Moe Lane

And I say this with no knowledge whether Bill Bolling is even thinking of a Senate run. I am also not saying that Ed Gillespie is the best choice for VA-SEN, because I’m pretty confident that many of my readers who are to the right on me on immigration will say that Gillespie is not. What I am saying is that my first reaction to this:

Former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie is considering a run against Virginia Sen. Mark Warner (D) next year.

“It’s a very winnable race,” the powerful GOP insider told POLITICO in a Saturday afternoon interview.

…was the title of my post; and that my second reaction was that Ed Gillespie should stay far away from Bolling if he wants to be a viable candidate in the Virginia GOP Senate primary next year. Bolling burned a lot of bridges by helping to inflict Terry McAuliffe on Virginia voters for the next four years; I’m not the only one who is not going to forget that, and I’m a damnable Republican squish. Imagine how the hardcore conservatives feel…

Moe Lane

Hey, did you sign up an account in the California Obamacare exchanges?  If you did, guess what: Covered California gave out your personal information to brokers, the better for them to call you up out of the blue and try to sell you an insurance policy!

Isn’t that nice of Covered California?

Raising concerns about consumer privacy, California’s health exchange has given insurance agents the names and contact information for tens of thousands of people who went online to check out coverage but didn’t ask to be contacted.

[snip]

Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California, acknowledged that these consumers did not ask to be contacted by the state or its certified insurance agents. But he said the outreach program still complies with privacy laws and it was reviewed by the exchange’s legal counsel.

Yeah, tell that to both individual consumers AND the insurance industry. The former generally does not like the idea that a website, group, organization, or government entity might feel comfortable at having personal information being given out to private third parties without prior consent.  And it doesn’t really matter whether somebody else might feel differently, or whether they might feel differently if they only had all the facts.  Folks get twitchy automatically when it comes to privacy; a smart government entity takes that into account, and designs the system to be opt-in, rather than opt-out.
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I think that I’m calling it an early night with this one.

Just pretend that this Amazon link is relevant to the above, click it, and feel free to do your shopping, OK?  I need to get some sleep.

Moe Lane

I won the Lovecraft is Missing Contest (entry was here).

Cool.  You know, I probably should finish it.  I had an idea about where that particular story would have gone.

Moe Lane

PS: Many thanks to Constant Reader Luke for pointing it out to me.  Christmas gets pretty hectic around here.

PPS: Lovecraft is Missing was a great webcomic even before it awarded me a prize.  Check it out.

I’ve already had two naps today and I’m still kind of beat.  Sorry about that.

Oh, boy, but this will be fun.

In a sign of the left’s new aggressiveness, a coalition of liberals is trying to marginalize a centrist Democratic policy group that was responsible for a Wall Street Journal op-ed article this week that said economic populism was “disastrous” for the party.

The coalition, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, and three other liberal advocacy organizations have urged their members to contact a group of congressional Democrats who are honorary leaders of the centrist group, Third Way. It published the op-ed article on Monday contending that the liberalism of Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio of New York City and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would lead Democrats “over the populist cliff.”

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Alas, yes, ‘ours’ – even if he doesn’t consider himself ‘yours.’  You voted, didn’t ya*?

Anyway, Andrew Malcolm sums up Barack Obama’s official tribute to Nelson Mandela.

 During his 593-word statement, Obama managed to reference the deceased freedom fighter eight times.

Predictably, Obama also managed to reference Obama 14 times.

The heck of it is: it’s not the worst ostensible-subject-to-me ratio that Barack Obama’s ever managed.

Moe Lane

*Sorry, but we expect them to abide by the results of elections that we win, and ding them when they don’t.  Works both ways.

Yo, peeps, they’re springing that Mer-rill New-man dude out so he can hit the road:

Mer-rill New-man — the 85-year-old American detained by North Kor-e-an authorities earlier this fall — has been “deported,” North Kor-e-a’s state news agency K%C%N%A% reported early Saturday.

His son announced late Friday that he is on his way home to the United States. “We are absolutely delighted to confirm that Merrill Newman is on his way home,” Jeff New-man said.

All y’all might be zonking your noggin’ trying to grok why the sudden dashin’ and slangin’ on this particular pixel-word-salad.  That’s down to the Kingdom of Not-Southie Kor-e-a still going all Kathy Bates in Misery on one Yang dude called Ken-neth B%a%e%; so until he’s Sweet Home Alabama too ’tis probably best not to rattle the cage of the cray-crays over there. You never know what’s going to get a wild hair up that kingdom’s ass, as New-man himself would represent.

So, the slang.  Bob Anson did this trick once.

Cult Of Personality, Living Colour

…I had forgotten just how 80s that band dressed.  They’re still around, by the way.

Well now.

The executive director of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange resigned Friday.

The chairman of the board of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange, Joshua Sharfstein, said Rebecca Pearce worked tirelessly and with dedication for two years to build the Maryland Health Connection.

…Which enrolled only 3,000 people, as of last Thursday.  Apparently that was close enough to the target number that Ms. Pearce felt all right about going ahead on her Cayman Islands vacation.  How are those, anyway?  I hear that they can be nice. (more…)

…Do not be embarrassed if you have to ask, What is a financial transaction tax (FTT)? I had to have had it explained to me, too.

Basically, it’s part of the well-the-Democrats-didn’t-quite-kill-the-economy-last-time-so-let’s-try-again ‘budget’ proposal (called, with no visible awareness of irony, the ‘Back to Work Budget’) set up by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  Essentially, what they want to do is tax actual stock, bond, and derivative contracts transactions.  Not the profits made on those transactions; the transactions themselves.  As even a cursory glance at the previous link will reveal, Heritage is absolutely horrified at the idea, largely because a FTT would have horrific effects on profits.  Including, say, profits acquired by pension funds – and, no, they didn’t carve out an exception for pension funds. And yes, this is an issue; Europe is going through its own version of this, and the Left over there is pretty adamant that pension funds not be exempted.  Because the Left wants that money.

Shorter Moe Lane: remember the Stamp Act?  Yeah, that’s what this is, more or less. Different system, different reasons, same basic idea.

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I don’t know where Breitbart.com got this one. Of course, I also don’t know how they found Socialist Realism Bald Eagle for the main picture, but that’s just funny. This is alarming:

http://landing.newsinc.com/shared/video.html?freewheel=90085&sitesection=breitbart_nws_us_sty_vmppap&VID=25422434

(It was also autoloading)

There were a lot of opportunities for Dark Humor in that video, but possibly the worst part was when the hapless zoo spokeswoman had to try to justify the whole thing in the name of scientific research. Madam, I believe that the hypothesis Eagles can as a species learn to get out of the way of rotating scythes of death has been definitively disproved at this point…

Moe Lane

PS: It’s not like the damned wind farms are particularly cost-effective, either. There’s a reason why they’re subsidized to a fare-thee-well.