Moe Lane

…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. (more…)

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… (more…)

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.

(more…)

(H/T: Instapundit) Scott Rasmussen is getting a little vexed with the punditry’s apparent need to settle the field now:

“I am somewhat irritated with the desire to pick a winner now,” says Rasmussen.  “Most voters still have the quaint notion that the election will be held in 2012, not 2011…My view of the GOP race is that Romney has won the establishment semi-finals by beating Pawlenty and Huntsman.  Now, the outsider candidate has to be selected.  GOP voters would prefer to vote for an outsider, but want to make sure it’s the right outsider, and no one has closed that sale yet.  Establishment Republicans (and some Democrats) seem puzzled that GOP voters aren’t flocking to Romney, and that’s probably causing some of the stories you’re hearing about.”

Admittedly, Scott runs a business that’s pretty explicitly politics-based and politics-driven, so take his vexation – and mine, come to think of it – with a grain of salt.  Still, this is why we have primaries, folks: just because nine is too many up there on the debate podium doesn’t mean that we have to winnow the actual field down to one quite just yet.

This observation by Ralph Peters is both depressing…

[Vladimir] Putin’s genius — and it is nothing less — begins with an insight into governance that eluded the “great” dictators of the last century: You need control only public life, not personal lives. Putin grasped that human beings need to let off steam about the world’s ills, and that letting them do so around the kitchen table, over a bottle of vodka, does no harm to the state. His tacit compact with the Russian people is that they may do or say what they like behind closed doors, as long as they don’t take it into the streets. He saw that an authoritarian state that stops at the front door is not only tolerable but also more efficient.

…and probably accurate (that’s why it’s depressing).

And in some ways it’s our own fault: in retrospect, the last two Presidential administrations probably should have paid a bit more attention to the post-Soviet era in Russia.  It’s hard to blame people for that inattention (after all, we were all first breathing a sigh of relief that the Cold War was over, and then we had the Middle East to worry about)… but it’s a somewhat grim truth that the typical face of capitalism in Russia in the 1990s usually was one of either a gangster, or a former (corrupt) government official, or someone with ties to either.  Or both.  This seems to have soured the Russian people a bit on the basic economic theory; unfortunately, it seems to have also subtly discounted the appeal of a democratic system of government as well.  What the Russians are apparently comfortable with these days would be an autocrat that leaves them alone, keeps the supermarkets stocked, does nothing to hinder the church, and demands that the rest of the planet show Russia the respect due a Great Power (with nuclear weapons)*. In other words: a grown-up, non-disfigured Doctor Doom.

The problem with this (aside from the obvious ones)? Putin has no sons.  That’s the problem with autocracies generally, in fact: I think that it was Poul Anderson who noted that despotism works fine as long as the despot is able, but sooner or later you get a meathead on the throne…

Moe Lane (more…)

Unlike @allahpundit, I know exactly how to respond to this report that what’s left of al-Qaeda is outraged that the Iranian regime is spinning 9/11 conspiracies: I think that this is a definite problem that needs to be addressed.  Personally addressed; the United States of America would be happy to discuss this matter face-to-face, as it were.  Heck, we’ll even accommodate the al-Qaeda leadership and come to them.

What’s their GPS coordinates?  If they just send them over, we can be right there.

Moe Lane

PS: I was going to track down the Onion’s old video on the topic, but they’re not taking the failure of their man-god at all well these days so forget about them.

There’s just something about an affirmative action bake sale that drives the progressive Left nuts.  Actually, sorry, I know perfectly well why affirmative action bake sales drive the progressive Left nuts:

• The basic concept – that you sell people baked goods on a sliding price scale, with white males paying the most and [INSERT TRENDIEST MINORITY STATUS HERE] paying the least – provides an immediate, practical analogy for people arguing against affirmative action programs.
• It’s not that it’s hard to argue that affirmative action bake sales are subtly racist while affirmative action academic/hiring programs are not; it’s that it’s hard to argue that without looking like a partisan schmuck to anybody who isn’t a diehard liberal already.
• And, most importantly: the progressive Left cannot stand not being taken seriously.  That affirmative action programs deserve not fury, but merely mockery, burns the netroots.  It burns them like acid.

Anyway, read the above linked Zombietime article.  The aforementioned bake sale was at Berkeley, so expect the opposition to it to be full of both bad language and Commies.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane