Moe Lane

Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds notes – not publicly gleefully – that Glenns Greenwalds are very upset.  It seems that Greenwalds are bothered by the fact that while it was apparently OK to call Reynolds evil for endorsing a targeted assassination program against Iranian nuclear weapons engineers and terrorist-enabling mullahs, it’s apparently not OK for Obama to be criticized for effectively signing off on such a program.  It’s apparently even worse to publicly approve of Ron Paul’s Israel views when compared to Barack Obama’s.  Poor Greenwalds are feeling aggrieved. And betrayed. And scorned.

In order: (more…)

The chutzpah is strong in this one.

…for declining to release his tax returns:

A spokesman for President Obama‘s re-election campaign blasted Mr. Romney and questioned whether he had something to hide in his finances.

“Why does Governor Romney feel like he can play by a different set of rules?” said Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for the Obama campaign. “What is it that he doesn’t want the American people to see?…”

I don’t know: possibly Romney’s got the financial equivalent of the alleged gentleman’s C+ GPA that Ben LaBolt’s boss has been resolutely hiding for the last decade or so? – No, come on: it’s like the worst-kept secret in Washington DC that the President doesn’t exactly live up to the intellectual hype that his sycophants like to toss around. Which is not to say that Obama is dumb. He probably has an IQ of about 125 or so; which is pretty good, all things considered. Middling decent. But it’s not like he can set fire to people with his mind. (more…)

Some faceless (well, he has a name, but he’s effectively faceless anyway) Eurocrat, on why bottled water companies in the EU may not indicate on their product that ‘regular consumption of significant amounts of water can reduce the risk of development of dehydration’:

Prof Brian Ratcliffe, spokesman for the Nutrition Society, said dehydration was usually caused by a clinical condition and that one could remain adequately hydrated without drinking water.

Those wacky Europeans.  God love ‘em, but they’re weird.  Then again, they all seem convinced over on the mainland that this EU thing is the only bulwark against them playing Let’s All Set Fire To Each Other, Repeatedly, Until The Americans Come Over To Save Our Burning Rears again, so I suppose that this is an improvement.

(Via somebody or other.)

Moe Lane

(Via Instapundit) Mr. Yoo is cruel, yet accurate, in his assessment of the almost-competent GWOT strategy of Barack Obama.

Let’s give partial credit where it is due.  Apparently the Obama administration argues that al-Awlaki was a legitimate target because he is a member of an enemy engaged in hostile conduct against the United States.  At least Obama has figured out that the war on terrorism is in fact a war, and that it is not limited just to Afghanistan.  We should be thankful that Obama officials have quietly put aside the arguments they made during the Bush years that any terrorist outside the Afghani battlefield was a criminal suspect who deserved his day in federal court.  By my lights, I would rather the Obama folks be hypocrites in favor of protecting the national security than principled fools (which they are free to be in the faculty lounges both before and after their time in government).

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I typed “Rage Against the Machine parody” into the search function of YouTube, and got… this.

Although I wouldn’t call it a true parody: unlike RAtM, it doesn’t make you want to choose instead the song that ends the Earth.

Obligatory Amazon filthy lucre link.

I knew that we had (and have!) beaten them like a drum.  But I hadn’t realized just how complete their gelding really was until I read this post-from-exile by Matt Stoller about the tattered remnant of the pathetically small Wall Street protests.  It’s like Stoller – and by extension, the people that he’s being an apologist for – has embraced every single stereotype ever made about the passive, excuse-for-failure-laden, shallow liberal whiner who thinks that a back-rub circle counts as ‘activism’ and that contemplating one’s navel is the true mark of the intellectual.  Between the way that the last administration steamrollered these people, and the way that Obama has decided to be just like Bush (well, Obama has apparently decided to be just like an incompetent Bush), you can only conclude that the antiwar movement has finally gone to Dementia Manor and is now almost happily settling in.  After all, they know their place now.  They understand what is expected of them.  They accept their fate.

Seriously.  The last sentence of that Stoller piece should have been This gimp mask is surprisingly comfortable.

Moe Lane

PS: Make me take them seriously.

Liz may end up being a better chew toy for us than even Alan Grayson was.

You know, I’m starting to understand why Liz Warren has all these weird opinions on how value is actually created: she’s just a creature of her environment. This one is a little involved, so bear with me.

