Month: December 2010

#rsrh Helen Thomas still being… Helen Thomas.

Oy.

“I can call a president of the United States anything in the book but I can’t touch Israel, which has Jewish-only roads in the West Bank,” Thomas said.

Again: oy.  In case you’re wondering, that link is to Jim Treacher’s quoting of Ed Morrissey’s not-really-gentle correction of that particular canard.  Short version: she’s referring to Israeli-only roads in the West Bank (the government restricts them to cars with Israeli plates, which are available to Israeli citizens… including the non-Jewish ones, of which Israel has quite a few.

You know, in her way Helen Thomas is a shining avatar of the power of American assimilation.  Nowhere else could the daughter of Middle Easterners grow up to be the sort of person who thinks that all Middle Easterners look alike to her.

Moe Lane

#rsrh QotD, Lesson needs repeating edition.

Jim Geraghty, on the incredible sight of watching surviving Democrats in Congress casually shrug off 25% losses in the House and 10% losses in the Senate*:

The only Congressional Democrats who understand the message of 2010 are the ones currently cleaning out their offices.

Pretty much.  As Jim notes, the rest of ’em are mostly Congressmen in safe districts (Senate Democrats are probably going to get a good deal more nervous as the 2012 election approaches).  Mind you, what with redistricting coming up maybe we can correct the gerrymandering that led to such safe districts…

Moe Lane

*The term for this is ‘decimation,’ by the way.

The Lame Duck Cubicle Farm: A warning.

This article from the WSJ provides us with a look of the final special indignities being heaped upon those legislators of the 111th Congress who will not be joining their colleagues for the 112th Congress.  Essentially, said legislators have been removed from their offices and relegated to a temporary cubicle farm in the bowels of the House office building.  They get two chairs apiece (plus space for two more staffers elsewhere), a phone line, office supplies… and, for those who weren’t retiring anyway, no doubt the furtive, repulsion-based pity of their peers.  There’s over ninety freshmen Members of Congress coming in next year, after all: and almost seventy of those freshmen represent flipped seats.  So there’s no real interest in keeping folks out of the cubicle farm.

I bring all of this up because there are two things that I would like to note towards House freshmen (and their staffers) in this matter.  The first thing is, Isn’t this great? The second is, DON’T. LET THIS HAPPEN. TO YOU. Continue reading The Lame Duck Cubicle Farm: A warning.

Movie of the Week: The Princess and the Frog.

What can I say? I liked The Princess and the Frog, despite the fact that the jazz soundtrack could have used some work.  It had a refreshing lack of The Idiot Plot, one of the more sensible Disney heroines, and the 1920s is an underused milieu for animation.  Plus, they pushed the envelope just a little, in places.  Subtly.

Also: gunfire.

And so, good-bye to A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

#rsrh House GOP boringly kills Globowarming committee.

(Via Hot Air) Just to be clear: it’s not enough to simply shut down the House Select Committee on Global Warming. (OK, real fast: the Democratic leadership created a committee in 2007 to pontificate on study global warming; said committee has been pretty much a exercise in grandstanding ever since, and the new Republican House leadership is going to get rid of it just as soon as they can.  Hence, ‘shut down.’)

Oh, no.  That’s too nice.  And not nearly ritualistic enough. Continue reading #rsrh House GOP boringly kills Globowarming committee.

#rsrh ‘Compromise?’ On raising taxes?

I fail to see why the Republicans are obligated to ‘compromise’ on raising taxes.  If the Democrats want to not raise taxes, they already have the votes that they need to do that for another month.  They can do anything that they like, in fact: raise the marginal rates to 60%; create a VAT; and even tax our air, light, thoughts, and dreams for humanity if they can figure out how to meter such things.  What they can’t do is make us agree to give them cover for doing something that we don’t want to do.

Regretting yet that eagerness in 2009 to go tell people “I won,” Democrats?

Admittedly, Ezra Klein sort of knows all of this already.  It’s just that he’s kind of incapable of admitting that something bad can happen in Washington that wasn’t caused by a Republican.  Sort of how recent European history… no, no: that’s a nasty analogy to make.

Moe Lane