Moe Lane

Hot Air’s Allahpundit, on why the North Koreans suddenly decided to relax restrictions on their markets before everybody quite died of starvation:

The key to this[...] is last year’s currency exchange, in which the NorKs tried to counter inflation by announcing that 100 units of the extant currency would henceforth only be worth one unit. No problem there — except for one small detail. They set a limit on how much currency each citizen could exchange, so if you had the equivalent of $100,000 stashed away in “old” money and the exchange cap was set at $100 of “new” money, guess what: You just lost the equivalent of $90,000. With people’s savings up in smoke, a new round of starvation duly began and now they’re trying to head it off by all but declaring defeat at the hands of the vengeful ghost of Adam Smith.

(more…)

OK, let me walk through this.

1. They needed a jacket for a scene in the movie Twilight* – no, I have no intention of seeing the series, unless there’s hella more decapitations and stakings added to it – so they sent out somebody to go buy one off-the-rack.
2. Like everything else involved with Twilight*, people go insane over the jacket.
3. The people who made Twilight* forget to get any kind of product placement agreement.
4. The people who made the jacket decide to re-release the jacket, and mention “Hey!  This is the jacket Bella wore in Twilight*!”
5. The people who made Twilight* are now suing the people who made the jacket that Bella wore in Twilight*.  They want all the jackets destroyed, too.

Wait, what?  When did the people who made Twilight* buy the rights to the jacket that they had Bella wear in Twilight*? Lawyers confuse me.

Moe Lane (more…)

…because FITS News is trying to inject himself* back into the narrative again by endorsing Nikki Haley, the woman who he lied about having an affair with.  That’s a safe link to Stacy McCain’s site; I’m not inclined to reward exhibitionists.  Which is also why I’m not fronting this post.

But if I can offer a piece of advice?  On a purely technical note, what’s happened here with regional blogger Will Folks is that he recently discovered that if he voluntarily wired his genitals into a light socket and flicked the switch, it can sometimes produce a certain amount of, ah, renewed vigor.  And that’s clearly all very gratifying to a certain type, and all that – but if done it too many times, not only will the vigor not return; one ends up with genitals that have the same color, consistency, and indeed chemical structure of burnt-out charcoal.  Not that it stops the sufferer from continuing to flick the on switch, of course.

It’s too late for Folks, but people wishing to avoid his fate should take heed.

Moe Lane

*Normally I’d say ‘re-inject,’ but let’s just say… no.  That’s far too crude an observation for either one of my sites.

PS: One of my peers over at Hot Air summed it up perfectly in their Headlines feature.  It’s so nice to see a[n] expert at work.

PPS: And another of them, over at AoSHQ.  Folks seems to have developed quite a negative reputation among major league Right-bloggers.

Crossposted to RedState.

That’s what you do when administration officials act suspiciously.

This one goes out to all those Democratic staffer new hires out there:

Rep. Darrell Issa, the conservative firebrand whose specialty is lobbing corruption allegations at the Obama White House, is making plans to hire dozens of subpoena-wielding investigators if Republicans win the House this fall.

[snip]

Issa has told Republican leadership that if he becomes chairman, he wants to roughly double his staff from 40 to between 70 and 80. And he is not subtle about what that means for President Barack Obama.

Be wary. (more…)

And they wondered why we looked askance at putting somebody in office with no executive experience.  Byron York points out  how the President apparently thought that offshore drilling was ‘absolutely safe’:

There was one particularly striking moment in President Obama’s widely panned Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil disaster. About midway through his talk, Obama acknowledged that he had approved new offshore drilling a few weeks before the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion on April 20. But Obama said he had done so only “under the assurance that it would be absolutely safe.”

Absolutely safe? Even before the Gulf spill, few defenders of offshore drilling would go that far.

Read the whole thing, particularly the bits where administration officials are falling all over each other to deny that they’re the ones who used the dread phrase.  In the meantime – since apparently I, a liberal arts major with a degree in English lit and some grad school work in library science, have more of a grasp of offshore drilling operations than the three-brained Vulcan genius elected to the Presidency in 2008 – let me explain what offshore drilling is.

Offshore drilling is when you go out onto a big pool of corrosive liquid that will kill you in minutes if you’re not careful, and days if you’re careful and unlucky (we call this an ‘ocean.’ Once you’re on this ocean, you take a big metal needle and you jam it into the rock at the bottom of the ocean, hard enough that it will break through the rock and hopefully find a big deposit of a flammable, toxic, explosive, and volatile complex hydrocarbon under pressure (we call this ‘oil.’  Assuming you find any oil, you then suck it up with a metal straw and bring it to shore.

