in Iraq. He says the comments were not hateful, but he was surprised to hear them because they hardly knew each other.

Now, clearly your standard antiwar BDS sufferers do not decide to take things to the next level and decide to go commit acts of treason against the USA.  The percentage is almost infinitely small, in fact.  But it’s also looking fairly clear by now that Shahzad was one of those fragments of a splinter of a sliver percentage that would snap – or he was a sleeper and was planning to do it all along.  Either way, why did he wait so long?  …oh.  Right.  He was possessed of a bowel-liquefying fear of what the previous administration would do to him and his fellow-terrorists if Shahzad tried anything.  This is an attitude that the current administration should be doing more to foster among our enemies.

And by ‘more’ I mean ‘at all.’

Moe Lane

This is old.

I don’t care.

(more…)