Moe Lane

Oh, my.

Q: When I first heard about the information sharing issues, my eyes nearly popped out of my head.

MELSON: Well, so did mine.

Q: I’m curious when you communicated that to the DAG, did his eyes pop out of his head, did he think this was a big problem.

MELSON: I can’t tell you what he thought or how he thought.  But he simply said, “We will have to look into it.”

Oh my, oh my, oh my.

Moe Lane

PS… Yeah, that’s a little obscure, huh?  Sorry: there’s some stuff going on.  Real quick: Melson is the guy formerly designated to be the fall guy on the DoJ’s Fast & Furious coverup; that exchange is probably the basis for the report that Deputy AG Jim Cole was briefed on F&F; and Cole is probably going to be the next guy designated to be the fall guy on F&F.

You know where this is going, right?

[UPDATE: I have been made aware that the individuals in this video are county employees, not state ones.]

OK, let me set the background.  You are a public sector employee for the state of Ohio; this probably means that you are a Democrat.  You are probably aware, however vaguely and dimly, that there is a group out there who went around a few years ago and got ACORN defunded by pretending to be a prostitute and her pimp who wished to get tax help for the former’s prostitution, not to mention tax help for their underaged El Salavadoran hooker enterprise.  This was largely considered ‘bad.’  So, you’re working one day, and in walk two men with bad Russian accents who wants to apply for Medicaid benefits, even though one of the men owns a modified sports car with a gold-plated engine that’s been purchased with profits from their illicit drug business.  And, oh yes: they need to know about getting public funding for abortions for their under-aged hooker sisters.

WHAT DO YOU DO? (more…)

…will be mocked sixty years from now.  Not to be a buzzkill or anything, but the US military was so heavy-handed about treating/preventing syphilis and gonorrhea during World War II for the following reasons:

• Both diseases are easy to catch and hard to detect in their initial stages.  Syphilis, of course, eventually drives you crazy and kills you; gonorrhea can be transmitted to children via the mother and make them blind (I didn’t know that one).
• Like it or not, prior to AIDS prostitutes were generally more likely to have STDs than the general population*.
• Conventional treatments prior to WWII involved silver nitrate for gonorrhea, and arsenic compounds for syphilis.  Yes, they were highly unpleasant.
• Antibiotics?  Sure, they had antibiotics.  Sulfa drugs, too.  What’s more important: that private with the clap, or that private with the gut wound?

Hence the propaganda.

I wonder about Cracked.com sometimes.  Surely they contemplated what that ‘procurable’ meant?

Moe Lane

*I am given to understand that this has abruptly changed in the USA after the rise of AIDS, but I cannot confirm this.

Not the bit about evolution/homosexuality bit – as I understand it, Darwinian theory is a little bit more nuanced than that when addressing the ways that traits that affect the group/pack/tribe can be valuable for the species in general even when they’re personally evolutionary dead ends – but the suggestion that gamers and/or bloggers don’t have the opportunity to breed.  I mean, speaking as a gamer… sure, back in the 1980s and 1990s there was a pretty lopsided gender ratio, but I know lots of female gamers these days.  It’s been that way for a while: I’m trying (and failing) to remember the last campaign that I was in that didn’t have a minimum of two female players in it, or a female player and a female GM.  Heck, my wife’s a GM herself.

Maybe we should update that particular cultural stereotype?

Moe Lane

Background on this: the SEIU was forced to cough up a copy of its “Contract Campaign Manual” as part of a court case – and it’s an interesting little document.  The whole thing reads, as F. Vincent Vernuccio notes in the Washington Times, as a step-by-step checklist on how to manipulate… just about everything, really… in the course of forcing favorable negotiation terms.  Mostly because that’s what it actually is.

Lots of people are going to concentrate on passages like this:

Union members sometimes must act in the tradition of Dr. Marin Luther King and Mohatma Gandhi and disobey laws which are used to enforce injustice against working people.

or

It may be a violation of blackmail and extortion laws to threaten management officials with release of ‘dirt’ about them if they don’t settle a contract. But there is no law against union members who are angry at their employer deciding to uncover and publicize factual information about individual managers.

