Moe Lane

A temporary tax cut, apparently. Peter Orszag has decided that the party doesn’t need to go down with the ship – or, more accurately, the ship’s captain:

In the face of the dueling deficits, the best approach is a compromise: extend the tax cuts for two years and then end them altogether. Ideally only the middle-class tax cuts would be continued for now. Getting a deal in Congress, though, may require keeping the high-income tax cuts, too. And that would still be worth it.

I’d feel bad about the way that the administration is grinding metal on this, if only… actually, I cannot conceive of a situation where I’d feel bad about watching the administration squirm as it realizes that it has to break yet another badly thought-out and hastily-made campaign promise. Although I suppose that we haven’t plumbed the depths of stupidity, at that: the depths of stupidity would be to impose a new tax of roughly the same amount to the average taxpayer and claim that this wasn’t breaking the huge albatross around his neck his most famous badly thought-out and hastily-made campaign promise:
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It’s a website dedicated to promoting grassroots GOTV for the Right, on a practical level: how to do it, how not to do it (particularly if you’re an employer), advice on why you need to do unglamorous, tedious and non-sexy tasks like walking the district to recruit voters and donors… things like that. Of particular interest to conservatives is the emphasis on precinct committeemen (which is something that RedState has brought up in the past, but bears repeating):

Concord Project is up and running today, and they’re looking for people to be involved on the state level. From what I’ve seen and read, this election cycle there’s an existing and welcome interest in GOTV by the Right – a polite way of saying that ‘conservatives are ready to crawl across broken glass in order to vote this year’ – but enthusiasm may be outstripping organizational awareness and skill. Hopefully, this will help in that regard.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

From Cracked.com, of course:

[The villains of Gotham] keep charging at Batman one at a time, even with 13 of their cohorts lying on the ground with broken collar bones. We’re not suggesting they just walk away and give up their life of crime–we understand that anybody who’s signed up to be a henchman for The Joker probably isn’t qualified to do anything else. But maybe you should fall back and try a new strategy. You’re not going to be the first guy in history to punch Batman into submission. Leave until you can come back with some dogs.

Of course, Batman will have a plan for that.

Because he’s Batman.

At least, on our side.  We talk about you like you are a schmuck – which, while rude, also has no relationship to ‘dog’ whatsoever*.

“Some powerful interests that have been setting the agenda in Washington for a long time, and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog.”

However, I would find it very believable that Democratic powerful interests may in point of fact speak of you in such a fashion.  Long tradition in your party leadership, and all that.

Very long.

Moe Lane

*Not to plumb the depths of Yiddish – a language which has almost as checkered and crooked a past as English does – but ‘schmuck’ usually carries the connotation of ‘penis’ (or, more vulgarly, ‘dick’).  Of course, several Yiddish words of roughly equivalent meaning have been known to creep into the language – thus making it tricky to determine which one is best for the job – but that’s part of Yiddish’s charm: it taps into all the languages that Yiddish speakers picked up while they were being kicked around Europe and being put on various enemies’ lists by clinical paranoids.

You simply have to be resigned to that.

…but it is going to be not particularly heavy.  Beautiful day today.  Admittedly, I’m cheating by taking the netbook out to the back yard while the eldest plays in the sandbox, but that’s why they invented wi-fi.

…I would like to note for the record that I don’t give a [expletive deleted] about what color it is, whether or not it looks like the VPotUS seal, or whether or not it’s in accordance with some minor government regulation that neither you nor I have ever heard of before, and probably never will again.  It’s a [expletive deleted] rug.  Presidents have been fiddling with their personal versions for decades.

Deal.

Moe Lane (more…)

This New York Times article was probably not meant to give the game away, but many things are done these days that have had results that were not actually meant.  It was probably not the author’s intent to subvert the obligatory optimism of the article with such a stark headline, either.  Here’s the mistake, in a nutshell: while the title (“Democrats Plan Political Triage to Retain House”) is an accurate enough summation of the article it’s still using a politically disastrous word (“triage”).  Let me explain why. (more…)

…it’s still Labor Day weekend, see you tomorrow.

It’s a gorgeous day out here on the Eastern Seaboard, and I have a book.  Shoo!  The Internet will be here tomorrow.

See Glenn Reynolds and Rich Lowry; my only contribution to this is a bit of confusion that this is somehow surprising.  After all, we are talking about a movement that, when it throws tea into a harbor as part of a protest, does so with ropes attached so that they can fish the tea out afterward.

Because otherwise somebody will have to clean that up, of course.  And it’d be the taxpayers who will have to pay to have it cleaned up.

Not having read American Taliban – and not particularly being interested in reading American Taliban, either – I don’t particularly plan to care overmuch about the blipping thing.  But after flipping through these self-congratulatory missives on how the book sucks just as badly as they think that Liberal Fascism did, I have to say: Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias, and the rest of them seem rather blatantly upset that Markos Moulitsas can get books published and they can’t.  Couple that with an existing desire to malign Jonah Goldberg’s (quite good) book – and if you wonder whether Jonah got under the Left’s skin with his insights, read their complaints and wonder no further – and you end up with this kind of petulant whining.

I’d be sympathetic, except that it’s Moulitsas, which means that this is totally deserved from a karmic perspective.

Moe Lane

PS: My colleague Dan McLaughlin wrote a very good article on this subject here.

UPDATE: I see that Jonah’s noticed this backward recognition, too.

Tell the truth, Spratt.  You mumble when people ask you which district you represent.

It sounds like that book will get at least one South Carolinian purchaser: Spratt’s campaign manager Wayne Wingate, who is completely behind the idea that Osama bin Laden would receive widespread support from Republicans in SC-05.  An opinion that Spratt apparently shares, given that he didn’t immediately turn on Wingate and lay him out on the ground for saying filthy trash like that about Spratt’s constituents.

Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s the report:

“If Osama bin Laden ran in this district as a Republican, he would get 38 to 40 percent of the vote in any election year,” says Wayne Wingate, Spratt’s communications director, as he walks alongside the congressman at the festival. “This is a very Republican district. So you’ve got that plus this tea party angst against any incumbent in the world right now.”

In point of fact, Mister Wingate – and Mister Spratt – if Osama bin Laden ran in SC-05 as a Republican somebody would come up to bin Laden and put a bullet in his brain.  This does reflect a change from our past methodology of capture and interrogate, but better safe than sorry. After all, since January 2009 there’s been a growing understanding among the American people that the political party running things can’t exactly be trusted with keeping the really bad illegal combatants under wrap. (more…)