Moe Lane

I hear that the deeper ideological message on this one is Hey, isn’t it great to watch Nazis get smacked around in a variety of new and exciting ways? – which frankly suits me right down to the ground.  Plus, air-conditioning.  There might even be an opportunity for a cold beer.

Moe Lane

PS: CAP WAS RIGHT.

And did Wu’s old staff know about the incident?

Sorry to put it that bluntly. It’s just that Rep. David Wu (D, OR*) has gotten increasingly erratic… actually, let us not mince words: Wu has been acting nuttier and nuttier for the last year. This RedState diary from February of this year tells what we thought was the tale: strange emails, bizarre statements, erratic behavior… and two pieces of interesting data:

• The first is that Wu’s campaign shut down in the final days of the campaign, after several events (most notably: a series of bizarre, possibly alcohol-related, but not obscene emails and photos sent to staffers) at the end of October triggered at least two interventions.
• The second is that seven members of Wu’s staff (including his chief of staff) resigned in February of 2011.

The (heavy) implication at the time was that the second event was because of the first… which would make this story one where Wu is kind of going crazy, and his staff (not being trained mental health professionals, after all) are quietly extricating themselves from a somewhat awkward situation. Which may not be nice of those staffers, but, really, what were they going to do? After all, it’s not like anyone was saying that Wu did anything felonious…

“Sources: Young woman accuses Oregon Rep. David Wu of aggressive, unwanted sexual encounter”

Well, then. (more…)

Take The ‘A’ Train, Duke Ellington & His Orchestra; vocal by Betty Roche

I think that’s the right one.

I’d make a flippant comment, but there’s some folks in Norway that could use your prayers right now.

I’m honestly sorry to say this, but when you start your article with “Amanda Marcotte is right,” you’ve pretty much just taken your credibility, shot it in the back of the head, and are now frantically digging a hole to bury the corpse in before somebody comes to investigate the loud noise.

The ironic bit? Absent those Fatal Four Words, Krugman’s column might have been seen as a sign that the fever might be breaking: it can be summed up as Obama is actually… really, really uninterested in doing his job and isn’t any good at it, is he? That would have been great: not so much for Krugman’s sake – well, not for Krugman’s sake at all.   It would have been for the sake of all those more salvageable people who shared Krugman’s original delusion that we elected some sort of transcendent man-god in 2008.  Alas, this probably isn’t a harbinger of that, after all.

This is something special, and you can take that any way that you like.  It’s not that teenagers (and, most assuredly, their parents) aren’t inclined to imbue high-school cheerleading with a bit more drama than it deserves: it’s just that usually people don’t make a literal Title IX federal case out it.

In a recent decision, the stately jurists of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit recount a cross between Mean Girls and Bring It On, in which former Creekview High School cheerleader Samantha “Sami” Sanches seeks Title IX relief against the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District for retaliation and sex discrimination. Those are big guns to brandish over the fact that Sami didn’t make the varsity squad, and you can practically see the judges’ pinched noses and thinly veiled contempt in the opinion‘s otherwise dry legalese.

“It’s a petty squabble, masquerading as a civil rights matter, that has no place in federal court or any other court,” the opinion begins. You can see where this is headed from there.

Oh, yes, you can.  Read the whole thing: the footnotes in particular* are not to be missed.  And how train-wreck hysterical is this decision?  Let me put it this way:  somebody went to law school, passed the bar, and became a Federal judge, and what’s his/her reward?  Having to make observations like this:

Being constantly called a “liar” and a “slut” after having been raped is undoubtedly more severe than being called a “ho” once for nabbing one’s friend’s ex-boyfriend.

And that’s not the only place where the judge felt the need to gently introduce the plaintiff to the concept of objective reality.  There’s more.  A lot more: you get the feeling from reading this decision that the judges on the Fifth Court of Appeals were really, really wishing that they could have settled this case on Day Three of the appeals process via gratuitous use of tasers on selected individuals (and I don’t mean the kid)…

Moe Lane

(more…)

The Club for Growth has put out this video showing twenty sitting Democrats and their past ‘support’ of a balanced budget amendment (H/T: Instapundit).

‘Support’ is in scare quotes because it’s all a lie, of course: one of the people in that video is Harry Reid, who is currently screaming about the (popular. Among adults, even) CCB bill because… (more…)

Things like… this.

That this happens probably says… stuff… about me.  And this site.

The first uses an event involving the second to illustrate a point about the third.

Less cryptically: Andrew points out that Rudolf Hess’s body was evicted from its grave after the lease ran out*, cremated, and the ashes scattered at sea – largely because Hess’s grave had become a magnet for neo-Nazis, and nobody wants those guys around.  Which is largely why we threw Osama bin Laden’s rapidly cooling corpse into the Indian Ocean**; let jihadi-wannabes try to cover that in flowers.

No, actually, knowing human beings they probably won’t pick one spot and commemorate the SOB there.  They’ll probably pick three or four, then fight with each other which is the ‘best’ one (hopefully, with live ammo).

Moe Lane

*Apparently you can lease grave space in Europe.  Hell, for all I know that’s the worldwide industry standard.

**Not to mention the Soviets’ Russians’ notoriously tight-lipped non-response to any and all polite inquiries on what happened to Hitler’s body.  I struck out ‘Soviets’ because while I no longer cut Commies any slack, I can’t say that I blame the Russians on this one…

…can stop any time now.

I am almost awesomely cranky this morning.  Not to mention trapped in a house with two small children who do not understand the implications of ‘heat index value of 118 degrees.’

Why did we stop doing stuff like this?

“A Song Was Born,” A Song is Born

It’s good.

Alternate title: The Silence of the Unicorns.

Politico wrote an entertaining enough article on the way that Obama’s 2008 bundlers aren’t going to be Obama’s 2012 bundlers, for various and sundry reasons (including a certain disillusionment with the President); but they made one big howler in the third paragraph: “Campaign officials deny that there’s any “enthusiasm gap,” and indeed the new operation appears to be on track to raise as much money as Obama did in his record-setting 2008 campaign.”  If you click the link, it’s to an older Politico article that gives a number of $86 million for Obama’s second quarter fundraising. Jim Geraghty goes off on this being representative of the President being on track: if trends continue Jim calculates that “[Obama] will raise $602 million, significantly less than the $750 million he raised in the 2008 cycle.”

But even that’s not true. The real number – the one that you have to use if you want to compare it to the $750 million total from the 2008 election cycle – was more around 47 million (the rest represents the DNC).  Punch those numbers in (and assume equal distribution*) and Obama is currently looking at a $375 million dollar haul.  That number will change – if for no other reason than the President’s total-to-date reflects a later absolute starting date this cycle, compared to the last cycle**8 – but for right now he’s in the hole.

Moe Lane

*A counter-argument at this point is that the President is going to replicate the flow of his fundraising – which is to say: 14% of his total will occur in the first year, and the remainder in the second.  With that metric: if it happens, then he is barely going to come within spitting distance of $750 million (note that Politico would then be correct by accident, given that they’re conflating DNC money with OfA money in their original post).  To which I laconically reply: if.

**While simultaneously being an extremely early starting date for an incumbent.  Welcome to politics: here’s your accordion.