This is a Sharp Baton Model #10 Twirling Baton:

Size ranges from 17 to 19 inches. It is constructed out of tempered steel, of a thickness of 3/8 of an inch - which means that it is light enough to be moved quickly, yet strong enough not to bend on impact against flesh. Note the white bulbs at the end, which will increase accuracy of blows without sacrificing too much in the way of impact trauma (less of a consideration on a purely crushing weapon than on one with a cutting edge). And, of course, it is center-balanced, which means that the momentum of the backswing after a strike will not be too ungainly. In short, while I’d rather have a Louisville Slugger M9 Series Maple Wood Baseball Bats - C271 - Natural in a sticky situation, this is not actually a bad club to have.

Which is my intro to saying, Don’t mug girls in marching band.

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(Via Glenn Reynolds) Matt Kibbe at Reason is too full of the milk of human kindness when it comes to the Online Left’s reaction to the Tea Party phenomenon.

The remarkable ends to which lefty bloggers, Nobel Laureates, bit-part actresses, and even a senior White House official all went to discredit the massive grassroots revolt perfectly matches Elizabeth Kübler-Ross‘ famous work on how to deal with grief, death, and loss.

Take Janeane Garofalo. Many tea party attendees were understandably offended when she compared them to members of the Ku Klux Klan. “It’s not about bashing Democrats, it’s not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don’t know their history at all,” she told Keith Olbermann. “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”

I know what you’re probably thinking about Ms. Garofalo, and it’s not kind. I thought it too. But look beneath the surface, and at least try to imagine her pain. As Kübler-Ross explains, first comes denial, then comes anger. Hope and Change, for Janeane, was dying. And she couldn’t believe it.

So we must pity them for their hysterical and panicked reaction to an actual, real populist movement? Pity them for their reflexive, unthinking retreat to emotional immaturity and crude sexual attacks? Pity them for their looming fear that their Great Lie - that they speak for the People - is well on its way to being exploded once and for all?

To quote Eric Flint (on an unrelated matter): Better still, let us not pity them at all.

Moe Lane

PS: I say this not to criticize Matt Kibbe, whose Freedomworks has been at the forefront of this issue. But it is a sad truth that the Online Left hates and fears us, and everything that we do; and until they abandon those ways themselves, there will be no peace.

PPS:

Hope to see you there.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Brother Pejman expands on this report that Vice President Biden is telling people to avoid public transportation and yank their kids out of schools.

If President Obama wishes to handle this crisis by sending Vice President Biden to an undisclosed location until it’s over, well, sacrifices must be made.

Moe Lane

PS: Watch the video that Pej found above: it’s not every day where you see what is effectively a pet media organ of the Democratic party call for closing the border. And watch for the gaffe at about 5:15. Freudian slip there, Joe?

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

It’s like the antiwar movement: 90% of the people who reflexively oppose her overlap with the category of People That You Never Want To Get Stuck In An Elevator With (if for no other reason than the smell), and the people who apparently spend their lives waiting for a chance to tell the world how eager they are to have their candidate run against such a non-entity are almost as funny*.  But I digress:

Sarah Palin to Appear on American Chopper

Turns out the hockey mom is also a motorcycle maven.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin recently welcomed the crew from Orange County Choppers – whose custom motorcycle business is featured on TLC’s American Chopper – to Anchorage where show star Paul Teutul Sr. researched building a bike to honor Alaska’s 50-year anniversary of being a state.

“It means so much to the state of Alaska that these guys are building this bike that will honor statehood here,” Palin says in the episode, airing April 30 at 9 p.m.

Via Hot Air Headlines. I don’t watch the show myself - no cable** - but I understand that American Chopper is pretty popular.  I figure that this is just one of those things, though: the Palins have always been outdoors types, the show producers know that she’d be an interesting person to do a episode with, and certainly there’s no ratings harm in having a show featuring a former VP nominee and sitting governor.

