lamar alexander – Moe Lane

Lamar! Czar! …and that joke will get old fast.

‘Rain of hellfire.’ If I had told people six months ago that this was going to be the level of the rhetoric coming from the Democrats I would have been soundly mocked for it.

Suffice it to say that Senator Alexander (R, TN) is amused at the DNC’s decision to play Teh GREAT Internetz Defenderz!!!11!1ONE!1!!!!11!:

(Via @nicklaus)

Hard not to be amused: it’s not every day that you see a major party organization threaten to unleash a “rain of hellfire” on health care rationing opponents. Or, as we here in Reality Non-Unicorn like to call them, “56% of the population.”

Moe Lane

PS: Yes, Lamar! was theoretically on to talk about the difference between positions that require Senate confirmation and postions that don’t (free hint: the Obama administration likes the latter. A lot). But why should I pretend that the DNC is anything except the White House’s sockpuppet? Nobody else is.

Crossposted to RedState.

Senator Alexander’s car industry conference call.

I participated in a conference call yesterday with Senator Alexander (R-TN) about his “Auto Stock for Every Taxpayer” bill; not to mention his “Car Czar” awards for government intervention in the car industry (his first one was to Barney Frank, for spreading intervention largess among his subjects). The general themse of the call was to discuss the problems inherent in making the government (in the abstract) an owner of a specific type of business; I don’t recall the word ‘nationalization’ being used in the call, but the word loomed there throughout. Not to mention its connotations.

The whole call is available here: my only – rather garbled, alas – question was on whether the general atmosphere of government intervention (and the specific one of Frank’s interference) gave credence to allegations of partisan Democratic interference in Chrysler dealership closings. Senator Alexander did not go so far as to endorse this theory, but he raised the important point that when you have an ‘incestuous relationship like this’ (his term) – which is to say, a direct relationship between the dealership and the government – allegations like these are credible. Even the appearance of impropriety is in fact a problem (I agree: it erodes trust in the government as being a reasonably impartial referee), and the only way to fix that is to get ownership out of the hands of the government.

And I really don’t have anything even semi-witty to say to end this, sorry. We just have to get the government out of the car industry. Simple as that.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Happy not-quite-ending for war hero’s widow and son.

(H/T: Technomancy for Fun and Profit)

Quick background: last year, USMC Sgt. Michael Ferschke was killed in Iraq while conducting door-to-door searches. He left behind his Okinawan-born, pregnant wife Hotaru Ferschke, who he had married a month before by proxy; and, of course, there were problems with her visa. Wizbang wrote about it here and here; Senator Lamar Alexander‘s (R-TN) office has been working on getting this fixed from the start, of course (I understand that some other (Tennessee?) lawmakers also assisted, but I couldn’t find details); between them and the USMC, they’ve made arrangements for Mrs. Ferschke to enter the country on a temporary visa, now that her son is born (more here).
Continue reading Happy not-quite-ending for war hero’s widow and son.