Don’t spill any. Or set it on fire.  Or have it explode, then set the ocean on fire.  That would be… bad.

…And that’s offshore oil drilling.  Valuable?  Yes.  Worth doing?  Certainly.  Vitally necessary for the continued smooth operation of modern society?  Only the real dolts – and I’m talking a level of doltishness found among, say, people who think that the existence of ubiquitous electric cars doesn’t imply the existence of ubiquitous nuclear power plants – would say no.  ‘Absolutely safe?’  Heck, no.

Moe Lane

PS: By the way, Mr President: the person who told you that?  Yeah. Fire that person.

Via the Daily Caller we get to see the latest use of mass therapy to treat the crippling scourge of liberal  lack of self esteem.  Using your money.

If you think $50,000 doesn’t buy what it used to, think again. For that rough sum, a professor at UCLA has agreed to draw up a report that proves opponents of the Democrats’ health-care bill aren’t motivated by a sense of fiscal responsibility or a general distrust of back-room deals, but by race.

The kicker? Taxpayers are funding the study.

According to the study’s abstract, provided by the National Science Foundation, a government agency under the control of the executive branch: “This research project attempts to provide further evidence for this Obama-induced racialization by pinpointing the extent that health-care opinions are influenced by racial attitudes and determining Obama’s causal role in racializing public opinion about a policy that has no manifest racial content.”

(more…)

Seldom does one see a music video so visually at odds with its aural component.

Fat Bottomed Girls, Queen

1978 was weird.

In that I am associating it with feelings of sorrow and melancholy…

…and I’m not sure why. The music, perhaps? I mean, as art it’s very interesting and uses technology in a clever way; obsessively, perhaps, but then obsession is hardly unsurprising in art. It’s probably not meant to make people sad, and yet it does. Or at least it does me.

Odd.

The title will make sense in a minute.

[UPDATE] More from Politico and Big Government.  And if you’re ever on the other end of this, the NRSC wants you to remember: don’t be like Alexi Giannoulias’ staffers.  No touchies.

Alexi Giannoulias (D CAND, IL-SEN) needs to hire a better class of goon.

Not so much for the specific details here – interesting how quickly the Left goes vigilante over cameramen, isn’t it? You’d think that the first thing that they’d do would be to call in security; but nope, give a Democratic campaign guy five-to-one odds in his favor and suddenly he’s a tough guy – but because right now the last thing Giannoulias needs is for any excuse for people like me to mention Giannoulias’ latest lie about his family’s mob bank:
(more…)

I had an urge to write a book today on the 2008 Democratic primary. I mean, I have a thesis. I have an idea for a rough outline. I know the subject well enough to do the research. I even have a title: Power Gaming: How the Obama campaign ganked Hillary Clinton’s nomination.

Please tell me that there are shots for this.

Or, Why Barack Obama Will Win the 2012 Democratic Nomination.

A good number of people – on both sides of the spectrum – are allowing themselves to speculate on the previously-unthinkable scenario that possibly, just possibly, the President might be successfully challenged in the primaries in 2012.  This is America, right?  People come out of nowhere to win elections all the time.  Why, look at President Obama!  He did precisely that in 2008.

Yes.  That’s why he’s redesigned the system to keep it from happening in 2012. (more…)

Since Mary Jo Kilroy (D, OH-15) is apparently unclear about this entire causality thing, allow me to remind her of her recent history.

• October 3, 2008.  HR 1424 (TARP) is passed in the House.
• November4, 2008.  Mary Jo Kilroy is elected to Congress.
• January 3, 2009.  Kilroy is sworn in as Congresswoman.
• January 21, 2009.  HR 384 (TARP Reform and Accountability Act) is passed in the House.  Kilroy votes for the bill, and thus preserving TARP.
• January 22, 2009.  (via Third Base Politics) A ‘resolution of disapproval‘ of releasing more funds to TARP is passed in the House.  Kilroy does vote for this; however, this is after the Senate version was defeated, thus making it what CQ accurately called a ‘hollow gesture.’
• December 11, 2009.  HR 4173 (The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009) is passed in the House; a motion to recommit is defeated.  Kilroy votes for the bill and against the recommit, and thus preserving TARP.
• June 17, 2010.  Video surfaces at the Jawa Report showing Kilroy claiming that she voted against TARP.

(more…)