Moe Lane

Charlie Cook has some very nasty, very vicious, and very enterta… I mean, cruel… advice for Republicans:

…as much as congressional Republicans are enjoying their schadenfreude, they would be well advised to think long and hard about their next steps. Even the most cursory look at opinion polls or focus groups reveals that the public is convinced we have an ineffectual and out-of-touch Congress that spends too much time backbiting, grandstanding, and Monday-morning quarterbacking while the country’s problems fester. Arguably, showboating for the cameras and holding hearings are what Congress does best; the temptation is unavoidable.

Republicans would be much wiser to pursue a third option: Dig up as much damaging information as they can about the Obama administration and leak it to reporters they know will write tough stories that won’t be traced back to the source. That way, the public won’t see the GOP as being obsessed with attacking the other side and playing gotcha at the expense of the big issues facing the country—the ones voters really care about.

Mind you, Charlie probably knows that this is highly redundant advice, too. NTIWKAAT, of course.

Moe Lane

…and  I’m not even on the side that’s getting beaten with sticks, for a change.

I will say this: there seems to be one hell of a disconnect between the inside-the-Beltway left-punditry and the rest of the country right now.  The former seem to be determinedly telling themselves that everything is about to blow over… in a milieu where NFL players are now feeling comfortable with Instagramming pictures of themselves urinating on IRS signs.

Audit this. instagram.com/p/ZVoxTXnxMU/

— Evan Mathis (@EvanMathis69) May 15, 2013

Or fake-urinating. The point is… you’d think that the Other Side would be realizing that they’re just telling each other stories, at this point. Then again, you’d think that I would have figured that out myself in 2006, 2008, & 2012 – so what do I know?

Moe Lane

And that we will respond to its unveiling in an adult and dignified fashion.

(more…)

And Twitter just started the resignation watch.

OBAMABUS being wound up. RT @moelane: Ohhhhhh sh*t: Barack Obama has ‘complete confidence’ in Eric Holder.He’s dead in the water.

— Aaron Gardner (@Aaron_RS) May 16, 2013

Eric Holder has Obama’s complete confidence even though he may have perjured himself yesterday by falsely claiming a recusal

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) May 16, 2013

“Billy Martin is my manager…” RT @hotlinejosh: Obama: “I have complete confidence in Eric Holder as Attorney General”

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) May 16, 2013

@melissatweets @moelane Obama: “I have as much confidence in him as I did in Rev. Wright.”

— SonnyGirard (@SonnyGirard) May 16, 2013

@moelane “I have complete confidence in the coach” = RIP

— Dome Beers (@DomeBeers) May 16, 2013

…Well, at least my Twitter neighborhood did.

Seriously, what’s the freaking point of having a sinister shadow conspiracy if we can’t use it to mess with this guy’s head, anyway?

A House Democrat inspired by the last James Bond movie has offered legislation to produce handguns with “personalization technology.”

The idea is to produce guns that can only be used by the gun’s owners. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.) cited the latest James Bond movie, Skyfall, as inspiration for the bill.

“In the most recent James Bon…

…and I don’t want to kill any of my readers’ brain cells, so I’ll interrupt there: NO.  Bad Congressman!  Bad! No biscuit! (more…)

Really, this is adorable:

[David Plouffe] rejected the suggestion that Mr. Obama, who forced Republicans to accept higher taxes on the wealthy after re-election, has been too passive.

Not the passive part, which is a) true and b) hopefully not worrisome at all to Democrats.  But here’s a harsh dose of reality for the Times’ mellow: in order to ‘win’ on tax hikes, all Barack Obama had to do was wait.  He campaigned on removing all of the Bush ‘tax cuts.’  All of them.  They were set to expire, and Obama could have had that happen with no fuss, no muss, no drama… and approximately one hundred million or so people screaming at him.  Instead, he made a deal with the GOP where they came in with nothing and walked out with 98% of the tax cuts that they campaigned on to preserve AND Obama taking the blame for the Alternative Minimum Tax fix*.

Oh, yeah.  Twist my arm a little more on that, dude.  And we lost that one so totally, ya, you betcha… (more…)

Well, he’s not trolling either myself, or the PJ Tatler:

Steven Miller, the now resigned acting commissioner of the IRS, is telling staff that the abuse scandal is not the reason he’s leaving.

It is with regret that I will be departing from the IRS as my acting assignment ends in early June,’ Miller wrote. “This has been an incredibly difficult time for the IRS given the events of the past few days, and there is a strong and immediate need to restore public trust in the nation’s tax agency.”

