It is currently 61 degrees in Manhattan.

Weather today will be cloudy, with a chance of rain; weather for the next two days will be highs in the upper forties, with a reasonable chance of rain but no particular chance of extreme weather. Typical-to-pleasant climate for the climate change conference that I’m covering, in other words.

Something out there has a sense of humor, I’m thinking.

Moe Lane

PS: By all means, hit the PayPal button to the side. Train tickets cost money. See? I’m taking public transportation. Minimizing the carbon footprint, yadda yadda.

A colleague’s real-time review of Watchmen.

“There are multiple scenes of giant blue penis.”

I have apparently not reached the maturity level of a 13 year old child, because I thought that the above was the funniest thing I read all night.

Oh, well, I didn’t complain when they dressed Mystique in a blue paint job; I guess that fair’s fair. Besides, it’s true to the comic.

More or less.

Moe Lane

Pelosi, Reid swear at each other in semi-public.

Are they getting their naps in? The older I get, the more I appreciate the concept of napping.

(H/T: Don Surber) The two Democratic branches of Congress aren’t precisely happy with each other right now:

Reid, Pelosi Swearing Match Over Omnibus

After an angry, swearing late night meeting among top Democrats, Congress voted Friday to give itself another five days to try to complete a long-overdue omnibus spending bill that had become a growing embarrassment for party leaders and President Barack Obama.

Senate Democrats had abruptly pulled back Thursday night after finding themselves one vote short of the 60 needed to cut off debate. The action infuriated Speaker Nancy Pelosi so much that the California Democrat wanted to abandon the $409.6 billion measure and instead push through a stripped-down continuing resolution to keep the government operating through Sept. 30.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) and his deputy, Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D.-Ill.) were called to Pelosi’s office late Thursday night and ultimately prevailed in their argument that Democrats should try to salvage the bill, which includes critical spending increases for vital agencies. But the heated, sometimes profane, exchanges were described as “ugly” by Democrats on both sides of the Capitol. Staff, kicked out in the hall, could hear the yelling, and Pelosi herself seemed a little abashed the next day, joking that nothing her leadership could say to her now would match the night before.

Continue reading Pelosi, Reid swear at each other in semi-public.

White House: Obama too overwhelmed to do his job.

Yeah, that should be good for another 200 points on the Dow.

Ed Morrissey is dizzy with trying to figure out which would have been worse: President Obama meaning the snub to Brown and Great Britain, or that it was apparently just a by-product of the administration’s inability to run the country. Me, I’m too busy being appalled that there are supposedly functional adults in the Democratic Party that thought that saying the below would help. Read the whole thing, but only if you think that both your head and the wall will survive the pounding that you’ll be giving the latter with the former:

Barack Obama ‘too tired’ to give proper welcome to Gordon Brown
Barack Obama’s offhand approach to Gordon Brown’s Washington visit last week came about because the president was facing exhaustion over America’s economic crisis and is unable to focus on foreign affairs, the Sunday Telegraph has been told.

Sources close to the White House say Mr Obama and his staff have been “overwhelmed” by the economic meltdown and have voiced concerns that the new president is not getting enough rest.

Mr. President?

Man up.
Continue reading White House: Obama too overwhelmed to do his job.

Off to an event today…

…and I need to spend the next hour or so taking apart some iambic hexameter and putting it back together again, only so now it doesn’t kind of suck.

So go read RS McCain, or something.  He’s got enough links to fill up any Right Wing Death Beast’s morning, and besides, he understands the power of a strategic Cthulhu in a post.

Moe Lane

PS: I’m not “venerable.”  I won’t be forty for at least…

Oh, damn.

Looking for someone to read? (Guy Gavriel Kay)

I was originally going to do a you’ll-like-this-guy – A Song for Arbonne is brilliant, you’ll love everything that he does, buy everything that he wrote – but never mind that now: read this article about the recent Russian poll of the greatest Russian ever. (Stalin in third, Lenin in sixth):

It would feel self-indulgent to launch a jeremiad about how very, very evil Lenin and Stalin and their system were. The novelist Martin Amis did this in a book a little while ago, Koba the Dread, which is essentially about his own belated discovery of that truth. And how his father, Kingsley Amis, and godfather, Robert Conquest (who exposed the atrocities of the Great Terror for the west) had been … right all along while Amis and his college chums had been proclaiming the glories of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China in the 1960s. It was nice to see Amis fils getting around to getting it right, but the tone of shocked baby-boomer awakening bordered on the amusing.

No, it seems to me there’s another point, a narrower focus to be sought here, and it comes from – unsurprisingly – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose The Gulag Archipelago, smuggled out to the west thirty-five years ago, documented the abomination of the Soviet internment camps with a terrifying mixture of Biblical prophet and meticulously detailed scientist. (Solzhenitsyn, who did more to expose the reality of Lenin and Stalin and the Soviet empire to the world than anyone else who ever lived, and did so with unfathomable courage, did not surface anywhere near the top of the balloting, by the way.)

Here’s the issue that seems necessary to register after considering this vote: in The Gulag Archipelago Solzhenitsyn makes the point that as of 1966 some 86,000 Germans had been convicted in Germany for Nazi crimes. But what about in the Soviet Union – the Gulag, the enforced starvations, the Terror? “In our own country (according the reports of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court) about ten men had been convicted.” (The italics are his.) And he asks, “What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body?” Continue reading Looking for someone to read? (Guy Gavriel Kay)