Keep that in mind when the unhinged screaming / reflexively smug sneering starts. Which it will. If Pavlov was alive today, he would have dropped using dogs in a heartbeat and used the Left-sphere exclusively for his experiments…

Moe Lane

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[UPDATE] “Say what you will about George W. Bush, he had a skin whose thickness wasn’t measured in Planck lengths.” I really wish that I had written that.

Because he’s sounding just a little bit self-conscious on the subject:

Obama targets tea bags at town hall

At his 100th-day town hall meeting in St. Louis Wednesday, President Barack Obama took direct aim at the anti-tax “tea party” demonstrations that have cropped up over the last month and took a veiled shot at the Fox News Channel, the cable news network closely associated with the protests.

[snip]

“Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I’m not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, Obama said, “let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”

See also (originally noted via FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog) the video below the fold:

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Did something get lost in translation? - Because there seems to be a couple of gaps there in the logic chain.

N Korea threatens nuclear tests

North Korea has threatened to carry out nuclear missile tests unless the UN Security Council apologises for its condemnation of a recent rocket launch.

Pyongyang said it would be compelled to take self-defence measures “including nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests” if no apology was made.

There are times when I suspect that the North Korean regime is deliberately pretending to be barking mad insane, solely out of some twisted sense of humor.  I actually don’t know if that is preferable to the alternative - which is that fifty years of combined isolationism and Marxism* can cause actual brain damage in the general population; at least that alternative offers the hope that their engineers won’t be able to put a real bomb together - but it does explain the disconnect here.  Which is, for those who are wondering, that informing a world that doesn’t want you to have missiles that can hit Beijing, Tokyo, or Honolulu that you will immediately start trying to make missiles that can hit Beijing, Tokyo, or Honolulu unless you get an apology from the planet over them raising a fuss about your program to create missiles that can hit Beijing, Tokyo, or Honolulu.

Yes, that’s the North Korean position.  Think about it too long, and your brain starts to hurt.  Which may be the point.

Moe Lane

PS: Out of idle curiosity: is the White House planning to do anything about this, aside from not visit the West Coast for a while?

*Remember, kids: friends don’t let friends go Commie.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

The more, the merrier.

Russia captures Somalia pirates

A Russian warship has seized a pirate vessel with 29 people on board off the Somali coast, Russian news reports say.

Guns and navigation equipment were found during a search of the pirate boat, officials were quoted as saying.

Notably absent from this account - or this one, or this one - is any indication that the pirates were let go afterward. It’s suspected that these were the same pirates that attempted to seize a Russian tanker earlier:

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Put this on the list of “I thought people knew this already:” offshore oil platforms are havens for marine life.

The original plan, mandated by federal environmental “experts” back in the late ’40s, was to remove the big, ugly, polluting, environmentally hazardous contraptions as soon as they stopped producing. Fine, said the oil companies.

About 15 years ago some wells played out off Louisiana and the oil companies tried to comply. Their ears are still ringing from the clamor fishermen put up. Turns out those platforms are going nowhere, and by popular demand of those with a bigger stake in the marine environment than any “environmentalist.” Every “environmental” superstition against these structures was turned on its head.

Marine life had exploded around these huge artificial reefs: A study by LSU’s Sea Grant college shows that 85 percent of Louisiana fishing trips involve fishing around these platforms. The same study shows 50 times more marine life around an oil production platform than in the surrounding Gulf bottoms. An environmental study (by apparently honest scientists) revealed that urban runoff and treated sewage dump 12 times the amount of petroleum into the Gulf than those thousands of oil production platforms. And oil seeping naturally through the ocean floor into the Gulf, where it dissipates over time, accounts for 7 times the amount spilled by rigs and pipelines in any given year.

