Sen Claire McCaskill (D, MO) sounds rattled.

Also, resentful.

Welcome, Instapundit readers.  I have worked out an interesting fundraising tactic here.

After a rather fascinating exercise of profiles in courage from her St. Louis office – essentially, they locked the doors, drew the blinds, called the cops, and hid from a bunch of protesters knocking on the door. But can you blame the staffers?

dsc026951

…I mean, those guys brought a cocker spaniel.

Anyway, Senator McCaskill would have liked to be conciliatory, except that the passive-aggressive resentment at being forced to treat these grubby neo-peasants as if they mattered as much as Beltway types kept getting in the way:

I think we learned from Friday and will do better in the future. In return I hope those that are protesting refrain from banging on the windows and doors continuously. Thanks so much.

Via Instapundit. For the record: it was the ‘Thanks so much’ part that wrecked the rest of the statement. If she had ended the statement one sentence earlier it would have actually come across as being witty; those three words decreased that quality by, oh, about fifty percent.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Today is the day for the Gitmo Report!

That’d be the one mandated by the President’s 01/22/2009 Executive Order that was supposed to reflect a clean break with the past; it’s supposed to be a review and critique of our detention policy, particular those of illegal combatants.  It and a review of interrogation techniques (mandated by this Executive Order) were scheduled for today, and both are absolutely necessary for the administration to have if they want to close down Gitmo.  Having these out will be a real shot in the arm for progressives who feel that the White House is dragging its feet on this issue…

Obama’s Gitmo Task Force Blows Its Deadline

An Obama administration task force set up to develop a plan for the closure of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay will miss its first deadline this week—and put off a key report—amid continued divisions over how to resolve one of the president’s thorniest policy dilemmas.

The task force, set up on Obama’s second day in office, was charged with preparing a report to the president by Tuesday, July 21, outlining a long-term detention plan for detainees captured in counterterrorism operations after Sept. 11. But continued debate within the task force over the legal basis for holding detainees who are not charged with any crimes—and where to house them once they are moved from Guantánamo—has forced the task force to postpone its report by a “few months,” a senior administration official told NEWSWEEK.

Or not. Via @allahpundit. Continue reading Today is the day for the Gitmo Report!

“Stand by Me.” (With blatant crass commercialism attached.)

Early night for me: I shall be watching a movie, and not musing darkly on the pitiful status of my Amazon.com referrals this month to date. It’s especially aggravating because Thomas Harlan is finally getting Land of the Dead out. It’s only been, what, five years since the last book in this series?


Stand by me, Ben E. King

Sorry about the video: it’s pretty cringeworthy.

Reviewing the June fundraising numbers.

Short version: the Democrats had a good month in their Congressional/Senatorial Committee fundraising (double their previous month’s totals, as well as double their Republican counterparts); the RNC is back to outraising the DNC; cash on hand is at parity, except that the GOP is running with a debt that’s 1/10th of their total and the Democrats are running with one that’s half; and this is all very different than this time in 2007.

Raised CoH Debts
RNC 8.00 23.70 0.00
DNC 6.75 13.03 4.91
NRSC 3.40 4.30 0.00
DSCC 6.20 7.90 3.70
NRCC 3.14 4.16 3.25
DCCC 7.10 9.70 6.00
GOP 14.54 32.16 3.25
Dem 20.05 30.63 14.61

Continue reading Reviewing the June fundraising numbers.

If you are a webpage designer…

…particularly one that does political sites; please read this article (“Designing Print Friendly Websites & Articles”), via @mlane*.  I cannot stress enough how useful it is to have functional print pages.

Moe Lane

*What?  No, no relation: somebody looking for me on Twitter followed him instead, and it turns out that he goes around and finds sites like these all the time, so I ended up following him, too.

Jule 20th, 1969. The Eagle has landed.

