Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

I really should read my own blog.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

“But what about the lurkers?”

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

People are complicated. Love is not.

It’s possible to be a liberal firebrand without crapping on the party.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

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Open Thread

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Apparently bloggers disagree with each other. Please discuss it here.

FWIW, I side more with Andrew because Sullivan is not playing the credible commenter here. He’s being an activist. This is presently a smart move because (a) Obama instinctively avoids fights, especially on the culture side, and (b) he responds to pressure from the left. There is also extra bonus incentive (c): if the activist left raises a big enough stink and acts insatiable enough, Obama’s “reasonable compromises” will end up looking like what nice people on the left wanted to see in the first place.

The first example that comes to mind is the public option. There was no eighteen dimensional yahtzee going on; Obama wanted some lesser compromise but the nutroots emboldened their representatives to make a fight out of it. The same thing happened when Obama tried nominating a torture advocate (momentarily forgot his name) for a senior advisory post.

In my experience it is an activists’ responsibility to be an insatiable pain in the ass. Destructive and stupid behavior usually backfires (ELF), but so does playing nice.

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Classy

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Erick the Red rides again.

————————–

Dear XXXX:

After RedState readers sent Senator Olympia Snowe 1600 lbs. of rock salt, she got back in line with the Republicans and has again signaled her opposition to Obamacare.

We have a new target whose life we need to make very painful over the next week. Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) went home over the August recess and told his constituents he was standing up to Nancy Pelosi and opposing her budget busting health care plan.

Today, Earl Pomeroy declared he would be Nancy Pelosi’s lap dog, despite the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office declaring her plan will exceed $1.5 trillion. Oh, they put back in the death panels and abortion funding too. It doesn’t matter to Earl anymore. He is going to support Obamacare and he needs to be painfully reminded that he is betraying his constituents.

I just sent Earl Pomeroy a pile of fake dog poop, only because the post office won’t send the real stuff. He needs a real reminder of what the Democrats are serving up and that he is betraying his constituents and selling out our country.

Please join me in sending Earl this fine reminder. Click here to order.

The address is:

Office of Rep. Earl Pomeroy

3003 32nd Ave S Suite 6

Fargo, ND 58103

(701) 235-9760

Likewise, I urge you to call his Washington office at (202) 225-2611 and express your displeasure.

Remember, if we make an example of Earl Pomeroy, both the Blue Dog Democrats and wayward Republicans will think twice before selling us out on health care.

Also, please note that Amazon.com will kindly send RedState some cash, so not only are you saving America, but you are helping RedState too!

Sincerely yours,

Erick Erickson
Editor,RedState.com

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Let The Sun Shine In

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This sounds like good news, even if it means that Democrats once again lost control of some important confidential data.

House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July.

The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations. The committee said Thursday night that the document was released by a low-level staffer.

In my opinion everyone on Capitol Hill is far too secure in their jobs. In the Army both scrutiny and punishment for a given offense partially depend on the defendant’s rank. The higher you are, the larger the book they throw at you (at least the system is meant to work that way). I would not suggest that we write a new set of penal codes for Congressional officials, but as it stands the system is structured almost the exact opposite of that populist ideal. These guys have the power, and their misbehavior impacts the nation harder than most quotidian crimes ever will, yet anything short of a Randy “Duke” Cunningham fire sale gets shrugged off as business as usual.

If it has to start with Charlie Rangel and Jack Murtha, fine. Off with their heads. Whatever it takes to put a little fear of the law in Congress’s untouchables is fine with me.

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Papal Judean Front

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Chunky David Brooks has a piece about Joe Ratzinger’s plan to cherry-pick disaffected wingers from the Anglican church as reinforcements for the coming holy war against Islam:

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.

I have to admit that I don’t understand in what ways Islam is a foe of Christianity. I guess the idea is that there are people out there would be Christians if they weren’t Muslims? Is it some kind of a recruitment battle? And, if so, how would uniting the Anglican Church and the Catholic church help with this. I thought part of the appeal of Islam is that it is schismatic enough to present ample opportunity for intra-Islamic skirmishes. But even if I’m wrong about that, seriously, what would a united Anglican-Catholic front accomplish in this holy war that the two churches couldn’t accomplish separately?

