Month: December 2013

Looking for a New Year’s Eve movie? There’s only ONE choice.

Blockbuster, popular, won two Academy awards, insanely all-star cast (multiple Oscar winners in their own right), absolutely seminal picture in its genre. Instantly recognizable, often imitated; sometimes remade, never successfully. It is, by any objective standard, a classic.

I refer, of course, to The Poseidon Adventure.

Happy New Year!

Moe Lane

2013, legislatively speaking: A whole lot of nothing, and thank God for that.

Don’t get me wrong: I like it when the legislature passes good laws and repeal bad ones.  But I prefer a situation where the legislature doesn’t pass anything to one where the legislature passes bad laws, enforces bad laws, and declines to enforce ideologically inconvenient ones (whether or not I want them to).  Which is to say: I like the 11[2]th and the 11[3]th Congress a LOT more than I do the 11[1]th, and I make no apologies for that.

…I was going to add to this, but I don’t really think that I have anything else to say.

[Numbers fixed. Although, to be fair: the 110th was nothing to write home about, either.]

“Five things Obama must do to avoid lame-duck status.”

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) Amazingly, none of them involve “Invent time travel.”  Which is a shame, because of the five they picked, “Minimize the liabilities” and “Keep the base energized” have a certain “bell the cat” vibe to them; “Take a page out of the Clinton playbook” is going to be a little bit difficult without any sort of, you know, triangulation scheduled*; and “Hold the line against the GOP” and “Go undercover” flat-out contradict each other.  For that matter, assuming that the President just goes and hides on a golf course for the next three years; how is that functionally different from being a lame-duck, anyway?

Continue reading “Five things Obama must do to avoid lame-duck status.”

Go West, young Lefty. Just not to California, no matter how aching your heart is*.

This is a serious suggestion: if you’re a young liberal looking to get ahead, sure, move to the Pacific coast.  Just avoid California like the plague.

usmoneymigrate

Travis H. Brown, author of How Money Walks, points to IRS figures that track the flow of wealth from some states and to others. From 1992 -2010, California was a net loser of $45.27 billion in adjusted gross income. $6.02 billion of that went to Texas. Texas, on the other hand, gained $24.94 billion in AGI during those years, with California the top source for transfers.

Continue reading Go West, young Lefty. Just not to California, no matter how aching your heart is*.

Chris Christie declines to defend draconian state gun laws in court.

What’s good for the jackass is good for the elephant:

Governor Christie’s administration did not defend one of the state’s stringent gun laws in a case where two retired arson investigators challenged rules over who can carry a concealed weapon, according to an appeals court decision released Monday.

The attorney general who made that decision, Jeffrey Chiesa, is one of Christie’s closest advisers and left that law enforcement job when the governor named him to a temporary post in the U.S. Senate earlier this year. He notified the court that the state would not be appealing a trial court decision in papers filed a month before the Newtown, Conn., school shooting last year that prompted a push for gun restrictions including a ban on high-caliber assault weapons in New Jersey.

In Monday’s ruling, a state appeals court upheld restrictions on gun carry permits, and noted the Attorney General Office’s failure to defend the state’s own statutes saying the attorney general “regrettably” decided not to participate.

Continue reading Chris Christie declines to defend draconian state gun laws in court.

Let the Big Wind subsidies die.

It doesn’t look good for this particular set of Obama cronies, but you never know.

At issue right now is the production tax credit that awards wind developers 2.3 cents for every kilowatt-hour they produce. Last New Year’s Day, after a ferocious debate that occupied a portion of the 2012 presidential debate, Congress passed a one-year extension of the wind-energy credit as part of the fiscal-cliff legislation. Under the last-minute deal, wind developers who make good-faith efforts to begin wind projects this year and which continue into 2014 will qualify for 10 years of subsidies, even though the credit expires for new projects.

Democratic lawmakers in both the US Senate and House are calling for a renewal of the credit…

Continue reading Let the Big Wind subsidies die.