Moe Lane

Philip Klein, on why the President is not going to be able to avoid the shower of ordure that is even now busily descending upon our current ruling class:

When Obama came into office, he argued that we needed deficit spending to boost the economy, so he passed a $800 billion stimulus package. Then, in one of his first supposed pivots to the deficit, he convened a ‘fiscal responsibility summit’ in February 2009. But that actually turned out to be part of a different pivot altogether. It was during that summit that then White House Budget Director Peter Orszag declared, “health care reform is entitlement reform.”

And so, for the next 13 months, Obama spent all of his energies trying to get health care legislation across the finish line.

(more…)

Bless their hearts, I hadn’t realized that things were this bad for the American Left: the Old Grey Lady is hardcore rewriting ol’ Tricky Dick into FDR 2.0, all for the benefit of its readership’s nerves and digestion*.  I look forward them doing this in twenty years to… no, not George W Bush; that rehabilitation is already underway.  No, I’m thinking of whoever beats Obama next year.  That man or woman will spend the next four to eight years being blamed for everything in a spectacularly over-the-top fashion**, which will make it all the more fun when the Left has to climb down again afterward.

Like they’re doing with Nixon right now.

Moe Lane (more…)

Said threats being made by one Graeme Zielinski, communications director (his title will be funny in a moment; trust me) for the Wisconsin Democratic party – and my, but did he ever communicate!  And more than Zielinski really intended to, methinks.

Background information: there’s a site called WisconsinReporter.com.  They apparently cover Wisconsin local politics – of which there’s been quite a bit lately that’s been of interest on a national level, of course – and earlier in the week the site reported on an interview that Governor Scott Walker did with the Heritage Foundation.  In the process of that article, WisconsinReporter.com noted two things:

1. Wisconsin reportedly added 9,500 jobs in June.  This is technically the same number as half the net jobs created nationwide in the US (direct comparisons are really sort of… imprecise).
2. And that Zielinski was – in the process of using language that, while not actually profane, was not exactly professional – touting Illinois’s job-creation credentials, despite the fact that Illinois reportedly lost a net 18,900 jobs in June.

So far, so… not really that much of a thing, is it?  Certainly not something that would spark a threat of going after press credentials.  At least, not something that would spark a threat that would be made by normal people. (more…)

Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I follow precisely two singers on Twitter.  Weird Al Yankovic is the first one, and Jewel is the second.  I know, an odd pairing in its way – but I think that both of them are finding that things are working out OK, and I like the idea of following non-self-destructive musicians.  Besides, they’re both extremely good at what they do.

Stay Here Forever, Jewel

Also, it’s probably just as well that embedding’s disabled for Jewel’s “What’s Simple is True.”  Because… well, damn.  And here I was thinking eroticism was dead in Western popular musical culture.

I don’t know.

It might not suck.  Does Justin Timberlake know how to act? – Serious question*.

Probably no gunkata, though.

Moe Lane

*Hey, I said a lot of unkind stuff about Leonardo DiCaprio, and it turned out that he knew how to act.

…in our current debt downgrade situation:

Christina Romer, the former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers on Friday offered a rather strong opinion concerning the announcement by Standard & Poor’s that the credit rating agency downgraded America’s debt to AA+.

Appearing on HBO’s “Real Time,” Romer said we’re “pretty darn f–ked”…

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I’ve never heard that particular word before. Or that I have not used that particular word, either.  I have.  Often.  Loudly.  Emphatically.  Sometimes even gratuitously. Ms. Romer even used it in context, although ‘in context’ in this case means ‘on the site of what is by all accounts a metaphorical and bacteriological cesspool.’  But I am forced to remind Ms. Romer that one major reason why we’re in the mess that we’re in right now is specifically because of her incompetence as President Obama’s chief economist.  As has been pointed out many, many times: the report that Romer and the rest of her eased-out-the-door staff put together used the argument that if the proposed stimulus passed, unemployment would cap at 8%; and if it failed to pass, unemployment would hit 9%.  So, having sold the argument, the Obama administration took almost a trillion dollars that we didn’t actually really have and spent it… (more…)

I read it and kinda-reviewed Temporary Duty already a bit back, but I figure that Constant Reader Ric Locke won’t mind if I maybe put some more money in his pocket.  Good stuff – classic SF, more or less – and it’s taking advantage of the new electronic model of publishing.  Check it out.

And so we cast the Powder of Ibn Ghazi over Cliffourd the Big Red God (Mini Mythos). Which I just got in the mail, and it was indeed awesome. And squamous!

When I saw this article he wrote (“The Rick Perry I Know“) I somehow misread the name as Maureen Dowd.

You can imagine the resulting feeling of fascinated dread that thus came over me as I clicked the link.  Indeed, I’m almost sorry that MoDo hasn’t written something along those lines; it’d have the same sort of compelling awfulness as you might find in some of the more relentlessly illustrated medical texts out there.

Otherwise known as Democrats’ $3 million recycling boondoggle staked through heart, head put on pike in Capitol.

No, I don’t know why Fox News doesn’t write titles like that, either.  Even if you hate Fox, you have to admit: you’d read that, right?

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s four-year effort to “Green the Capitol” is officially no-more, having been dumped into an existing energy-savings program on the Hill in a move that Republicans say will save more money, eliminate redundancy and promote collaboration.

I’m feeling lazy, so I’m just going to assume that the evidence that this may have been actually a convenient bit of jobs patronage (as the article notes, there was already an existing recycling program in place – but then, existing programs are usually already staffed) is out there somewhere and simply grandly not-quite-libel* the former Speaker’s putatively good name in the meantime.  Or maybe I’ll go burn some Styrofoam.  Gimme a break: I’m recovering from the night of total and twisted debauchery that I over-indulged in last night to celebrate my wife traveling this weekend**.

Anyway: three million ain’t much, but every little bit helps.

Moe Lane (more…)

It’s a PDF reader that works properly and can download PDFs from my various online RPG libraries – and with a remarkable lack of fuss for an Apple product.  The interface for reading those PDFs is likewise intuitive to use; I haven’t done any marking and/or editing yet, but it looks like it’ll be helpful there, too.  If you were planning to use your iPad 2 to store gaming documents (and have them on hand for games), GoodReader looks like a good bet at five bucks.  I may even be able to cut down on my print library a little.

I mention this largely because I routinely use this forum to scream about the iPad’s frustrating unwillingness to do things that are really very, very simple: so it’s only fair to note when it works right, too.

Mingulay Boat Song, Richard Thompson

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Breathe in.

Breathe out…

I’m deleting the first version of this, because it was a very ticked-off and extremely snide examination of certain governmental idiocies and the certainly idiotic government officials that decreed them.  Seriously: after a certain point, muttering I told you that this was going to happen, dummies doesn’t actually help anybody, including yourself.

So… time for the intervention YouTube again.  Hope this helps.