Month: December 2009

I need hardly recommend that people drink responsibly tonight…

…actually I probably do, at that.  Drink responsibly tonight.  Don’t drive if you’ve been drinking.  I myself am having a glass of Chocovine  (essentially, it’s Bailey’s, only as not as alcoholic) at home and being quietly thankful that it would take real effort for a drunk driver to send his car through my kitchen.  Depending on the sleeping baby’s sleeping habits, I might even put in a movie.

Here’s to a considerably less drama-filled new year and decade.  Won’t happen, but it never hurts to hope.

The Frozen trailer.

I am not actually suggesting that you see this film; it is, bluntly, stupid.  It is stupid because clearly neither the writer(s) nor the director of the movie (plot: “Three people stuck on a snow lift for a week.  Also, wolves”) have kids.  If they had kids, then they would have probably purchased the Mighty Machines DVD “Winter Blast” by now – and so would know that there would be an entire team of snowplows and specialized machines out there all week putting the slopes back in order.

Yes, yes: no doubt they could have some convoluted reason to explain that away – if they thought of it.  Bets that they did?

Moe Lane

Democrats resegregate DC school system.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Are you surprised? I’m not surprised.

The leaders of D.C.’s school choice movement, Kevin P. Chavous (former D.C. Councilman) and Virginia Walden Ford (executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice), today issued the following statement:

“House and Senate Appropriators this week ignored the wishes of D.C.’s mayor, D.C.’s public schools chancellor, a majority of D.C.’s city council, and more than 70 percent of D.C. residents and have mandated the slow death of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This successful school voucher program—for D.C.’s poorest families—has allowed more than 3,300 children to attend the best schools they have ever known.

Via Big Government.  You know, there’s a part of me that would almost prefer that this was evidence of some sort of long term payback – one that would have been in the works for about 150 years at this point – against African-Americans by the Democratic party.  At least that would be a reason to wreck school choice.  It would be a conscious decision.  Instead, though, I’m faced with the tawdry reality that the Democratic Party simply just doesn’t care.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

To a deep pit in Perdition.

Sing it, brother.

It was a decade that demonstrated what a bitter thing winning could be. Remember how, despite the opposition party’s best political efforts to abandon a war effort and abandon a nation to deadly chaos, our political and military leadership found a way to prevail there? Most people have forgotten. The more than 4,300 Americans dead in Iraq don’t need to have died in vain, though the commonly accepted narrative will be that they did. They did something good there, for that nation whose future was always written in blood, for a region that was stabilized and shown that democracy is possible. The only satisfaction from all of that was of the sort that can barely be spat out in words … You see, we’ve done it. You tried to stop us. So many fought so hard, and would not be denied. It had to be done and now it has been.

God damn the Naughts.

Personally, it wasn’t bad: but I’ll be happy to see this damned decade dead and buried.

Crossposted to RedState.

Jack Murtha (D): INCOMPETENT Earmarker?

I mean, it’s bad enough that he’s doing it: but apparently it’s not even working.

In 2005, Rep. John P. Murtha announced here that a technology firm was moving into an abandoned plate glass factory. Best of all, he promised, the new firm would generate 140 jobs.

The Pennsylvania Democrat steered $150 million in defense money to Caracal Inc., along with a $3 million grant for factory renovations. “Today’s ribbon-cutting ceremony is yet another indication that our investment in this region’s economic revitalization is paying off,” he said that day. But Caracal never created the jobs the congressman touted. The firm peaked at 10 employees and then folded in early 2008. Once its Murtha-engineered Navy contracts ended, the company could not survive.

The article goes on to note that Rep. Murtha’s earmarks aren’t generating jobs for either the companies that he’s supposedly fostering via earmarking (over 60% have seriously underperformed) or his district (unemployment rates seem to have not been affected by Murtha’s pork habits at all): there’s also a lengthy section where specific firms are discussed in terms of Murtha’s… well, ‘litany of failure’ works as a description.  Clearly the man is off of his game; if this was a post about an athlete I’d be counseling voluntary retirement, while he still had his dignity.  As he’s a legislator taking my tax money to enrich his cronies and lackeys: scratch out ‘voluntary.’

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Heretical bishop arrested in drug raid.

The reporter must have loved writing the first paragraph. In some ways, it’s why you get into the news-reporting business in the first place:

A church bishop shot earlier this year in an attempted robbery was arrested on suspicion of selling narcotics and is being investigated on suspicion of sexual assault.

Authorities served a search warrant Tuesday at Our Lady of Tepeyac Church in Home Gardens, an Old Catholic fellowship outside Corona. Sheriff’s investigators found evidence the man was selling narcotics from the church, according to a Riverside County sheriff’s report.

(via @vermontaigne) If you want to know what an “Old Catholic fellowship,” it’s… complicated. Oh, sweet merciful Lord, is it ever complicated.  Particularly if you haven’t had coffee yet; I think that this guy’s from the ‘Let’s have married and lady priests!’ wing of schismatic Catholics, and not the ‘Reform!  We didn’t need reform!’ wing – but that’s a guess.  And the aforementioned coffee’s sounding better and better as an idea.

Moe Lane

Moe Lane