Moe Lane

I personally don’t give a flying leap about online poker one way or the other, although I thought that banning it in 2006 was kind of counterproductive and gave enemies of the GOP yet one more weapon to use against us with regard to libertarians.  So the news that the FBI went after three of the biggest online poker websites hammer and tongs doesn’t have any real personal significance for me.

But watching libertarians get reminded that there is “bad,” and then there is “worse?”  …Well.  Let me simply note that yes, indeed, the Democrats were trying to make themselves look better on this issue than they have apparently turned out to be.  I will also note that while libertarians and conservatives are often at loggerheads with each other, the true opposite of a libertarian viewpoint is always going to be a liberal one…

Moe Lane

(Via Instapundit.)

‘JSOC’ being short for the ‘Joint Special [Operations] Command,’ which is known to normal people as a group that coordinates communications and operations among various American Special Forces organizations*.  The alleged would-be spy Bryan Martin allegedly traded secret documents to an FBI operative in exchange for roughly $3,500; there’s no indication as of yet that he was working with anyone else, but between this and the Wikileaks Manning case it looks like the US intelligence community is on heightened alert for potential espionage problems.  Looks like it’s not the end of history, after all.

Moving along, the confusion of Hot Air over how cheap this transaction was is why I’m bringing it up.  You see, this kind of money is the rule, not the exception.  Hollywood aside, foreign governments do not pay out large amounts of cash to would-be spies.  They are, in fact, usually very cheap about it: for every Aldrich Ames there’s there’s a dozen Markus Hess’s.  However, the exception is generally found among American intelligence groups; the CIA in particular supposedly has a policy of paying very well for this kind of information.  It’s not like the Cold War, where we could get highly trained and educated foreign professionals to crawl across broken glass in exchange for a green card and a retail franchise in Terra Haute, Indiana – but if you’re a disaffected member of the repressive and shortsighted regime currently running your country, by all means: give Uncle Sam a call.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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…actually, that’s a bit of a fib; being mean to Kevin Drum (and any other Mother Jones flunky) is a bit of a social and civic responsibility these days.  Anyway, he was just found whining “You know, if I’d wanted Dick Cheney as president I would have just voted for him” in response to the White House’s desire to expand the ability of law enforcement to read email headers without a court order.  Folks can determine where they sit on that particular issue, but I’d like to remind Kevin, as from one old school blogger to another: it’s funny that you should say that, Sparky.   (more…)

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

No, I don’t have any updates to the FBI investigation of former Congressman Mahoney (D, FL-16) and whether he used campaign funds to pay off one of his mistresses, sorry. That’s going to be a quiet kind of story until the FBI finishes said investigation; after all, Mahoney was brutally sacrificed to the media gods by the Democratic Party desperate to have that story not derail their 2008 Congressional campaign. People who may find themselves accused of anything similar, please note: don’t count on a payback for your loyalty – even if you happen to be innocent, which Mahoney was almost certainly not.

Which brings me to my next point.  Rahm Emanuel.  Name was linked to Mahoney’s back then – something about sanitizing the record – but nobody in the media was interested in pushing on that for very long.  But now that Rep. Emanuel is COS Emanuel, and now that we’re reminded that Emanuel’s a Freddie Mac guy who entered into lucrative contracts on the DCCC’s behalf with his landlord’s polling firm (it’s claimed that it was a complete coincidence that he wasn’t paying rent), one does have to ask: what, exactly, did Rahm Emanuel have to do with Tim Mahoney’s little payoff problem?

And can we get an answer under oath?  I only ask because there’s been an awful lot of Democrats Behaving Badly stories in the news lately.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.