Month: March 2012

#rsrh An excellent Fast & Furious review.

If you don’t have time to read it, let me summarize: Eric Holder’s Justice Department’s attempts to utterly stonewall Congress’s investigation of Operation Fast & Furious has been done in a fashion that would, if done by any organization not aligned with the Obama administration, result in a series of raids and subpoenas by the Justice Department.  The entire structure is rotten, from the top down, and Congress is rapidly approaching the point where criminal contempt citations of top officials (including the Attorney General) will be issued.  Historically, that’s the point where the executive branch throws in its cards and goes along with the legislative branch.

But let me add this: I am not actually confident that Attorney General Holder and President Obama realize that they’re over a barrel, here.  I know that a lot of people have been impatiently waiting for this story to hit the front page, stinks and all, but good scandals take time to ferment.  If Congress is going to issue contempt citations because the Justice Department won’t give up documents, and if the administration lets them go through with it, there is absolutely no way that the media won’t go on a full-court press about the Attorney General being held in contempt by Congress.  And before anybody thinks that this will be a net positive for the administration, let me remind you of something: people died because of administration incompetence, and the administration then tried to cover it up.  That makes this particular scandal quite a bit different than just about every other Washingtonian scandal of the last forty years.

Shorter Moe Lane: chum in the water.

Via Instapundit.

Halfway through Hound of the D’Ubervilles…

…which was written by Kim Newman, and which has as its conceit that it is the long-lost memoirs of Sebastian Moran, big-game hunter and right-hand man to Professor Moriarty*. So far, great fun: Newman’s portrayal of Moran is instantly and comfortably familiar to anyone who is a fan of Harry Flashman, and the multitudinous ironies of that add a certain spice to the stories. Check it out.

Moe Lane

*I refuse to explain who Professor Moriarty is.

So. That Skyrim game huh?

Got up to 78th level, ended up running every faction, High Elf sword-and-board enthusiast (of all things); killed the Big Bad, got married to the hallucinogenic tree sap smuggler, and am now sitting with her at the dinner table and thinking about how to turn all those gold ingots and jewels upstairs into the nucleus of a profitable minor enchanted item industry. Because I’m done with kicking the withered asses of Draugr Deathlords. Somebody else can do that stuff for a while.

IOW, putting on hold until the DLC comes out.
Continue reading So. That Skyrim game huh?

#rsrh Please pray for the family of Rep. Donald Payne (D, NJ).

The Congressman is being flown back to New Jersey via emergency transport, and that almost certainly means exactly what you think that it means: Rep. Payne’s colon cancer is in a terminal stage, and they want to make sure that his family and loved ones can see him one last time.

If you are the praying sort, pray for his family.  This is a very hard burden to bear; I wouldn’t wish colon cancer on my worst enemy.

Norm Dicks (D, WA-06) cuts and runs.

This one must have hurt, really.  I mean: a guy spends over three and a half decades in Congress.  He’s carefully establish himself as a convenient… receptacle… for almost-respectable defense lobbyist payoffs.  And he’s just gotten the brass ring: next in line to his party’s top slot at Appropriations.  And in the last Congress? That spot was the Holy Grail for people who wanted to wet their beaks while serving their country.  This was, in other words, as close to being Norm Dicks’ moment as is allowable for people who are… like Norm Dicks.

Then it all went bad.  Because Norm Dicks soon discovered – like the rest of the Democratic party – that the reason why David Obey (the Appropriations chair in 2010) decided to retire was because Obey realized that he wasn’t going to be the Appropriations chair in 2011.  And thus it came to pass.  In the meantime, Norm Dicks got publicly mocked by libertarians.  The House duly flipped parties.  Dicks himself had his worst showing (admittedly, 58%) since 1994 and the second/third worst showing in his electoral history.

And then those miserable so-and-sos in the new House leadership banned earmarks.

Continue reading Norm Dicks (D, WA-06) cuts and runs.

Life imitating Larry Niven again?

Be thankful it wasn’t the organ bank thing.

So there’s some evidence that we may have to revise our theories on when North America was first settled again:

At the height of the last ice age, [Smithsonian Institute anthropologist Dennis] Stanford says, mysterious Stone Age European people known as the Solutreans paddled along an ice cap jutting into the North Atlantic. They lived like Inuits, harvesting seals and seabirds.

The Solutreans eventually spread across North America, Stanford says, hauling their distinctive blades with them and giving birth to the later Clovis culture, which emerged some 13,000 years ago.

Glenn Reynolds semi-reasonably asks in response, “So what happened to them?”  I say ‘semi-reasonably’ because I know that Glenn has read a Larry Niven book or two in his time: clearly, what happened was the magic went away. Continue reading Life imitating Larry Niven again?

#rsrh Voting with their feet: corporations continue to abandon Blue.

(H/T Instapundit) Walter Russell Mead’s wincing again:

Wall Street Bankers To Occupy Salt Lake City

The news that many evil bankers are fleeing New York City, pink slips in hand, will surely cheer the Occupy Wall Street crowd . But Salt Lake City has even more reason to be happy about this turn of events.

And I feel bad for the guy. Legitimately. Mead’s taking a bit long on his personal Vision Quest from liberal to conservative (while being surprised about how little actual changes have to be made in one’s opinions and policy opinions*), but everybody’s got a different Vision Quest.  I imagine it must distress him to see how the Democrats simply refuse to admit that there are flaws – easily fixed ones – in the urban blue model that is making corporations amenable to voting with their feet**…

Moe Lane

*I’m given to understand that it doesn’t work like that when you go the other way from conservative to liberal.  Certainly I’ve noticed (speaking from personal experience) that it’s a heck of a lot easier to be a conservative heretic than it is to be a liberal one.

**At some point some ostensibly-bright Democrat is going to try to come up with a scheme of punitive  relocation fees in order to try to keep the corporations’ tax revenues – and the corporations themselves, I suppose – in one state.  The fallout to that should be entertaining to watch.

#rsrh A friendly piece of advice for Shirley Sherrod.

Support among the Online Left for Sherrod’s defamation suit just abruptly became a good deal less reliable.  Because it really wasn’t about Sherrod; it was about getting to Andrew Breitbart.  And Breitbart has passed, so she just won’t matter to a lot of them anymore.  Oh, it won’t happen right away; but this issue just started the long, downward arc towards obscurity.

My advice is that Sherrod not take it too personally.  After all, it’s not like the Online Left particularly considered her to be a person in the first place.  She was a tool, and the tool is no longer necessary.  This is the way of the world, or at least the way of the portion of the world dedicated to the Cause…