Month: June 2014

GWB Rehabilitation Watch, Look At Those Gallup Numbers! edition.

He’s already beating Jimmy Carter, although God knows that isn’t hard.

Gallup-Bush

There’s no real reason to bring this up, except of course that doing this incredibly torques off all of those folks on the Left who based their own sense of self on their loathing of George W Bush. That’s bad mojo, my friends: bad, bad mojo. And it’s something that my own ideological compatriots will need to watch out for, once the current guy is out of office: Barack Obama’s image will be rehabilitated in the public eye. It almost always happens.

So, those guys on the Left? Don’t be like those guys.

Paul Ryan to IRS: ‘Nobody believes you.’

That’s the central problem that the IRS has, here:

A defiant IRS Commissioner on Friday refused to apologize for the loss of ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s emails, and said the agency produced what they could, attributing their disappearance to dated technology.

“I don’t think an apology is owed,” chief John Koskinen told Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp after the Republican lawmaker asked for one at the first hearing since news came of crashed computers of some IRS officials.

Continue reading Paul Ryan to IRS: ‘Nobody believes you.’

I make no bones about this site being pro-Pluto.

It’s a planet, dammit.

This week, amid so much discouraging news of irredentist militias and unrepentant neocons, there was a small bit of news that might cheer people up, at least a little: Pluto, it seems, may be accepted back into the club of planets.

It will not surprise you to hear that the New Yorker is as sneeringly patronizing to pro-Plutonians as it is to us dread ‘neocons,’ not to mention everybody else that the author’s tribe hates.  Which makes this a bit of an ironic article on the fellow’s behalf, given that he probably doesn’t realize that he’s being as reflexively supportive of his own tribal prejudices as the people that he was sneering at.  I’m not mad about that, mind you: I’m cheerful, you see, that we’re making promise in getting Pluto back into its rightful place. Continue reading I make no bones about this site being pro-Pluto.

The Daily Beast interviews rape victim from 1975 court case involving Hillary Clinton as defense attorney.

I know that the title is clunky.  The problem is that every alternate headline that I came up with made it sound like Hillary Clinton raped a twelve year old girl.  Which is not true.

Well, possibly for a given value of ‘not true.’

Hillary Clinton is known as a champion of women and girls, but one woman who says she was raped as a 12-year-old in Arkansas doesn’t think Hillary deserves that honor. This woman says Hillary smeared her and used dishonest tactics to successfully get her attacker off with a light sentence — even though, she claims, Clinton knew he was guilty.

The victim in the 1975 sexual abuse case that became Clinton’s first criminal defense case as a 27-year-old lawyer has only spoken to the media once since her attack, a contested, short interaction with a reporter in 2008, during Clinton’s last presidential campaign run. Now 52, she wants to speak out after hearing Clinton talk about her case on newly discovered audio recordings from the 1980s, unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon[*] and made public this week.

Quick background, for people who don’t know: twelve year old was raped in Arkansas. At the 1975 trial, Hillary Clinton (defense attorney) made various claims about the victim, played a bunch of procedural games with the physical evidence, and managed to get her client a plea on a lesser charge that ended up with him in jail for a year, with two months time served.  The victim? …Had and has a hard life. Continue reading The Daily Beast interviews rape victim from 1975 court case involving Hillary Clinton as defense attorney.

I am distressed about these allegations about Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Not because of her writing – I never cared overmuch for it – but because Bradley was a seminal figure in the creation of the Society for Creative Anachronism.  Finding out that Marion Zimmer Bradley was definitely looking the other way when her husband molested children* and may have been a molester herself is… unpleasant.  God knows that you have to get used to the idea that people in previous generations – including people who produced good art – could be and often were quite horrid, but (if fully true) that sordid tale is even worse than the usual.

Via Instapundit.

Moe Lane

PS: No, I don’t know why I’ve never heard of this before now, either.

*Again, that is documented.

Ah, the majestic Canada goose.

Cordially hated by every human being on the Eastern Seaboard that has the misfortune to live under a migration path.  As Georgians are being reminded of, even as we speak:

Georgia wildlife officials are asking landowners to be patient with Canada geese during their summer molting period.

State waterfowl biologist Greg Balkcom says geese begin losing their feathers and growing new ones in late June and early July. During this time, the birds are unable to fly and are known to frustrate landowners who are irritated with the volume of feathers and feces the birds produce.

Although Wikipedia is telling me that more and more of the damned things are now sticking in one place, because, hey, golf courses are like Heaven to a Canada goose. …But of course. They vex us. They vex us, and we shall have them…

Via Fark Geek.