Moe Lane

Guess he’s not counting on the President to campaign for him, then.

Rep. Charles Rangel compared President Obama to former Vice President Dick Cheney Saturday for their shared commitment to the Iraq War, one the Harlem Democrat argues is based on the country’s hunger for oil.

“I challenge anyone to tell me we aren’t there because of the oil,” said Rangel, who kicks off his re-election campaign for a 21st congressional term in Washington Heights Sunday.

“The lack of an honest explanation [for the war] is consistent with Bush and Cheney,” he told the Daily News during an hour-long interview that touched on his ongoing ethics probe, relationship with the President and ability to get work done in Washington.

Via AoSHQ.  Personally, I’m hoping for a nice, nasty, expensive primary here that Charlie Rangel will barely survive.  Michel Faulkner would certainly prefer to face him than somebody with plausible deniability…

Moe Lane

PS: By the way… Barack Obama and Dick Cheney identical?   Not on Obama’s best day, and Cheney’s worst.

I understand and endorse the argument that anti-Semitism needs to be pushed back on whenever possible, mind you.  But when it comes to Helen Thomas specifically… she is old, and angry, and alone; and in a few years she will be dead and I (probably) will not be.  And once Helen Thomas is dead she will very quickly also be forgotten, and I suspect that she knows that already.  So there is nothing that I have to do besides wait.

There is no mercy or pity in this: I waste neither on people who hate Jews. And I say nothing against those less indifferent to her fate than I.

Moe Lane

Of course he does.

This is amusing, in a darkly humorous sort of way:

More recently, Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation and a member of J Street, said in an interview: “America has three choices. Either say, it’s politically too hot a potato to touch, and just pay the consequences in the rest of the world. Or try to force through a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, so that the Palestinian grievance issue is no longer a driving force or problem.” The third choice, he said, “is for America to say, we can’t solve it, but we can’t pay the consequences, so we will distance ourselves from Israel. That way America would no longer be seen, as it has been this week, as the enabler of excesses of Israeli misbehavior.”

Via Hot Air. It’s darkly humorous because there are five options here, not three – which Daniel Levy knows full well. (more…)

Stephen Hunt, British steampunk author (I’m reading The Rise of the Iron Moon right now, having gotten tired of waiting for the American edition to come out), was asked in 2008 about this bloody opinionated Richard K Morgan article.  His response, in part:

A Hugo can be swung by an actively voting population of less people than can squeeze into my local McDonalds, and the people who really vote for my work do so with little slips of paper bearing Her Majesty’s head on them (shortly, said ballot to be widened to include illustrations of US Presidents).

OK, that part was really more tangential to his larger response. Still a good quote.

“THUNDER!”

“THUNDER!”

“THUNDERCATS, HO!” (more…)

Georgia On My Mind (not live), Ray Charles

Just felt like listening to it.  I mean really listening to it.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I didn’t think that such a thing was possible, but I was wrong:

Now build me one with a couple of these mounted on it, and by GOD I will get you all a YouTube video that you will never forget.

[UPDATE]: Good Lord, it’s a tradition.

Literally.

Milwaukee’s Department of Public Works is reporting a series of thefts on the city’s north side. Someone is stealing manhole covers and sewer grates, and neighbors suspect the motive to be monetary.

(Via POWIP) Well, you know this: whoever is steeling this stuff is in good shape. Probably pumps iron. On the positive side, cases like this really test the metal of coppers; on the negative side, these sorts of cases have a magnetic effect on imitators. And then there’s the way that crimes like these can rust away community standards of living…

OK, I’ll stop now.

Moe Lane

The Utah GOP primary is on June 22nd: Tim Bridgewater is one of the two candidates who will be competing for the nomination. He checked in with us today:

Tim’s site is here.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Glenn Reynolds reminds me of this paragraph by Allahpundit in response to the news that the President has been aware of the true magnitude of the BP spill all along:

The real disgrace here is why, if he really did know right away that this was the oil equivalent of an asteroid strike, he didn’t scramble some sort of all-hands-on-deck emergency operation to protect the coastline. Remember, Jindal reportedly requested five million feet of hard boom back on May 2, long after Obama (according to Wolffe) knew about the magnitude of the disaster. By May 24, not even 800,000 feet had arrived. What happened?

So, seeing as it’s been clear all along to the White House that we had an ecological disaster on our hands: why did the President not act in a timely fashion to try to keep the oil off of the beaches in the five Gulf of Mexico states?

Gee, I don’t have the slightest idea.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Personally, I would have thought that any group stupid enough to send in a blockade runner named after a useful idiot who tried to play chicken with a bulldozer would be unteachable, but score one for the human survival reflex:

Israeli naval commandos seized an Irish-owned aid ship [MV Rachel Corrie] headed for Gaza Saturday morning, officials said.

The Israel military said it boarded the ship by sea with the compliance of the crew 35 kilometers (22 miles) off the Gaza coast.

“As far as I know there was no resistance or violence on the boat,” Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman Avital Leibovich told CNN.

The boat was carrying cement, which is on Israel’s prohibited-substances list: Hamas uses the stuff to build bunkers against the day where the Israelis get tired of Gazan terrorists shooting off rockets aimed at Jewish schoolchildren. Which the people who sent the cement know very, very well.  Nonetheless: well done in learning this stimulus: response thing, peace activists! Your educations continue apace: why, if you keep it up and work at it, you might even someday reach the moral plateau currently occupied by cyanobacteria…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Looks that way:

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who left the Republican Party to run for Senate as an independent, has hired a top Senate Democrat’s former chief of staff.

In a just-released statement, Crist announced that his media team will be headed by Josh Isay, who used to work for Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. Schumer is a member of the Senate’s Democratic leadership team and once headed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

More details here (H/T: Hot Air). The company is SKDKnickerbocker, and the anonymous Democrat who noted that this wouldn’t be happening without permission from the White House is quite correct: it wouldn’t be. Naturally, this means abandoning Kendrick Meek (interesting fun fact: he supported Hillary Clinton in the primary), but that’s no obstacle for the Democratic party, particularly since Meek is African-American anyway and thus assumed safe to be imposed upon*. Also naturally, you can assume that Crist will promise to caucus with the Democrats; even more naturally, you can assume that he’ll lie about that, too…

Mind you, all of this assumes that Crist can beat Marco Rubio. Click on that link to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Moe Lane (more…)