Month: May 2011

Elizabeth Warren (Who?) CFPB nomination on indefinite hiatus.

The Who? in the title reflects the fact that Elizabeth Warren is more or less unknown outside of Activist Left circles, where she is generally considered to be a secular saint*. Warren would also be the first head of the “Consumer Financial Protection Bureau” (CFPB) mandated by Dodd-Frank, except for the minor detail that the last thing we need right now is yet another regulatory agency seemingly designed to put the brakes on economic development.   Anyway, the short version of the current brouhaha: Senate Republicans won’t let Warren’s nomination come to a vote; House Republicans have no qualms whatsoever about denying the President the ability to make recess appointments for the rest of the 112th Congress; and Democrats, having conveniently forgotten that they did the exact same thing to President George Bush, are upset and wounded over the entire thing. And, oh yes, progressives are particularly upset and wounded that a Republican** called her a liar to her face when she tried to play I’m-too-important-for-this-hearing:

What makes this particularly entertaining is that the Left really, really wants this specific woman in this specific position, which suggests that the CFPB is going to be more or less a meaningless shell without her.  Those remembering the history of the FBI may want to contemplate the perils of giving an unelected bureaucrat too much power – oh, who am I kidding?  The Right doesn’t need me to tell them that and the Left is going to scratch their heads over the very question.  At any rate, expect this one-sided showdown to contribute to what promises to be a very long, slow burn this summer by Democrats as they increasingly wonder why things aren’t breaking their way…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*I’m not exactly sure why she’s in such high regard – which doesn’t mean that it’s not real, for given values of ‘real.’  To the point where the Left was certain that she could have saved the Democratic majority in the House in 2010.  No, really.

**Rep. Patrick McHenry, NC-10 (until they finish fixing the CDs in North Carolina, at least).  Hey, why doesn’t the Online Left go and raise a lot of money for his opponent? – seeing as McHenry’s in a R+17 district, which makes him almost as vulnerable as Rep. Elijah Cummings (the other Congressman in that clip) is.  Which is to say… not.  We’re all still having a chuckle over here at the way that one simple “You lie!” removed $1.69 million Democratic dollars from the 2010 election as thoroughly as if the money had been taken out to a field and burned.  We’d love to see it happen again, and again, and again.

This BBC Sherlock is excellent.

Watching the first episode now, and I’m pleasantly surprised on how well it works.  Then again, I did like the Downey/Law Sherlock Holmes, so obviously I’m not entirely a purist on these issues*.

Moe Lane

*Doyle would have liked that movie, I think.

[UPDATE]  Ah, so there are only three episodes’ worth so far.  Which means that I should probably ration them a little.  I have to say, they took full advantage of my preconceived expectations from reading the original Conan Doyle.

Apple starts getting scareware.

You know, it’s amazing how even a brief acquaintance with Apple’s customer service* can make the schadenfreude all the tastier:

One of the most pervasive and costly types of infection is now hitting Mac computers, signalling the end of an age of innocence for Apple customers, who until now have been spared many common cybersecurity problems.

Apple didn’t really handle the problem well, either: they apparently seem to be thinking that this was an one-time thing, instead of being the harbinger of The Time Of The Suck that Microsoft has already had to deal with.  Well, they’ll learn – and in the meantime, I’m going to make sure that all of my account information with this company uses a debit card; which will be annoying, but not as much as somebody hacking Apple and running up ten grand on my household’s credit card.

I suggest that the rest of you do the same.

Moe Lane

*It took me an hour and three different people to find out that Apple does not have a clue about what is the iPad equivalent to Powergramo (allowing me to record Skype calls and turn them into mp3s).  I don’t mind – too much – that something like that is only available on real computers; I do mind that Apple doesn’t seem to take demands on my time as seriously as I do, considering that they want to sell me stuff.

[UPDATE]: The person who emailed me this has passed along where he got it from.

#rsrh Hoka Hey.

“Alea iacta est?”  Never mind your Latin, Jonah Goldberg:

The simple fact is that the Democrats have their battle plan. It’s going to be Medi-scare every day in every way for the next 17 months. They are on autopilot. They are committed. Their die is cast. They have crossed their Rubicon. They have no desire to defend Obamacare, high gas prices, high unemployment, and a third Middle East war. They want — no, need — to be on offense because they have so much they cannot defend.

The question now is, “What are Republicans going to do about it?” Are they going to play the role of Pompey, the dissolute leader who didn’t want to fight? Or will they don Caesarian robes and join the battle head-on because they know they have nowhere to retreat? That is the political choice for the GOP: Win or die.

…let’s go with something more American.  “It is a good day to die!” – which, by the way, is not as fatalistic as it sounds: the Sioux were always down with the idea that it’d be their opponents who discovered the truth of the notion.  They just knew that if you were prepared to die, too, you’d often end up with fewer casualties than your less-motivated opponents.  And the Democratic establishment doesn’t have the guts to take the hits, up close, and personal: if they had, they’d have passed a budget next year.

So let’s hit ’em again.

Moe Lane

PS: Screw you, ye Online Left: you keep lying that I want to kill Grandma.  So I don’t care if you’re getting the vapors over language that is clearly metaphorical.

This Netflix thing is more or less…

…designed for iPads, it seems: which is nice, because using the latter for an actually useful video editing platform is still hung up with the minor detail that I still can’t find an app that will let me translate the video from my Canon PowerShot SD1200IS into a form that iMovies can comprehend.

And this is why Apple has a niche in the market.  You’d think that their phones and mp3 players would have allowed them to exploit a breakout, but that isn’t going to happen.

#rsrh So… it was like she was watching herself…

…do these things, right?

Antonio Cosme Velasco Soriano, 69, had been sent to jail for nine years in 1998, but was let out on a three-day pass and returned to his home town of Benejúzar, 30 miles south of Alicante, on the Costa Blanca.

While there, he passed his victim’s mother in the street and allegedly taunted her about the attack. He is said to have called out “How’s your daughter?”, before heading into a crowded bar.

Shortly after, the woman walked into the bar, poured a bottle of petrol over Soriano and lit a match. She watched as the flames engulfed him, before walking out.

She was there, sure, but it was as if she was in some sort of dream after she saw the guy who raped her then-thirteen year old daughter, right?  And she couldn’t wake up, right?  It was all very disconnected and confused and she doesn’t really know what happened next, right?

RIGHT?

Via @MelissaTweets.

Moe Lane

PS: For the record… when you find your daughter’s rapist who should still be in jail instead out on furlough and about to have a beer, and said rapist taunts you; you should not GO TEMPORARILY INSANE, find a bottle of gasoline, douse the rapist with it, and then set him on fire.

That’s not nice.