Month: February 2010

Lawrence O’Donnell loses it at Marc Thiessen.

I actually had a better title in mind, but it was too earthy for RedState. Anyway, watch this fascinating exercise in ‘speaking truth to power’ towards Marc Thiessen by O’Donnell:

If you conclude from that clip that ‘speaking truth to power’ is more or less equivalent to ‘throwing… feces’ [more earthy language, sorry] – well, you could be forgiven for that, given the evidence. Ed Morrissey calls it an ‘unhinged rant‘ – which I don’t agree with; speaking as a ranter myself, it’s not up to even minimal rhetorical standards – and wonders whether Joe Scarborough has had enough of this… there we go with the earthy language, again. O’Donnell has a genius for turning stuff into that sort of thing, it seems.

Moe Lane

PS: I haven’t actually read Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, but if it’s getting this kind of incoherent primate screeching in response then there must be something to it.

Crossposted to RedState.

Clinton released from hospital. #rsrh

Well, this is good news:

Former President Bill Clinton was recovering at his Chappaqua, N.Y., home Friday after undergoing a heart procedure.

Clinton adviser Douglas Band said in a statement that Mr. Clinton left Manhattan’s New York Presbyterian Hospital “in excellent health.”

“He looks forward in the days ahead to getting back to the work of his Foundation, and to Haiti relief and recovery efforts,” it said.

Heart operations are no joke, even today.  Plus, there’s the Haiti relief efforts to consider; he and former President Bush are of course involved in coordinating US efforts for the disaster there, so the sooner he feels well enough to return to those duties, the better.

Moe Lane

Patrick Kennedy (D, RI) cutting and running.

Was it something we said?

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

That’s the word that’s going down on the street:

A Democratic official says Rep. Patrick Kennedy has decided not to seek re-election for his seat representing Rhode Island in the U.S. Congress.

The official spoke to The Associated Press only on the condition that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak ahead of the official announcement.

[snip]

Patrick Kennedy has been in and out of treatment for substance abuse since crashing his car outside the U.S Capitol in 2006.

Interesting that the Kennedy name is no longer sufficient to protect its holders from premature leaks like this. Also interesting that this is happening; then again, his numbers were abysmal. They were so abysmal that GOP challenger John Loughlin might even be disappointed about this, although… no, I doubt it.

More here: apparently, Kennedy felt the need to take his life in a ‘different direction.’ I would be cruel about my suggestions of where that different direction might end up going – but I just noticed something about this video I did a while back:

The Democrats are starting to run out of sitting Congressmen featured in it who’ll still be sitting Congressmen, starting next January.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The tragic victims of Snowmageddon.

In no particular order:

  1. Eggs.
  2. Salsa.
  3. Milk – in half gallon containers.
  4. Jamieson’s Whiskey (that one hurt).
  5. Fresh bread.

…no, I’m having difficulty imagining what you’d make with all of that, too.  Tex-Mex toast with whiskey on the side?  Toast Omelets with whiskey on the side?  Whiskey with just-leave-the-bottle on the side?  The culinary possibilities loom.

Rasmussen: 61% call for health care mulligan. #rsrh

The Democrats are grinding metal at this point.

President Obama this week called for a televised bipartisan summit to get his health care reform plan back on track, but 61% of U.S. voters say Congress should scrap that plan and start all over again.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds just 28% who think it is better to build on the health care plan that has been working its way through the House and Senate.

It’s the independents that are making this issue such a killer for the current ruling party. Rasmussen reports:

  • 66% of independents want to scrap the whole plan and start over.
  • 59% of independents want to defer a new plan until the next Congress.
  • 66% of independents oppose the Democrats’ health care rationing bill.
  • 57% of independents strongly oppose the bill.

And it’s the ‘strongly oppose’ that’s the worst bit.  Opposition to the Democratic health care rationing bill has hardened, which is why it has died.  How much longer do we have to deal with the stink before the Democrats will admit that they need to dig its grave?

Moe Lane

Great moments in Democratic recycling, February 2010. #rsrh

I meant to link to this Hawaiian good-luck symbol from (I believe) the NRCC yesterday:

x2_a6005c

…and I also remember seeing somewhere someone pointing out that back then the unemployment rate was around 6% and change. On the bright side, we’re probably not going to see double that this year.

[pause]

I think.

Barack Obama: JUST LIKE BUSH.

That would be George Herbert Walker Bush, mind you.

Obama, in a Feb. 9 Oval Office interview, said that a presidential commission on the budget needs to consider all options for reducing the deficit, including tax increases and cuts in spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“The whole point of it is to make sure that all ideas are on the table,” the president said in the interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “So what I want to do is to be completely agnostic, in terms of solutions.”

Obama repeatedly vowed during the 2008 presidential election campaign that he would not raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 and households earning less than $250,000 a year. When senior White House economic adviser Lawrence H. Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner suggested in August that the administration might be open to going back on that pledge, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs quickly reiterated the president’s promise.

Via Newser.  So much for ‘not one dime’, huh?  Goodness gracious, this man can’t even go back on his most highlighted domestic policy promise without bloviating about it.

Moe Lane

PS: If you’re surprised… why is that?  It’s not like you weren’t warned.

Crossposted to RedState.

It seems the act of research is a subversive activity requiring registration. #rsrh

Well, this is odd.

Just before I went to bed I noted this AoSHQ post.  To summarize, somebody found a 1951 South Carolina law targeting Communists* and chuckled about all those weird laws still on the books.  Then some hard Left sites got a hold of it, apparently mistook current attempts to repeal it with it actually passing (as suggested by a comment here) and started what was apparently a highly viral session of online babbling about the Right by the Online Left.  Entertaining – there’s something inherently funny about people who can’t do basic research attacking the intelligence of other people, particularly when they get things rather drastically wrong – but not all that relevant in the larger scheme of things.

Except that I’ve noticed that there was another sloppy, egg-on-your-face fake gotcha story making the rounds – I lost my temper about it, in fact – and it reminds me a little of the 2004 election cycle.  Remember that one?  You couldn’t go a day without some had-to-be-later-retracted outrage about funeral wreathes or loyalty days or whatever it was that was helping distract the Online Left from the electoral DOOM descending upon them.  I don’t really remember much of that after Bush’s re-election, and it all more or less stopped when the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007.

And now they’re back doing it.

Hmm.

Moe Lane

*Just to be particularly mean-spirited about it: no Republican voted for this law in 1951 – I mean, a Republican in South Carolina in 1951? HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Heck, we didn’t even take control of the state legislature down there until the 1996 elections – and the Democrats were the ones who couldn’t get it repealed the first time, either.