Month: August 2010

Got cancer – and millions of dollars? Nancy Pelosi can help!

Let me summarize this Dallas Morning News article about Lisa Blue: if your husband (Fred Baron) is a millionaire and multimillion-dollar Democratic Party fundraiser – John Edwards’ bagman, in fact – and also dying of bone marrow cancer, then you can not only get away with smuggling into the country experimental cancer medicine of dubious efficacy; you can get the Speaker of the House herself to lean on the FDA to let your husband get the medication in question – despite the fact that it didn’t actually work.  And then you get to brag about it, while piously talking about how awful it is that regular families don’t have your ability to violate federal regulations on access to experimental and untested medicines*.  Continue reading Got cancer – and millions of dollars? Nancy Pelosi can help!

The THAT WOMAN election tracker.

I saw this last week; the Washington Post has put up a Palin Endorsements Tracker to track, well, former Governor Sarah Palin’s endorsements. So far, of the 42 that they list: 20 primary wins, 10 primary losses, 6 still to be determined (this includes Miller up in AK, as the primary isn’t officially concluded up there yet), and 6 no-primary. That works out to two-to-one successful primary picks, which is apparently not too shabby.

Looking at the map itself: it’s pretty eclectic.  Categorizing the choices is surprisingly hard, and may be actually the result of a deliberate strategy by Palin.  Maybe she’s running, maybe she’s not; maybe she’s Tea Party, maybe she’s establishment; maybe she’ll throw her support behind female candidates, maybe that’s not really a concern for her, balanced against the need for conservative candidates. If I were a Democratic strategist, this would be worrying me.  Hard to plan against a strategy where the pattern isn’t obvious*.

Moe Lane

Continue reading The THAT WOMAN election tracker.

#rsrh QotD, Infinite Silly Season Edition.

Ben Domenech, in the process of noting the President’s fondness for repeatedly – and incorrectly* – using ‘silly season’ as a descriptor for elections:

In most of these incidents, the president was responding to questions about his supposed “elitism” or some question of inappropriate activity — but the use of the term undercuts the message he’s trying to send. Instead of dealing with the real question, the line suggests that elections are themselves silly, and it’s when those infuriating little people with their rallies, signs and complaints aren’t paying attention (when politicians aren’t earning votes) that the real work gets done.

Ben goes on to suggest that perhaps the President has grown bored of having to convince said ‘little people’ of anything, which is no doubt a searing indictment of Ben’s inherent racism for even suggesting the possibility. And probably also a searing indictment of my inherent racism for thinking that the sentence could just as easily be ended after ‘bored’ and still have semantic value. Marvelous new post-racial America we’ve been brought to under this current administration, ain’t it?

Moe Lane

Continue reading #rsrh QotD, Infinite Silly Season Edition.

Eddie Bernice Johnson (D, TX-30) diverted scholarship money to family members.

So. We have a legislator named Eddie Bernice Johnson (D, TX-30), member of the Congressional Black Caucus, and thus one of the people whose responsibility it is to hand out partial college scholarships to worthy recipients. A worthy project, to be sure: good policy, good politics, good publicity. There is – sensibly – a non-nepotism rule; and there is – also sensibly – a rule that this money is to be given to students in your district. But there is apparently no oversight at all over who gets the money, which is why Rep. Johnson was able to use this money gave 15 scholarships to six ineligible kids – four grandchildren and two kids of an aide – and none of them live in the district. Important point, there: even if grandchildren and children of aides don’t count under the anti-nepotism rule (an argument which the CBC itself rejects), the point of the whole thing is to foster local education. Rep. Johnson’s defense? She’s a nine-term Congresswoman who somehow missed the fact that she wasn’t supposed to give CBC scholarships to out-of-district family members.

Seriously:

Two days later, she acknowledged in a statement released by her office that she had violated the rules but said she had done so “unknowingly” and would work with the foundation to “rectify the financial situation.”

Initially, she said, “I recognized the names when I saw them. And I knew that they had a need just like any other kid that would apply for one.” Had there been more “very worthy applicants in my district,” she added, “then I probably wouldn’t have given it” to the relatives.

Continue reading Eddie Bernice Johnson (D, TX-30) diverted scholarship money to family members.

Book of the Week: The High King of Montival.

And it’s about time, too. Unfair, no doubt: The High King of Montival is part of a series (the Emberverse*), which means delays. Still: out in a week.

And so Dungeons & Dragons Fantasy Roleplaying Game: An Essential D&D Starter (4th Edition D&D) is out this week. Err, it’s being switched out. You know what I mean.

Moe lane

*Short version: gunpowder, electricity, and most high-energy chemistry stops working one day – while at the same time not affecting actual people. This would drive scientists and engineers mad, except that most of them lived in areas which promptly started in on starving to death and the survivors had more important things to worry about. Essentially, adventure with a steadily-increasing fantasy quotient.

Batman, Hostess Cupcakes, and the hell that was the 70s.

In some ways, this frame from Cracked.com’s 6 Insane Batman Comics Courtesy of Tasty Hostess Cupcakes says it all.  Or about Hostess Cupcakes, and the intersection of them with superhero comics in a time where everybody was desperate to get the consumer economy revving up faster.

Sweet God, but the pre-Reagan era purely sucked.