No. Seriously.
For those who don’t remember, the White House traded an $80 billion cap in costs with PhRMA in exchange for $150 million in pro-health care rationing advertising buys, then claimed that they didn’t do any such thing. Except that now Senator Carper’s committed the classic Kinsley gaffe: inadvertently telling the truth in Washington by admitting matter-of-factly that such a deal apparently took place.
Oops? Continue reading So, Senator Tom Carper just admitted to the PhRMA/WH deal.
I just encountered the first supermarket bag boy trying to score tips for the first time since the last real economic rough spot (i.e., the early Nineties).
Unfortunately for those folks, who the heck keeps cash around as a matter of course anymore? Between ATM fees and everybody taking debit cards these days, there’s not much point, really.
Crossposted to RedState.
And depending on your monitor, the picture (via Michelle Malkin) may be the actual size:
That’s the delta smelt – or, as Rep. George Radanovich (R, CA-19) likes to call it, “a worthless little worm that needs to go the way of the dinosaur” – and it’s the reason why direct farm losses in California’s San Joaquin valley are being estimated at a high of 647 million (against a backdrop of a 3 billion agricultural loss in California generally). Not to mention what could end up being 80,000 lost jobs. Unfortunately, while the delta smelt is eligible for the Endangered Species Act, the Californian farmer is not.
Moe Lane Continue reading This fish cost California almost a billion dollars.
(Via Hot Air Headlines) I have a problem with this.
Germany will walk out of the U.N. General Assembly if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust in a speech he will give Wednesday, and it wants other European Union countries to do the same, the foreign ministry said.
My problem with this is that intolerance to Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism should be so instinctive and reflexive that nobody would have let Ahmadinejad talk at the UN in the first place. The Canadians aren’t bothering to wait for the inevitable vileness; they’re just going to walk out (via Instapundit). So on that curve the German response gets down graded from its original A to a B-.
Mind you, that’s a heck of a lot better than the F that we’re getting. Did somebody at the UN with a malignant sense of humor schedule this one? The President is going to speak the same day as Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Libya’s Gadhafi and Zimbabwe’s Mugabe; you have to wonder whether Syria’s al-Assad and/or North Korea’s Il-sung Jong-Il had scheduling conflicts. Doesn’t anybody at the White House check people’s work before they send it out?
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
The full endorsement for Marco Rubio is from Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite (R, FL-05):
Brown-Waite, who has been critical of what she has said is Crist’s attempts “to be all things to all people,” said Monday she thinks the GOP tide is turning in favor of Rubio.
“He is picking up a lot of steam with the recent victories from the straw polls. It is great to see momentum building for him,” she said.
Rep. Brown-Waite joins Rep Jeff Miller (R, FL-01) in endorsing Rubio over Crist. Continue reading Marco Rubio scores 1.5 endorsements.
Via @cayankee:
Enjoy the earworm! And, remember:
How the HELL did we get this far without the Safety Dance?
Safety Dance
Well. Fixed, that.
The problem with this essay on race by Texas Railroad Commissioner and Senatorial candidate Michael Williams is that you really need to read the whole thing: there are too many good bits to cram into just one snippet. But a taste:
What grieves me most, however, is not that false cries of racism shortcircuit our debate, but that it makes legitimate concern about pockets of racism impossible to hear among the majority of Americans where it truly exists. Racism does still exist in America today – on both sides of the political spectrum. Now it will be that much harder to expose because the real cry will be impossible to distinguish from the false one, much like the boy who cried, “wolf.” Racism exists, but so does opportunity, and I can personally attest to the fact that there is far more opportunity than racism.
We have rid our institutions of government of the practice of discrimination; if only we could rid our political discourse of the ugliness that ensues when we ascribe discriminatory motive to statements with no obvious discriminatory aspect. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd couldn’t help hearing a missing word in Congressman Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s speech to Congress. The Congressman yelled, “You lie.” Ms. Dowd couldn’t help hearing, “you lie, boy.”
While Congressman Wilson started a fire, Ms. Dowd poured fuel on it. The greater ugliness is not the inappropriate outburst, but Ms. Dowd intentionally injecting a word loaded with a history of racial condescension to label a whole movement of opposition.
Continue reading Michael Williams (R Cand, SEN-TX) wants to talk about race.
…(as can be found via here) is someone who has forgotten, or never knew, that the phrase “Not In Our Name” originated as a slogan against the liberation of Afghanistan. in other words: I’ve known for half a decade that the antiwar movement lies when it suits them, so I was hardly surprised when the mask slipped on this one.
Contemptuous, but hardly surprised.
In other news, General McChrystal is possibly threatening to resign if the White House doesn’t start listening for his requests for more troops. For the sake of pretty much… everybody… I hope to hell that’s a garbled report; mostly because I don’t think that the President has ever handled a situation like this before, and I have precisely zero respect for his ability to learn how to do things right on the first try.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
[UPDATE]: Welcome, AoSHQ readers.
Darryl Fears & Carol Leonnig being the Washington reporters who did their level best to make their story about James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles racial:
Though O’Keefe described himself as a progressive radical, not a conservative, he said he targeted ACORN for the same reasons that the political right does: its massive voter registration drives that turn out poor African Americans and Latinos against Republicans.
“Politicians are getting elected single-handedly due to this organization,” he said. “No one was holding this organization accountable. No one in the media is putting pressure on them. We wanted to do a stunt and see what we could find.”
(Bolding mine) Well, guess who had to retract that passage by Darryl Fears & Carol Leonnig*? Continue reading WaPo retracts racism charges made by Darryl Fears & Carol Leonnig.
