Month: May 2011

#rsrh I started to read this Philip Klein…

…article about how the President wasn’t going to release the Osama bin Laden death photos, and started muttering something to the effect of The decision is probably not going to be left up to the White House – and then I noted that Philip made the same observation at the end.

I have to agree with Glenn Reynolds and Stephen Green: the political side of the bin Laden excision has been… poorly executed.  Much worse than the military side, which I suspect was the aspect of the original mission that worried the White House most.

Tim Pawlenty and the Tea Party.

Interesting post here about Tim Pawlenty and the Tea Party:

A two-term governor who typically emphasizes substance over style, Pawlenty has long been setting the groundwork to run a conventional campaign. He carries many of the calling cards of the kind of “safe” GOP candidates who have, in every presidential election of the modern era, beaten back challenges from grassroots favorites who eventually fizzled out in the end.

Though he may lack the rhetorical sizzle of some of the more fiery White House aspirants, including Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain and Pawlenty’s fellow Minnesotan Rep. Michele Bachmann, Pawlenty has been increasingly aggressive in his efforts to court the insurgent wing of the GOP and has fully embraced the language of the tea party.

Some interesting speculation in there on Iowa, South Carolina, and (especially) New Hampshire.  When it comes to South Carolina, I do wonder whether Pawlenty’s commitment to the Thursday debate will help make up Governor Nikki Haley’s mind on an endorsement, now that Gov. Haley Barbour’s out of the race and Gov. Mitch Daniels looks increasingly unlikely to run. I guess we’ll see.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Charlie Crist, ambulance chaser.

I know that sometimes, people wonder if the things that they do for the Right, or the Republican party, really make a difference.  To that I say: why not ask Charlie Crist?

From Florida Governor and presumptive Senator, to ambulance-chasing lawyer ready to serve you.  I don’t know about you, but I’m going to put this one up on the wall.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

[UPDATE]: Here’s the blogger that it was originally from.  Suggestion for folks doing video captures: try to attach your website to the end of these things.  Makes it easier to trace the original source.

You know, I’m just going to…

…take the rest of the night off. I’ve got a stack of books to chew through, and right now the OBL thing is sucking the oxygen out of virtually every other news story in the universe. Maybe I’ll fiddle with the iPad2, try to see what I need to buy to get the right mix for video editing.

Or maybe I’ll do the dishes.

Rep. Issa asking hard questions on WH message security.

As represented by the growing use of iPads – and no, that’s not actually ridiculous.  An iPad or iPad2 on a 3G network is a combination camera, scanner, and communications device that is independent of the White House’s servers; which means that anything written or transmitted by it is not going to be automatically recorded by those servers. And the problem with that?  Well, the problem with that is called the Presidential Records Act, which defines and regulates a lot of the official communications and records of the Executive Branch.

Let me summarize the below video from House Oversight:


Continue reading Rep. Issa asking hard questions on WH message security.

Shorter Megan McArdle…

“People can get weird about mangled quotes on the Internet.”

Kind of convoluted to describe this one: it started when somebody realized that she wasn’t all warm and fuzzy at the thought of Osama bin Laden getting a sudden case of lead poisoning, so she decided to tell the world on Facebook.  Said somebody backed up her realization with a MLK Jr quote; then somebody else* deliberately removed the quotation marks from said quote, to make it look like the whole thing was a direct quote from Rev. King.  That got passed around, often by people who are pretty darn defensive about the fact that they’re so disassociated from their countrymen that they can’t enjoy a good monster-killing; then another guy who really, really, really should have known better, Penn**, retweeted it without checking first; and then it went viral.

And then more defensive disassociated types started whining to Megan, once she debunked it.  The usual: conspiracy theories, pseudo-intellectual blather, and general man-child syndrome.  Because it’s the Internet, and Megan gets a lot of progressive trolls, and Megan is a woman, and oh right I’m supposed to pretend that progressive male trolls don’t have a lot of… issues.

Oops.

Moe Lane

PS: That wasn’t really ‘shorter,’ was it?

*This is where I start to judge people.

**Really, man.  Really.  It’s the Internet, dude.