“…is the seed of the Church.” – Tertullian.
I have prayed for Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani’s safe deliverance, of course. And I would not wish the sin of murdering this man upon anyone, equally of course. But, as Allahpundit noted, “The goal isn’t to kill him but to terrify him into asserting Islam’s supremacy by recanting his beliefs.” Which tells me that the Iranian regime [doesn’t] really understand Christianity nearly as well as the regime thinks that it does.
Moe Lane
I knew that we had (and have!) beaten them like a drum. But I hadn’t realized just how complete their gelding really was until I read this post-from-exile by Matt Stoller about the tattered remnant of the pathetically small Wall Street protests. It’s like Stoller – and by extension, the people that he’s being an apologist for – has embraced every single stereotype ever made about the passive, excuse-for-failure-laden, shallow liberal whiner who thinks that a back-rub circle counts as ‘activism’ and that contemplating one’s navel is the true mark of the intellectual. Between the way that the last administration steamrollered these people, and the way that Obama has decided to be just like Bush (well, Obama has apparently decided to be just like an incompetent Bush), you can only conclude that the antiwar movement has finally gone to Dementia Manor and is now almost happily settling in. After all, they know their place now. They understand what is expected of them. They accept their fate.
Seriously. The last sentence of that Stoller piece should have been This gimp mask is surprisingly comfortable.
Moe Lane
PS: Make me take them seriously.
…don’t look as good as the one in my head. Case in point: I had what I thought would be a highly entertaining slam against duckspeaker Janeane Garofalo (apparently, EVERYTHING she sees is racism, at least when it comes to Republicans*. Including supporting minority Republican candidates) (via @mkhammer). Alas, when I saw the finished product it just looked… lame.
Yes, yes, more so than usual, hardy har har.
Moe Lane
*As a good general rule: when I find an item that has excrement on it, I check to see whether the place where it came from is the source of the excrement. When every item I touch turns out to have excrement on it, after a while I check to see whether the excrement is coming from me**.
**Trust me: if you have kids, then eventually you will have stealth excrement on you.
Well, I suppose that this was inevitable.
A self-styled drug-trafficking group calling itself the “Zeta Killers” claimed responsibility this week for the recent murders of at least 35 people believed to belong to the Zetas, Mexico’s most violent criminal organization.
The claim by the “Mata Zetas” has stoked fears that Mexico, like Colombia a generation before, may be witnessing the rise of paramilitary drug gangs that seek society’s approval and tacit consent from the government to help society confront its ills, in this case, the Zetas.
(Via AoSHQ Headlines) Before you start cheering, the WSJ article goes on to note that these guys (they call themselves Los Mata Zetas, or “Zeta Killers”) are probably not so much ‘annoyed Mexican citizens taking the law into their own hands’ as they are ‘rival drug gang members using vigilantism as a cover’ – although I suppose that you could be a violent drug gang member and still find the Zetas appalling. Which they are. It’s just that it’s an open question whether these people are any better: while the WSJ did report that the group assassinated 35 people, the AP notes that that total “included 12 women and two minors.” While killing hangers-on of a drug gang may be an effective terrorist tactic, it is nonetheless still a terrorist tactic. And it’s a tactic that suggests that angels – even the Old Testament (read: scary) ones – are thin on the ground in Mexico right now. Continue reading Drug-related/vigilante/(both) violence escalates in Mexico.
Reason (and Instapundit) is as shocked as I am: apparently, in the course of fighting the War on Some Drugs, the DEA did a “massive drug raid” in Roswell, New Mexico last week. In the course of said raid, they got a tip that a suspect was at a particular location, so they… Continue reading #rsrh Dog Fails to Bite Man: DEA avoids shooting elderly couple.
I just deleted 400+ spam comments touting tax relief sites.
Re: Your Brains, Jonathan Coulton
I’m… not really allowed to play this one around my wife.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go record a hand clap.
Regarding my previous post: I spoke too soon.
A Florida teenager is behind bars as an accessory to the brutal murder of 16-year-old Jacob Hendershot. But that may not be the most shocking part of the crime – Stephanie Pistey says she believes she’s part vampire and part werewolf.
Ah, Florida. You are like a real-life Weekly World News*, only with an actual body count.
Moe Lane
*See, this is what I’m talking about. This is the good stuff.
…every time I get a new video game*: I spend all my non-politics time on that instead of looking for weird crap on the Internet to mull over, and later point out. Which is great, right up to the point where I have to generate content.
So… anything odd happen lately, I guess? I know about the satellite deorbiting, but I assume from the general lack of green-blowing zombie apocalypse that nothing untoward occurred.
Moe Lane
*KOTOR. Did you know that you can win the game without getting any Force abilities that help your resistance to hostile Force powers? Did you know that not getting those abilities really, still really SUCKS? And did you know that there’s a level 20 cap? Yeah, well, now you do.
FactCheck puts it very succinctly:
President Obama’s claim that he pays a lower tax rate than a teacher making $50,000 a year isn’t true. A single taxpayer with $50,000 of income would have paid 11.9 percent in federal income taxes for 2010, while the Obamas paid more than twice that rate — 25.3 percent (and higher rates than that in 2009 and 2008). And if the $50,000-a-year teacher were in Obama’s tax situation — supporting a spouse and two children — he or she would have paid no federal income taxes at all.
What FactCheck is referring to is one of the President’s latest talking points: on at least two occasions in the last few days he’s said “I shouldn’t be paying a lower effective rate than a teacher, or a firefighter, or a construction worker” and “Somebody who’s making $50,000 a year as a teacher shouldn’t be paying a higher effective tax rate than somebody like myself”: obviously, this is complete nonsense. It’s in fact at Elizabeth Warren-levels of nonsense* …but I am very surprised that the fact that the President’s spouting off said nonsense would apparently be a shocking revelation for, well, anyone.
Continue reading President Obama clueless about teachers’ tax rates.
