Author: Moe_Lane

Nutter plays games with Philly legal system funding.

(Via Drudge) I’m putting this one up mostly because of the last name – it’s Mayor Michael Nutter, and the game is “Give us money or we’ll shut down services that you don’t want to shut down.” It’s apparently a favorite game of urban Democrats, given that it seems to happen with distressing regularity in our larger cities:

Nutter Warns Of ‘Virtual Shutdown’ Of Courts

[snip]

The city has asked the state to approve a temporary sales tax increase in Philadelphia and allow changes to how the city makes its pension payments.

Without those changes, Nutter says nearly 1,000 police officers and 200 firefighters would be cut.

The reason for the cynicism is that threatened cuts like these are never in areas where voters might shrug and go “Fine” – which is of course where the cuts should be, for precisely that reason.  Staying within budget is hard; it’s much easier to spend it all on feel-good projects (for various definitions of ‘feel-good’) and scare the taxpayer with budget cuts.  In other words, Philly voters should contemplate that this is a problem that’s largely of the City of Philadelphia’s own making.

Alternatively, Philly voters could perhaps contemplate that the real problem is that they’re electing too many Democrats…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

I think MSNBC is trying to get the President shot at.

(H/T Ace of Spades, NewsBusters, & Hot Air) I’m aware that’s kind of an inflammatory statement, but hear me out.

OK, remember last weekend, when there were a bunch of reports of armed people at the Arizona town hall? Lots of stories of bemused reporters trying to get their heads around the notion that in Arizona you can wander around with an AR-15 –

Which is not a fully automatic weapon, by the way. You can’t buy fully automatic weapons in the USA*. I mention this because this is apparently news to our journalistic class.

– anyway, lots of bemused reporters, not least because of this picture (via here):

Health care rationing protester, by the way. See also this video, and stop at about 0:28.

OK, yup, same guy. Now watch this: Continue reading I think MSNBC is trying to get the President shot at.

I’d like to introduce these two approval rating polls to each other.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Hot Air readers. May I suggest this Gibbs video? It’s translated!

Gallup, meet Rasmussen.

Rasmussen, Gallup.

I believe that you two have something in common*.

Crossposted to RedState. Continue reading I’d like to introduce these two approval rating polls to each other.

My Zombie B-Cast.

I always think that I sound weird and nervous in these. The first doesn’t bug me – after all, I am weird – but the second is not something that I can do anything about, besides do more things like these. Thirty minutes or so of very strange policy analysis on Breitbart’s B-Cast below:

My major regret? Not mentioning Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Oops*…

Moe Lane

*Seriously, my mom liked that book; she thought that Jane Austen would have liked it, too.

Crossposted to RedState.

The – translated – Gibbs PhRMA/Axelrod payola video.

Video via The Conservatives: it’s of Gibbs ducking and weaving away from a question about why Axelrod’s former company’s getting that sweet, sweet ad money from the White House’s new friend PhRMA, so I thought that I’d annotate it. Particularly note the snide comment about free markets at the end.

Yes, there’s a small problem with the bottom-half text. Windows Movie Maker, remember? I do what I can with the tools that I have – and I know that the tools that I have aren’t the best.  Hence, the Wish List.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Now it’s the *administration* who’s using the term ‘Waterloo.’

Non-ironically, to boot.

But at a time when the president had hoped to be selling middle-class voters on how insurance reforms would benefit them, the White House instead finds itself mired in a Democratic Party feud over an issue it never intended to spotlight.

“I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,” said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.”

Bolding mine, and via Patterico’s Pontifications, who is laughing as hard over this as I am. Please also note that being for a public option is now being seen as being a non-mainstream position by the White House culture itself: the tone-deafness exhibited there is staggering, particularly since it was guaranteed that the WaPo would run with that.  Which suggests one of two alternatives: either the White House is going to drop the public option, or the White House has precisely zero message discipline.

Or both, I suppose.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

How to (legally*) personally profit from your position as a Presidential Senior Advisor.

Just follow these easy steps!

  1. Create AKPD Message & Media, a public relations company that specializes in astroturfing.
  2. Attach yourself to the campaign of the candidate that eventually wins the 2008 Presidential election.
  3. Disengage yourself from AKPD Media, but under circumstances where the company ‘owes’ you 2 million dollars, which it will then pay back over time (we call this ‘income’).
  4. Become a Senior Advisor to the President.
  5. Have the President negotiate a tone-deaf deal between the White House and lobbyist group PhRMA to get the pharmaceutical industry to support health care rationing.
  6. ‘Discover’ one fine summer day that AKPD Media, the company that you created and which is still paying you money, has been given a fat advertising contract by PhRMA to astroturf health care rationing.
  7. Profit!

See The Conservatives, Michelle Malkin, Protein Wisdom, Bloomberg, & Hugh Hewitt for more. Continue reading How to (legally*) personally profit from your position as a Presidential Senior Advisor.