…no, wait, I already commemorated the launch and landing. So let’s segue instead to one of the legendary Apollo-related YouTube clips:

This would be the point when people posting this video are supposed to make the disclaimer that they don’t approve of this sort of behavior …except, really: there’s something deeply satisfying about watching Buzz Aldrin haul off and pop a Fake Moon Landing conspiracy nut in the nose. It’s probably also a lot more effective than the guys from Mythbusters going on the air tonight to explain yet again to the lunatics that yes, really, we went to the Moon.

Well, if the choice is between having them Expressing the Crazy and merely brooding about it, I vote for having them brood about it.  They’re unlikely to be violent about it when they snap.

Moe Lane

‘Mike Ross is Pelosi’s Lap Dog.’

That’s me fixing Roll Call’s title for it:

Ross Is Blue Dogs’ Bulldog

Months ago, Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), chairman of the Blue Dogs’ health care task force, told House leaders and chairmen they’d better include Blue Dogs in the writing of their health care bill. But that didn’t happen.

Now, Ross has become the rallying point for a massive revolt against the leadership health care plan and may be the biggest obstacle to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) oft-stated desire to pass it by the August recess.

This is, of course, nonsense. Mike Ross voted for the obscene debt bill masquerading as a stimulus package; and he’s used up his free pass by getting to vote against cap-and-trade. He’ll break on health care; there are a bunch of other fake ‘conservative’ Democrats who’ll need the cover, and one mustn’t be greedy, right?  More to the point, Ross and his ilk like to pretend that they don’t know that the reason why there are so many tax-and-spend Democrats in positions of authority is because the Blue Dogs signed off on putting them there.  This is all pure theater, in other words; and it’s theater as performed by actors who have a very low opinion of their target audience’s intelligence.  I note all of this solely so that nobody is surprised when Ross comes out of a meeting with a fake grin, an agreement on a trigger mechanism for imposing state-run health care, and a breezy assurance that rationing old people’s medical treatment is the best way forward for fiscal conservatism.

And I can’t wait to see the person we run against him in AR-04 next year.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

So, they merely overspent 100% on the ham. That makes it all *better*.

Glenn Reynolds has an update on the Ultimate Ham Sandwich oopsie.  For those unfamiliar with it, it was an item on the Recovery.gov site that suggested that the government was buying ham at $595,600 a pound.  As it turns out, there was a typo (which pretty much everyone figured, anyway): the actual price was $1.50/lb.  Drudge’s retort to that reply – a link to a Food Lion online circular listing ham going for 72 cents – has since blown up; but (picking a store at random) ham is going for $1.09/lb over at the Appomattox Food Lion, which does suggest that the government should have shopped around a bit.  Or maybe issued vouchers.  Or made some faint nod towards a market solution.

I will politely avoid any suggestion that the reason that they didn’t is because Food Lion is not particularly known as being a heavy Democratic Party supporter.

Crossposted to RedState.

Politico: D.C. Doing great during recession.

And by ‘D.C.’ Politico means ‘The trendy parts of D.C.’

I’d just like to make that clear. When Politico is writing things like:

The rest of the country has a new reason to hate the inside-the-Beltway crowd: Our economy is better than yours.

At 6.2 percent, the unemployment rate in the D.C. metro region is lower than in any other major metropolitan area in the country — and far below the 9.5 percent national average.

…they’re more or less obscuring the problems that DC itself has. They do note the 1/3rd illiteracy rate in the District itself, not to mention unemployment (which is either 10.9% or 11.3%, depending on which official harbinger of doom you believe more), but the article writer seems more interested in interviewing Republican politicians about how awful DC is compared to the rest of the country than it is in interviewing Democratic ones about why it is that the non-tourist part of the city of DC is in such bad shape.  After all, as Politico itself notes: “[f]ifteen cents of every dollar the federal government doles out throughout the world on goods and services is spent in the D.C. metro area,” which raises the question of why the District itself isn’t benefiting more – particularly since it’s a Democratic-controlled city in a Democratic-controlled area in a Democratic-controlled administration.  It should be benefiting more, but it isn’t.

And I can’t possibly imagine why that might be.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.