Month: November 2009

Breaking: Greg Craig dumped as White House Counsel.

Guess that means Gitmo is still hiring.

Choice of verb deliberate, there: Craig doesn’t seem all that happy to be pursuing a new and exciting career as a data point in the November unemployment statistics.

Tokyo (CNN) – In the first major shakeup among President Barack Obama’s senior staff, White House Counsel Greg Craig is being pushed out in favor of veteran Democratic lawyer Bob Bauer because of a dispute over plans to close the U.S. military prison in Cuba, CNN has learned.

The move will be announced by the White House in the coming days, a senior administration official and a senior Democratic source confirmed. The sources said it could be announced as early as Friday while the president will be in Japan starting a four-nation tour of Asia, which would make it likely the staff change will be overshadowed by other events.

Craig declined to comment and hang up when reached by CNN late Thursday evening.

Oh. I think somebody needs a hug.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Self-portrait?

Ahem.


No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I enjoy it, if so.

Moe Lane

PS: The Waste Land and Other Poems: Including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Cuba shuts down… Cuba… to save energy.

(Via Drudge) Note that this directive involved 90% of the economic infrastructure of Cuba.


HAVANA, Nov 11 (Reuters) – Cuba has ordered all state enterprises to adopt “extreme measures” to cut energy usage through the end of the year in hopes of avoiding the dreaded blackouts that plagued the country following the 1991 collapse of its then-top ally, the Soviet Union.

In documents seen by Reuters, government officials have been warned that the island is facing a “critical” energy shortage that requires the closing of non-essential factories and workshops and the shutting down of air conditioners and refrigerators not needed to preserve food and medicine.

It apparently more or less worked – no word on how many people it killed while doing so – but I have an alternate suggestion: how about the next time this happens the Cubans replace the current ruling regime with a functional democracy, embrace a free market capitalist system, and utterly reject the modified Marxist theology that they’re currently suffering from? That way they can stop worrying about keeping the air conditioning running, and start worrying about the populace’s obesity rates.

Just wanted to throw that out there.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Quote of the day, Tom Maguire edition.

On our current ruling party’s top-down decision to actually run on their record to date – stop laughing! – instead of running away from it, Tom writes:

I sort of like the old days when we had a debate and then passed legislation, but this new approach – legislate first, then debate – may work out, too.

This is certainly turning out to be a rather more straightforward short-term political recovery than anticipated for the GOP.  Of course, it helps when one belongs to the political faction that the Other Side had previously decided to enthusiastically (and as it turns out, prematurely) shut out of the original debate.

Crossposted to RedState.

Looking at the Cook Competitive Race Chart.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers. And AoSHQ readers, too.

Looking at the Cook Political Report’s latest competitive race chart is in itself informative – the short version is that of the top 108 competitive races, the following ratios apply:

Dem GOP
Likely D 45 0
Leans D 23 1
Toss-up D 12 0
Toss-up R 0 3
Leans R 1 8
Likely R 0 15
Total 81 27

…but there’s some interesting things that can be seen with a little sorting.  Below is a chart of competitive seats, sorted by Cook Partisan Rating:

Continue reading Looking at the Cook Competitive Race Chart.

Pelosi fine with jailing the uninsured.

I fiddled with cutting down this video…

…of Speaker Pelosi admitting that she’s fine with sending people who don’t want to be insured to jail (H/T: Infidels are Cool); but I’m not all that happy with the results. Which is interesting, because I’m also not happy with the notion of throwing poor people into jail just because Speaker Pelosi wanted to raid taxpayer wallets and pocketbooks for the benefit of the Democratic Party’s various special interest groups.

Again.

See also Hot Air, AoSHQ – and probably everybody else soon enough.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

‘Real’ choices are for ‘real’ people, Megan. Not conservatives.

I’m moderately surprised that Megan McArdle doesn’t already know the answer to her implicit question here:

Obviously, since I’m pro-choice, I think you can argue against abortion control in many effective ways. But this[*] is not one of them–at least not if you hew to the feminist notion that women are entitled to their own choices and preferences as individuals, not lumped in with some vast undifferentiated mass of women who all want the same thing.

To too many of the people that she’s objecting to, women who aren’t pro-life aren’t actually ‘real’ women. Or particularly people, for that matter.

:shrug: You get used to it, of course: I’m just surprised that Megan hasn’t by now.

Moe Lane

*’This’ being defined as ‘dismissing conservative female objections en masse as being contradictory to a liberal tautology.’

Crossposted to RedState.