February 2012 – Page 20

…It lacks only a “Bless Your Heart.”

I technically first saw this over at AoSHQ, but my wife was telling me about this yesterday: it’s apparently a letter written in 1865 from a former slave to his former master, who had written to him offering a job after the Civil War. If you ever want to learn how to tell somebody to go perform a sexual act upon himself without once using profanity and/or a direct insult, this would be an excellent place to start.

Breaking: Heath Shuler (D, NC) cuts and runs.

And it sounds like it’s not to run for Governor of North Carolina, either. The relevant text:

This was not an easy decision. However, I am confident that it is the right decision. It is a decision I have weighed heavily over the past few months. I have always said family comes first, and I never intended to be a career politician. I am ready to refocus my priorities and spend more time at home with my wife Nikol and two young children.

Translation: redistricting had doomed Heath Shuler, anyway, and it’s a bad year to be a Democrat in North Carolina. Just ask Bev Perdue.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Man, Charlotte’s going to be all kinds of fun during the Democrats’ convention this year, huh? Whose idea was that, anyway? Joe Biden’s? It kind of feels like a Joe Biden kind of decision.

#rsrh QuestionotD, We Were Wondering That Ourselves Edition.

Steve Sugarman, while writing on how Hollywood got stop-thrusted on SOPA/PIPA, noted the same thing that the rest of us did: while both the Online Right and the Online Left generally came down hard against the two bills, when Democrats had to choose between their online allies and Hollywood they went with Hollywood. Republicans, on the other hand…

They began to ask why they should risk the ire of their Internet supporters to rescue an industry that was happily advertising how much it hated them.

Why, indeed. I certainly hope that entertainment executives are taking one particular lesson to heart: to wit, get your danged stables of talent under better control. Allowing them to say any fool thing that comes into their largely vacant heads has put the studios and entertainment conglomerates into a rather sticky situation with regard to Hollywod’s influence with the government; worse, the politicians all know it…

#rsrh QotD, No Kidding Edition.

As God is my witness, the pun was unintentional.

Any, Megan McArdle, on the Left Just Not Getting It about why it’s impolite to try to force the Catholic Church to provide financial support for contraception to its workers:

I’ve seen several versions of Kevin’s complaint on the interwebs, and everyone makes it seems to assume that we’re doing the Catholic Church a big old favor by allowing them to provide health care and other social services to a needy public. Why, we’re really coddling them, and it’s about time they started acting a little grateful for everything we’ve done for them!

These people seem to be living in an alternate universe that I don’t have access to, where there’s a positive glut of secular organizations who are just dying to provide top-notch care for the sick, the poor, and the dispossessed.

I’m a bad Catholic myself. An awful one, in fact. But the fact that I disagree with the Church on contraception does not mean that I will tolerate the government bullying her on contraception. As Megan later notes, the government assists Catholic and other religious organizations in their charitable activities because religious organizations tend to be very good and very efficient about providing them; and, like it or not, the Catholic Church has very serious ethical and moral issues about birth control.

It’s also older than the Left, and fully expects to still be here when the modern liberal/progressive movement consists of footnotes in dusty books.

(Via Instapundit)

Moe Lane

Happy No More Years Day!

Dan Spencer over at RedState reminds us that three years ago today Obama gave himself three years to get this situation under control:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRAMdUNo2Cg

Continue reading Happy No More Years Day!

Sen. Kent Conrad (D-LAME DUCK, ND): We did too pass a budget!

No, Sparky, you didn’t.

The Democratic Senator from North Dakota is taking the position that The Budget Control Act (the formal name for the agreement that raised the debt ceiling) totally counts as a budget. While the idea of a federal budget that only takes twenty-eight pages to describe is actually kind of intriguing to me, the fact remains that the summary tables of an actual federal budget are larger. More to the point, in a budget you get an idea of:

How much money is coming in;
From where it’s coming in;
How much money is going out;
And where the money is going.

Guess which of the two documents has that information? Spoiler warning: it’s not the document that Senator Conrad is touting as being a budget. Continue reading Sen. Kent Conrad (D-LAME DUCK, ND): We did too pass a budget!