Month: January 2010

Pushback on some pushback rhetoric…

…I hesitate to call it a ‘meme.’ At any rate: somebody – presumably somebody from the other side of the spectrum – attempted to derail Mark Steyn’s observation that Adam Nagourney is sounding a little bereft-of-information these days by rhetorically asking:

You do realize that Democrats have won every single federal-level election since Obama’s election, right? Five.

Err… wrong, actually.  Eight.  And the attempt to eliminate the loss of NJ’s governorship (and pretty much VA as a whole) from consideration is both duly noted, and mocked. Continue reading Pushback on some pushback rhetoric…

I probably don’t really count as an early Brown adopter, Cynthia.

Thanks for the shout-out and everything, but I’m a well-known GOP party hack. Endorsing Scott Brown right out of the gate wasn’t exactly unsurprising for me.

Admittedly, it would have been a no-brainer anyway, but that’s just the serendipity talking.

Crossposted to RedState.

On the Haiti situation.

(Donations to the American Red Cross can be made here.)

Unlike Dan Collins, I’m not particularly sympathetic to the administration’s upcoming suffering of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune over Haitian relief delays (although I agree that said delays are largely outside of this administration’s control).  This would be because I don’t really expect that the people squirming under the world’s inexplicable refusal to stop resenting the USA even when the Democrats are running it will take the proper lesson – i.e., stop freaking caring so freaking much.  Instead, they will probably revert to type and bitterly and impotently fume that the current President (not being a total idiot) called in former President George W Bush for help with the relief efforts*.

So, really, I don’t see any reason to show any nonreciprocal niceness about it.

Moe Lane

*As I had foreseen.

Crossposted to RedState.

Scientists on track to eliminate most domesticated animals.

…I exaggerate: absent a Singularity, it would take too long for the technology to percolate through the Third World to guarantee extinction events for our food animals.  But the possibility is there:

Scientists turn stem cells into pork

LONDON – Call it pork in a petri dish — a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, and save some pigs their bacon.

Written by someone who hasn’t seen a pig lately, I’d wager. Pigs are large, aggressive, dangerously smart animals that know why we keep them, and who aren’t averse to returning the favor if they can manage it.  It’s not like they’re horses; people don’t really like them much, except for maybe the potbellied subspecies.  Replace them with a vat of regenerating bacon and most people will never miss the species once it’s gone.

Via Ace of Spades HQ.

Moe Lane

PS: To sort-of reference Harry Turtledove: is this stuff either kosher or halal?  Would any vat-grown meat be?

RS Alumnus Pejman Yousefzadeh asks outright…

…a question that a lot of us are quietly wondering right now: “Is Martha Coakley TRYING To Lose?” Exhibit A is the Schilling Yankee smear, which garnished this reaction from me last night:

…it sounds nuts to think that a Democrat would sabotage her own race, but so far Coakley’s checked off every box that I can think of. So you tell me.

Crossposted to RedState.

DOOM.

Marvel, my brothers and sisters:

DOOM

It will most assuredly fluctuate many times over the next three days; and Martha Coakley might actually still win the election. But ask yourself: did you think that we’d ever be discussing the MA-SEN election in terms of a possible Democratic victory?

Well… false modesty aside, I always did.

Moe Lane

PS: Scott Brown for Senate.

Quote of the Day, John Yoo edition.

This pretty much encapsulates the intellectual, and I use the term extremely loosely, rigor of the antiwar movement when it comes to the GWOT:

How did he do it? It’s a question John Yoo has been getting a lot lately. How did he manage to outwit Jon Stewart? (“He slipped through my fingers,” Stewart recalled after Yoo’s recent appearance on The Daily Show. “It was like interview sand.”) Easy, says Yoo. “I’ve spent my whole career learning to settle down unruly college students who have not done the reading.”

…yes, pretty much. From what I watched of the interview I’d say that Stewart’s mistake was classic: his assumption that of course everyone agreed with his faction that torture was ordered; torture was committed; and that everything that his faction calls ‘torture’ was in fact torture caused him to walk into punch after punch.  What made it exceptionally painful (for given values of ‘painful’) was seeing Yoo take pity on Stewart a couple of minutes in and gently start presenting both sides of the core argument of What does the government need to do when faced with deliberate, unconventional attacks on its citizens? That lapse on Stewart’s part is actually a lot more damning than his inability to lay a few zingers on Yoo, but try telling that to his disappointed fanboys.

Mind you, I like Jon Stewart: he was making fun of the President back when it was still secular blasphemy.  But a man’s got to know his limitations.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The Change that they were waiting for: Gibbs and the WH Press Pool.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers. And Ed Driscoll readers.

Contra Hot Air and Instapundit, this isn’t really funny:

…it’s sad. The White House press pool is being given the mushroom treatment; and they know that they’re being given the mushroom treatment. But they don’t want to respond appropriately – which is to say, stop letting Robert Gibbs define what are or are not appropriate questions to ask. Until that happens – and the press corps internalizes the notion that Gibbs and the administration needs them a hell of a lot more than they need Gibbs and the administration – they’ll keep getting the mushroom treatment.

I’d be sympathetic, except that elections have consequences.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.