daily caller – Moe Lane

DCCC covering up stalking videos?

People may recall that Politico published a story several days ago cataloging what appears to be a somewhat alarming trend: to wit, videos showing ostensible ‘tracking’ of Republican candidates by individuals. I say ostensible because the way that the videos come across are as rather obsessive stalking of said candidates. For example: while it is understood that a candidate will be followed around, casing a candidates’s house from several different angles (account name: WI08RawFootage) or deliberately putting another candidate’s address (account name: AR01RawFootage) online, is generally considered to be, well, creepy. And that’s what is happening.

Now here’s the thing. As Politico noted, the DCCC itself is apparently “unapologetic” about these activities, and ready to justify this practice:

House Republicans have spent this entire Congress trying to hide that they’re protecting benefits for millionaires and perks for themselves instead of protecting the middle class, but we won’t let them keep it secret any longer,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesman Jesse Ferguson wrote in an email. Democratic officials said placing the videos on the DCCC’s website and YouTube serve a useful purpose, most notably making the footage available to friendly outside groups for use in TV commercials. That way, they don’t violate laws against coordinating with those groups.

Which is a very interesting statement, and one which will be revisited in a little bit… because there’s something that Politico didn’t catch: the accounts that Politico found have been sanitized.

Just not well enough. Continue reading DCCC covering up stalking videos?

Inside blogpoll post, 5/31/2011 edition.

OK, I’ll be honest: the major reason why I’m posting these buckets of cold water regarding the relative popularity of the Daily Caller to ThinkProgress (short version: TP gets about half of the traffic of DC, and acts like it gets twice) is because I have the tabs still up and content is content. You may be forgiven for thinking this irrelevant, in other words. Lord knows that ThinkProgress largely is*.

Inside-blogpoll screenshots after the fold: Continue reading Inside blogpoll post, 5/31/2011 edition.

Daily Caller: was Yucca Mountain shutdown lawful?

The DC has the scoop*: Congress is now investigating whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) actually had the authority to unilaterally shut down the Yucca Mountain nuclear storage facility without Congressional authorization, given that Yucca Mountain was authorized under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982. Furthermore, there are now serious questions about whether the NRC’s leadership – and, by extension, the Obama administration – is ignoring the actual science of the situation in favor of petty and crasss partisan politics.

This is the key paragraph, I think: it describes the background to the sudden quashing in November 2010 of a safety report on the facility.

Dr. Janet Kotra, the deputy office director responsible for drafting the [Yucca Mountain] safety evaluation, known as the Safety Evaluation Report (SER), wrote in an internal memo that [NRC Chair {and Reid crony} Gregory] Jaczko unilaterally instructed his staff to “move to orderly closure of NRC’s Yucca Mountain program.” This is despite the fact the Nuclear Waste Policy Act remains in effect and the full commission has yet to rule on whether the Department of Energy can legally withdraw the license application.

Continue reading Daily Caller: was Yucca Mountain shutdown lawful?

The Righteous Indignation Book party.

Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! is, of course, Andrew Breitbart’s latest book; and I had the opportunity to ~~schmooze~~ meet up with folks from The Daily Caller / Americans for Tax Reform at a book party that they threw for Andrew yesterday. I finished the book itself today: it’s very accessible, and while it told me a lot of stuff that I already knew (from both an outsider’s and an insider’s perspective*) it should be a good deal of help to people who want to get into the political arena and start swinging. And, incidentally: “go out there and start swinging” (in a purely metaphorical sense, of course) is the central message of the book. Good advice, too.

Videos below the fold: the first is Andrew’s general speech (which has some profanity in it, so be prepared), and the second is the minute I was able to gouge out of his time to get him to answer a question for RedState. It was a busy book party for Andrew, in other words. Continue reading The Righteous Indignation Book party.

#rsrh QotD, a perfect metaphor edition.

(H/T: Instapundit) The Daily Caller, on an unique problem for that hip, young-voter crowd:

With Comedy Central’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” and the “March to Keep Fear Alive” scheduled the weekend before the midterm elections, politically minded college students face a choice: Do I want to spend a day with television comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert for a party on the National Mall, or sit in a windowless room for hours making cold calls to strangers for a political campaign?

For some members of Democratic college clubs around Washington, the decision is not an easy one.

Really, the more I think about it the more perfect this gets. Stewart and Colbert couldn’t have messed up the Democratic party more with the timing on these things if they were actually trying. It’s being touted by various groups of College Democrats as an enthusiasm-boosting mechanism for… College Democrats, who typically are generally expected to be enthusiastic anyway, given that they went to the trouble of joining groups like the College Democrats. And while enthusiasm is very nice, if you have to take off the weekend before an election to get pumped up to vote in that election – not to mention getting other people to vote in that election – well, there’s a problem there.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh QotD, a perfect metaphor edition.

#rsrh Journolist: “SOMEONE LEAKED!”

This is probably not going to be a good week for people affiliated with the Journolist.

Not that I have confirmation of that, by the way. Although if somebody would happen to have the archives, I wouldn’t mind seeing, oh, any random details about what those guys were saying about RedState (I sincerely doubt that I was ever personally subject to their ire, more’s the pity).

#rsrh I may have said mildly unkind things…

…about Tucker Carlson, from time to time, in the past.

Please be advised I repudiate any and all such statements that might have been made, apologize for any hurt feelings that might have resulted from them, and will be happy to discuss the matter further with Mr. Carlson if he should feel that the previous two statements were insufficiently contrite.