EU parliament poised to shift right, if not downright EU-skeptic.

This week’s dose of unintentional irony comes to us via Riehl World View. The context: the way that the EU parliamentary elections seemed poised to give more say to political parties that don’t like concept of the EU parliament all that much.

“It is a paradox, really. It shows how divided the center-left forces are at the moment. Normally sitting governments are punished at European elections,” said Jackie Davis, an analyst at the European Policy Centre in Brussels.

Funny: from all the way over here in the USA that’s what it looks like the European electorate is actually doing.

Moe Lane

PS: Go Tim Worstall.

Crossposted to RedState.

Private space companies want less government regulation.

And I want a pony.

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Three guesses who gets their wish first?

The future of space could soon belong to private companies—the soon-to-be retired space shuttle is being replaced by private launchers, space tourists are snapping pictures from the International Space Station, global positioning systems are ubiquitous, and entrepreneurs are building suborbital craft destined for use by paying customers. But the mood at the Space Business Forum, an annual gathering of investors and space geeks held in New York City, was impatience to get the feds out of the way so the private sector can attract investments and grow quicker. “I’d say the role of government [in the space industry] is too high,” says Heidi Wood, the senior equity analyst for aerospace for Morgan Stanley. “There are far too many hands on it.”

(Via Instapundit) Not to be overly delicate about it, but people have noticed that the political party for whom ‘regulation’ isn’t a swear term is the political party currently running the US government, right?  So unless your killer space application also happens to have some way to directly profit a couple of Congressional committee chair’s cronies (or, for the most ethical ones, the chair’s Congressional District in general), I wouldn’t count on let-the-market-decide arguments getting any kind of traction any time soon.

Elections have consequences.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Well, SOMEBODY’S getting fired over this global warming ad flap.

To quote Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a failure to communicate:

‘Global warming is baloney’ signs put the heat on Burger King

A row between the fast food giant Burger King and one of its major franchise owners has erupted over roadside signs proclaiming “global warming is baloney”.

The franchisee, a Memphis-based company called the Mirabile Investment Corporation (MIC) that owns more than 40 Burger Kings across Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, has described Burger King as acting “kinda like cockroaches” over the controversy. MIC says it does not believe Burger King has the authority to make it take the signs down.

The Guardian shoved in as many cooking allusions as it could – which they shouldn’t have, but it’s forgivable – but the, ah, meat of the matter is that the Burger King spokesman says that they have the right to shut down this kind of signage on the part of its franchisees, and that the franchisee has agreed to take down the signs; while the franchise spokesman says that Burger King doesn’t have the right to shut down these signs, and that Burger King can… deal with it. The word ‘cockroaches’ was used in the latter’s response, as was an explicitly cheerful willingness to drag it out in court for the next ten years.

[[John]] McNelis added: “The [restaurant] management team can put the message up there if they want to. It is private property and here in the US we do have some rights. Notwithstanding a franchise agreement, I could load a Brinks vehicle with [rights] I’ve got so many of them. By the time the Burger King lawyers work out how to make that stick we’d be in the year 2020.”

Which is why I figure that somebody’s getting fired. You usually don’t have people in marketing making statements that are that direct unless they’re either sure that they won’t get fired, or that they’re sure that they will…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Labour gets swept away from local governance in UK.

If I understand this correctly, this is kind of a big deal:

Labour left with no county councils in England as Tories seize control of heartlands in local elections

Labour slumped to a record low in yesterday’s local council elections as it was swept from power in its last four counties.

The party faced losing more than 300 seats as its projected share of the vote plummeted to 23 per cent, leaving it trailing in third place in the last big test of public opinion before a General Election.

Gordon Brown admitted the party had suffered a ‘painful defeat’.

As I understand the term, ‘counties’ in the English part of the UK are somewhat more powerful than American counties, but not as powerful as American states: so this is only vaguely like the nearest American equivalent (one party losing control of all fifty state legislatures). Nonetheless, it’s an epic-level shellacking (when your candidates are being beaten by the guy from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party*, you’re in trouble) – and one that suggests that the EU Parliament election results are going to be down right fascinating…

Moe Lane

*Who didn’t win.

Crossposted to RedState.

Unlike Hot Air, there is no reason for MoeLane.com to be on a top 100 political blog list.

I’m flattered that Little Miss Attila thinks so highly of this site, but even if I thought that this list of the supposed top 100 political blogs made any coherent sense, ML still wouldn’t be on it.  I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have some influence in this field; I’m a major contributor and site moderator for RedState, which is one of the top 100 political blogs.  But RS isn’t ML.

Not that I take the aforementioned list seriously, anyway.  If I understand this correctly, the rankings are chosen via a combination of: a). outbound links from RSS feeds and b). Wikio’s internal rankings of the blogs in question, modified by ‘freshness.’  Translation: if you get linked to a lot by blogs with high Wikio ranks whose RSS feeds allow HTML, you’re well on your way to being one of Wikio’s top 100 bloggers.  If not, well, Wikio will be happy to encourage you to behaviors that will enhance your Wikio score.

Personally, I would be worried if ML was on this list: the traffic for this site is about what I’d expect from the linkages that I get.  If I got enough links from high-ranked blogs to put me on the top 100 list, but wasn’t getting their traffic, I’d be forced to conclude that none of the readers from those sites were actually clicking through; they were just reading the summaries/excerpts and moving on.  I don’t mind that so much from the Other Side – I more or less disagree with RS McCain’s Rule 4; starting a fight with a Left-sphere blogger is almost never worth the usually miniscule traffic – but it’d be alarming coming from mine.

All that being said: I have no idea why Politico isn’t on that list.  By Wikio’s own rules – flawed as they might be – it should be in the top ten.

Today, of course, is D-Day.

It is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Normandy landings – and it’s been obviously discussed in great detail around the ‘Net.  Anything that I could add has probably been said already, so I will merely note the date and my profound respect and admiration for those men who fought and died to liberate Western Europe.

[UPDATE] Actually, this bugs me a little about myself that I felt the need to publish the above self-indulgent blather.  It’s all true, of course – but it’s also pretentious of me to pretend that the universe was waiting for me to type that out.

Sorry to bother you with it.

Ensuring that the poor are always with us, San Francisco edition.

(Via Don Surber, via Glenn Reynolds) Witness what happens when a San Francisco beggar gets ideas above his station:

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It’s a reminder of how he has turned things around.

In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month’s rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.

[snip]

The bureaucrat told Moore that she found out about his business after reading about his success in this paper.

The article goes on to write this line: “Christine Falvey, spokeswoman for Public Works, said the department’s contact with Moore was meant to be “educational.”” – and truer words were never written. It is very educational to see that Jerry Pournelle‘s observation that bureaucracies formed to help poor people end up with a vested interest in making sure that there will always be poor people is as cynically true as ever.  I would also like to note that if the San Fransciscan permitting system requires that people trying to claw their way out of alcoholic hell to rejoin the rest of society jump through these kinds of hoops, then the San Franciscan permitting system has failed, and needs to be taken out to an abandoned field and set on fire.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.