Author: Moe_Lane

#rsrh QotD, Charlie Cook edition.

Charlie’s trying to explain to the Democrats – gently – why the usual line of giving out free stuff isn’t working out for them like it usually does:

My theory is that in September of 2008, when the financial crisis was beginning, the world was seeing some scary stuff. Lehman Brothers fell on September 15, 2008, the world’s credit markets seized up, the economy went into cardiac arrest, and the stock market dropped 500 points on one day and 800 points on another.

This had just as much of an impact on the public’s views of economic security as 9/11 had on the public’s views of national security. Consumers have been spending less, saving more, paying down debt, and investing more cautiously. In every respect, they have behaved more conservatively in their personal finances than anytime in recent memory.

Continue reading #rsrh QotD, Charlie Cook edition.

#rsrh Sir, if they were *MOSSAD* sharks…

…you’d never have caught them.

Egyptian officials say they have not ruled out the possibility that a fatal shark attack in Sinai on Sunday could have been a plot by the Mossad.

“What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark [in the sea] to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs time to confirm,” South Sinai Gov.

Via Fark.  Rebuttal… God help us all… via Hot Air Headlines.

#rsrh Annnnnnnnnd here we start the 2012 House cycle.

Cook’s put up their first assessment of the 2012 election battlespace.  It’s reasonable, given the large number of Republican freshmen Congressmen this cycle:

Rating Dem GOP
Likely D 28
Lean D 11
Toss-Up 4 6
Lean R 14
Likely R 37
Total 43 57
At-Risk 15 20

Still, don’t get too attached to these numbers, though: this is all pre-redistricting.

JSOC analyst arrested in FBI spy sting.

‘JSOC’ being short for the ‘Joint Special [Operations] Command,’ which is known to normal people as a group that coordinates communications and operations among various American Special Forces organizations*.  The alleged would-be spy Bryan Martin allegedly traded secret documents to an FBI operative in exchange for roughly $3,500; there’s no indication as of yet that he was working with anyone else, but between this and the Wikileaks Manning case it looks like the US intelligence community is on heightened alert for potential espionage problems.  Looks like it’s not the end of history, after all.

Moving along, the confusion of Hot Air over how cheap this transaction was is why I’m bringing it up.  You see, this kind of money is the rule, not the exception.  Hollywood aside, foreign governments do not pay out large amounts of cash to would-be spies.  They are, in fact, usually very cheap about it: for every Aldrich Ames there’s there’s a dozen Markus Hess’s.  However, the exception is generally found among American intelligence groups; the CIA in particular supposedly has a policy of paying very well for this kind of information.  It’s not like the Cold War, where we could get highly trained and educated foreign professionals to crawl across broken glass in exchange for a green card and a retail franchise in Terra Haute, Indiana – but if you’re a disaffected member of the repressive and shortsighted regime currently running your country, by all means: give Uncle Sam a call.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Continue reading JSOC analyst arrested in FBI spy sting.

#rsrh Why, that miserable [expletive deleted].

Senator Debbie Stabenow (D) has divorced her husband – and, frankly, she should have gotten one free kick in the groin in, too.  This stems from an incident in 2006 where then-husband Thomas Athans got arrested for soliciting a prostitute.  David Catanese calls the details ‘not pretty,’ and I agree:

Athans, 46 at the time, was not charged with soliciting and testified against the 21-year-old Westland woman. The woman was sentenced to probation on a charge of misdemeanor trespassing.

The older I get, the more hard-nosed (and less libertarian) I become about prostitution*.  But there’s something off-putting about a john being able to skate on a solicitation arrest by testifying against a hooker on a misdemeanor charge.  You have to wonder whether the sentence “Do you know who I am?” was uttered at any point during the initial arrest… and whether it, indeed, made a difference…

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh Why, that miserable [expletive deleted].

#rsrh O’Donnell’s million.

I’ll be honest. I don’t really know the reason why Christine O’Donnell has a million dollars left in her war chest, and I don’t really much care.  Truly, I do not.  I can think of three legitimate, innocent, rational reasons for that money being there, and there are probably more.

But I’ll say this: I can come up with five to ten good, worthy House candidates that could have used a share of that money.

Moe Lane

Obama retreats on tax hike.

We won.

It looked that way earlier in the day, and it’s now confirmed.  The ‘deal’ will be that the White House ‘delays’ raising taxes for two more years in ‘exchange’ for getting a thirteen-month extension on unemployment benefits*.  That last is problematical, but given the Democrats’ moral weakness thus far the GOP might still be able to keep pushing a little and get offsets in federal spending elsewhere to make up the difference.  Besides, it’s Christmas: the optics are bad.  Even if we don’t get that, everybody who matters is going to breathe a huge sigh of relief.  The Democratic establishment will have a fig leaf for their cowardice and the Right will have successfully kept the Other Side from delivering another kick to the groin to the US economy; it’s not perfect, but it’ll keep things from getting worse until 2012.

By the way, ‘deal,’ ‘delay,’ and ‘exchange’ were all in scare quotes because this wasn’t really a deal; more like the Democrats finally admitting that they didn’t have the guts to raise taxes in the middle of a sour economy.  And the White House isn’t delaying raising taxes; even assuming that Obama’s in a position to raise them in 2012 he won’t dare do it then, either.  And it’s not an exchange; as noted above, the GOP can give ground on this topic readily enough, particularly if we can take the opportunity to gut some useless spending elsewhere.

In other words, it’s pretty much all over except for the gloating.

Moe Lane (crosspost) Continue reading Obama retreats on tax hike.