Moe Lane

…which means that the video that I just put together via iMovie is going to have to wait until I get home. Heh. So much for on the fly video processing, huh?

Still, no worries; got a lot of useful footage today, which was the idea. There are a bunch more legislators and candidates and whatnot at CPAC than I remember from years past, and they’re more serious than I remember them being, too. Which is to be expected, really.

Not unrelated to the fact that Blogger’s Row is filling up; I eventually found somebody with a charger with the right power connection.

We got a lot of New Media folks here today. And folks running for office: I’m hoping for a good number of candidate and politician interviews. Already got Richard Mourdock, who’s in the middle of a primary run for Senate in Indiana.

And if you are here and you happen to have an iPad with a Logitech keyboard with you PLEASE stop by Blogger’s Row; I did not bring a charger for my keyboard and I am even now screen-typing.

More seriously, we’re hoping to get a bunch of interviews out of this, as usual.

The STOCK Act – which is short for the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act; honestly, I wish that they’d stop coming up with cute names for these.  This particular one is not really obnoxious, but some of them have really reached for the acronym – started to get really pushed through last year, once it came out that Members of Congress, including then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, were profiting unduly from legal insider trading*.  I call it ‘legal’ not in the sense that there was nothing wrong with said insider trading; I call it ‘legal’ because Congress exempted itself from the rules that the rest of us have to follow. The distinction is important.  It’s perfectly legal for, say, Senator Dianne Feinstein to buy into a biostock company just before the company picks up a fat government subsidy check, even if she knew about it ahead of time.  That’s the problem.

Anyway, one of the more egregious things being done – again, involving then-Speaker Pelosi in at least one case – was the practice of offering Members of Congress a favorable position from which to buy into an IPO.  Pelosi in particular used this practice to buy into a Visa IPO, right before credit card legislation that hampered Visa got somehow sidetracked in Congress for a year; she ended up making a killing on the (again, ‘LEGAL’) deal.  And, naturally, the amendment that would ban this practice in the future has been named the ‘Pelosi Provision’ by Republicans.  By all accounts, the former Speaker is unhappy about this; I am uncertain whether or not that she is as unhappy about this as I am that the woman made several million unfortunately-legal dollars off of her former position to manipulate and delay legislation, but I somehow doubt it. (more…)

…but it can’t be better than this parody of it.

Personally, I’m getting tired of the cowardice of politicians.  Particularly when it comes to dealing with sour market conditions.

Gotta love the nanny state, huh?

Yes, I know that state Senator Constance Johnson thought that she was merely making a point about abortion.  That’s because she’s not very bright.  Very many people can tell the quantitative difference between a gamete and a zygote – even if they have to look up the words in the dictionary – and many of those people will not be amused at being lectured to like this.  Probably best for her to pretend that she meant it that way all along.

I’d say that this will make it hard for Sen. Johnson to rise further from her current position as state senator, except that Oklahoma Democrats are finding it quite hard enough to get ahead as it is…

…personally, I don’t find the system nearly as ‘corrupt’ or ‘pollut[ed]‘ as the New York Times seems to – unless, of course, we’re simply taking both terms to be semantically equivalent to ‘got rid of legislators that the NYT liked’ – but in its way that just makes all the better this bitter, despondent, let-me-swig-more-rotgut-and-pound-the-typewriter screed about how Obama’s going to use those eeeeeeeeeeeevil Super PACS in his campaign.  I mean it, too.  Watching the anonymous author come to terms with the fact that he or she was deliberately and callously lied to will warm your insides.

Mind you, the author will still vote for Obama in November. Which is why I’m so contemptuous: don’t expect respect from me if you can’t even respect yourself…

Via Hot Air Headlines.

I’d change it, except that I think that it’s also true.

I think that Jonathan Last is misunderstanding Matthew Yglesias’ interests, here (the short version: the latter seems to think that American cities only had one newspaper apiece in the old days, and the former is mocking the latter in response).  The Yglesias ‘brand’ has always been ‘precocious youngster;’ which is easy enough to do when you’re a kid blogging from Harvard, but considerably harder when you’re a thirtysomething, fairly doctrinaire liberal who has had all the interesting bits burned away after spending several years in Establishment Left ‘journalist’ knocking-shops*. So, there’s not exactly a reason to avoid being sloppy: the occasional dumb mistake is perfect for simulating that fresh-faced look, no?

Now, I’m not saying that Yglesias deliberately got it wrong about how many American cities had multiple newspapers in the Good Old Days; I’m merely saying that he’s got no real pressing economic reason to do the necessary research.

Moe Lane

*Look it up.

In today’s Morning Jolt Jim Geraghty observed, while implicitly dismissing former (involuntarily) Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper’s (D, PA) sudden getting religion over Obamacare for the cynical political move that it probably is, that the myth of the conservative Democratic Congressman was, well, a myth – and that he’s been saying that since 2010.  Well, I’ve been saying that, too – so I decided to look at all the examples of so-called conservative Democrats found in that article, and where they are no.  The results were amazingly gratifying:

• Bart Gordon (forced to retire, 2010)
  
• Bobby Bright (removed, 2010)
  
• Dan Boren (cutting and running, 2012)
  
• Gene Taylor (removed, 2010)
  
• Heath Shuler (cutting and running, 2012)
  
• Joe Donnelly (switching out to lose Senate race, 2012)
• John Barrow (going out fighting [cruelly redistricted], 2012)
  
• S.H. Sandlin (removed, 2010)
  
• Walt Minnick (removed, 2010)

(more…)

I’ve been meaning to ask this question for a while about Operation Fast & Furious. Because apparently the number was higher than 200; so I was just curious about how many dead Mexicans are functionally equivalent to one Obama appointee’s career.  Three hundred? Four hundred? An even thousand?

Or is the answer “Don’t bother asking?”

I am speaking pseudo-medically, here.

The entire article by Albert Hunt is possibly a bit too snide about various Republicans, but this part is at least on-point about Obama’s behavior at the annual Alfalfa Club dinner:

Obama hates such dinners. Some of his aides, in particular his political adviser David Plouffe, urged him not to spend an evening mingling with the 1 percent. Yet he chose to go, and attendees said it was the first time they could recall a speaker leaving before the other side had its fun. In addition, Obama’s 87-year-old predecessor was present.

Imagine the criticism five years ago if President George W. Bush had walked out on a dinner before Hillary Clinton spoke, with Bill Clinton in the audience.

(more…)

Believe me, it’s alarming to me, too: but Jon Walker has a point here about Obama’s excitingly new position on Super PACs.

When the Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United ruling, Obama still had one of the largest Democratic majorities in Congress in decades.  But Democrats still didn’t do anything about it. If they viewed that holding as truly critical, the Democrats could have passed a law addressing the issue. Passing legislation about campaign finance reform was simply not a priority for the Obama administration.

(more…)