Moe Lane

The question before the board: below is a word picture of the reaction of NPR listeners to Tuesday’s State of the Union address (this can fairly be called a ‘receptive audience’ for a Democratic President).  They were asked to describe the speech in three words: the larger the word in the picture, the more it was used – which presumably means the biggest word is one that can be reasonably be seen as the word that people will tend to most associate with the speech.

The word of the day was apparently ‘salmon’:

(H/T: @jeffemmanuel)

So here goes: Did President Obama intend for his speech Tuesday night to be about salmon? – Serious question: the President has a definite problem with generating memorable bits on his own for his prepared speeches*, and at least this one was a deliberate joke.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Now that the first rush of secular Messianic hysteria has subsided, can we all just admit that President Obama ripped off “Yes we can!” from Bob the Builder?  We’d be better off as a country if we just faced this unfortunate truth head-on, as it were.

Most of the Republican-themed political cartoons in this slideshow were wishful thinking, fairly naked agitprop, pretty dang stupid, or a combination of all three – but I look at this one and ask myself, Did the cartoonist really mean to pay us this compliment? Because it’s true: the Republican party did make a wide turn to the Right in the last election, and we did knock the Democratic party off of a cliff in response.  I understand that Democrats would rather think about three Senate retentions than about the fact that, say, they effectively lost control of most of the Midwest/Appalachia, but at some point they’re going to have to confront their problems…

I’m not one to subscribe to theories of societal guilt, but seriously: somehow this… this… this can be traced back to us. I’m quite certain of it.

Endhiran Tamil DVD with English Subtitles

Sorry?

Moe Lane

PS: Saw this on Twitter; don’t remember where, and not sure if the person who showed it really wants to given “credit” for finding it.

Yeah, I know: Inception was starting to get stale.  I picked The Eagle Has Landed mostly because of this inside-blogball political piece demonstrating that there ain’t nothing so stupid that you can’t get a Media Matters for America hack like Eric Boehlert to confidently argue its side, but that’s not really relevant.  It’s a good flick – and if you don’t get the joke, well, I guess that means that you need to see the movie, huh?

Moe Lane

I don’t know why he’s bothering to yell at the President over this, though: the question of whether Harry Reid has the ability to get earmarks passed into legislation was abruptly settled last November.  The House has banned them, and in case anybody was wondering whether the Republican base considers that ban to encompass the conference process where the differences between the Senate and House versions of a bill are resolved, let me clear that up: the Republican base does so consider it.

And the Republican base will get very, very loud if it even looks like the House GOP is wavering on this issue – which, I hasten to add, it does not currently appear that they are doing.  I fully expect them to stay fully righteous on earmarks, in fact. But it’s just best that everything be put on the table, all spelled out and everything, just so that there are no unfortunate misunderstandings later.  I’m sure that we all want to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings, don’t we?

Via @amandacarpenter.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Getting rid of Phil Hare in IL-17 last year was one of life’s little pleasures – originally because Phil Hare was an odious little apparatchik toady who inherited the seat and kept it from inertia, but later because I grew to like Bobby Schilling.  Small business guy, pretty friendly, enjoyed taking whacks at Hare at every opportunity: what wasn’t to like?

Turns out that Representative Schilling hasn’t lost his taste for afflicting the comfortable: he’s publicly taken up the President on Obama’s kind offer to talk to Republicans about fixing the health care bill.  Bobby’s got a bunch of things to discuss:

• The individual mandate.  Which is on track to be thrown out as unconstitutional.  Oopsie!
• The 1099 disaster.  Short version: Obamacare added legislation that would force small businesses to have to make truly insane amounts of disclosure on their transactions.  Obama opposed fixing this until after his party got shellacked in the midterms.
• Schilling’s family’s Health Savings Account.  Which is on the chopping block once Obamacare is fully implemented, and so much for keeping your health plan if you wanted to keep it (Schilling chose not to use the Congressional health plan).
• And, oh yes: the general lack of transparency in the Obamacare ratification process.  Although the election of Bobby may be taken as a sign that the first corrective measures along those lines have been taken.

(more…)

…was, overall, not an advantage for the President: it made things dull.

Well. Duller. You kind of need that seating polarization to give you the feedback at how well or poorly the President is doing at the SotU. Mind you, the seating buddy thing also did something really, really cruel to President Obama: it denied him an opportunity to look over the crowd and think to himself Damn, but we got our heads handed to us last year.  That’s something that he really, really needs to remember for the next two years, lest he end up watching the 2014 SotU address from a private residence in Chicago.

Hey, if I thought that he was actually listening to me I’d never be writing this out.  It’s not like the President has me over every Sunday for cakes and tea…

Moe Lane

…is of course the title of this book byNewt Gingrich: Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract With America.  Which is a book that I have never read, and probably will not read – I’m not that big into political books, mostly because I already produce enough amateur punditry to not really need outside sources – but if the President is so determined to make Winning the Future a Google search term I might as well cash in on it.

Remember: filthy lucre, folks.  Filthy. Lucre.

Moe Lane

If you’re a webcomic artist who is not drawing a politically-themed webcomic, do your readers a favor and not drop politically-based entries at random, and without warning.  Particularly if you think that you can be extra-rude because there’s not a chance that one of them will be reading you.  It jars.  It certainly makes it abruptly more likely that you’ll never get a link again.

Yes, xkcd gets away with it.  You are not xkcd.

Thanks in advance!

Moe Lane

PS: I’ve pretty much dropped the few political-themed webcomics I was reading, mostly because I’m trying to find a place where I can stop thinking about that sort of thing for a while.

Lola, The Kinks

It was this or a Buffy musical number.

This is me!

I want to throw Gabby Giffords off of the House Armed Services Committee until she’s recovered from her assassination attempt!  I thought that it was important because without that vote we’d have NINE more Republicans on the committee than Democrats, not eight!

(pause)

I can count up to nine!

(pause)

I was almost carried away by members of my own party and beaten with sticks!

(pause)

I memorialized my cat, Gretzky!

Moe Lane

The most exciting point of the SotU was when my kid dropped and broke a water glass.  Tells you something that I missed thirty minutes from that and story time, and it didn’t make a darn bit of difference, really.