The article compares Lousiana’s offshore marine environment with Florida’s (which has significantly more restrictions), and notes that the former is generally healthier than the latter’s, particularly when it comes to reef development. This should not be particularly surprising, given that oil companies have two positive incentives to preventing pollution around their sites. The first is, of course, that if they don’t the environmental lobby will do their level best to gut them; the second, possibly more important reason is that every drop of oil spilled is one drop of oil that cannot be sold. And oil is valuable, so maintaining a clean rig that doesn’t leak or corrode will maximize one’s oil-extraction potential. At least until you get to a situation where it’s not profitable to keep the site clean, but that only happens when maintenance costs threaten to wipe out profit, and the only real way that this could happen when it comes to oil is if somebody pushed the tax burden too high.

And, really, what nature-hating idiot would think of suggesting that?

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I have nothing really to add to either this or this, except to note that:

a) I’m not particularly surprised;
b) The Republican primary in PA next year just got a lot more straightforward, while the Democratic one is now going to be significantly less so;
c) The Democrats are rapidly running out of reasons why they can’t pass their hearts’ desires.

And, oh yes:

d) Elections have consequences, and we’re about to have a year and a half of some. Please keep that in mind in November 2010.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Rasmussen has a poll out that argues against the “people hate Congress but love their own congressman” meme. Essentially, that explanation is beaten out 2-to-1 by “the fix is in:”

…23% believe members of Congress get reelected because they do a good job representing their constituents.

However, 50% believe the high reelection rates result from election rules that are “rigged to benefit members of Congress.” It is worth noting that the word “rigged” is a strong term included in this survey question. The fact that half the nation’s voters believe the election rules are “rigged” is a testament to the high levels of distrust in the country today.

28% aren’t sure, which is probably too high a number for comfort either way.

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Hey, who here thinks that the Nation, ThinkProgress, Washington Monthly, Firedoglake, and the rest of the Journolist stenographers are going to reference this?

(For those who can’t see it: it shows Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer bragging about cutting out the very funding that a good number of ostensibly-unrelated Left-bloggers and writers are trying to pin on the GOP, in the person of Senator Susan Collins.  And never mind the fact that the cutting was done as a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to bribe the GOP into signing on to the Democrats’ debt bill; or that it was an incredibly tacky unsuccessful bribe in the first place.  Reality-based thinking is somewhat… flexible for the Online Left.)

Yes, neither did I.  Even the ones that aren’t overtly obediently writing whatever they get told to write are busy with their uncritical willingness to accept Democratic talking points as gospel truth (as if it’s our fault that it takes a Cabinet appointment to make a Democrat pay his taxes).  So it’s almost certainly foolish to expect that the dogs linked above will even dare bark at their masters.  Never a good idea to make those who feed you angry, right?

Anyway, see Michelle Malkin, Don Surber, Protein Wisdom, The Sundries Shack, Legal Insurrection, Q & O, AoSHQ, Hot Air, and my unworthy self for more details of what is proving to be all the evidence that you need that not only is the Left-sphere being fed its points: it’s being fed its points sloppily.  Frankly, any of the above could have done a better hit job, even if you assume (as well you should) that we’d be intending to sabotage it…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

[UPDATE]: And I thought that I was being harsh.

Back in the day, Senator Schumer bragged about removing the funding, in fact. He thought that it was “bipartisan.”

He said the compromise hammered out between Senate Democrats and moderate Republicans - which has enough support to get it past any threat of a filibuster - was far better than that passed by the House on Jan. 29.

“All those little porky things that the House put in, the money for the [National] Mall or the sexually transmitted diseases or the flu pandemic, they’re all out,” Schumer said.

(H/T: AoSHQ)

“Bipartisan” being defined as “three Republicans and the Democratic party,” of course. Now that there’s a question about said funding, suddenly they feel like they need to pin it all on the Republican party, and never mind that the stripped-out appropriations was part of a failed attempt to bribe the GOP. Note, “failed”: if they had wanted to do a real cut, they would have axed things that would have hurt across the board; instead, they went with what they themselves considered extraneous or meaningless, and it’s just Schumer’s bad luck that the swine flu decided to break out in Mexico.  So, as Don Surber notes, we’re going to get the default option from the Democrats again: blame it on the GOP somehow.

Of course, the people that will scream loudly about this will say not a word about Schumer if they can possibly help it. That’s because they don’t actually care about swine flu. Well, that’s not quite true: after all, the more people that die, the more they’ll feel justified and righteous about screaming about the Republican party. Sure, it’s a tragedy, but the really important thing for them is to elect more Democrats.

Moe Lane

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A lot of money. As in, his net worth has increased fifty-fold, and that’s not a typo. Gateway Pundit revisits some commentary by Pro Patria about Al Gore’s relationship with Big Green (a good name, that):

So just what has Al Gore gained from his Big Green escapades? According to public disclosure information, Gore was worth somewhere between $1 million and $2 million in 2000. Not quite eight years later, Gore is estimated to be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million. While I ordinarily would applaud such financial gains from such a short period of time, I can’t help but to question just how it happened. When you look out at what Al Gore has done, it’s evident that he figured out on a way to capitalize on the creation of Big Green while becoming the official doomsday prophet that has helped to build Big Green into the monetary powerhouse that it has become.

That post is from 2007, and the number it mentions was also reported here and here (neither unsympathetically, which is the reason why they were chosen): Gateway Pundit is bringing it up again because Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) had some pointed questions to Mister Gore on his business relationships. Human Events had ten more, all of which should be asked by his supporters themselves, and none of which will be.  Note that Blackburn did ask some of these questions; also note that Gore evaded them, complete with that patented “the fools denied my greatness!  But I’ll show them!  I’ll show them ALL!” smirk that he reserves for situations like this.  I have to admit; if this is Gore’s revenge scenario for America it’s going well.

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They’re all good ones, but #4 resonates:

No. 4: This one is for the Republican party: Run candidates in every legislative district, even if you have to put up the lame and the halt. That was how Tip O’Neill did it in the 1940s - he’d field Democrats in even the most Republican districts, getting the challenger’s name out and waiting for the GOP incumbent to retire or move on, at which point the Democrat would have more name recognition than the new Republican. Every cycle, Tip’s Dems picked off a few more GOP seats. The Democrats finally took over the Massachusetts House in 1946, and haven’t looked back. The other plus: Whenever a summer scandal breaks (think OUI, think young girlfriend working for lobbyist, think money-laundering scheme), the Republicans would already have a candidate in place to take advantage of the anti-incumbent vote.

#4, in fact, has resonance outside of Massachusetts. Frankly, that’s one of the reasons that we won LA-02: if we hadn’t had keeping running candidates there we would have never been able to take advantage of Jefferson’s weakness. Make ‘em work for it, and wait patiently for our chance to take the shot.  I also like Jules Crittenden’s #11/#1: having these people work part-time appeals on general principles.  The less time that they’re there, the less opportunities to spend money they’ll have.

Moe Lane

This would be the point where people tell me that Massachusetts is impossible to reform, impossible to repair, and impossible to flip. So we shouldn’t even think about trying, because we don’t have a chance in heck of doing anything useful.

Funny: that’s what they said about Louisiana.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

(HT: Hot Air Headlines) In the process of trying to ‘convince’ the President to not re-energize the Right by starting witch hunts over interrogation - and in the process of mischaracterizing a largely Democratic party-spawned complaint over AIG bonuses as ‘populist’ - David Broder quite accidentally said something foolish:

Obama, to his credit, has ended one of the darkest chapters of American history, when certain terrorist suspects were whisked off to secret prisons and subjected to waterboarding and other forms of painful coercion in hopes of extracting information about threats to the United States.

That’s not even in the top ten. I came up with the list below the fold in about five minutes, and I bet that someone with more than a heavy minor in history could do even better.

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I have to admit that when it comes to avenging slights made against it this administration has both total recall and infinite patience. What’s below (via Instapundit) is probably the most important part of this New York Times article about Jack Murtha’s travails:

While past presidents often courted Mr. Murtha with phone calls and private meetings, President Obama has extended to him no such courtesies. On a visit to the White House, the lawmaker told senior defense officials that it would be “foolish” and “ridiculous” to cancel all of a $13 billion contract to buy new presidential helicopters, as he later recounted to a defense industry newsletter. But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has insisted on scrapping the deal as a symbol of waste.

