Screw it. This should be the official theme song for the GOP in 2016.
Whether Ms. Swift is particularly happy about it, or not: then again, as I understand it she signed over distribution rights to the label, so her emotional state over this would be largely irrelevant anyway.
Normally by now there’d be at least a hint of it, surely. I suspect that Bioware would rather do multiplayer expansions, which admittedly would make the people who like to do multiplayer happy. I’m just not one of those people.
Ach, well. Still a great game. Once you accept the limitations of the tactical camera.
Postmodern Jukebox.
Do NOT try to buy any of their stuff on Amazon, though. They only have samples there. It’s iTunes or nothing.
If you’re looking for the Scott Walker speech, here you go*. Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I skipped it at first myself. But reports came in that he was kicking it, and… yeah, Scott Walker did. A lot of emotion under control, there. Can’t say that I’m surprised about either: in retrospect, the Left may have miscalculated in allowing its pro-death-threat wing to drive anti-Walker sentiment in the Wisconsin recall and re-elections. You want to get a man focused and driven? Threaten to murder his wife. (more…)
…and damaged cognitive ability: “A recent gun buyback event in Oregon, aimed at curbing the number of weapons on the street, turned into a planned profit making opportunity for a group of firearms enthusiasts.” Basically, the gun buyback people were offering too-high prices for some firearms, so certain gun enthusiasts simply sold them clapped-out pieces of junk for a profit. The buyback also offered to trade ‘high capacity magazines’ for $25 gift cards for a store that happens to sell ‘high capacity magazines’… for $8. Yes, that worked out pretty much as you’d expect, too: they ran out of gift cards. It’s a shame I don’t live in Oregon; there was clearly money in that.
But the best part? At least one person said Hey, wait, I know precisely where people who want to sell firearms are going to gather – and so he waited outside in order to make a better cash offer for the firearms that were worth more than the buyback value. How did it go?
“I picked up five weapons including a Model 11 Remington SemiAuto 12-gauge from 1926, a Mossberg bolt-action 20-gauge from 1947-1950… AND a pre-1900, 12-gauge breech action with Damascus barrel……AND……. a couple of 22 pistols,” wrote the member.
Because this is America, that’s why. And it shouldn’t surprise anybody that the system was so easily gamed, here. I think that sometimes we forget that we largely don’t trust governmental competence for a reason.
Via PJ Tatler.
Megan McArdle put her finger on precisely why Barack Obama floated the oh-heck-no proposal to tax people’s 529 college funds: “About the only people I saw defending this particular idea were blue-state singles who haven’t yet confronted the monstrous expense of shepherding their progeny into the new mandarin class to which they belong.” …And that’s who Barack Obama was trying to back-channel pander to, of course. In 2012 single voters broke strongly for Obama – single women more so then men – and since a tax hike on college fund earnings wouldn’t affect them too much (especially the ones without kids), Obama probably figures that it’s a ‘safe’ tax hike to have*. (more…)
Former President Bill Clinton took a romantic jaunt in 2002 to convicted pedophile pal Jeffrey Epstein’s “orgy island” with “two young girls” from New York, according to a shocking new interview.
Virginia Roberts, who’s accused Epstein of turning her into a “sex slave” at age 17 and forcing her to sleep with his powerful friends, claimed Clinton stayed in one of the many villas on Epstein’s US Virgin Islands estate — where group sex was a “regular occurrence.”
Let’s walk through this paragraph.
