Month: December 2010

Obama retreats on tax hike.

We won.

It looked that way earlier in the day, and it’s now confirmed.  The ‘deal’ will be that the White House ‘delays’ raising taxes for two more years in ‘exchange’ for getting a thirteen-month extension on unemployment benefits*.  That last is problematical, but given the Democrats’ moral weakness thus far the GOP might still be able to keep pushing a little and get offsets in federal spending elsewhere to make up the difference.  Besides, it’s Christmas: the optics are bad.  Even if we don’t get that, everybody who matters is going to breathe a huge sigh of relief.  The Democratic establishment will have a fig leaf for their cowardice and the Right will have successfully kept the Other Side from delivering another kick to the groin to the US economy; it’s not perfect, but it’ll keep things from getting worse until 2012.

By the way, ‘deal,’ ‘delay,’ and ‘exchange’ were all in scare quotes because this wasn’t really a deal; more like the Democrats finally admitting that they didn’t have the guts to raise taxes in the middle of a sour economy.  And the White House isn’t delaying raising taxes; even assuming that Obama’s in a position to raise them in 2012 he won’t dare do it then, either.  And it’s not an exchange; as noted above, the GOP can give ground on this topic readily enough, particularly if we can take the opportunity to gut some useless spending elsewhere.

In other words, it’s pretty much all over except for the gloating.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Obama retreats on tax hike.

#rsrh EJ Dionne: Speaker-to-Ducks.

See, now this is the mistake that E.J. Dionne and other more or less doctrinaire Democrats keep making.  Dionne knows that the country has problems; he also knows that these problems need some sort of solution implemented.  Fast.  Obviously, the existing solutions by established politicians aren’t working, so Dionne’s going to solicit opinions from less established ones (who will hopefully be more frank, or innovative, or who will have a fresher perspective).

So far, so good… except that to do all of this Dionne went out and interviewed three losers.  Specifically: Mary Jo Kilroy (one-term lame duck), Joe Sestak (two-term lame duck who retired to go lose a Senate race), and Tom Perriello (one-term lame duck).  And the advice that they gave was precisely what you’d expect from a group that had eight years’ worth of Federal experience between them, and who universally folded at their first real challenge: fight the power (with all the tired class war cliches that they have to command) and recycle the platitudes that all three relied upon to win in 2006 and 2008.

Now, what Dionne should have done would have been to interview the people who won: Representative-elect Steve Stivers, Senator-elect Pat Toomey, and/or Representative-elect Robert Hurt*.  Because first, their opinions about what needs to be done in this country are obviously going to be more relevant than Kilroy’s, Sestak’s, and Perriello’s.  And second, because the minor detail that E.J. Dionne is not going to like hearing what the winners have to say is actually a feature, not a bug.  You see, Kilroy, Sestak, and Perriello deserved to lose.  Because they were wrong.  And their party is wrong.

And the Democrats – indeed, the entire Left – need to face that.

Moe Lane

*It wouldn’t hurt for Dionne to have talked to Pat Meehan, who won Sestak’s old district.

#rsrh Mini-review of the Canon Powershot SD1200 IS.

Glenn Reynolds has put up a link to a one-day Amazon sale on the Canon Powershot SD4000 digital camera.  I have the Canon PowerShot SD1200IS, and it’s more or less replaced my Flip Ultra Camera for my primary video recording. I like the Flip for its simplicity and capacity, but the Canon is smaller, seems to hold a better charge, gives good video and audio for an impromptu interview, and is much easier to transfer files off of.

In other words, that sale on the SD4000s is almost a steal.

OK, breaking a rule here.

I’m revisiting the article linked by the previous post. As AdFreak noted, if this doesn’t move you than nothing will.


Find more videos like this on AdGabber

Moe Lane

PS: Terry Pratchett once noted that losing your hearing wasn’t always a totally bad thing for a composer; as he put it, being deaf doesn’t mean that you stop hearing the music. You just stop hearing the distractions. That might just be a comforting lie that hearing people tell themselves, but it’s a nice comforting lie none the less.

#rsrh More liberal lunacy on the Repeal Amendment.

The great attraction of the Repeal Amendment (executive summary: it’s a proposed amendment that would allow state legislatures to overrule Congress with a two-thirds majority) is that it reveals the abysmal ignorance of those on the Left who oppose it. Apparently – at least, according to Dana Lithwick/Jeff Sheshol, Dana Milbank, and Doug Mataconis* – Article V of the Constitution is just there for show, and God forbid that conservatives ever propose to use it to do anything.

