Moe Lane

This story about how the Progressive Change Campaign Committee is threatening to hold their breath until they turn even bluer if the Democrats don’t start taking them more seriously has been going around for the last day. I’m noting it mostly for these two lines:

“It’s not a question of who they’re going to support for president, they’re going to vote for Barack Obama. It’s a question of where their time and money is going to go,” spokesman T. Neil Sroka said.

[considering]

Schmucks. Amateurish, self-defeating schmucks.

(more…)

Going Postal is, of course, the movie version of the Terry Pratchett Discworld novel of the same name; and, of course, the British have had it forever before they deigned to share it with us.  I’d make a rude comment, but I don’t dare do that until I have a copy in my grubby little hands.

Hey, there are some things I can’t fight.  Or don’t dare to.

Rubber baby buggie bumpers, Last Action Hero.

Moe Lane (more…)

…being used by SEO sites.  Not to mention annoying, when you’re ego-googling* yourself.

Yes, yes, world’s smallest violin:

Poor, Poor Pitiful Me, Vitamin String Quartet

No, I didn’t know this existed either.  Isn’t it cool, the way that the universe still persists in giving us neat new stuff?

Moe Lane

*That’s the problem with hate mail: you end up wanting more.

…and [expletive deleted].

I wanted to quote something from it, but this has to be one of the whiniest whines from what has become one of the whiniest whining magazines on the Whining Left (yeah, repeat that word enough times and it looks weird to me, too).  The gist?

• Just wait!  Whichever person beats Obama next year...

[Yup, that means that Ed Kilgore thinks that Obama's going to lose.  Oops.] (more…)

The news that 224 people (out of roughly 500,000) had contributed a total of approximately $39,500,000 (roughly 40% of the total) to the DNC/OfA campaigns in the second quarter of this year is, of course… interesting; but it doesn’t really drive home the implications of such high-powered ‘amateur’ lobbying being done by the bundling elite that’s doing such wonderful work for the Democratic party.  We need something that highlights the situation, as it were.  I therefore propose that political pundits adopt the obama as a mathematical value, where the obama is defined as “$175,000, or the approximate value of a Democratic bundler.”  That gives the actual Obama campaign a second quarter value of 227 obamas, which isn’t quite right – but, heck, this isn’t actually higher mathematics.  Or even lower mathematics, so hush now.

Where this will be useful is in looking at the ratio between Obama’s obama number and the obama numbers of his current opponents (which we will call the Democratic Hypocrisy Index, or DHI).  To use the Politico article’s examples above: Mitt Romney collected $517,000 in obama-measurable donations, while Pawlenty collected $70,000.  That gives Romney a value of 2.95 obamas (more or less), and Pawlenty one of .4 obamas – which gives Mitt a DHI of 1.3% and Tim one of [.2]*%.  Put another way: this means that whenever Obama complains about big money donations to the GOP, he is being almost seventy-seven times more hypocritical than his target when he’s talking about Mitt Romney, and a staggering [five hundred and eighty-eight*] times more hypocritical when he’s talking about Tim Pawlenty.

Obviously, the President needs for that DHI number to go down, somehow.  Alas, that won’t happen as long as he’s leaning on Democratic elitist moneybags to keep his campaign afloat…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: The term that you are trying to remember is ‘millibears.’

[* Fact-checkers have corrected my bad math slightly: it's still bad math, but it's more accurate bad math.  Much obliged. - ML]

Such a tragedy, if true.

President Barack Obama has chosen a candidate other than Elizabeth Warren as director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a person briefed on the matter.

The president’s choice is a person who already works at the consumer agency, the person said yesterday. Obama may make the nomination as soon as next week, another person briefed on the administration’s plans said.

Not least because Elizabeth Warren’s ascension to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was seriously touted as being a game changer in the 2010 election; seeing her nomination first get questioned, then get nibbled to death by ducks, was no doubt traumatic, to some.  Her final rejection by a Democratic-controlled Senate that’s unwilling to fight for her should cause some entertaining meltdowns, no?

Via Hot Air, which notes that this isn’t confirmed yet.  Mind you, after one of Rep. Issa’s patented on-the-griddle sessions it’s not really all that surprising that she might be ready to cut and run herself…

Moe Lane

Ignore the rest of his article on the ongoing debt ceiling controversy – Dionne is the kind of person who is comfortable trying to portray House Majority Leader Eric Cantor as being some kind of Machiavellian mastermind running a shadowy conspiracy to control the Republican party behind the scenes, if you know what I mean* – but as Mickey Kaus notes, Dionne’s got a good (if probably unintended) idea here for putting President Obama on the hot seat:

…Cantor takes every domestic spending cut that was discussed as part of the negotiations with Vice President Joe Biden, declares that the administration has blessed them, and packages them together for a vote.

Dionne calls this a worrisome scenario: I call it a good idea that hasn’t really been assessed and discussed yet by us folks over here at the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, which is why I’m highlighting it now.

Thanks, E.J. Dionne!  If this works out, maybe we’ll buy you a fruit basket or something.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*And I think that you do.

…sorry about the TLAs, but if you don’t get ‘em right off of the bat you probably won’t be interested in this post anyway.

Anybody, if you’re like me you’ve looked at the prices for the legendary – and inexplicably out of print* – Beyond the Mountains of Madness: An Epic Campaign and Sourcebook (Call of Cthulhu Horror Roleplaying, #2380), which starts at sixty bucks and rapidly gets worse.  Fortunately, the invention of the PDF format was a positive boon to the roleplaying game industry (and its customers, most of whom don’t have the room for many new books) – so somebody had a rush of oxygen to the brain and made a digital version available for about one-third off.

Mind you, forty-two bucks for a digital download is a hell of a lot in absolute terms, which is why it’s on a wish list..

Moe Lane

*IIRC, GURPS Imperial Rome got a second edition precisely because somebody went onto Steve Jackson Games’ old forums and started bragging about how he found a copy of the first edition for only a hundred bucks. It wasn’t the brag so much as it was the way that people kept congratulating the guy that made the company take notice.

Carolina In My Mind, James Taylor

Peaceful.

Not to mention lacking: common sense; civility; an awareness of basic etiquette; and, if this report is correct, basic human decency – but that’s a different issue. Anyway, Rep. Jackson-Lee thinks that we’re opposing President Obama because President Obama is black:

The reason why I say ‘dead to shame’ in the title is because it’s obvious to anyone with a triple-digit IQ that the only reason why Sheila Jackson-Lee is still gainfully employed is because of racial gerrymandering, coupled with incumbency. The reason for the question mark? Well, that’s because I’m not sure Rep. Jackson-Lee meets the benchmark laid out in that first sentence.

Just got emailed this.

So… that’s the new media parody of the movie version of the musical conversion of the Shakespeare play.  All we need to do is turn it into a Flash game and we’ll be all caught up.

It’s hardly a surprise – Pawlenty has been arguing since January that automatically raising the debt ceiling without exhausting other options (read: spending cuts) first is a bad idea – but the video below shows that the former Governor of Minnesota continues to want Republican legislators to not back down on this issue:

As GOP 12 noted, this statement by Pawlenty…

Now is the time. The hour is late, and these problems are big, and the only way you’re going to get people to do something tough is to put their backs up against the wall.

…sounds a lot like what Erick Erickson was saying this morning: (more…)