Author: Moe_Lane

Strictly business, Madam Speaker.

A pair of stories (HT: Hot Air Headlines, here and here) illustrate the sudden appearance of troubles for the Speaker of the House rather neatly. First, the general:

Democrats: CIA is out to get us

Democrats charged Tuesday that the CIA has released documents about congressional briefings on harsh interrogation techniques in order to deflect attention and blame away from itself.

and now, the specific:

Source: Aide told Pelosi waterboarding had been used

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A source close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now confirms that Pelosi was told in February 2003 by her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah.

This appears to contradict Pelosi’s account that she was never told waterboarding actually happened, only that the administration was considering using it.

Which is a nice way of putting it*. Continue reading Strictly business, Madam Speaker.

Obama is not going to legalize your stash. Ever.

I refuse to believe that Matt Welch doesn’t already know all of what I’m about to write already.

Obama Loses His “Cool”
With his glib dismissal of pot legalization, the president looks less like the man, and more like The Man.

When the generation of Americans under the age of 30 gets around to realizing that this handsome young president might not be nearly as cool as they’d hoped, it won’t be hard to affix a date on when the milk began to sour. It was March 26, 2009, when Barack Obama conducted a live town hall press conference featuring questions submitted online.

Near the beginning of this hip and mildly groundbreaking interaction, the president said this: “We took votes about which questions were gonna be asked.…Three point five million people voted. I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high, uh, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve, uh, the economy and job creation. And, uh (chuckles), uh, I don’t know what this says about the online audience (laughs), but I just want—I don’t want people to think that—this was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered. Uh, the answer is, no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.”

The live audience laughed and applauded. The kids online? Not so much.

To those in a hurry, let me summarize my response: If you’re surprised, you have no right to be. Continue reading Obama is not going to legalize your stash. Ever.

New Camille Paglia’s up.

She’s not happy about the Mark Davis thing. I can see why – I wasn’t too happy about it, either – although I will note that it’s going to be a cold day in Hell before Sykes apologizes for making roughly similar comments.  I think that Paglia’s underestimating just how nasty the other side’s being these days, but it’d be a boring world if we agreed with her all the time. After all, she is a liberal.

Besides, the bit about Scare Force One’s on the money. How the White House press pool keeps from throwing shoes at Gibbs on a regular basis I’ll never know.

Crossposted to RedState.

The new laptop has arrived!

It is being stripped for action even as we speak.

Thanks again to everyone who helped out with that; I’m not done with all the sonnets*, but hope to be so fairly soon.

Moe Lane

*I’m still selling them for $20/sonnet:

Nothing political that I wouldn’t agree with anyway.

Democrats: taxing health insurance back on agenda?

Why not? It’s not like this would affect them any.

WASHINGTON – The Senate’s top tax writer said Tuesday he is considering limits on the tax-free status of job-based health insurance to help pay for President Barack Obama’s plan to cover all Americans.

Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., described his idea as senators began to grapple with how to pay for the costs of the plan, which independent experts put at about $1.5 trillion over 10 years. There are no easy options.

Baucus is carefully not saying at what income level this would start at, which is of course Senatorese for “a lot lower than you’d expect from earlier rhetoric.” Which should come as an unpleasant surprise or two to folks entering the workplace after it comes into effect; well, the ones who aren’t union employees or government workers, at least. Your standard ‘kids out of school, with first real white-collar job’ types, in other words; if this passes, it’s going to be reduced health benefits for new hires, less take-home pay to cover the taxes, or the joys of negotiating with the central government for elective health procedures. None of which is going to be very fun for them.

No, avoid schadenfreude. We want them voting their class interests, remember?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Can this Carrie Prejean thing be over now?

Speaking as somebody who is actually for same-sex marriage: has my side mucked things up enough, or do we want to really go for the gusto and alienate still more people?  She’s not getting tossed, her detractors are not going to get a social conservative crusade declared against her (mostly because the social conservatives that they think that they were aiming at don’t actually, you know, exist), and now we get to be reminded that the current President is prepared to do anything for same-sex marriage except actually stand up for it.  Let’s quit while we’re behind, OK?

Moe Lane

PS: Do you know what would help?  Going out and working to pass actual SSM legislation such as Maine’s (via Slublog).  That doesn’t bother people like judicial fiat or ‘shut up, he explained’ does.  Strange but true.

Crossposted to RedState.

Speaker Pelosi has a new excuse for not opposing waterboarding.

It sort of stops working after the third try, you know.

The Speaker of the House has come up with yet another reason for why she didn’t say anything about waterboarding at the time:

Pelosi defense: couldn’t object in ’03

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned in early 2003 that the Bush administration was waterboarding terror detainees but didn’t protest directly out of respect for “appropriate” legislative channels, a person familiar with the situation said Monday.

The Pelosi camp’s version of events is intended to answer two key questions posed by her critics: When, precisely, did she first learn about waterboarding? And why didn’t she do more to stop it?

Because, apparently, “All along” and “because it didn’t poll well at the time” won’t satisfy anybody at this point. Both Cold Fury and AoSHQ have a good deal of righteous scorn on this one; I’m just going to touch fairly briefly on what this means, going forward. Continue reading Speaker Pelosi has a new excuse for not opposing waterboarding.