Moe Lane

…is out, and it’s (as usual) good.  A taste:

Let’s put this year into a full-body scanner and check out its junk, starting with…

JANUARY

…which begins grimly, with the pesky unemployment rate remaining high. Every poll shows that the major concerns of the American people are federal spending, the exploding deficit, and — above all — jobs. Jobs, jobs, jobs: This is what the public is worried about. In a word, the big issue is: jobs. So the Obama administration, displaying the keen awareness that has become its trademark, decides to focus like a laser on: health-care reform. The centerpiece of this effort is a historic bill that will either (a) guarantee everybody excellent free health care, or (b) permit federal bureaucrats to club old people to death. Nobody knows which, because nobody has read the bill, which in printed form has the same mass as a UPS truck.

I miss his blogging.

I feel sorry for Greg Mankiw: I really do.  Here he is, living a life that allows him to place articles in the New York Times – which is not a bad place to be – and he publicly mucks it up by publishing a piece that crashes and burns on the first word of the title.  The title is “How to Break Bread With the Republicans,” and as advice goes it is… not bad.  Absolutely useless, but not bad.  But it’s still absolutely useless, primarily because it assumes (as the “How” in the title shows) that the President simply doesn’t know how to reach out to his Republican opposition.  Trust me, President Obama knows: he simply doesn’t want to.  Obama doesn’t want to because… well, there are multiple reasons. (more…)

Not to be unkind – OK, that’s a big, fat, juicy lie; it’s all about being unkind – but if MSNBC is interested in finding out why Decision Points is a bestseller, possibly they should solicited the opinion somebody who’s actually written a book? – Because I went over to Amazon, actually; and while I was able to find the author page for George W. Bush readily enough, this is what comes up when you punch in “Alex Pareene.”  Which I suspect is diagnostic, in its way*.  Although I suppose that I shouldn’t take this entire exercise in futility on MSNBC’s too seriously: even Pareene looked like he was phoning in the snark (and I’m being generous in scoring it as ‘snark’).  Ach well: as (I think) Stephen King said that (I think) Bob Dylan said, when they give you forks and knives, you have to cut something.

Via Hot Air Headlines; see Newsbusters for more scorn towards Pareene and MSNBC.

Moe Lane

*Although I will agree with this Pareene person that the Kindle does make it easier to buy books.  I’m actually reading Decision Points on the Kindle right now; but I was planning to buy it anyway.  It’s a pretty good read, not to mention a good tool for refreshing my memory about the events of the last decade.  We did go through a lot back then, just didn’t we?

I only vaguely remember Streets of Fire: it was always on HBO after a while, which is probably diagnostic.  It had a good scene of the hero opening up a butterfly knife, I think.

I Can Dream About You, Dan Hartman

Moe Lane

PS: Because the damn thing was on the radio this afternoon, that’s why.

“I lost.”

Needless to say: talk is cheap.

(Via POWIP) …OK, manatees don’t have thumbs.  But if they did, they’d be using them to show their support for the outflow water from the Big Bend coal station in Tampa, Florida.  You see, it’s gotten rather cold in the Gulf of Mexico this year – we will now pause while the fundamentalist Greenies solemnly declare this to be the fault of the dark god Globalwarming* – so the manatees have been going places that are generating more heat.  Such as the Big Bend coal plant, which is apparently such a [popular manatee destination spot] that the plant has a manatee viewing center for the benefit of tourists and/or marine biologists.   It’s apparently been a bad year for manatees freezing to death – which leads one to the conclusion that if you hate coal in Florida, you hate these guys:

And if you do… you ought to be ashamed [of] yourself, Gaia-cidist. (more…)

You may recall from last week that Ms. Carol Shea-Porter got herself in a bit of hot water over the following quote about the secret cabals out there trying to destroy our democracy, or something: “They’re in the halls of Congress everywhere, and it means, for example, that you sit on a committee and you say something about concern about Chinese influence or something, you don’t even know if in the next election, somehow or another, they manage to send some money to some group that now doesn’t even have to say where they got it.*”  This gem was from a ABC News article wherein the news group interviewed four politicians who had their heads handed to them in the last election, so as you can imagine, there was some bitterness involved.

Now, WMUR has decided to chime in on this, indicating that Ms. Shea-Porter** is attempting to ‘clarify’ the story, which was widely seen as at least implying that the former Congresswoman was blaming her election loss on rampaging Chinese hordes.  The claim is that Shea-Porter was speaking generally, and that she had not intended to suggest that said Chinese influence had had anything to do with her election.  This argument will probably work for anybody who thought that Ms. Shea-Porter was a shining example of Congressional majesty – which is to say, the class of people who are often impolitely designated as having ‘room temperature IQs.’  For the rest of us: read on. (more…)

…but it’s a slow day, sorry.  I’m waiting on an opinion on a post title before I post and crosspost.

I have to take issue with the title of Richard Fernandez’s article on the coming, temporary rise of anarchism within the Left (“The Crusade of Innocents“): there’s nothing particularly innocent about the anti-globo anarchist blackshirt Left.  Then again, there’s nothing particularly ‘anarchistic’ about those fools, either: if you want proper anarchism (not to mention a more moral one) go look up the more… committed… anarcho-capitalist libertarians, who at least have the saving grace of not routinely going out and throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. (more…)

OH, I’M SORRY: AM I TALKING TOO LOUD? GIVE ME A BREAK: IT’S ALMOST 11 AM, YOU ALL SHOULD BE SHOWERED AND FED AND READY TO HAVE A NICE, QUIET AFTERNOON TAKING DOWN THE LAST OF THE CHRISTMAS STUFF.

Yes, so I had one (1) beer last night and watched Superman: Doomsday on this Netflix On Demand service that I’m trying out, in lieu of going out and drinking tequila until oblivion at somebody else’s place, then sleeping on the floor.  That’s what happens when you have two kids and a forty-year-old metabolism: you learn to pace yourself.

BUT IT WAS A NICE MORNING: WE HAD PANCAKES… OOPS, I’M TALKING TOO LOUDLY AGAIN.  SORRY.