Month: December 2009

Merry Christmas Eve Day!

I expect light posting, now that the Democrats in the Senate have put coal in all our stockings (this, hopefully, being the only piece of news this morning). Although I do appreciate the left-handed gift of having health care rationing pass without the Usual Suspects being able to sneer about it. It takes real skill to have Jane Hamsher and Grover Norquist come out together and call for the same practical result, but that’s the Democratic party for you. I foresee a very enjoyable 2010, for given values of ‘enjoyable.’

In the meantime, here’s some Mormons kicking as… err, having a good time with Joy to the World.

How to fix the Embarrassing Presidential Loot problem.

Here’s the background: American Presidents can’t actually accept valuable personal gifts from heads of state, so they end up… being tossed in a warehouse somewhere.  This perturbs both The Volokh Conspiracy and Instapundit, both of whom find it wasteful.  I actually sympathize with the government on this one: auctioning off the stuff will tick off some of the gift-givers, particularly the more naturally tiresome ones.  So what we need to do here is to think outside the box.  Ready?

OK, here we go.

What we do is, we build this really, really big building.  In it, we put a bunch of sliding walls with doors on them – enough to make a bunch of rooms that are about, say, 10 feet by 10 feet; and they’re sliding so that you can come up with new floor plans every week.  Then you take a bunch of this stuff and you put it in various boxes and chests for people to find.  Just to keep things interesting, you can also put in some actual cash – pennies, half dollars, and those stupid dollar coins; also to keep things interesting, you can make some of the chests stay locked unless somebody has a key, or figures out the mechanism, or maybe solves a puzzle first.  You can also hide boxes, if you want.  If you really want to make it hard, stick somebody in the room to guard really important stuff.  That’ll keep people from making a beeline to the six-digit items.

People?  Yeah, people.  You sell tickets for people to go through the rooms.  They get a couple of hours to go through; anything that they have on them when they get back to the entrance they can keep.  If they stay past the time allotted for them, they either have to pay more to stay, or lose it all.  They can also pay to have a master key to some of the locks, or for having the right to tell some of the guards to leave, or maybe even to have the right to switch around some of the rooms temporarily.  There’s all sorts of things that you could do with that.

I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking, “Moe.  This will lose the government money.”  Not true!  The government’s just out for building/renovation costs and maintenance staff; besides, you could generate some really good cash flow here by VIDEOTAPING THE RESULTS.  Particularly when one group – oh, yeah, you’d do this in groups – encounters another.  This could be the ultimate in reality shows…

Moe Lane

‘O the rising of the sun, and the burning of the goat…’

Well, it kind of scans.

A giant straw goat – the traditional Scandinavian yuletide symbol – erected each Christmas in a Swedish town has been burned to the ground yet again.

The 13-metre (43-ft) high billy goat has been torched 24 times since it was first erected in Gavle in 1966.

That pretty much works out to once every other year, and while I understand that the people of Gavle may be a bit upset that they’ve been signed up for the involuntary Christmas tradition of Burning Down The Swedish Goat I’m not sure that they can fight the rest of the country.  Or, apparently, the clandestine American Burning Down The Swedish Goat tourism industry (apparently, they caught an American doing it one year).  Maybe they can pretend it was all their idea, all along?  Might be worth some extra cash, especially if they make it into a contest…

Current Charlie Cook guess: R +4 to +6 in Senate.

I’m surprised that I missed this, actually.  Then again, there were things going on last week.

Our Senate/Governor Editor, Jennifer Duffy, currently estimates that the range of outcomes in the Senate could run from a wash, with neither party gaining a net seat on the other, up to a three seat gain for Republicans. In the gubernatorial races, she sees the same likely outcome, a wash to a GOP gain of three seats.

[snip]

My own view, separate from the Cook Political Report’s estimates, mirrors [House Editor David] Wasserman’s current 20-30 seat net gain for Republicans in the House, but in the Senate, I take a bit more aggressive posture. I suspect a Republican gain of between four and six seats, predicated on Democrats being unlikely to beat any Republican open-seat Senate candidate or being able to unseat any Republican Senate incumbent. Democrats will have to be more concerned with defending their own seats.