I’ve seen other pieces criticizing Douthat’s piece for being Crusadesque, but no one seems able to explain what form this Crusade will take and why it requires coordinated action among Christian Churches. What the hell is he talking about?

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Open Thread

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Seven hours is too long to hold it.

***Update***

It seems like a while since my last photo blog, so meet the new lens. A manual-focus Sigma 50mm f2.8 1:1 macro arrived yesterday from KEH.

macro

The compact lens fits nicely on a little E-P1, even attached with a Hong Kong Nikon-m4/3 adapter from kp_store on eBay (the adapter also works well, although it grabs the lens a little tighter than I like). All-metal construction gives the lens some heft and wonderful focus action. Although lens weight makes the camera a bit front-heavy and the light meter goes Galt whenever I put on a manual lens, sharp close-ups call for a tripod and exposure bracketing no matter what so it is not that big a deal.

Some tests will determine whether this becomes my go-to portrait lens; so far all signs point to yes.

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Dumping Will Kill Us All

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The last time I wrote about the health care bill my post took for granted that any Public Option measure would include provisions to block private insurers from dumping sick and old clients. The reason is simple. If insurers can drop expensive clients for essentially any reason then the existence of a public option will encourage them to commit any skullduggery to keep nobody but the healthiest clients (until they get sick, of course. then they’re screwed) and leave the government to manage everyone else. Caring for the neediest would drive public plan premiums through the roof, it would force public plan managers to make all of the most unpopular decisions and it would probably force public plan managers (and not the cream-skimming private plans) to hit up Congress again and again for cash.

If a bill like that reaches the Senate floor then we might as well spike it. I am not kidding about this. Both the politics and the policy will suck hard for Democrats. A “public plan” with no dumping protection could function worse in practice than if we did nothing at all. A public plan flameout will delegitimize the Democrats and probably kill off any future support progressive health care reform.

Once again we can thank Democratic moderates for crippling a good bill (remember state aid in the stimulus?) for no reason except to put some daylight between themselves and the dirty fucking hippies. It concerns me that nobody in America seems to take policy seriously other than the Democratic left.

***Update***

My rant only makes sense insofar as the final health care bill effectively controls dumping. In the link in this post Ezra suggests that risk sharing will not be as effective as I assumed it would be. If I’m wrong then everything is fine. If I am right then we’re screwed. I guess we will wait to see the reconciled bill.

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The Drone Attacks

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Something has to be done about this:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came face-to-face Friday with simmering Pakistani anger over U.S. aerial drone attacks in their country and drew back slightly from her blunt remarks suggesting Pakistani officials know where terrorists are hiding.

In a series of public appearances on the final day of a three-day visit, Clinton was pressed repeatedly by Pakistani civilians and journalists about the secret U.S. program that uses drones to launch missiles to kill terrorists.

***

During an interview with Clinton broadcast live in Pakistan with several prominent female TV anchors, before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one member of the audience said the Predator attacks amount to ”executions without trial” for those killed.

Another asked Clinton how she would define terrorism.

”Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?” she asked. That woman then asked if Clinton considers drone attacks and bombings like the one that killed more than 100 civilians in the city of Peshawar earlier this week to both be acts of terrorism.

”No, I do not,” Clinton replied.

Well, Secretary Clinton might not think small unmanned drones firing missiles into villages is terrorism, but it is pretty damned clear a lot of people in Pakistan would disagree with that assessment.

And I’m pretty damned sure if predator drones were flying over American cities firing missiles into populated areas and killing a bunch of innocents, Secretary Clinton and everyone else in the country would pretty quickly label it terrorism. Hell, if someone mails an unnamed white powder to someone, we freak out for a couple months. Let alone blowing up dozens of people every week.

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