Moe Lane

“Like Sherman through Atlanta,” I was told.

Hee.

This is as about as exciting as it got, sorry:

Man lives after ‘driving car over Grand Canyon rim’

A man survived a 200ft (61m) drop in the US state of Arizona after apparently driving his car off the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, authorities have said.

Well, it’s a Wednesday.

Moe Lane (more…)

Not that I intend to get sucked into the FL-SEN primary quite just yet, but this line from Ace about Florida primary candidate Adam Hasner made me laugh out loud:

I am completely against choosing political candidates based on irrational, tribalistic ethnic appeal, in all circumstances and based upon sacred principle.

Unless it works in our favor. In which case… okay.

Particularly since normally we’d be talking about going a little bit incremental, given that it’s a Democratic-held seat and all that.  But that’s the thing about getting a couple of wins; it makes you hungry for more.

Moe Lane

BEWARE!

In the latest event, a sword-wielding ninja smashed 11 cars in South Union Township, PA. and tried to stab a man who confronted him, say police. Santino Guzzo said he heard glass breaking, found the ninja hiding in a yard, and was cut in the hand during the ensuing ninja escape.

“He was like a gazelle that just got attacked by a lion,” Guzzo told the Pittsburgh Trib. “He got up and fell, and got up and fell. Then he jumped off a cliff.”

Guzzo reported that he “did not move with the grace typically associated with a ninja” and that he therefore “will not live in fear of the ninja’s return.”

By the way, Boing Boing:  the plural of ‘ninja’ is ‘ninja.’ Yes, yes, I know: English traditionally doesn’t give a [expletive deleted] what the grammatical rules are for other languages.  But, given that ‘ninja’ means ‘night-clad assassin of DOOM’… well, do you want to offend them with your barbarian’s defiling of their native tongue?

That’s what I thought.

Moe Lane

…and don’t do a very good job of it, really. The Orlando Sentinel reported that Rep. Daniel Webster got heckled by “members of progressive groups such as Moveon.org and Organize Now,” while Allen West got screamed at by a woman later identified as being a former radio host for Air America (remember them*?).  A few things to note about this:

• When the newspapers are taking the time to note that hecklers are professional activists, then the activists are officially Doing It Wrong.
• And the reason why the activists are officially Doing It Wrong is because the goal of the exercise is to upset and dismay the legislator that you’re trying to target.  During the health care town hall meltdown, what one took away from it was the way that Democratic legislators ran and hid from their own constituents.  Politicians who didn’t – like, dagnabbit, Barney Frank – generally came out of the situation with little trouble.
• And in fact neither Webster nor West were particularly upset nor dismayed at the reaction.  Webster kept patiently explaining his votes and calmly engaging the screamers.  West bluntly told his screamers that they weren’t going to intimidate him.

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…as @allahpundit just tweeted, the birth certificate nonsense isn’t the biggest nonsense of the morning:

The brutal crackdown by Syrian President Bashar Assad may finally be getting the attention of world leaders — but apparently not enough to stop Syria from becoming the newest member of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Of course they did.  It’s times like this that make me wish that my life had save points.

Moe Lane

Much like similar laws passed in states like Wisconsin and Ohio, the legislation will go after public sector union abuse of collective bargaining over health care.  Let me refresh people about why that’s important: it’s important because the public perception of benefits packages has traditionally been that they are somehow fundamentally different than wages; this despite the fact that a person who used to have, say, $5,000/year’s worth of health care but now has $10,000/year has effectively gotten a $5,000 raise.  But since it’s not seen as a raise, many public sector unions have had free rein in effectively bargaining for more and more benefits every  year, in lieu of technical raises.  Which is what this legislation addresses:

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

[snip]

Under the legislation, mayors and other local officials would be given unfettered authority to set copayments and deductibles for their employees, after the 30-day discussion period with unions. Only the share of premiums paid by employees would remain on the health care bargaining table.

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A long-delayed scalp for ‘em; Sen. Dick Bryan of Nevada (following in the dubious footsteps of fellow-Democrat Sen. William Proxmire) came close to killing off the Allen Telescope Array back in ’94, but private contributions saved it.  That can happen, when the government’s not sucking up too much of the wealth… which is, alas, not an accurate way of describing either the Federal or California state government, these days.

But, hey!  Don’t worry: that 2.5 million dollars a year is going to be spent right here on Earth!  Admittedly, it’ll be spent on government subsidies to reliably Democratic donors, but that’s what happens when you try to pretend that basic scientific research is more important than important things, like keeping public sector unions sweet.

Moe Lane

PS: Hey, I’m not the one who gutted the funding.  Blame the NSF and blame the state of California.  Which is to say, blame the Democratic party.  When we were running the country the budget could stretch to sums of money like this…

OK, this was going to be the song of the night…

…but (Thanks to garfield minus garfield) now I’m kind of creeped out about using it.  Even if I do normally use these things as an excuse to put up an Amazon.com link.

That’s pretty… middling decent.

Thought that would get your attention: anyway, Ace of Ace of Spades HQ is having a little fun hacking his way through the deliberately-produced tangled thicket of weighting and changes in methodology and redefined standards that goes into Harvard academic rankings.  Conclusion?  He estimates that the President has an IQ somewhere between 110 and 120… which dovetailed neatly from this estimate of 116 from 2008.  Which is perfectly respectable, of course…

…for mere mortals.

But is it fair?  Bless your heart, but why should I care?  If the President’s refusal to release his college transcripts require us to go out and calculate Obama’s (apparently not all that impressive) intelligence by hand, as it were – well, that’s his fault, not mine.  You see, in the 2004 election the existing narrative regarding Bush vs. Kerry was that the Senator from Massachusetts was clearly the more intellectual of the two… a narrative that persisted up until 2005, when it came out that in point of fact John Kerry actually had slightly worse grades in college than George Bush did.

So.  116 IQ.  If the President wants to push back on that, he’s welcome to release his college transcripts – and maybe give the right-blogosphere one heck of a black eye in the process.  Lord knows he could use a win right now…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

The International Association of Fire Fighters’ Big Labor bosses have decided to, ah, reallocate their resources in advance of 2012:

As newly elected Republican state legislatures aggressively push a slew of anti-union measures, the International Association of Fire Fighters is freezing its federal political spending and shifting all resources toward its beleaguered state and local colleagues.

It’s kind of a shame that they’re not going to urinate away another fifteen million in the next national election – although possibly the ordinary, decent fire fighters who get stuck with the bill being run up on the Democrats’ behalf might find this to be a distinction without a difference.  For my own part, I’d rather have whatever electoral wars that are going to take place next year take place in the state legislature, and not Congress.  Aside from everything else, it shows who’s actually winning in the first place.

Moe Lane

Sorry, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t recognize the essentially anti-Semitic nature of the anti-Israel movement.  And neither am I going to pretend that I take said movement’s agitprop seriously, either.  The flotilla that got intercepted last year while trying to break the Gaza blockade was providing materials to build bunkers and fortifications for Hamas, which is of course a terrorist organization dedicated to killing every Jew in the world. That’s why the Israelis intercepted the flotilla.  Some of the idiots on the flotilla resisted, and some of the aforementioned idiots got killed. And now the Hamas-lovers are going to try to break the Gaza blockade again… and the Israelis will intercept them again; only this time I would suggest that the IDF not bother with paintball guns first.

Yes.  Paintball guns.  Hearing that, you’d almost think that the IDF has the same regard for human life as civilized people.  But that’s surely impossible, of course: and if you don’t believe me, just ask the antiwar movement.  Once you start them up, one of them can go on for hours about the perfidious Jews Israelis… (more…)