Seriously: these people are so infuriated that the conservative Republicans in objective reality are so different from the conservative Republicans that live in their ids that they’re making really quite silly arguments.  To add to Glenn’s commenter’s observation, by Dana Milbank’s own argument he’s not only against our freeing, then extending citizenship to, African-Americans; Milbank doesn’t want women to vote, either.

Which is just nasty of the man.

Moe Lane

Continue reading #rsrh More liberal lunacy on the Repeal Amendment.

#rsrh Peter Wehner smacks around John Derbyshire.

Oh, good.  John Derbyshire hates former President Bush’s African AIDS initiative.  That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside; but not as much as reading Peter Wehner’s elegant, devastating, and – most importantly – informed destruction of Derbyshire.  It’s always nice to see nativist fools (particularly nativist fools who weren’t born here, and who want to slam the door firmly shut behind them) schooled so comprehensively.

Via Jeffrey Goldberg, who is nonetheless all wet with his call to stop contributing to an Israeli firefighting emergency fund.  That comes perilously close to irony, in fact.

Big Wind looking for federal handout.

The wind ‘industry’ is apparently looking for more federal aid – actually, no, there’s nothing apparent about it.  They want more federal aid, they want it permanently – and they want it specifically allocated to them, and not as part of a nebulous ‘alternate energy’ package.  Otherwise, they’re afraid that they’ll go out of business. For the record: if your business plan requires – not benefits from; requires – an annual bailout from the federal government in order to function, then by definition you have a bad business plan.  Mostly because you are not actually in business; you are a parasite pretending to be a business.  I understand that this point has been obscured since the Democrats took Congress in 2007, but it bears repeating.  A lot of repeating.

Now that we’ve got that lesson in Capitalism 090 out of the way, let’s clear something up.  It may be that the 112th Congress may find it expedient to take into account the Left’s religious sensibilities on ‘green’ power.  If so, however, a basic appreciation of this country’s secular ideals demands that the Left gives up blocking its favorite environmental devil figure.  I refer, of course, to nuclear power generation.  To put it very bluntly: if they want to get the angels of wind farms then they have to enthusiastically support the demons of nuclear power plants.  Note ‘enthusiastically:’ they’re going to have to actively and effectively oppose the antinuke scientific illiterates alongside the rest of us.  Because the USA is not going to reduce the amount of power that we generate every year if we don’t have to, and that is not negotiable.  The more reasonable green types need to accept that reality.

And if they don’t want to do that: well. I guess that they don’t really love Mother Gaia all that much, after all.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

‘I’ll see your six and raise you thirty-five.’

Classical reference.

Anyway, a couple of things about this remarkably balanced NYT article on the knife-rights movement:

  • It’s remarkably balanced.  I suspect a stealth conservative. Or a closet medieval re-enactor*.
  • One flub, though.  Knife-rights activists should not be said to ‘contend’ that the Second Amendment applies to edged weapons (clubs and maces, for that matter); the proper verb should be ‘remind.’
  • This bit: A police officer there fatally shot a man in August after, the officer said, he ordered the man several times to drop a knife that he was carrying. But the legitimacy of the shooting has been questioned by the Police Department, partly because the knife, which had a three-inch blade, was found in a closed position near the body of the dead man, who had been using it to carve a piece of wood… is not actually an example of how ‘volatile’ the knife issue is.  As described, it’s an example of bad police training.

As you might have guessed, I’ve got a sword or two in the house – and I know people with a fairly decent medieval arsenal, including fully-articulated and absolutely functional plate mail armor sets.  The fact that nobody almost never hears of people running amok** in this country through the streets with a battle-ax suggests that we’re capable of handling the strain of keeping edged weapons around.

Moe Lane

*Because we’re everywhere.  Incidentally, if you ever want to meet hardcore liberals who are also hardcore 2nd Amendment absolutists then join the Society for Creative Anachronism.  Also an excellent place to meet conservative/Republican neo-pagans.

**I admit that it’s apparently a real problem in Indonesia, which is where the term originates.  I am also reminded by my wife that recently we did have somebody (a television star, apparently), who killed his mom with a sword.