Author: Moe_Lane

Quote of the day: Arlen Specter edition.

If he keeps it up at this rate, by the 2010 campaign season, Specter will be so helpful that he’ll have tied up Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and left him buried in the desert surrounded by fire ants.

– Gail Collins, and that’s really the best part. The rest is fairly standard blathering about how wonderful the Democrats are, whining about how awful Joe Lieberman, and a not-quite-concealed weary anger at having to show a very minimal courtesy towards Specter now.  That last bit is all too familiar to anybody on my side of the partisan divide that’s had to grit his or her teeth over Specter’s antics for the last few years, and I can’t say that any of us are missing not having to do it any more.

So have fun with that!

(Via Jennifer Rubin, who is frankly more interesting to read anyway.)

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Rich Obama supporters start realize that he’s talking about *them*.

Avoid schadenfreude.

Look, I understand the temptation to mock. I really do.

Barack Obama’s rich supporters fear his tax plans show he’s a class warrior

Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy.

But it is now dawning on many among them that Mr Obama was serious about his campaign trail promises to bring root and branch reform to corporate America – and that they were more than just election rhetoric.

A top Obama fundraiser and hedge fund manager said: “I’m appalled at the anti-Wall Street rhetoric. It was OK on the campaign but now it’s the real world. I’m surprised that Obama is turning out to be so left-wing. He’s a real class warrior.”

It’s a powerful temptation; worse and worse, it’s a justified one. You knew and I knew that this was going to happen. You knew and I knew that the upper classes were going to be subject to the Democrats’ faux-populism soon enough. You knew and I knew that they were going to raise tax rates on the wealthy, and never mind that it won’t actually work. And you knew and I knew that when Rahm Emanuel informed the world that you never let a good crisis go to waste, he meant it.  So, it seems almost a duty to mock the people who are just now coming to the realization that they’re not only going to get beaten with clubs; they’re going to get beaten with the clubs that they themselves have paid for. Continue reading Rich Obama supporters start realize that he’s talking about *them*.

Napoleon… the romance author.

I am not making this up:

Napoleon Bonaparte – the romantic novelist

The first English version of his romantic novella Clisson et Eugénie, is due out this autumn, according to the Bookseller magazine.

When Napoleon died in exile on St Helena, aged 51, his possessions included the manuscript of his novella, the pages of which were scattered as souvenirs. But the fragments have been pieced together over the years, with the first page fetching £17,000 at auction two years ago.

The manuscript was written when he was an ambitious young soldier aged 26, shortly before he made his name by smashing a royalist coup in Paris in 1795. It tells the story of a brilliant young soldier who loves, loses and dies heroically in battle “pierce by a thousand blows.”

The New Ledger doesn’t really want to believe it. I sympathize, but it’s all too frighteningly plausible. They just let anybody write, you know…

[pause]

What?

Apparently, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth can control Time and Space…

…as they were able to make Kerry crony Wade Sanders start downloading kiddie porn seven months before the group even existed. Jules Crittenden wonders whether this is going to be the harbinger of a wider epidemic: me, I just wanted the opportunity to run this clip from Heroes.

Because any day that you can reference Hiro Nakamura is a good day pretty much by definition, of course.

Crossposted to RedState.

Since when did Alexandria decide it wanted Gitmo detainees?

Jennifer Rubin, who also commented on that Jim Moran column I raised an eybrow at earlier, reminds us that the subject has come up before…

It seems Jim Moran’s hometown spoke out on this issue a couple of months ago, according to this news report. Residents were apparently “decidedly unfriendly to news that the Obama administration might move some detainees from their highly controlled military fortress at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Alexandria.” The rest of the political establishment is not nearly as excited as Moran about being a “host city”…

As the WaPo article notes, a couple of years ago Alexandria had to play ‘host’ for Zacarias Moussaoui and some other terrorist suspects going through the criminal justice system, and they didn’t enjoy the situation in the slightest. Which is why city officials made it clear in said article that they were not interested in having Gitmo detainees show up in their locale now; and which is why both Jen and I are wondering whether Rep Moran bothered to actually check with anybody before he volunteered his district for the ‘honor.’

Probably not: it’s funny how often statements like “But that’s not the Alexandria I know and have represented in Congress for nearly 20 years” turn out to be, well, untrue…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

2009 seems to have been an unpopular choice for Year of the Future.

There was Freejack…

…which was promisingly got-2009-comprehensively-wrong; and then there was Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which was superficially better at calling our modern era…

…up to the entire ‘mecha’ and ‘alien invasion’ thing.  But other than that, not so much.

Any others I’m missing?

Moe Lane

Bring back yellow journalism!

At least it’s usually interesting.  Not to mention, local.

In the process of commenting on the way that the Washington Post – a paper presumably interested in goings-on in Washington, DC – seems only interested in the Kwanzaa Diggs shooting on the Op-Ed page, R.S. McCain notes:

Murder is news. Rape, robbery and drug busts are also news. And guess what? Crime coverage, if done right, sells papers. If the Washington Post can’t be bothered to cover a shooting that leaves one teenager dead and two others wounded, what the hell is the point of publishing a newspaper?

Good cops-and-courts reporting used to be a staple of American journalism. Was such coverage sometimes lurid and sensationalist? Sure. But it sells newspapers. The problem is that too many people in our newsrooms for the past several decades have failed to understand that they’re in a business, the object of which is to sell the product and make a profit.

Where I differ with Stacy is that I think that this is only half of the problem; the other half is that the people running the papers today don’t really understand that, by and large, if the American reading public wanted a national paper that defined the news we’d already have one.  The New York Times likes to think of itself in such terms; so does the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times had some pretensions along those lines.  The fact that all three papers are in financial trouble right now has apparently not been taken into account. Continue reading Bring back yellow journalism!