Moe Lane

You want to tell me how great your candidate for RNC chair is?  Excellent!  Make your pitch.

You want to tell me how awful somebody else’s candidate for RNC chair is?  …well, there are a lot of people out there who I am sure will be happy to take that call.  I ain’t one of them.

Moe Lane

PS: This rule will also be in effect for the 2012 primary season.

PPS: No, I’m not going to name names.

PPPS: I am, of course, happy to see any evidence that a Democrat is involved in skulduggery.

Ed Morrissey and Jim Geraghty are both looking slightly askance at Time Magazine’s choice for Man of the Year – or is it Person of the Year, at this point?  I can’t wait for human-level AI/First Contact with an alien species/successful Uplift: we’re going to have a whole new bunch of speech nannies nagging us for our anthropomorphic* prejudices.

Anyway, the problem here is that Time picked the Guy Who Came Up With Facebook, which is [really killer analogy deleted here as being highly unfair to the Guy Who Came Up With Facebook**].  I’m unsure why Ed and Jim – or heck, me – cares that much about the whole thing, though.  After all, Time is using this annual ‘award’ to try to sell magazines; if you’re looking for cogent analysis of individual impact on the world culture, keep on going.

Personally, I would have picked this year to choose ‘You’ for M/PotY.  At least, in this country.

Moe Lane

(more…)

You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch, Thurl Ravenscroft

Not actually Boris Karloff.

Almost as much as Harry Reid hates working for a living, apparently: the word is out that he’s going to take all that legislation that the Democrats didn’t bother working on when they had a mere 59/41 Senate majority and make Congress work on it over Christmas break… when the Democrats will have a 58/42 majority. He is also blaming this on the Republican party, of course… mostly because Reid is too lazy to come up with even a semi-plausible excuse.  Or possibly too contemptuous of the whole process; I don’t think that we’ve ever had a Senate Majority Leader who visibly enjoys the job less than Harry Reid does.  Why he kept the position is beyond me: he clearly hates it, and he’s not very good at it, and nobody really is better off for Reid keeping it.  It’s a mystery, really.

Anyway, Congressional staffers are no doubt even now calling their relatives and loved ones to tell them that, well, maybe they won’t be home for Christmas after all.  I’m reserving all my sympathies for the Republicans caught up in this last act of petulance of the 111th Congress, of course – but I’d like to remind the Democrats likewise in a vise on this one that it’s their own blessed fault, or more accurately, the fault of their various bosses.  After all, if a majority of Democratic legislators had had the guts to throw out the leadership that led them en masse into a wood chipper this November then maybe more of said legislators’ employees would actually get to go home for the holidays…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

I see that I have gotten your attention.

Via RedState colleague Aaron Gardner comes this report from Germany suggesting that they’ve managed to kill the HIV virus.  As I have had it explained to me, German doctors treating a HIV-positive patient suffering from leukemia (immune system) with adult* stem cells taken from a donor with a particular mutation (one that offers a heightened resistance to the HIV virus).  After two transplants, the leukemia went into remission – and the HIV virus is no longer detectable in the patients bloodstream, after 3.5 years.

This is highly exciting news, but one caveat: this treatment involved first destroying the patient’s existing immune system via chemotherapy and radiation.  Which is better than dying, but it’s not really a treatment that’s currently amenable to mass production methods.  Still: possible first, easy later.

Moe Lane (more…)

Somebody cruel asked former President Carter what his biggest failure was.  His answer? “I guess my biggest failure was not getting re-elected.”

Which sort of misses the point, doesn’t it? Because from what I dimly remember of the time period – and have read since – Carter didn’t lose because of the hostages, or because of the malaise, or because of the stagflation, or even because of the killer rabbit.  He lost because he was… well, Jimmy Carter.  It was a package deal, in other words.

Moe Lane

PS: Also from that interview: “I did the best I could, but I failed.”

(pause)

“You did the best that you could” is what we tell our children in order to keep them from despairing at ever learning how to master the skill of winning, Mr. President.  In an adult such excuse-making is highly unseemly.

…Slate manages to call into question Republican/conservative motivations (apparently, the Right doesn’t really despise pornoscanners and health care rationing), but not Democratic/liberal ones. I swear to God, it’s like these people can’t help themselves.  All Christopher Beam had to do was avoid making a cheap shot for one article and he would have been golden.  But he couldn’t hold it together for long enough.

Depressing, in its way.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Moe Lane

PS: One thing that a lot of people in the Middle forget about defaulting to trying to find ‘bipartisan’ solutions to problems is that such a stance assumes that a partisan solution is always going to be, at best, suboptimal.  Which is nonsense.

…The Walking Dead series now*: this is pretty much everything that I’d be there for. Don’t click on the video if your job inexplicably has a problem with zombies being headshotted; and if your job does, my sympathies.

Via @JonahNRO.

*I don’t have cable TV.

I was going to shake a finger at Allahpundit a little for being dismissive of the concept.  Then I watched the trailer.

(pause)

Yeah, that’s going to suck.

It was my first intention to cheerfully ignore the quote-unquote ‘No Labels’ movement, given that it is yet another iteration of what is a peculiarly American phenomenon.  You see, you get these rich liberals who decide that since the political system is clearly controlled by a shadowy cabal of elites, surely they’d be candidates for membership as the Secret Masters of the Democratic party; then, when they discover that their role is actually to be sheep to be shorn for the benefit of public sector union bosses and government apparatchiks – and that the Republican party insists that their elites actually like America – they get quite huffy and start their own ‘nonpartisan’ little clique.  And so we see here with ‘No labels:’ you can tell that it’s ‘nonpartisan’ because they’ve got Republicans in it, too!  Well, except for that pesky little detail that their ‘Republicans’ can’t win elections as Republicans.  Which just makes them better Republicans, no doubt.  Pure.  Ethereal.  Safe.

But now it turns out that there’s actually a real reason to mention “No Labels:” Ben Smith reports that they stole their design from a graphic artist named Thomas Porostocky.  A very unhappy graphic artist – and for good reason: Mayor Bloomberg has more money than Croesus, which means that he could have easily just paid for the designs that his group stole.  But it apparently didn’t even occur to No Labels to recompense artists for their work; which makes sense, as it’s clearly not as important as electing Democrats by splitting the independent vote away from the Republicans. (more…)

[Forty-five minutes of swearing, struggling, three suppressed attempts to throw the damn thing through the window, and one general network failure later]

I haz a Kindle that works.

‘Course, I don’t have anything to put on it yet, but that’s Step 2.  Even with the slow erosion of Amazon.com revenues on the site, I can probably get a book out of it every month.  A couple, if I stick with some of the more obscure and low-priced ones.

…quick analysis of the Virginia Obamacare court decision (short version: individual mandate unconstitutional, severable from the rest of Obamacare, no injunction on Obamacare as a whole until the Supreme Court takes a gander at the law), I really have only one thing to add: the severability issue was always going to be more of a political issue than it would be a legal one.  We were always going to have a big bite at that apple; Judge Hudson’s declining to address the point doesn’t really signify.