Moe Lane

The formal capitulation took place yesterday, and signals an end to Gov. Dayton’s ill-conceived, ill-timed, and ill-executed attempt to dominate the Minnesota legislature in the same way that predecessor Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R, MN) did during his term in office.  The very short version, for those not following along: Minnesota Republican legislators wanted a $34 billion dollar, two-year budget with no new taxes; Dayton wanted $3 billion in business-killing tax hikes.  Republicans told him no, and sent him a budget, which Dayton vetoed.  The Minnesota government shut down – which meant, among other things, that Minnesotans were in critical danger of running out of beer and not being allowed to fish.  Faced with such proven evidence of abject incompetence and idiocy on Dayton’s part, eventually the Governor was brought to heel like a whipped dog; his formal capitulation soon followed.  Final score: $35.7 billion over two years with no tax hikes – and legislators in Minnesota have to pretend that Gov. Dayton was not savagely politically beaten.  No, seriously… apparently this is supposed to be framed as being a ‘compromise.’

Interestingly enough, post-capitulation news articles on this don’t seem to mention Pawlenty nearly as much as they did, pre-capitulation.  Although that may just be a sort of terrible pity towards Dayton, who did turn out to be a very slender, and trivial to break, reed…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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They have come.

Fear their wrath.

Via @markknoller.  Who is, of course, completely unmoved by the whole thing.  Yup.  Yes, indeedy.

Finishing Harry Turtledove’s The War That Came Early: The Big Switch (latest in a goood WWII alternate history series, not to mention one that ominous as all hell) and starting Gail Carriger’s Heartless (The Parasol Protectorate) (latest in a good steampunk/Victorian urban fantasy series, and YOU JUST SHUT UP YOU SHUT UP RIGHT NOW)*.  As I noted, both are good, but they have somewhat… different… mindsets to them.

So it goes.

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So, let’s walk through this interesting defense-via-faint-damnation of Aaron Swartz by Timothy B Lee.

• Timothy B. Lee’s article, summed up, is as follows: Aaron Swartz was right to hack into JSTOR and take all those articles without paying for them, but he went about being right very, very stupidly by physically breaking into things while stealing downloading other people’s articles. [Somebody on Twitter made the objection that double-quotes suggest a direct quote, instead of me just summing up Lee in a mean and vicious manner.  Being magnanimous in victory and all that, I'll be nice and 'fix' it. - ML]  This is a standard telecommie (one of my readers at MoeLane.com prefers ‘infosocialist,’ which works too) defense; which is… interesting.
• Well, who is Timothy B. Lee?  Well, his Forbes profile says that, among other things, he’s an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
• And when you go over to Timothy Lee’s Cato Institute profile, it notes there (but not on his website’s disclosure statement) that Lee “was the co-author of RECAP, a software project that promotes public access to federal court records.” (more…)

Verum Serum is perfectly correct: we either have a cash reserve of 3.2 trillion in our Social Security lockbox, or we do not (we do not, by the way).  If we did (we do not), then the President’s bluff of not issuing Social Security checks would have been even more stupid than it first seemed.  Since we do not have that reserve, it is irresponsible for the Democrats to pretend that the money is there – but that’s actually an incidental point; the true point is that Jan Schakowsky can’t have it both ways.  She has to pick one narrative, and live with the consequences.

But it’s fun to watch her try to squirm off of the hook.  Yeah, call your hosts ignorant some more there, Jan.  That’ll shut them up… no, no it did not.

Moe Lane

*That is me being nice.

Admittedly, given that this website model involves having to look at things like this (NSFW*), I can’t say that I blame him, much.  ‘This’ being a look a the divorced-from-market-pressures wing of the modern arts (pretentious interpretive dance sub-faction): a fun game is to see how far you can get in the videos without succumbing to the desire to start bouncing spoons off of the foreheads of the people involved in making them.

(pause)

Video 1, 38 seconds.  I wonder how far David got?

