Moe Lane

Like the Movie/Book of the Week, or the daily music video.  Only, I’m not sure what it should be.  It should be:

• Hopefully interesting;
• Hopefully useful;
• And hopefully revenue-generating.

Suggestions? – Bear in mind that, on the grid or no, I don’t have the money to budget regular product reviews, and people don’t send me stuff to review, either.

Well, this is rich.  In the process of complaining about how the White House seems to be a combination of Mayor Daley and Barney Fife – no, really, that’s explicitly the two figures that they used – Politico reports:

One senior House Democrat said it is baffling “how one group of people can be so good at campaigning and so bad at politics” — a phrasing nearly identical to that of a second veteran House Democrat who expressed the same sentiment.

(H/T: Instapundit) No, what’s baffling is that there are senior members of the Democratic party who are actually still possessed of the belief that the Obama administration was good at campaigning. I mean, I understand that it’s necessary to keep telling the rank-and-file that they won in 2008 because their leader was off playing… what’s the phrase? “12-dimensional chess?”… but surely the higher-ups need to be firmly in contact with Reality Non-Unicorn, yes? (more…)

Hey, weird historical fact: did you know that there was a time in history when the term ‘Jewish’ actually had connotations of cowardice attached to it? No, really! There was this entire bizarre stereotype where Jews were supposedly fearful and unwilling to confront those who opposed them.

Unlike, you know, this kid, who calmly walked into a crowd of screaming California leftists while waving an Israeli flag.

Via Hot Air Headlines.  Watch to the end, where as an added bonus you can see two of the finest products of the Californian public school system.  If by ‘finest’ one means ‘most depressingly typical.’

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

So I will.  If you are a geek, this is going to make you feel a whole hell of a lot better about life.

I promise.

Via AoSHQ Headlines. (more…)

I devoutly hope that it was meant as a joke – only nobody else got it, and the originator of said joke watched in steadily-increasing horror as the ad went on to completion and publication…

(H/T theblogprof)

War, Edwin Starr

There may be some tactical irony going on, here.

Primary’s in a week: Steve’s in the homestretch.

Steve’s site is here.

Crossposted to RedState.

This is the classic movie The War of the Worlds, not the later Canadian series; not that I didn’t like the latter, of course. Pretty good stuff.

And so, farewell to The Musketeer… no doubt through a handy window.

B.R. Myers:

The question of where Europe ends and Asia begins has troubled many people over the years, but here’s a rule of thumb: if someone can pose as an expert on the country in question without knowledge of the relevant language, it’s part of Asia.

- Quoted by The New Ledger’s Christopher Badeux, as part of his elegantly savage takedown of crypto-Durantyites* Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias.  Mind you, I don’t agree with everything Myers writes in that article… but it’s nice to read an Atlantic article where the author has no subconscious need to proactively wince over the magazine’s unseemly fascination with Sarah Palin’s uterus.

Moe Lane

*This was almost ‘neo-Durantyites,’ but I thought that I’d save that sneer for the first really hardcore apologists for Tienanmen Square.

Is this a cry for help?

Because they keep bringing it to the forefront.  Let me set the scene for this: it turns out that the job offer that Bill Clinton had supposedly offered Joe Sestak was in fact a job offer that Sestak could not take and still keep his House seat.  This is important, because Sestak being able to keep his House seat is kind of critical for somebody in the White House not being possibly on the hook for a federal felony.  But when Robert Gibbs gets asked about this, well, hi-jinks ensue:

“The Intelligence Advisory Board, which most reports said this offer was for, that would be a position a member of the House could not serve on,” a reporter said.

“That’s how I understand the way the PIAB is written,” Gibbs said.

“But the memo, it said that this would be a position to serve in the House and serve on a presidential advisory board.”

“Correct,” Gibbs said.

“Well, how could he sit on the board?”

“He couldn’t,” Gibbs said.

“So that wasn’t the offer, then?”

“I’d refer you to — ”

“What position, what board, was it then?  Do you know?”

“I’d refer you to the memo.”

“But the memo didn’t specify.”

“Right,” Gibbs said.  “Thank you.”

The tightrope that Gibbs is unsteadily walking on right now is that while the PIAB clearly isn’t the job that was offered, as long as he doesn’t actually say which one was actually offered he doesn’t have to explain away more awkward details.  Like, for example, that the only other Presidential board offering (the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, or PERAB) would have also required Sestak to give up his House seat, and that it would have been less relevant to Sestak’s life experiences than the PIAB.  Or that there’s a definite contradiction between Sestak’s answer on how many times that Clinton met with him, and the White House’s answer.  Little things like that.

Congressional Republicans are continuing to push at this issue: you’d think that the White House would be not doing its best to encourage them.  Unless they just don’t like Joe Sestak?  He is a swarmy little sort, after all – and it’s all his fault that they’re dealing with this issue in the first place.  It would certainly explain why Sestak is going to be on the other side of the state for the President’s Philadelphia visit…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

As somebody privately noted, the battery was removed first: and where’s the fun in that?

You do have to wonder if it would have been even more spectacular that way…

(Via Drudge) The saw is stuck.

The risky effort to contain the nation’s worst oil spill hit a snag Wednesday when a diamond-edged saw became stuck in a thick pipe on a blown-out well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said the goal was to free the saw and finish the cut later in the day. This is the latest attempt to contain — not plug — the gusher. The best chance at stopping the leak is a relief well, which is at least two months from completion.

Of course it is.

In other news, a tanker full of puppies, cheerful nuns, and plucky orphans has been dispatched to the Gulf region to help with the spill; the SS Molly Brown will be docking at Galveston on the way in order to pick up the world’s greatest living brain surgeon, who will be assisting next week in an emergency procedure to save the life of a brilliant researcher on the verge of making a breakthrough in the field of fusion power.  Accompanying her will be the world’s last remaining stores of live smallpox virus, secure in a pendant around a rhesus monkey’s neck.

Because we might as well get it over with.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.