Moe Lane

I abjure it, and shake my fist at it.

That is all.

I just noticed that the President kind of likes to use that phrase a bit.  I wonder if he realizes that it makes him look like a bit of a narcissist?  Particularly since he’s clearly using that phrase in all those occasions to argue that while bad things that happen under his watch are always his responsibility, they’re never his fault.  Even the Christmas bombing attack was declared by the President to be ultimately the fault of a pre-Obama watch list system.  It’s frankly a far cry from ‘The buck stops here,’ which is at heart an admission that policy decisions flow from the top, and failures in policy are in fact in some way the fault of the people who are ultimately responsible for them.  Then again, Barack Obama is also a far cry from being another Harry S Truman.

I look forward to the hate mail that will implicitly validate my argument.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

I’m not affiliated with this administration: I don’t have to use the weasel term ‘misrepresented.’

Basically, what happened was that Salazar added language to a report on the Gulf oil spill, and that said language called for a drilling moratorium. That’s not the lie: the Interior Secretary is allowed to make his own recommendations, even when they’re dunderheaded recommendations. No, this is the lie:

Salazar’s report to Obama said a panel of seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.

“None of us actually reviewed the memorandum as it is in the report,” oil expert Ken Arnold told Fox News. “What was in the report at the time it was reviewed was quite a bit different in its impact to what there is now. So we wanted to distance ourselves from that recommendation.”

(more…)

Not just “No.”
Not even just “Hell, no.”

The background: Obamacare assumed in its ‘official’ numbers cuts in Medicare payments to doctors; this has been scheduled for some time, but every year there was a ‘doc fix‘ to keep the cuts from being enacted.  The merits of the doc fix can be argued later: what is important here is that the Democrats used these supposedly planned cuts to make Obamacare look fiscally responsible, and the Republicans loudly pointed out that the Democrats had no intention of actually making the cuts, thus giving one more data point to support the argument that Obamacare was a passel of lies.  There was even a memo (later frantically declared fake, but never confirmed fake) noting that after the passage of Obamacare there’d be time to do the doc fix, so no need to talk about it at the time.

Lo. Obamacare has passed, and the President wants to talk about stopping the doc fix. (more…)

It’s Saturday and it’s nice out – also, new computer. Yup, there’s a contradiction there. Anyway, this gave me the idea:

Everybody hang cool.

Sing amongst yourselves.

…demonstrates that the replacement computer is up and running – and that the Internet connection works, although I don’t know why.  Frankly, it should not.  It didn’t work for hours and hours last time I had to upgrade my computer system.

Hey, English major.  I just tap on the keys and let the magic box do its thing.

You know, at first I was probably just a touch annoyed that the White House has spent billions – this is not an exaggeration; billions – on encouraging ‘green jobs’ without knowing what the heck a green job is:

Buried deep inside a federal newsletter on March 16 was something called a “notice of solicitation of comments” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor.

“BLS is responsible for developing and implementing the collection of new data on green jobs,” said the note in the Federal Register, which is widely read by government bureaucrats and almost never seen by the general public. But the notice said there is “no widely accepted standard definition of ‘green jobs.’”

But then I saw this:

To help find that definition, the Labor Department asked that readers send in suggestions.

Suggestions?  Oh, I have suggestions: (more…)

People do Renn Faires all the time.  Mind you, in terms of finding good homemade booze and attractive women who read science fiction it’s nothing on an SCA event* – but then, Gabe’s married with a kid anyway, so I guess that the point is moot.

Moe Lane

*I’m not sure how it works as compared to science fiction conventions: I made it a point never to attend one unless I was accompanied by a date.

Yes, the title is meant to be subtly mocking.

This article in the New York Times on the awkward disconnect between the President of the United States and the political party that he’s presumably in charge of is actually… not  too bad, really.  This, for example, is pretty clear-headed:

In 2006 and 2008, Democrats did something that had not been done in American politics since the Great Depression, which is to string together two consecutive “wave” elections — roughly defined as a gain of at least 20 seats in the House of Representatives. They gained a total of 55 House seats and 12 seats in the Senate; the tide came in twice and with unusual strength. That means that some significant number of the Democrats elected in the last two cycles, to put it bluntly, really don’t have much business holding their seats in the first place. Either their districts normally trend Republican — 49 Democratic House members were elected from districts that voted for John McCain — or they themselves probably wouldn’t have cleared the threshold for a successful candidacy in a more conventional election year.

…where it breaks down is in considering some of the implications.  Well, that’s why we’re here. (more…)

(via @davidhauptmann) Contrary to first impressions, this is not an example of the popular definition of insanity*:

Democrats will keep blaming George W. Bush until the problems from his administration end, according to Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In an interview with MSNBC, Pelosi said congressional Democrats feel justified in blaming the Bush administration because of the problems it left behind for President Barack Obama.

…after all, it worked in 2006 and 2008, right?  Push the button marked ‘Blame Bush,’ get the food pellet named ‘win elections.’  Classic Skinnerite operant conditioning… and if Pelosi and her Democrats needed less time to be conditioned than Skinner needed to train rats and pigeons, well, I will not be unkind and voice my opinion about what that says about the mother-wit of the Speaker of the House.

The only question is, what are the Democrats going to do when they notice that the button is no longer wired up to the food pellet dispenser?  Do they even realize that this could be a possibility?

Moe Lane (more…)

I think that he is… (more…)