…as they should, frankly.  But looking at the document itself tells you something interesting about SEIU: it apparently hasn’t had an original thought in its collective head since, I don’t know, about 1985 or so*. (more…)

My post Saturday on the obama as a unit of measurement (found here and here) had a bad math error that rather drastically overstated the amount of hypocrisy typically shown by Democrats about big contributor money when Obama is compared to Tim Pawlenty (they’re only being 588x as hypocritical, not 10,000x) .  This was brought to my attention, and the data has been since corrected.

My apologies for any inconvenience.

Hey Hey What Can I Do, Led Zeppelin

This used to be the hardest non-live Led Zep song to find; now it’s flipping ubiquitous.  YouTube really shook things up, huh?

Somebody just sent me this link, because they know me.

Oh, yes, they know me.

“Yes, it’s the TOILET SEAT OF DEATH!”

As I’ve said before, I think: one great tragedy of this reality not being a steampunk reality is that this man does not have the opportunities that his genius should earn him.

Or, as Jake Tapper/Jake Tapper’s editor* put it, “President Obama Picks Former Ohio Attorney General to Run Consumer Bureau, Bypassing Woman Who First Came Up With the Idea.” I agree with Ed Morrissey: that’s not really the headline that you want to see in this kind of awkward situation.  I mocked the elevated importance that the Online Left has given both Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau yesterday, but let me do it again: if you want to understand just how little that Democrats who actually, you know, matter cared about either, look no further than Obama’s lackadaisical response to Warren’s nomination being blocked.

Not that any of this is stopping some on the Online Left, who are apparently currently – wait for it, wait for it! – pushing for her to run against Scott Brown** for MA-SEN.  The Wall Street Journal wants her to go for it; it is no doubt merely my imagination that they’re doing that while quietly chuckling and adjusting the scope on their metaphorical sniper rifle…

Moe Lane (crosspost) (more…)

I think that this quote below from a New York Times article on whether the GOP will allow themselves to be stampeded on irresponsibly raising the debt ceiling might just be fairly representative of attitudes among our freshman class. More to the point, I think that the New York Times is coming to the same conclusion:

“Re-election is the farthest thing from my mind,” said Representative Tom Reed, a freshman Republican from upstate New York. “Like many of my colleagues in the freshman class, I came down here to get our fiscal house in order and take care of the threat to national security that we see in the federal debt. We came here not to have long careers. We came here to do something. We don’t care about re-election.”

In fact, the New York Times may – I repeat, may - be even sufficiently concerned about this issue that it’s prepared to do some actual journalism on the subject. The quotes from Republican legislators were all on-point (including a rousing one from Sen. Lindsey Graham, of all people), and there were much fewer attempts to argue the Democratic talking points for them. The NYT even went so far as to not just remind its readers that Democratic rhetoric now doesn’t match their rhetoric from 2004; it actually noted that “[t]he increase then was $800 billion. The White House is now seeking an increase of at least $2.4 trillion. That would lift the limit to at least $16.7 trillion, about twice the level set in 2004.”

Yes, I recognize the irony of praising a newspaper for writing something that looks like actual news. This is the world we live in.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

…and the ChiComs are upset about this.  You may safely assume from my use of the term ‘ChiComs’ that I am bearing up under the weight of their disapproval without suffering any visible strain.  Call me an old unreconstructed Cold Warrior if you like, but I think that if the Chinese government spent less time worrying about the movements of the exiled spiritual/temporal leader of one of its conquered territories and more time on turning the People’s Republic of China into something better than the kind of country that one associates with “People’s Republic” then life would be brighter all around.

However, I certainly hope that the Dalai Lama got to use the front door this time (H/T: Gateway Pundit)… what?  Of course I can hold a grudge.  I’m a blogger, remember?

[UPDATE]  There’s just something fun about pissing off a foreign Commie-lover. I note ‘foreign’ because, given that Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people and everything, you usually can’t rely on them having the minimum necessary brainpower to recognize when they’ve been insulted in a language not their own.

I normally don’t mention things like that, but I was looking up something, came across this, and said Yup, that’s a garish tie. I think that it’s the way that the eagle looks like it just took a hit of Etorphine*, under the mistaken impression that it was actually merely indulging in a mild stimulant – and now it has to frantically spend the next two days hiding the high until it can sneak off of the tie.

That’s it.

Moe Lane

*If you don’t know what that is, then clearly you haven’t needed to sedate any elephants lately.