#rsrh Arlen Specter (D, PA) catches a break…

…the President will not be campaigning for him.

And while the White House has backed Mr. Specter in the primary, making good on a pledge made when he switched parties just over a year ago, Mr. Obama seems unlikely to make a campaign visit for Mr. Specter before the primary, Democrats said. They said the White House is not eager to be embarrassed by having the president make a last-minute visit on behalf of a candidate who goes on to lose, as happened in the Massachusetts Senate and New Jersey governor’s races.

Aww, they left out Virginia.  They’re also acting as if those losses were despite the President’s presence, rather than because of them; which is a contentious thing to say, but then, the man has a really, really bad track record with these tough races…

Via Jim Geraghty.

Moe Lane

PS: TOOMEY.  By the way?  Joe Sestak’s pro-TARP, pro-‘stimulus,’ pro-Obamacare, pro-cap-and-trade, 100% NARAL, and a gun-grabber.  Yeah, that’s going to fly well in 2010’s Pennsylvania.

‘So, Moe, how’s your election cycle going?’

Let me put it this way: below (in no particular order) is my Top Ten List of Democratic Members of the 111th Congress Whose Presence There Personally Offends My Sense of Civics.

David Obey
Jack Murtha
Alan Mollohan
Eric Massa
Charlie Rangel
Russ Carnahan
Carol Shea-Porter
Alan Grayson
Jim Moran
Patrick Kennedy

It’s going great. Thanks for asking!

Moe Lane

News media starting to get ornery over Kagan thing.

Not that the White House cares.  Or do most of the people reading this, except in a theoretical, pass-the-popcorn sense, I suppose:

The White House today posted on its website a video allowing Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to speak “in her own words” about her personal history and perspective.

In the interview, conducted by a White House staffer who produces videos for the administration, Kagan discusses her childhood, parents and professional career. At one point she jokes that people get confused between her job as solicitor general arguing cases before the Supreme Court and the attorney general, who puts “the labels on the cigarette packages.”

While the White House seems to believe the American people deserve to hear from Kagan, it has not made her available to reporters. That prompted some consternation at today’s White House briefing.

As most folks involved with the VRWC will happily tell you, this is a totally-expected and unsurprising gambit in the administration’s ongoing move to turn the media’s 2008 infatuation with the President into whole-scale neutering. The White House’s logic is compelling, in its way: they know what they want Kagan to say, they have no intention of letting her say anything to the media that is off-message, so why even bother with the formality of an outside interview? There are plenty of people in the Executive branch of government who know how to operate a video camera, so get one of those, do the interview, hand it to the media, and tell them to get it on the nightly news. That’s how it worked in the campaign, right? Doing it this nakedly is just more… efficient.

It will be fascinating to see whether this ends up being the Obama administration’s War of Jenkins’ Ear moment. Particularly if the White House ends up playing the part of the Spanish…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Went to go see Iron Man 2…

…It Did Not Suck.  Pretty good, in fact: not the Crystallized Awesome that was the first film, but the Stark/Pepper dynamic was still there – and (call me a heretic) I liked Cheadle better as Rhodie.  More heroic engineering, and more of the laws of theoretical physics being waved to as they are passed by at high speed.  I’m not exactly sure what the heck Black Widow was doing in this one (besides the obvious), and I’m not sure what they plan to do for an encore… but I didn’t mind shelling out regular price for this.

In other news: who the HELL decided that Grown Ups (starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James, Rob Schneider and David Spade) deserved to be on the big screen, yet we can’t have a sequel to Serenity? Doesn’t doing that much cocaine send your brains igniting out of your ears, anyway?