Month: February 2013

Japanese PM wishes to change Japanese constitution.

Three guesses, and the first two don’t count.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told lawmakers Thursday he intends to change the post-WWII constitution that imposed pacifism on Japan, in a move likely to stir suspicion in China and beyond.

…Did you guess where Abe was going with that? – Because it’s not exactly surprising.  And, given our current decision to do a slow recede from foreign affairs, it’s probably advisable.

Moe Lane

PS: That war ended a quarter century before I was born.

Matt Yglesias gets mugged by the DC small-business bureaucracy.

The temptation to snark, here, could be overwhelming.  The temptation to snark here, in fact, is almost overwhelming.  Matt Yglesias, on the personal roadblocks placed on him starting a new business in (Democratic party-dominated) DC:

In the District of Columbia, I need to get a simple Basic Business License to rent out a single dwelling. After puzzling over the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs website for a bit, it became clear that step No. 1 was actually to file form FR-500 with the Office of Tax and Revenue, which you can do online. Then it was time to hustle down to the DCRA (which closes at 4:30 p.m.) to file the paperwork. Once there, I learned that filing the FR-500 online wasn’t good enough—I needed a hard copy. Fortunately, the Office and Tax and Revenue was right across the street, so I went there and refiled. Then it was back to the DCRA to stand in line to get a number, wait for the number to be called, do some more paperwork, wait in another line for the cashier, fork over $100 in fees, then get a slip from the cashier to finalize the paperwork.

But then it turned out I needed to go to a third office, the Rental Accommodations Division of the Department of Housing and Community Development. It closes at 3:30 in the afternoon and required a 15-minute walk through a sketchy neighborhood. So the next morning I went down to that Rental Accommodations office to file a paper claiming exemption from D.C.’s rent control law.

The striking thing about all this isn’t so much that it was annoying—which it was—but that it had basically nothing to do with what the main purpose of landlord regulation should be—making sure I’m not luring tenants into some kind of unsafe situation.

Continue reading Matt Yglesias gets mugged by the DC small-business bureaucracy.

QotD, Gee, I Wonder Which Site They Should Get To Host A ’16 GOP Debate edition.

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) Byron York, on the RNC’s sudden realization that the Year of Hell that was the 2012 Republican primary may not have been the smartest thing that we’ve ever done. Anyway, they’re going to revamp the blessed thing (bolding mine):

…who should conduct the debates in 2016? “That’s a tricky question,” says Fleischer. “Putting on a proper live debate is no simple matter, and usually the people who are good at it are the networks or the cables. So it’s something we’ve got to work through and talk through, to figure out how the debates are going to be reflective of what a Republican primary voter thinks.” In the end, the party might decide to assign a few debates to organizations that did not conduct them in 2012.

YES. THAT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA.

Moe Lane
Contributing Editor, RedState.com.

The essential problem with the Chuck Hagel nomination.

It’s actually… pretty simple: Chuck Hagel is a bit of a schlemiel.  I’m not actually trying to reference Hagel’s Jewish problem*, here: it’s just that Yiddish has an excellent word to describe a sad-sack bungler, and English wants the useful words.  It wants all the useful words.

…Anyway, Hagel is a schlemiel.  Now, I know what people are thinking: they’re thinking “But… but… but being a schlemiel has NEVER been a barrier to acquiring a Cabinet post!”  And they would be correct.  We – read, both parties – have traditionally taken the opportunity given to us by the Cabinet to store inconvenient, superfluous, and/or ineffectual politicians for a while until they can be safely retired**.  This is, in fact, a time-honored tradition.  The problem here, though, is that we typically do not nominate schlemiels for Secretary of Defense; a quick review of the list of them reveals a group of sharp-tongued, tough-minded, and generally strong-willed men who would have gone through Thursday’s Armed Services Committee hearings like a hot knife through soft butter. Continue reading The essential problem with the Chuck Hagel nomination.

Fire glass.

This is the first clean link that I could find to the below.

Source: funnyjunk.com via Mary on Pinterest

 

To quote the original: “Fire glass produces more heat than real wood, and also is environmentally friendly. There is no smoke, it’s odorless and doesn’t produce ash. You are able to stay toasty warm without cutting down trees and the specially formulated glass crystals give off no toxic deposit.

Main Benefit: That shit looks like sorcery.”