And in a recent meeting with the secretary, Mr. Murtha pushed a plan to divide a $35 billion contract to build a new airborne refueling tanker between two rival contractors — a compromise that pleases both but would cost the government much more. Mr. Gates listened with little response, several people briefed on their conversation said, but he later dismissed it.

You see, restrictions on how, how often, and how much one may trade favors for cash can be finessed. There’s always a loophole or an exception; in fact, often simple indifference on the part of those with oversight can be enough. But Jack Murtha’s power comes from his supposed access. He is not supposed to be one who can be slighted - or worse, ignored.

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They apparently have their back to the wall at this point:

Sri Lanka rebels call ceasefire

A Tamil Tiger spokesman told the BBC the move was due to what he called an “unprecedented humanitarian crisis”.

Sri Lanka’s defence secretary however dismissed the announcement as “a joke”, insisting the rebels must surrender.

The rebels have been beaten back to a 12 sq km (5 sq m) area. The UN says more than 160,000 civilians have fled from there, but 50,000 remain.

…and by most accounts they’re fairly deserving of their fate. Not that the Sri Lankan government itself is a paragon of virtue: reading between the lines here, said government seems to be slowly shifting towards a designation of ‘unpleasant.’ On the other hand, a lot of it seems to be due to the pressures of fighting a long, drawn-out regional civil war against what appears to be a much more unpleasant opponent, so possibly once the TT is gone the Sri Lankans will relax things a bit. It’s possible: after all, it’s a “Democratic Socialist Republic” that actually tolerates opposition parties and lets them win national elections. Usually, a title like that is a code phrase for “Communist dystopia…”

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

[UPDATE] Hot Air reports that the New York Post put the wrong name on a quote: it was Meghan Clyne who made the comments below, not Governor Sarah Palin.  Stick this one in the Too Good To Be True files.

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) It ranges from the petty to the serious - honestly, I don’t think that not getting a shelter dog ranks up there with mishandling the ’stimulus’, or even killing minority scholarships in DC - but the NYP has a full range, and any article that has quotes from both Glenn Beck and TalkLeft is going to be fascinating reading. And if it all seems so terribly unfair… well. Consider this a teachable moment, then: with the lesson being it’s not really a good idea to take a man and raise him up as some sort of god, or at least an avatar. Men may make mistakes; gods may not. Mistakes are intolerable in gods.

But never mind my natterings: Governor Sarah Palin Meghan Clyne was kind enough to opine for the NYP article, and excerpts of her comments are past the fold.

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And, honestly? She didn’t even break a sweat.

This is how you do it, by the way. You don’t let them define the agenda; you certainly don’t let them define the terms; you concede nothing (you can always agree, but you do not concede); you keep going back to a disputed point over and over again until they get tired of trying to sneak one past you; you never lose your cool; when you catch them trying a stupid tactic like read a headline and pretend that it’s established truth, you call them on it without a hint of self-consciousness; and in this case, you don’t accept the other side’s presumptuous bluff that they speak for the American people. Because they don’t.

And you don’t give a tinker’s dam if they like you afterward. To quote Truman: if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

Moe Lane

PS: Good job, Ms. Cheney. Just in case my reaction wasn’t already clear.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Two guys try to hijack an 84-year-old guy’s car in Tacoma, Washington… yeah, you know where this is going, don’t you?

TACOMA, Wash. — Ted Mazetier may be a grandfather, but at 84 years old, he’s still got his chops.

And two men learned that the hard way.

Yeah, you know where this is going. See Boing Boing and Instapundit for more aesthetic appreciation of what was by all accounts a short, yet lovely beat-down of two very unlucky criminals. Of particular poignancy is that the criminals have been captured, and will thus have to live with this particular humiliation for the rest of their lives…

Moe Lane

PS: Embarrassingly, I have yet to actually see Gran Torino.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.