Foreign Affairs are in the...

...best of hands.

Iam reassured that the amateurs of the previous administration are now history.

UPDATE: Native speaker Eugene Volokh has this to say on the matter:

How does that happen? Unless I'm unfamiliar with some alternative meaning — and one that the Russian foreign minister was unfamiliar with, too — "peregruzka" doesn't remotely mean "reset." "Gruz" means "load," and "pere-" means "over-"; "peregruzka" means "overload." (I take it that "overcharge" is used in the story to mean an excess of an electric charge, which is to say an electrical overload, not "overcharge" in the more common English sense of charging too much money.) Doesn't the State Department have fluent translators to do such things?

One of his commenters, BTDGreg:

So, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan all work hard to make sure the Russians never start a nuclear war and the first thing Obama and Clinton do is present them with a red button and encourage them to push it?

Stabilizing the Venezuelan Economy

Jeremy McDermott of the Telegraph:

Mr Chavez last month won a referendum allowing him to stand indefinitely for re-election. With that now achieved the Venezuelan leader, who has vowed to turn his South American nation into a model Socialist state, is now taking some unpopular decisions needed to stabilise his floundering economy.

Sort of like Yasser Arafat's condition has stabilized, I suppose. But I agree: Mr. Chavez is indeed well along the way to turning Venezuela into a model Socialist state.

Mr Chavez is seeking to ensure that his core support, the poor, can still fill their shopping baskets with food.

That's rich, Jeremy.

"If any industry wants to ride roughshod over the consumers, with a view to getting better dividends, we are going to act," said Carlos Osorio, the national superintendent of silos and storage.

That's the attitude, oh Glorious National Superintendent of Silos and Shortages..er...Storage.No one should have any self-interest in producing food: The National Will, embodied in Hugo Chavez, is sufficient reason.

Production quotas and prices have now been set for cooking oil, white rice, sugar, coffee, flour, margarine, pasta, cheeses and tomato sauce.

Apparently white rice can only be sold at around half the cost of production. It is the National Will. Nonetheless, the parasitical rice growers evade their social responsibilities by converting regulated white rice into unregulated flavored. Hugo, Embodiment of the Nation, will likely soon put an end to that, and white rice shall flow thru the streets, too cheap to bother growing.

Just wait until The One starts taking advice from The Embodiment. Our floundering economy, too, shall stabilize.

The NRA Still Has Some Clout

They have managed to get a bad bill pulled, at least until a useful amendment is added.

House Democratic leaders on Tuesday pulled legislation from the floor that seemingly had nothing to do with guns because the NRA disliked it.

The bill in question would give the District of Columbia a voting member of Congress. The gun-rights lobby prefers a Senate version, which includes language amending the District’s gun policies, and some suggest the NRA could make life difficult for conservative Democrats if that language is not included in the House version.

An interesting aspect is that giving DC a voting Representative is blatantly unconstitutional as the Constitution authorizes the feds to apportion reps and senators to the states. DC is not a state, so it can't have voting reps. The Democrats don't care. There continue to be seriously dangerous people running our government. Like any good fascists, the Dems don't care about the rules when the rules stand in their way. Il Duce led the way in Italy, and the Dems goose step behind.

I suspect the Republicans who want the pro-gun ownership amendment figure that when the voting Rep section of the law is struck down by the Supreme Court, the gun section will remain. The problem is two fold: In order to get the amendment enacted into law, they have to explicitly violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution (by knowingly voting for an unconstitutional bill), and they run the risk that the SCOTUS will not strike down the law. George Bush found that out with McCain-Feingold.

Mr. LaPierre gets it.

As, of course, the Executive Vice President of the NRA ought:

"I don't care if it makes their butts pucker from here to the Potomac, the Founding Fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules."

That is exactly why the gun grabbers want to grab all the guns. They get it too.

TARP

This would be scary if it wasn't funny.

Or something like that.