Not that it really meant anything; it’s sort of a scientific guess made to give expectant mothers a date to plan around. And birthdays on my side of the family tend to clump around the 27th anyway, so I’m not actually expecting the kid to arrive for a couple more days (or failing that, Thanksgiving, thus complicating family gatherings for years to come).
That being said, if I suddenly stop posting and responding to emails that’s the reas Continue reading Today was the Due Date, by the way.
[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.
Everybody’s overthinking Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) flip-flop from his 2001 stance on military tribunals:
…those who commit acts of war against the United States, particularly those who have no color of citizenship, don’t deserve the same panoply of due process rights that American citizens receive. Should Osama bin Laden be captured alive—and I imagine most Americans hope he won’t be captured alive. But if he is, it is ludicrous to suggest he should be tried in a Federal court on Center Street in Lower Manhattan.
…to his current stance:
…when asked by the reporter why Schumer now backs criminal trials over military tribunals, Schumer says he wants to see them executed.
You see, in 2001 there was a Republican running the government, and that Republican was taking the attitude that we were going to treat the 9/11 attacks as attacks. So Schumer went along with that. But now it’s 2009, and there’s a Democrat running the government, and that Democrat is taking the attitude that we are going to treat things like 9/11 as crimes. So Schumer is going to go along with that.
Besides, there’s money in it. After all, this is the man who justified “little, porky amendments.”
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
I know that Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) is not on a lot of people’s Christmas card lists, but this exchange between him and Attorney General Eric Holder was four minutes, forty seconds’ worth of pure schooling:
Not filmed was the bit in the end where Holder was on the floor, looking for his teeth. You do not walk into a situation like that without an elementary knowledge of the relevant historical record*. You do not come completely unprepared for a obviously-telegraphed question like “So. What are you going to do with a captured bin Laden?” And you do not assume that Senators like being given the mushroom treatment. Because if you do any of that, you can be assured that some Senator, somewhere, will take the opportunity to introduce you to pain.
Moe Lane
PS: No, really. NPR even noticed. NPR. Via Newsbusters, via Instapundit:
The exchange started with Graham stumping Holder with a question one would have thought the attorney general would have been prepared for…
Not one of Holder’s better days.
*Reminded me of this, actually.
Crossposted to RedState.
#52: An African-American barber has a completely different definition of what the word ‘short’ means than, say, a Caucasian stay-at-home dad does.
#53: When the barber asks you – in a slightly skeptical tone – to consult the chart on the wall after you’ve told him to cut your hair short; if you wear glasses to correct your very nearsightedness, PUT YOUR GLASSES ON before you consult said chart.
#54: If you have just learned #52 & #53, have a good laugh over it afterward. That one, I managed.
Moe Lane
PS: No, no pictures. What do you think I am, mad? Don’t answer that.
Via Instapundit, HHS Secretary Sebelius is trying to do some damage control on the recent ‘suggestion’ that women stop getting routine mammograms before they’re 50:
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, told women to ignore the new advisory recommendations for now.
“The U.S. Preventive Task Force is an outside independent panel of doctors and scientists who make recommendations. They do not set federal policy and they don’t determine what services are covered by the federal government,” said Sebelius in a written statement.
“Our policies remain unchanged,” she said of the federal government. ” Indeed, I would be very surprised if any private insurance company changed its mammography coverage decisions as a result of this action.”
A statement that is very comforting… until you remember that the Democratic party’s goal is to establish governmental control over the health care insurance industry. Who here thinks that an insurance company already grimly aware that they exist on governmental sufferance might feel the need to ‘change its mammography coverage decisions’ to reflect current state medical policy? Particularly if there are consequences for not being in compliance with all the laws, regulations, rulings, and opinions that bureaucracies generate more or less automatically. And if the government doesn’t like the idea that people are going to instinctively assume that said bureaucracy is willing to ‘encourage’ ostensibly-private entities to follow bureaucratic dictates, then perhaps the government might like to consider reining in its bureaucrats. As publicly as it can manage.
I’ll end by noting that this is all an inevitable by-product of the health care rationing bill; it is, in fact, why I call it that. More people covered, better service, lower costs: in the best-case scenario, pick any two. In the scenario that we’re going to get, if this passes? We’ll get the first one, and the current ruling party will muck up the second while flagrantly ignoring the third. That’s because the first one is easy, and can be done by lazy people. The other two require work to accomplish.
Moe Lane
PS: Ed Morrissey reports that there are no oncologists on the task force that made the ‘recommendations.’ I really, really hope that this isn’t actually true.
Crossposted to RedState.
Specifically, the Transformers: 25th Anniversary Matrix Of Leadership Edition [The Complete Series]
So sue me. And watch as we switch out G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Moe Lane
Another entry in the Democratic party’s War on Science:
Mr. Gore apparently thinks that we live on the surface of Sol; as Ed Morrissey notes, this temperature range is more accurate for stellar cores than for terrestrial ones. Ed also notes that this is unlikely to destroy Gore’s credibility, which is a conclusion that I reluctantly share. If his acolytes have swallowed everything else that the man says, they’ll swallow this, too…
Moe Lane
*Surprisingly apropos.
Crossposted to RedState.
It looks like terrorist lawyer – and you may parse that as you wish – Lynne Stewart may spend more time as an involuntary guest of the government than she first thought:
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court upheld on Tuesday a disbarred New York lawyer’s conviction on charges of supporting terrorism by helping an imprisoned blind Egyptian cleric smuggle messages to militant followers, ordered her to prison and told a judge to consider a longer sentence.
The three-judge panel described the 28-month prison sentence given by the trial judge to civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart, 70, following her 2005 conviction as “strikingly low” and not matching “the seriousness of her criminal conduct.”
The appeals court ordered the trial judge to think about lengthening the sentence, noting that the judge had declined to consider whether Stewart committed perjury when she testified at her trial.
Two thoughts on this:
And that last sentence shouldn’t need to be parsed at all.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
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