Month: February 2015

Tweet of the Day, That Is A Great Photo edition.

The driver who managed to extricate his or her car without wrecking the ice did a nice job, too.

I mention that because whoever did it probably drove away wistfully thinking that nobody would ever notice.  Well, somebody did. Nicely done.

Moe Lane

PS: Now watch: it’ll turn out to be a Photoshop, or something.

Your essentially meaningless (until you win) quiz/contest of the day.

The question is not “Can you pick the correct names of US Presidents from the options below?” Of course you can!  That goes without saying.  No, the question is “How many seconds does it take you to sort through the list?” They give you two minutes: and yes, I know, you’ll only need less than one.  Your job is not to beat the clock; your job is to beat my time.

It’s bad when you look at a seven day forecast…

…like this:

weather

And then you say “HEY, WOW, THAT’S GREAT!” I mean, shoot, at this rate on Sunday I’ll be ready to go hit the pool.  And I mean literally hit the pool: any water that’s still in there (I assume that the property managers drain it every year) isn’t going to melt in a single day of just-above-freezing.

Spring can’t come quickly enough, at this point.  Or, shoot, a runaway greenhouse effect. As many people have noted: the nice thing about greenhouses is that they’re hot*.

Moe Lane

*Also, wet.  Which is why we grow things in them.

How Debbie Wasserman Schultz* Taught the Left To Be Utter Cynics.

  • Shot: “Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s office offered to change her position on medical marijuana if a major Florida donor recanted his withering criticism of her, according to emails obtained by POLITICO. The proposal to Orlando trial lawyer John Morgan was straightforward: retract critical statements he made to a reporter in return for Wasserman Schultz publicly backing his cannabis initiative that she had trashed just months earlier.”
  • Chaser: “The free-market-promoting Competitive Enterprise Institute receives funding from the drug lobby. When an issue arises where the drug lobby’s position is at odds with the Institute’s stated principles of free enterprise, the Institute sides with free enterprise instead of with their donor. …It says something about the way the Left works, perhaps, that a liberal magazine [Mother Jones] finds this odd.”

Timothy Carney went on to note that, at both of the think tanks that he worked at, both organizations were “very clear that their donors don’t get to influence the policies advocated by scholars. That’s the way any reputable think tank works. [Stephanie] Mencimer [the author of the Mother Jones piece] seems to think there’s something wrong with this.” Well, of course Stephanie Mencimer would think that there’s something wrong with this! Look at the examples that are most immediate to her!  The DNC chair herself was ready to flip on an issue, if that’s what it took to keep her job – and make no mistake, this is about Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s job. After the utter debacle of 2014 the woman’s once-bright political career is in serious danger. But a Senate bid could repair her fortunes – if she won.

Against all of that, what’s a piddling little position on medical pot?

Moe Lane

Continue reading How Debbie Wasserman Schultz* Taught the Left To Be Utter Cynics.

Left mad the Right’s noticed that entire ‘ambivalent about America’ thing Obama does.

There’s a reason why the Right has been laughing over the hysterical (in both senses) reaction by the Left over what were actually some commonplace remarks by Rudy Giuliani.  To wit, we all went Yes, ‘Barack Obama doesn’t love this country the way that you or I do’ sounds about right.

So what?

The perception that Obama dislikes America is nothing new in conservative circles. Radio talk hosts have asked me numerous times – often, in creative ways – if I agree that the president  “hates” America. Since none of us has the ability to bore into the souls of fellow humans and unlock all their hidden motivations, the question is distracting and irrelevant. And as political rhetoric goes it’s needlessly hyperbolic.

But really, is it that outrageous or surprising that so many Americans doubt whether the president “loves” the traditional role the United States has played on the world stage, or whether he “loves” the capitalism that’s defined us for the past 50 or 60 years, or whether he “loves” the Constitutional protections we have for religious freedoms, guns, or free speech?

Continue reading Left mad the Right’s noticed that entire ‘ambivalent about America’ thing Obama does.

The Ferguson protest movement: Ripe For The Plucking.

It’s like watching a horror movie, really. Admittedly, one where you’re not really emotionally invested in who lives and who dies, but there’s still that sense of Yeah, don’t go into the cellar.  Yup, you went into the cellar. Fine, let’s get this over with. Here we go:

The next move after expressing anger in the street is often the hard part for new civil rights groups. Do they seek changes in the law? Push to elect sympathetic candidates? Focus on winning over those who aren’t yet on their side? Or pull back from the moment and get radical, pressing for wholesale social change?

In Ferguson, many of the more than a dozen organizations that formed in the tear-gas clouds of August fragmented over the course of the fall. Conflicts flared over organizers who spent much of their time honing their profile on Twitter and attending an endless series of conferences on activism. Members of some new groups grumbled about leaders who seemed more interested in scoring airtime with Don Lemon on CNN or winning donations from wealthy celebrities than about recruiting poor people to their cause.

So… business as usual, then, for Left-protest groups? The next step is where those in the leadership who display the right combination of ambition and bootlicking get to join the establishment (and burnish their fifteen minutes of streetcred for the rest of their lives), while the husks of the movements all get taken over by the blackshirts and used to advocate a permanent, violent Marxist ideology. So it has always been done, and so it will always be done to the Left. Establishment Democrats and the blackshirts are, in fact, pretty good at this entire symbiotic predator/scavenger relationship: and, of course, killing and gutting new Leftist protest groups as they appear are a great way to keep them from doing something truly subversive, like successfully primary Establishment Democrats and win elections.

Which is, by the way, a measure for success that many in the Activist Left hates. Mostly because they just can’t seem to, you know, succeed at it*. Hopefully, they won’t figure out why for a good, long time.

(via @gabrielmalor)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*I dunno. Go ask Eric Cantor whether the Tea Party movement still has any teeth.  …And while I wrote that out kind of facetiously, the truth of it is that Cantor went from being maybe the next Speaker of the House to an embryonic lobbyist in a single night. That’s the kind of power that Lefty street-level operatives crave. And that’s precisely the kind of power that their masters – word choice deliberate – in the Democratic party so carefully deny them.

Quote of the Day, [Academia] Chose… Poorly edition. [UPDATE]

Glenn Reynolds, on trial lawyers [academics] and the way they’re getting kicked in the groin down in North Carolina right now:

…when you align yourself exclusively with one party, and weaponize yourself in that party’s cause, you’re going to pay the price when the other party is in power. That’s the price you pay for whoring yourself out.

A slightly harsher word than I might have used, but Glenn’s a law professor himself. He has a certain amount of leeway there.  He’s also, of course, right.

[UPDATE: As Faithul Reader Mikey NTH noted in comments, this was about academic centers, not trial lawyers. Which I knew and should have noted, because I read about this story a couple of days ago.  Ach, well.  My bad, and at least I don’t actually have to change anything besides ‘trial lawyers.’ Even the ‘law professor’ bit still fits.]

So, yeah. I seem to have been nominated for a Blog Bash award.

Best Investigative Post for 2014 category, for a post I wrote for RedState on Voter ID and the fringe factions that oppose it. My friends and fellow RedState colleagues Aaron Gardner (Activism) and Dan McLaughlin (Microblog) also scored nominations; I figure that it’s a win for all of us if it’s a win for one of us, which is my sneaky way of getting early dibs on Aaron’s and Dan’s reflected glory.  I mean, both Rusty Weiss and Lachlan Markay wrote some solid posts, there. I want to win, of course, but there would be no shame in losing to either of these guys.

But that’s why we have the saying that it’s an honor just to be nominated.  Now I have to go see whether I still fit in that suit. …Suit.  Joy.