This is how you tell Lefty groups that have made it to the media from Lefty groups who have not: see which ones are upset that the Department of Justice secretly subpoenaed two months’ worth of Associated Press phone records.The Huffington Post is an example of the former; Media Matters for America is a good example of the latter.  And the former is now taking the latter to task.  Now, HuffPo is still Lefty, so you know that there’s still going to be some gratuitous stuff in there, but here’s a good bit.

If you’d like the press to listen to your urgings, you are probably not going to get that to happen while taking the position that it’s OK for the government to snoop through the phone records of reporters and editors. To the perspective of those reporters and editors who were subject to the DoJ’s probe, and to the journalists who take the AP’s side in this matter, you guys are just dicks for putting out these talking points.

Excuse the language.  Not much else to say, otherwise, except to note HuffPo later notes that if Media Matters is going to be in a cleft stick if a Republican President ever does this.  This is probably incorrect: after all, Media Matters’ corporate masters are indifferent to consistency.  God knows that an objective look at the group’s success rate reveals that said masters are also indifferent to effectiveness…

(more…)

…Wait.  What?

[Buycott] itself is the work of one Los Angeles-based 26-year-old freelance programmer, Ivan Pardo, who has devoted the last 16 months to Buycott. “It’s been completely bootstrapped up to this point,” he said. Martinez and another friend have pitched in to promote the app.

Pardo’s handiwork is available for download on iPhone or Android, making its debut in iTunes and Google Play in early May. You can scan the barcode on any product and the free app will trace its ownership all the way to its top corporate parent company, including conglomerates like Koch Industries.

So, basically, you can find out via this app that some company likes to invest in cheap energy or improved crop yields.  You will not find out via this app that the typical user of Buycott is quite hypocritically happy to use an electronic device made in a Chinese sweatshop – but then, we already knew that. (more…)

It just ain’t Barack Obama’s day.  Or week.  Or month. Or year…

The Internal Revenue Service is now facing a class action lawsuit over allegations that it improperly accessed and stole the health records of some 10 million Americans, including medical records of all California state judges.

According to a report by Courthousenews.com, an unnamed HIPAA-covered entity in California is suing the IRS, alleging that some 60 million medical records from 10 million patients were stolen by 15 IRS agents. The personal health information seized on March 11, 2011, included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data.

But, hey, trust them with Obamacare tax enforcement, right?

Right?

Moe Lane

PS: Don’t look at me: I voted for the other guy.

Saw that in a comment to this piece, which is a politely horrified reaction to anti-fracking agitprop trying to convince Manhattan hipsters that FRACKED GAS!!!!! is about to blow up Greenwich Village. Oh, and RADON RADON RADON.  The poor guy writing said horrified reaction then attempted to point out the obvious flaws in said agitprop… and, of course, got screamed at in comments by various sectarian fanatics*.

:pause:

Look, I honestly don’t mind people allowing their religious sensibilities to inform their policy positions, but I must insist that radical environmentalists stop pretending that their frankly unsophisticated, if not actually cartoonish, belief structure is some sort of hyper-scientific Absolute Truth.  Or if they can’t do that, then they can at least stop trying to make the rest of us go along with the joke.

Moe Lane

PS: I wait, with no little trepidation, for the day that somebody goes out in public and blames natural gas fracking on the International Zionist Conspiracy.

*To be fair: there were sane people in the comments there, too.  Hence the post, in fact.

I know, I know: you are wounded unto death about such a thing occurring. Wounded unto death.

Attorney General Eric Holder will testify before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, where Republicans say they’ll grill him about the Justice Department’s secret review of Associated Press phone records and the IRS targeting of conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny, among other issues.

The oversight hearing had already been scheduled for 1 p.m. on May 15. But Republicans now plan to use the time to address the two issues that came to light this week.

The real question is, though: will it just be the Republicans piling on? Possibly not: the National Journal is kind of hinting* that maybe Democrats on Judiciary will be wanting to put some distance between them and the Obama administration’s exciting new game Wheel of Scandal. The AP thing would be the place for House Democrats to do it, too. Of the (current) Big Three scandals going on right now (Benghazi, IRS, AP): the narrative on Benghazi is locked down among Democrats. No way are any of them going to admit that the White House deliberately lied about the origins of that attack because they were in the middle of a Presidential election. The IRS issue is kind of problematical: the Democratic progressive base simply seems intellectually incapable of understanding why it looks horrifically bad when the IRS confesses that they targeted the administration’s political enemies. Best not to push that one too far… but the AP? Yeah, that’s reasonably safe. Particularly since the House passed a federal shield bill in 2009 that would have protected all those fine, upstanding journalists. So, yeah, they’re on the side of the angels on that one. (more…)