The list of films that stand in stark thematic contrast to American Sniper is long. Just to name a few: MTV Films made Stop-Loss, with Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in which a group of young soldiers nearly run off to Mexico rather than go back to Iraq. It was little more than a sexed-up infomercial warning young men off military service. In the Valley of Elah, starring Tommy Lee Jones, was a tepid murder mystery masquerading as a morbid meditation on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Washed-up auteur Brian De Palma made Redacted, a graphic film about American soldiers who rape an Iraqi girl and murder her family. Matt Damon starred in Green Zone, a heavy-handed thriller about a government conspiracy to hide WMDs in Iraq. (Green Zone was loosely based on the work of Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who was widely rebuked for misrepresenting his need to be evacuated by helicopter from his military embed in Afghanistan. The real reason he wanted out: to attend the film’s celebrity-studded premiere.) John Cusack was a twofer. First he starred in Grace Is Gone, a film that egregiously wallows in the grief of a man who can’t bring himself to tell his kids his wife was killed serving in Iraq. Then he made War, Inc., a painfully unfunny satire about corporate profiteers amid a war in the fictional country of Turaqistan.
I’ll be honest. I only care about this because of the tourism factor: “Some investors now say the euro could fall to the point where it is on equal footing with the U.S. dollar for the first time since it climbed above the buck in late 2002.” Cheap euros mean a better time for me the next time I get to Europe. Not that I know when I’m getting to Europe again; kids, you understand.
Alas*, the Brits kept the pound, which means that this will have zero effect on my usual foreign purchases (British roleplaying game materials). Seriously, this blog post is all about what it means to me. Europe could go into ludicrous speed hyper-inflation and I wouldn’t care unless I suddenly took up paper mache as a hobby and thus needed a good source of waste paper…
Via Drudge.
Moe Lane
*For given values of ‘alas,’ and those values are probably not shared by the British themselves.
Come on, you have to admit: it sounds better than “The team that is building Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s political organization for a possible presidential campaign has brought on a GOP strategist with Iowa ties: David Polyansky.” As the Des Moines Register notes, Polyansky was one of Senator Joni Ernst’s key advisers during her successful campaign last year: he was also involved in getting Mike Huckabee to win the Iowa caucuses in 2008 and Michele Bachmann to win the Ames Straw poll in 2012. True, neither Huckabee nor Bachmann went on to win the nomination: then again, neither Huckabee nor Bachmann are Scott Walker. Besides, this is clearly about Iowa. Presumably the Duke of Skull Throne will be seeking suitable courtiers for the other primary states…
Via RCP.
So, the convention schedule is firming up:
A few thoughts on this: first off, yes, that’s significantly earlier than from the previous two election cycles (as Dan McLaughlin is noting here). In 2008 the Democratic convention was held from August 25th to the 28th, and the Republican convention was held from September 1st to 3rd. In 2012 the GOP held ours from August 27th to the 30th, and the Democrats had theirs from September 4th to 6th. I’m noting the dates because at first I was under the very mistaken impression that the distance between the two conventions was usually longer; but it’s not, really. Presumably neither party wants to give the other one any kind of extended convention bounce.
Second: the Democrats are going to have an interesting time picking their venue. The AP reports that the choices for them are NYC, Philadelphia, and/or Columbus. I don’t really think that picking any of those will actually give the Democrats more votes, but I also think that the Democrats have pretty much already decided on Columbus for other reasons. It’s an open question whether NYC is going to be in any kind of shape to hold a convention after another year of Bill de Blasio – imagine how the city might look if the Mayor/NYPD feud goes on for another year – and Philadelphia is… not what it was. A very historically significant city with a proud civic history, but… well, at least they’re not Detroit*. It also is an easy train ride from NYC for any screaming protesters native to Gotham, while Columbus is not. And yes, that’s a consideration.
Lastly: if anybody next year complains about how strange this election season feels to him or her, this would be why. It’s been a while since we had conventions this early. It may be long overdue, but it’s still out of the ordinary. I wonder how the election cycle will look with an extra month of full-bore campaigning by both candidates?
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Yes, I know that since Cleveland is where we’re having our convention, this is a somewhat ironic video to use. However, it’s good to have a bit of a laugh, no?
Twitter
, and is (to the best to my knowledge) in the public domain.Site by Neil Stevens | Theme by TheBuckmaker.com