I’m personally a sunny optimist, so six (AR, CO, CT, DE, NV, PA) is more my lower limit right now. And I think that at least one supposedly ‘safe’ seat for the Democrats is going to get absolutely hammered this year – and no, I’m not saying which one. People keep laughing at me in private when I suggest it.  None the less… heck of a way to start the new year, huh?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Hesitating in the face of volley fire.

Back in the day – which is to say, the days before reliable automatic weapons were present on the battlefield – armies relied pretty heavily on volley fire and rigid discipline to win battles.  There were two reasons for this: first, of course, the more missiles you have in the air at once, the harder it is to get out of their way.  The second reason was psychological: charging in the face of steady fire – even essentially unaimed fire – is extremely difficult.  Armies and their generals simply had to accept that there would be casualties, and that the proper response was to keep moving forward and return fire.  So it usually came down to determination versus determination.  Sometimes the one side broke and ran… and sometimes one side simply hesitated in the face of a sustained series of volleys.  It sounds counter-intuitive, but that can happen when your troops are braver than your generals.  Or when your generals simply don’t know what to do next, and don’t have the capacity to improvise.

Why am I bringing this up?

The White House privately anticipates health care talks to slip into February — past President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address — and then plans to make a “very hard pivot” to a new jobs bill, according to senior administration officials.

[snip]

Internally, White House aides are plunging into a 2010 plan calling for an early focus on creating jobs, especially in the energy sector, along with starting a conversation about deficit reduction measures, the administration officials said.

Ed Morrissey has more.  Bottom line: this will probably work out well enough for the President, but only because he has over two years before he has to start worrying about getting re-elected.  Democratic Members of Congress have eleven months, and they’ll need every second of it to handle the problem of their unpopular support of an unpopular health care rationing bill.  Put another way: either health care is an immediate crisis, or it is not.  If it is the crisis that we were told, then the President needs to get his fellow-Democrats in Congress to press on through and pass something with the urgency that they’ve been claiming all along was necessary.  If it is not the crisis that we were told, then the President needs to pull his fellow-Democrats out of this particular fight before retreat becomes impossible (but rout does not).  Letting Democrats in Congress take fire on health care rationing in the same way that they’ve been taking fire on cap-and-trade will simply get more of them fired in November for no good reason*.

But that assumes that the President is loyal enough to his party to take the personal hit to what’s left to his reputation for competence.

Moe Lane

*Which is fine with me, of course.

Crossposted to RedState.

Today’s laugh-out-loud moment about the hardcore Greens.

Prime comedy. Prime.  This guy apparently thinks that the Greens would be swayed by this argument:

…people in developing countries have much more important things to worry about–such as earning a living and getting ahead. Fighting climate change ranks low on the list of Third World priorities. The sprawling slums of Mumbai need more energy, not less; they want better roads, not fewer. More economic development would produce the money to help clean the now foul water and air, but also provide access to better education, one of the best ways to assure more manageable birth rates.

Instead of looking to make developing countries even more dependent on Western largesse, greens should focus on ways to help improve the day-to-day lives of their people. Rather than prattle on about the coming apocalypse, they could work to replace treeless, dense slums with shaded low-lying clean houses that are easier to heat or cool. Those interested in nature might purchase land and rebuild natural areas. The children of cities like Mumbai should have the opportunity to experience wildlife other than crows, pigeons and rats.

(Via Instapundit) I mean, this assumes that deep ecologists actually care about non-white people*.  I’m not exactly sure why: all the evidence points the other way.

Moe Lane

PS: It’s a sensible article.  A pity that the intolerant theocrats that it’s aimed at will dismiss it utterly, as being heretical about their ecologically-flavored dogma.

*I was going to type out ‘non-white people living outside of First World countries:’ only, most of the worst offenders among the Greens are Europeans, and, well…

Crossposted to RedState.