Moe Lane

Chris Mather/John Kass, on the allegation that Politico’s original Cain story was leaked by… Rahm Emanuel:

“Not only is the suggestion completely false, it is totally absurd,” Chris Mather, Emanuel’s communications director, told me. “It didn’t happen. It is false.”

Mather even offered to repeat it in several languages, but I believe her.

Yeah.  I particularly like that false/absurd dichotomy, there: you can almost see the “Like we’d be that rococo in our skulduggery” subtext.  Which is fair: there’s such a thing as professional pride, after all.

[UPDATE: Turns out that the answer is no.]

(Dammit, Ben Howe beat me to it at RedState)

I don’t have access to the original report from Greenwire, and I’m not familiar with Greenwire in general.  But if this is true, it’s pretty, well, damning:

Jackson accused House and Senate Republicans of deliberately misusing EPA’s assertion that it would need 230,000 people to enforce greenhouse gas regulations. The number, she said, was drawn from an agency document arguing for “tailoring” the regulations to exempt small businesses.

“Those jack-booted thugs knew that,” she said of the Republicans.

I mean, that’s supposedly a direct quote from a speech made earlier this week at the University of California (Berkeley); and if you need to have it explained to you why it’s a bad idea for elected officials to explicitly couch policy disagreements in this kind of violent rhetoric… well, you’re probably one of those people who got all, ah,  stirred up by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’s gay-baiting last week.  Which was even more low-rent than this outburst (assuming that Jackson really did say this) – but not by much.  At this rate we’ll end up seeing Energy Secretary Chu being carted off to jail for running a meth lab.. (more…)

One year before the 2012 Presidential election, and the unemployment rate is 9%.  Which is pretty much what it’s been since May.  What’s that?  What were we promised that it was going to be at this point?

Why, just over six percent:

I don’t know about the rest of you, but that just under 7% unemployment that we were told we’d be facing if we didn’t pass the ‘stimulus’ bill is looking pretty darn good right now.

Moe Lane

Admit it. You knew this was going to happen eventually.

(more…)

Brahm’s Lullaby, Jewel

I’ve tried everything else.

One up waaaaaaaay past his bedtime, at that.  I suspect gas.

(pause)

That statement should really have a knife chord associated with it.

This is not ‘jumping’ the shark.  This is using a parasail to hover above the shark, all the while throwing chum at it.

Background: Cain’s Chief of Staff Mark Block went on the air today to admit, yeah, it really couldn’t have been former Cain staffer Curt Anderson who leaked the original Cain sexual harassment story to Politico, given that Anderson’s denied it in Politico – and is now giving permission to every reporter that Anderson’s ever talked to about Cain ever to reveal the details of those conversations.  For those unfamiliar with the way Washington, DC works: that’s either suicide or supreme self-confidence… and the fact that Anderson is still upright and walking around kind of suggests that it wasn’t suicide.  So, that issue’s over at least, right?  Nope!  Herman Cain went on the air after Block did and indicated that he still suspects Anderson.  Because, you know, Perry Perry Perry Perry Perry.

And, oh yeah: they’re going to think about suing Politico.  Because they weren’t grinding metal on this story enough already. (more…)

…Kipling and all. My original draft after the fold; guess I shouldn’t have decided to wait until tonight to record the song.

In the meantime, here’s a decent tune to sing the Kipling poem to.

(more…)

This should have been up yesterday, but the various technical breakdowns that I was having were fairly epic.  Anyway: you probably remember Ovide Lamontagne as being a NH Senate Republican primary candidate in 2010… and for graciously conceding the race when he lost the primary, which may have well saved the GOP that seat in the general election.  At any rate, he’s currently the only Republican candidate in the NH-GOV primary, and we spoke yesterday about the race and his plans for the campaign.

Ovide’s campaign site is here.  Just as a reminder: January’s NH Presidential primary is distinct from the state’s other primaries, which will all take place in September of 2012.  Also a reminder: New Hampshire elects governors to two-year terms (current Democratic governor John Lynch has… declined… to run for re-election).

Moe Lane (crosspost)

I notice that a lot of people are getting upset about various and sundry issues, meltdowns, backtracks, walkbacks, flubs, snubs, oopsies, whoopsies, smack-talk, back-talk, goofballs, screwballs, messes, confessions, depressions, omissions, comissions, misses, hisses, disses, flare-ups, screwups, miscues, dropouts, walkouts, and THE SUMMONING OF THE DREAD LORD AZATHOTH SO THAT HE MAY EAT THE EARTH.

Folks.  None of this is a failure of the system.  Testing the candidates to destruction is what the system is designed to do.  And look at Barack Obama for an example of what happens when you don’t.

I guess that the strain was too much for them.

Pic via Verum Serum.

Yeah, I know, I know: merely asking this question feeds into the entire weird (and sometimes sewage-tinged) false narrative that the Koch brothers run the Tea Party.  Blame Mitt Romney for that: after all, if this Examiner article is correct (via Ben Domenech’s Transom) then Mitt Romney seems to believe that the Koch brothers run the Tea Party, and he’s acting accordingly.  You tell me how to ignore a conspiracy theory when a Presidential candidate refuses to.

Seriously.  I spent a good part of the morning trying to come up with a way to do that, and failing.

But let’s backtrack a little and go over the background.  As you’ve probably heard, Team Romney is going gangbusters over Governor Rick Perry’s supposed weaknesses on immigration, particularly his opposition to a national E-Verify system.  See Ramparts 360 and RightWing News for Perry’s actual views on the subject (and immigration in general): to summarize, Perry is as about as impressed at the federal government’s current ability to run a country-wide identification database as he’s impressed at its ability to run pretty much anything else; which is to say, Perry is not particularly impressed.  Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is actually pretty hardline on E-Verify.

For the moment, at least.  Whether this survives the weekend may be an open question.  Because, again, comes this news that Mitt Romney – everybody put down their coffee cups, by the way – is planning to court the Tea Party – and the Koch brothers. (more…)