Moe Lane

“That’s all I can stands; I can’t stands no more.” – Popeye

Jake Tapper titled the post where he compares President’s Obama rhetoric in 2010 (semantic translation: “I don’t have the testicles to be rude to Republicans at their own retreat.”) to his rhetoric today (I can’t improve on Tapper’s title) “Throw Grandma From the Train.”  Apparently, being forced to abandon his happy-shiny 2011 budget has made the President… well, Obama was already “petulant,” and “more petulant” doesn’t have the same ring to it.  “Childish” or “adolescent” are both overused.  “Labile” sounds dirty. Let’s go with “imbalanced;” it has a certain ring to it.

Anyway: as Hot Air noted, this entire sorry exercise in induced narcolepsy that was the debt speech this afternoon was yet another dreary attempt by the President to use what is an entirely overinflated reputation for rhetoric to get past an unpleasant situation.  Unfortunately for President Obama, this is not 2008, and the media is not full of people eagerly trying to excise their inner racist demons by collaborating in the election of a clueless Harvard liberal who is as about as authentically African-American as I am.  (more…)

I’m not even going to say the name of the person who Jim Geraghty slams here.

If your staff has to leak that you’re the “adult in the room,” you’re not actually being the adult in the room.

Admit.  You don’t even have to click the link to know.

I’ve just had three posts in a row get dynamited before publishing, each due to an inconvenient fact that invalidated the central thesis.  One happens all the time.  Two happens from time to time.  Three?  I may need to drink more coffee, or something.

So here’s Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus stealing a pen.

Daniel Stone of The Daily Beast is being sloppy here…

A new study by the American Red Cross obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast found that a surprising majority—almost 60 percent—of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable. More than half also approved of killing captured enemies in cases where the enemy had killed Americans. When asked about the reverse, 41 percent thought it was permissible for American troops to be tortured overseas. In all cases, young people showed themselves to be significantly more in favor of torture than older adults.

…and you can tell by the fact that he didn’t actually directly link to the survey in question.  At first glance it’s not exactly obvious why: after all, the question that was asked is potentially even more depressing.  The statement that got the 59% approval was: “Torturing captured enemy soldiers or fighters in order to get important military information.”  But it’s not entirely… useful to Stone, because the big question in the US government was never “Is it OK to wire up terrorists to car batteries on a regular basis?”  That was easily answered with a “No.”  The big question was, “Are interrogation techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation actually torture?” – an argument that Stone and his ilk clearly think is “Yes.”

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Road To Nowhere, Talking Heads

You see: unlike Charlie Crist, I could care less. Oh, I won’t fiddle with Byrne’s stuff because it isn’t public domain, but that’s a different issue.

We talked this afternoon on South Carolina’s Spending Accountability Act (which was formally signed into law today). To refresh people’s memories: Governor Haley had campaigned in part on a platform of transparency, with a specific focus on the South Carolinian legislature’s ability to vote on funding issues without their votes actually going on the record. The Governor has long been a proponent of reversing this, and the Spending Accountability Act is the result: it requires roll call votes on bills, particularly ones involving the budget. We spoke on this and some other matters:

Gov. Haley’s Facebook page (mentioned at the end of the interview) can be found here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Background: Cisco is shutting down its Flip camera division, apparently because smartphone cameras are kicking Flip’s posterior.  Glenn Reynolds notes that in a confrontation most people would rather lose their cameras than their phones; I agree with that, but I have to admit that the Flip has fallen out of favor with me as a video camera.  It’s mostly because transferring video from the Flip is… kind of annoying, actually.   I’ve stopped taking it to places, instead relying on my Canon PowerShot SD1200IS 10 MP Digital Camera; I bought that to take pictures, but honestly the video features serve my needs and the footage is saved in a format that can be directly ported over to Adobe.  Plus, the Canon is both lighter and less conspicuous; which may be a feature for some…

My friend and RS colleague Erick Erickson has just put up a post noting that former Governor Tim Pawlenty has picked up a top-notch campaign manager in Nick Ayers.  Erick rightly notes that this is a strong indicator that you have to take Pawlenty seriously as a Presidential candidate; Ayers was actively courted by everybody, and it’s unlikely that he’d sign on with a campaign that couldn’t win.  What I’d like to do here, though, is use this opportunity to point out a video from last year that might help explain why this campaign should be taken as seriously as Erick now is.

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Karma.  It’s what’s for dinner.

A lot of people are going to concentrate on the US House maps. If you compare the old one:

…to the new one:

…you can see why: there are four freshmen Republicans in Indiana, and this map directly helps at least three of them (particularly IN-09′s Todd Young, who gave Baron Hill a somewhat surprising upset last year). It also will encourage IN-02′s Joe Donnelly to abandon his own district in order to run for and lose either the Senate or the Governor’s race in 2012. All of this fairly obvious; but it’s the state house races that are interesting. And possibly a bit of applied vengeance.

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Oh, was that too harsh? I’m sorry: it’s just that I have a bit of a problem with President Obama having things like this written in his name:

When the Equal Pay Act was signed into law in 1963, women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by men. Though women today are more likely than men to attend and graduate from college, women still earn an average of only about 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. Even when accounting for factors such as experience, education, industry, and hours, this wage gap persists. Over the course of her lifetime, this gap will cost a woman and her family lost wages, reduced pensions, and diminished Social Security benefits. Though we have made great strides, wage discrimination is real and women are still more likely to live in poverty. These inequities remind us to work even harder to close the gaps that still exist.

…when as a candidate Senator Obama notoriously hired less women, had less women in positions of authority, and paid them 82 cents for every male dollar. There’s just something about rank, hypocritical self-back patting that grates, somehow… particularly since declaring today to be “National Equal Pay Day” is about that you can expect out of this administration, anyway. Seriously, the Obama administration managed to muck up the passage of the so-called “Paycheck Fairness Act” last year, despite the fact that the 111th Congress had had the bill ready for Senate approval for virtually the entire term, including that one stretch where there was a cloture-proof majority*. And, oddly enough, the Obama administration completely forgets to mention that detail in the course of the aforementioned back-patting about how wonderful the White House is being towards women.

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Fiftieth anniversary of the Yuri Gagarin launch; twentieth [thirtieth] of the first US Shuttle mission.   Normally, my standard reaction to any kind of Commie “achievement” is to offer the Hawaiian Good-Luck Symbol, but Gargarin climbed on top of a pile of liquid explosives that he knew damned well was part of a family of man-killers, then calmly waited while they lit a match*.  So I rationalize that he probably wasn’t doing it for Communism; he was doing it so that Mother Russia could put one in the eye of the USA, and that’s… fair.  Besides, hell, we won in the end anyway.

Via Instapundit.  And here’s an extra bit: superstitions in the Russian/American space program.  Which, before you scoff: liquid explosives.  Lit match.  If these folks need some centering rituals, you let them have their damn centering rituals.

Moe Lane

*Michael Flynn for that image, I think.

Hot Air has a breakdown of the cuts in the CR.  Very short version?  Conservatives have a valid beef: we could have gotten more, although there was a limit at this point to how much could have been hacked out of available funds.

But if you’re a liberal you should be livid at what we got in exchange for letting 330 million in Planned Parenthood funding stand*.

Moe Lane

PS: Now, onto the debt ceiling.

*For now.