• Thursday, Politico put out a story on the sacrificial lamb candidate for MA-SEN’s upcoming Democratic primary that noted that Warren’s rhetoric about government transparency didn’t extend to her own tenure as chair for the TARP-overseeing (Congressional Oversight Panel).  Turns out that “Warren opposed GOP efforts to draft a budget for the bipartisan oversight panel, despite telling The Associated Press in 2008 that she wouldn’t buy a winter coat without a spending plan.”
• A total of 10.5 million was spent by COP over two years (8.3 million under Warren’s oversight), and we don’t actually have a line-by-line breakdown of what that money was spent on.  But we know that 8.7 million went to salaries.
• Warren’s pay during that time period?  According to her campaign staff’s original disclosure? $64,289 for 2009 and 2010.  (pause) Why, that’s quite modest, for Washington DC…
• Oh, wait, never mind: the Warren campaign confessed Friday that she “had been paid $192,722 for serving as chairman of a congressional committee that monitored the 2008 federal bank bailout, three times as much as had originally been acknowledged.”  Yeah, that’s more in line with the bloated Dizzy City salary guidelines that we all know and loathe with the collective fury of a billion exploding suns.
• Are you wondering whether Politico made the goof?  Nope!  The Warren campaign admitted that they gave out the wrong information. “‘In a rush to meet your deadline, we made an honest mistake,’” [Warren campaign flack Kyle] Sullivan said. “‘And we misread a document and thought $64,289 was for 2009 and 2010. It was only for 2010.’”
• At this point, you’re probably asking “Couldn’t Politico look all of this up on Warren’s financial disclosure forms? She’s running for Senate.”  Yeah… except that Politico claimed that this N-dimensional genius from beyond space and time didn’t actually make the deadline to file one of those things as per federal law.
• Let me end with the note that this level of pay does not even begin to approach what she was making as a Harvard law professor.

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Q.  What do you call the White House abjectly caving on its plan to placate Green religious fanatics by inflicting restrictive, job-killing air pollution rules on the American economy?

A.  INSUFFICIENT.

(pause)

What?   Not punchy enough?

Moe Lane (more…)

Trail of Cthulhu’s Bookhounds of London & GUMSHOE’s Book of Unremitting Horror. Plus, thanks to the reaction to people like this (I decided to let some of all y’all see some of the hate mail after all)…

…reacting to posts like this, the PayPal account has been refilled to the point where I can go buy The Esoterror Fact Book now.  So keep that hate and rage coming, folks!  This is, like, my major source of disposable income at the moment*.

Besides: it’s a good life, having idiots hate you.

Moe Lane (more…)

(Video canceled in order to tell all y’all how awesome I am, for given values of ‘awesome.’  Rather sad values, at that.)

I called this.  I so totally called this.

I said it first on Inauguration Day, 2009 (on RedState, too): and I said it again in November 2010, twice.  I knew that it was going to happen, and so did you.  But here’s the kicker: ThinkProgress didn’t.  And that’s why they’re so personally and professionally ineffectual – just like most of the Online Left.  They don’t know themselves and they can’t be bothered to know us… and, fortunately, we don’t have the poisoned luxury of either type of willful ignorance, ourselves.

The best part?  I can point and laugh… and they won’t change their behavior one iota.  Pride’s a harsh master, eh, what?

Moe Lane

PS: Please, no applause: just throw money.

…although I think that Project Valour-IT could use the cash more, frankly.

Oh, this is entertaining.  The government shutdown in Minnesota is about to end not with a bang, but a whimper:

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton sent a letter Thursday to House Speaker Kurt Zellers and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, saying he “reluctantly” agrees to accept the Republican budget proposal from June 30 if it will end the government shutdown .

Hey, Dayton can be as reluctant as he wants about being brought to heel. Just as long as he’s brought to heel. (more…)

Nope.  Writing this sentence did not cause nigh-physical pain for its author.

A group including former White House officials, union leaders and one of Hollywood’s biggest producers have joined forces to start an outside effort to help President Obama and Congressional Democrats in 2012 by using the very sort of anonymous, unlimited donations from moneyed interests that the president has so deplored.

Nope. Not at all, nosireebob.  That thin screaming that you’re hearing?  Nope, that’s not the death of hope and innocence in the battered soul of a newspaper reporter who has realized that he has been implicitly working for a political faction who has been secretly laughing at him for his stupid naivete.  Not all: it’s actually just gas.

It’s just gas, blast your eyes.

Via RCP.

Moe Lane (crosspost)