Moe Lane

Streams Of Whiskey, Pogues

(pause)

Actually, this is better:

So I see that Harry Reid has suddenly realized that he doesn’t have the votes to put together a 1.1 trillion buck omnibus pork-extravaganza.  Ain’t that a shame.  I also got sent a link to this incredibly, amazingly, and absolutely hysterical kick-sand-in-their-faces from our esteemed Republican Senators:

Minutes later, in one of the most chortling colloquies of the 111th Congress, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) gloated over the defeat of the spending bill.

Kirk, the most junior member of the Senate asked, “Did we just win?”

McCain responded, “I think there’s very little doubt that the Majority Leader of the United States Senate would not have taken the action he just took if we didn’t have 41 votes to stop this monstrosity.”

Kirk continued, “so for economic conservatives, a 1,924-page bill just died?

“A 1,924-page bill just died,” McCain responded laughing.

Is it time for the Democratic party’s theme song? It is time for the Democratic party’s theme song.
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I just got the email that director Blake Edwards has passed; he was 88 years old.

Edwards, of course, was the director for the Pink Panther/Inspector Clouseau movies, among many others.  It is a measure of the man’s skill that I have never forgotten this clip from The Pink Panther Strikes Again:

I don’t know why it stuck in my head, but it did.  But then, Blake Edwards always did like to make movies that did that.

Moe Lane

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There’s… a certain irony in these two Penny Arcade strips: I’m giving real thought to starting up a game next year.  It’s been a while and I need to exercise that part of my brain.

…by shooting state in the head.

I know that the title sounds kind of… apocalyptic, but really: how else can you describe it?  The short version: California’s unelected Air Resources Board has decided to cater to left-wing religious fundamentalism by arbitrarily imposing artificial and annually-diminishing limits on energy production (the so-called ‘cap-and-trade’ scheme).  These limits, when mixed with eye of newt, toe of dog, and powered unicorn breath, will magically transform into the coveted and rare substance known as ‘new green jobs’ – which are just like regular jobs, except that they also heal Mother Earth, cure scrofula, and freshen your breath.  Unless, of course, there’s a mocker and unbeliever in the audience who will wreck the entire process with the weight of his disbelief; fie on those detestable eco-traitors!  Fie, fie!

…More seriously; why anybody out there still thinks that you can get more productive by arbitrarily taking energy out of a system is beyond me completely.  I’m also grimly aware that the idiots on the California Air Resources Board are all there because the soon-to-be-gone Republican* governor put them there.  If there’s a silver lining, it’s that we’re going to see very, very quickly whether or not the Democratic governor coming in to replace him is going to be able to do any better.

Outcome… dubious.

Via Hot Air and Blue Collar Philosophy.

Moe Lane

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Via Instapundit comes this surprising op-ed from the New York Times that admits that the People’s Republic of China’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ caused truly frightening numbers of deaths: looking at the actual source material, its author is now estimating a death toll of 45 million (50% more than previous estimates).  That works out to about 6.5% of its population, based on the 1960 census: to put that in perspective, the equivalent for 2010-era USA would be 20.15 million, or just over the entire population of New York State.

Now, this op-ed is not surprising because said famine (which was largely deliberate) is unique in the annals of world Communism: it’s not.  The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had deliberate famines in the Ukraine in the 1930s and a general one just after World War II.  The Khmer Rouge of Democratic Kampuchea likewise had a general one in the 1970s, as did the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the 1990s.  Half the famines in Africa over the last fifty years involved either civil wars started by Marxists, or started against them.  In short, it’s long been known that the only thing that Communism is good at is in turning large numbers of live peasants into large numbers of dead ones.  That’s because – as I have noted before – Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life.  Literally. (more…)

Back about two weeks ago, Media Matters was duly upset about Glenn Beck saying that “there seems to be a mounting call for violence from the left:”

[Video not working: sorry.]

