Moe Lane

Far Away Boys, Flogging Molly

Via @heminator.

Moe Lane

PS: No, not this Dale Peterson.  But I suspect that they’d probably have gotten along all right.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!

:breathe:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!

So, now it’s wor… Oh, never mind: somebody beat me to the joke already.

:pause:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!

Moe Lane

PS: The best part?  Used to be that these kinds of transactions were vanity purchases on the part of the print entity.

Executive summary: the setup and funding of election recounts is affected, like virtually everything else in politics involving money, by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (otherwise known as the BCRA, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold*).  The Federal Election Committee (FEC) has advised that aid by the national committees in the recount efforts be administered as per the following:

• Direct financial support is limited to $5,000 to a candidate’s recount efforts (the standard amount allowed to PACs), independent of whatever contributions were made to the candidate during the election.  So people and PACs who gave the legal maximum to the candidate before the election may give up to the same legal maximum directly to the candidate for recount purposes only.
• A national committee may also set up a recount fund to pay expenses generated by the recount process, and the recount process only.  Contributions to this fund are likewise subject to the restrictions set up by BCRA for contributions to national committees.

More details after the fold.

(more…)

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I’m putting both of those terms in quotes for different reasons. To begin with (and in reverse order), they’re not ‘tax cuts.’ The tax cuts were done years ago. What the administration is flirting with doing is raising tax rates to pre-Bush levels, in the middle of a sour economy and looming inflation.  I know that the Democrats would like to pretend otherwise, but I’m not obliged to help them.  And ‘temporary’ is one of those fascinating political terms of art that mean their opposite: there is nothing so permanent as an officially ‘temporary’ policy, as we’re starting to see now.

Moving along, David Axelrod today confirmed to the National Journal that the administration was caving on raising taxes.  Admittedly, he was trying to make it sound like the administration was not caving, but that strategy only works when your target audience lacks the mother-wit to click through on links*.  Here’s what HuffPo reported: (more…)

In the process of genteelly begging soon-to-be-ex-Speaker Nancy Pelosi to not run for House Minority Leader, Joan Vennochi issued the usual flatteries about her: that Pelosi had fortitude, that the way the country turned against her was unfair, that Pelosi demonstrated a good grasp of how to wield power, and so forth.  This is a remarkably common theme among the Left, these days: and I suppose that if I was required to deal with the uncomfortable fact that the Speaker-for-now managed to mirror-flip the House in a single election then I’d be grasping at whatever straws that I could, too.

But let’s try to make our analysis of REPRESENTATIVE Pelosi’s job performance reality-based, shall we? (more…)

While I liked how Glenn snuck a Mythos reference* in when he linked to this story about quantitative easing, there’s one small problem with it: Case NIGHTMARE GREEN was at least a plan.  QE2 is at best a Hail Mary pass.

In other news, we’re starting to see the first local stories about rising food prices.  Inflation and a stagnant economy; who would have thought that we’d ever see such a thing?  We’ll need a word for that, I guess.  Hmm… “Inflatnant?”  No, doesn’t really trip off of the tongue.  Oh, well, I’m sure that we’ll find a suitable term.

Moe Lane

*It’s part of the background of Charles Stross’ excellent spy fiction/Cthulhu Mythos mash-up series, the first book of which can be found here.

Fausta’s program; you can listen in via the link. The topic will be the midterms, so you know that there’s going to be some of the gloating and the snickering and the sudden change to sobriety and the going just as suddenly back to gloating.

Good God: the Back to the Future trilogy is 25 years old.  Still pretty definitive when it comes to time-travel flicks, though.

And so, farewell to The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

Hot Air characterizes this story about the inability of younger House Democrats to rise to the top of their party’s hierarchy as “Young Dems wonder: When will it be our turn to lead the party?“  The answer, of course, is “It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.”

No, actually that is the answer.  There are roughly forty or fifty Democratic Members of Congress who are real*; the rest are just there to pad out the caucus.  If the youngsters don’t like it, well, they can have their turn when the current Democratic leadership is done with gloriously driving the party over the cliff… which will, of course, be blamed on everybody except the current Democratic leadership.  Until then, it’s sit down, shut up, and follow orders.  Which the younger House Democrats will, of course, do.

Just so you know: even if the new crop of Republican freshmen was collectively inclined to be as passive the folks that sent them to Washington would pitch a fit.

Moe Lane

PS: This one bit from the Hill article is pitch perfect, really.

Others said Pelosi had won the right to lead the caucus next year through her performance as Speaker. “She’s taken us this far,” Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.) said.

Yes.  Yes, she has.

*At least, from the Democratic leadership’s point of view.

Back in June reports came out suggesting that Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar had lied in a report on the Gulf Coast spill by claiming that a panel of outside exports had peer-reviewed the report’s conclusions, which included a job-killing moratorium on offshore drilling.  After this came out, the Interior Secretary had to retract and disavow any nefarious intent on the administration’s behalf; and you could have believed as much of that disavowal as you liked.  Given that this White House purely hates offshore drilling and jumped at the chance to reverse course on the topic, it was reasonable enough not to believe a word of it.

Well, it’s now confirmed, via an Inspector General’s investigation, that the language in question was actually changed by a staffer to White House energy adviser Carol Browner.  This makes sense; Browner is a notorious Greenie who took advantage of the Gulf Coast oil spill to do a little empire building.  That the report just happened to get manipulated in such a way as to make it appear that the industry consensus supported an immediate moratorium on offshore drilling, and that it just happened to be manipulated by the office of the one staffer whose agenda would be advanced by a moratorium, is being treated as a… coincidence, apparently.  You see, nobody’s admitting any wrongdoing, which is expected to be treated as evidence that there wasn’t any.  And you can believe as much of that as you like, too.

Meanwhile, one Congressman estimated that we lost 12,000 jobs and about 1.8 billion dollars in revenue in the Gulf.  But Browner got the President’s Blackberry number, so: even trade, right?

Moe Lane (crosspost)