“Gun walking”

WTF, ATF?

More stupid from pelican neck

Update: Bad link fixed.

Michael Moore seems to believe that money comes from cash mines located on federal land, exploited illegally by rogue capitalists.


Starving prole demands bread.

Offline (What, again?!?)

I'll be traveling on business for a couple of days; therefore, it's open thread time!

So, what's as extinct as the great auk?



Update - Obama discovers "subterranean agenda" in conservative opposition to his administration.


"Dang! Who spilled the beans?"

Update II: The Australian carbon tax Downfall remix (H/T: RC).

Jane Russell (Continued)

Stacy McCain has an interesting post on Jane Russell (she was a life-long Republican!), and Bob Belvedere has the photo tribute.

Stalin: just another misunderstood humanitarian

Tomasz Sommer and Marek Jan Chodakiewicz cast a skeptical eye on recent attempts to exonerate Stalin for his involvement in the Great Purge. And as you might expect, an American historian plays an important role.

A more sophisticated example of Stalinist apologetics came in 2009 when Yuza and Eksmo published Leonid Naumov’s ‘The Bloody Dwarf’ against the Leader of Nations: Yezhov’s Plot. Naumov considers the pro-Stalin historian J. Arch Getty, a UCLA history professor who has soft-pedaled the Great Terror for American audiences, to be his master. One of Getty’s more significant contributions to revisionism was the shifting of blame for the bloody purges from Stalin to Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD in the mid-1930s. But this apparently didn’t go far enough, and Getty later exculpated Yezhov as well in a 2008 monograph published by Yale University Press (and coauthored with Oleg V. Naumov—apparently a distant relative of Leonid’s) called Stalin’s ‘Iron Fist’: The Times and Life of N. I. Yezhov, in which Getty and Naumov write, “Although it seems so from our liberal perspective, Yezhov’s cruelty was not in contradiction with the specific ideas of humanity and community he shared with his fellows.”

So, if Stalin wasn’t the real culprit in, er, Stalinism, who’s to blame?

No one. All the bloodletting was the function of impersonal forces of history.

Just one of those things, then, just one of those crazy things.


"Hey, you kids get off my lawn! And put Uncle Joe right-side up!"

Competing gun buybacks

The City of Austin, Texas held a gun buyback event, but some brilliant entrepreneurs outbid the police.

H/T: Jeff S.

John Edwards keeping low profile

Well, if I were facing an indictment, I probably would, too.

Priceless line in the article:

"We all just feel for him, no matter what he's done," Bill Smith, a chef at Crook's Corner, a frequent Edwards haunt, told the Times.