Anyway, up he goes in the blogroll.

Moe Lane

*Don’t expect salaciousness, though.  Oh, my, no.

April In Paris, Count Basie

Yup, redoing this one too.  CAPTAIN AMERICA IN TWO DAYS.

One thousand, three hundred and twenty-four words; that’s how many words it took for Salon’s Bob Calhoun to make the case (including, I expect, to himself) that it’s OK for liberals to be into Captain America*.  It’s kind of sad, really: can’t the stone-cold hardcore Lefties just like Cap for what he is? Yup: rhetorical question: if they did, they wouldn’t have tried, I don’t know, shooting him in the back or something.

Which reminds me: “Cap was right.”

Moe Lane

*The answer to the question “Whose side would he be on?” is, by the way: America’s.  That’s sort of the point of Captain America, really: we’re all expected to work out what he’s a symbol of on our own and stop bugging him while he’s out fighting Nazis.

His observations about the Winklevoss twins, who were apparently all involved in that Facebook thing (sorry: I didn’t bother watching The Social Network). I won’t spoil your fun by giving you a transcript, but I am forced to agree with him.

Well, not ‘forced.’

When the first North Carolina redistricting map came out at the beginning of July,  Democrats of course bawled like stuck calves.  Speaking objectively, this wasn’t a surprise: the way that it was set up, it put four Democratic Congressmen – Larry Kissell, Mike McIntyre, Brad Miller, & Heath Shuler – at a serious disadvantage in the 2012 elections.  Put simply, the map threatened to flip NC from 6/7 GOP/DEM to 8/5 GOP/DEM, or even 10/3. If you examine the previous map, you’ll understand why such a dramatic shift; the Democrats went notoriously overboard in gerrymandering in 2000, when they controlled the process.  In short, we had a humdinger of a karmic adjustment going on in North Carolina.

But then something interesting happened: Rep. GK Butterfield (D, NC-01) started complaining.  Rep. Butterfield is a beneficiary (along with Rep. Mel Watts of NC-12) of the racial gerrymandering system set up in response to the Voting Rights Act; and he made some rather pointed objections to the first map, arguing that it ‘disenfranchised’ some of his former constituents by moving them into majority-white districts.  North Carolinan Republicans thought about it – and must have decided that they agreed, because they went into the maps again and redrew both Butterfield’s and Watt’s districts to make them more in line with the VRA’s perceived guidelines.

Of course, that meant that they had to… make some unavoidable choices: (more…)

This is why they have Wikipedia, Contessa: it’s so you can look up the people that you’re interviewing (Mo Brooks, AL-05) beforehand – and thus not end up looking like an idiot.

Well. More of an idiot, at least.

Moe Lane

PS: Who here thinks that Brewer just assumed that nobody from Alabama can even spell ‘economist,’ let alone be one?

[UPDATE]: Heh.  Ed Morrissey twists the knife a little when it comes to academic qualifications.  I’m not exactly sure why journalism isn’t an Associates Degree, myself – or maybe vo-tech?

Jim Geraghty, towards some self-identified rubes (in this case, wealthy moderate Republicans turned off by THAT WOMAN) who just got the recent disappointing news that Chris Christie is not running for President:

Dear wealthy moderate Republicans: I mean no disrespect, as you’ve made more money than I’ll probably ever earn and you’re quite accomplished in your fields. And like you, I find Chris Christie to be a bold and inspiring leader, who makes a very intriguing option at the national level someday.

But not all of us are shocked and stunned about Obama’s class warfare and his demonization of you and the sense that he doesn’t think of himself as your president too. Some of us spent two years telling anyone who would listen that he was a lot more liberal than his bland, blank-slate rhetoric suggested. And was all of this worth it because you “couldn’t live” with Sarah Palin? Really? The prospect of having her living at the Naval Observatory was so epically offensive to your sensibilities that you really thought this, and all of the economic joy we’ve endured for the past 30 months, was the better option?

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