Oddly: as of 7:37 AM, 12/16/2010, Media Matters has precisely zero to say about would-be class warrior Clay Duke. Clay Duke is, of course, the guy who decided to Fight The Power by walking into a Florida school board with a handgun, spray-paint a “V for Vendetta” left-wing gang symbol on the wall, then try to shoot a couple of people before turning the gun on himself. He’s of interest because, as Transterrestrial Musings and The Blaze note, his Facebook page (since sanitized) is a long, extended paean to the Paranoid Left, including a general links list which includes such sites as Indymedia, Wikileaks, and… Media Matters for America. (more…)

[monotone] Please. Don’t. Stop. [/monotone]

Let’s set the (somewhat stylized) scenario, here:

The Senate on January 5, 2011 – as per the apparent wishes of Senators Tom Udall of New Mexico and Tom Harkin of Iowa, neither of whom are up for reelection in 2012 – votes to change the rules so that a simple majority may short-circuit the filibuster. Cheers and applause from the progressives; silence from the Republicans. The cheering dies down as progressives realize that the Republican silence is not from stoicism; it is more anticipatory. What do they anticipate? Why, a knock on the door! It is a courier from the House of Representatives, with the freshly-printed text of HR 1 (“Repeal of Obamacare”), ready for the Senate’s perusal.

All forty-seven Republicans sign off on that bill. Immediately. So does Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who campaigned on Obamacare’s repeal.

Then eyes turn to:

• Kent Conrad of North Dakota. Blue Senator, Red State. Up for re-election in 2012.
• Claire McCaskill of Missouri. Blue Senator, Red State. Up for re-election in 2012.
• Ben Nelson of Nebraska. Blue Senator, Red State. Up for re-election in 2012.
• Bill Nelson of Florida. Blue Senator, Red State. Up for re-election in 2012.
• Jon Tester of Montana. Blue Senator, Red State. Up for re-election in 2012.
• Jim Webb of Virginia. Blue Senator, Red State. Up for re-election in 2012.

What do you think the odds are that the GOP can get three of those Senators to panic? You don’t know? – Funny; neither does the Obama administration, which is why they’d be insane to sign off on making it easier for Republican Senators to pass legislation, not harder. (more…)

This is so totally on my Wish List now:

It’s the RPG for Charlie Stross’s brilliant espionage/Cthulhu Mythos Laundry Files series, and IT MUST BE MINE. If only for completeness’ sake.

So, I told myself that I wasn’t going to get sucked into going to go see Pirates of the Caribbean 4.

But then they did this:

Yup.  They really and truly did throw some money at Tim Powers.  Which means that the original On Stranger Tides – WHICH IS THE BEST DAMN VOODOO PIRATE ADVENTURE NOVEL EVER WRITTEN – will almost certainly be re-released as the ‘novelization,’ which will put more money in Tim Powers’ pockets, and I hope to God that the man has an agent with the mother-wit to say the magic phrase ‘percentage of the gross,’ because while there are better things to do with one’s money than to give some of it to Tim Powers, the list is not exhaustive.

So.  Yeah, yeah, I kind of have to go see this movie now.

Via Nodwick.

Actual thought process on this one:

I don’t know why people are making such a big deal about a reprint of Agatha H. and the Airship City (Girl Genius) anyway OH WOW IT’S AN ACTUAL HONEST-TO-GOD BOOK INSTEAD OF JUST A HARDCOVER OF ALL THE COMICS WHICH WOULD NOT BE A BAD THING BUT OH WOW THIS IS SO COOL.

And so, adieu to The Difference Engine (Spectra special editions).

Read some of the papers these days and it’s like nobody’s ever - in the history of the world – had a legislature change hands from one political party to the other.  Because the Democrats are certainly not acting like they get the magnitude of what happened to them:

• You’ve got the New York Times commiserating with Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.  The poor woman has to scramble to keep her lucrative Appropriations gig!  The nerve of those awful Republicans.
• It’s been mentioned before (mostly in passing, to be sure) that it’s apparently noteworthy that Republicans are stopping by various offices in order to measure for drapes, but still.
• Roll Call mentions rumblings of alarm among rank-and-file House Democrats as they realize that committee heads are following Nancy Pelosi’s lead and not stepping down – and certainly not allowing themselves to be downsized.
• And over at the Rothenburg Political Report Stu Rothenburg asks the largely rhetorical question “Have Democrats forgotten the election already?” Answer: how do you know that they ever understood the results in the first place?

And, of course, there’s the entire largely ceremonial Democratic angst and anger over Obama’s tax deal.  (more…)