Moe Lane

OK, I’m fiddling through yet another casual run-through of Dragon Age Origins (mostly because I was hearing about how great it is to double-dagger rogue it).  So, every time I load up the game I get a brief flash of an artist-inspired intro screen; which means that I get a quick look at this guy:

Who the hell is this guy supposed to be?  He shows up nowhere in the game.

This is a minor enough mystery, but I’m getting bored with wondering.

You look at something like this, and after a while…

…you almost just have to shrug.  This is who President Barack Obama is.  He doesn’t know any better, and he doesn’t want to learn any better, and there’s nothing that we can really do about it before November of 2012 except work around him, somehow.  Anyway: sorry, world.  We don’t often go off the deep end in this country, but when we do I have to admit that the results are pretty spectacular, in an ‘epic disaster’ sort of way.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

…I’m perfectly down with not letting Commies hold teaching jobs.  After all, we make it really difficult for avowed Nazis to be avowed Nazis in this country, and nobody seems to mind – and they’re certainly just as vile as your average Commie.  Given the sheer number of people that were killed in the Twentieth Century by Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-Maoists, I think that the Republic can survive reviving the tradition of Better Dead Than Red.

Other than that?  Fairly good article pooh-poohing the so-called ‘Christianist’ (rolling eyes) menace that keeps the more excitable (and easily scared) netrooters awake at night, and listening for Evangelicals under the bed.  Although I’d also like to point out for the record that, during the time period that you were writing about, a good deal of that prejudice that you pointed out was firmly enshrined in the Democratic party.  Which has done a piss-poor job at repenting for it, by the way.

(Via Instapundit)

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…and, oddly, it’s not bigger news:

As political rancor reached a crescendo over the debt limit crisis heading into the August Congressional recess, would-be Democratic donors seem to have been left with a bad taste in their mouths. Figures released Tuesday night show the Democratic National Committee making its poorest fundraising showing in months.

The $5.4 million raised by the main fundraising arm of the Democratic Party in August was overwhelmed by the more than $8 million raised by the Republican National Committee. The DNC’s haul was far lower than the $12 million it raised in June and the $7 million it raised in July.

Probably because, thanks to the Supreme Court’s landmark – and very belated – free speech reform decision (Citizens United v. FEC), worries about the parties having enough money to properly promote candidates have been fairly drastically muted.  Which means that while this news is of course welcome, it’s does not really have the connotations of being part of a life-or-death struggle that it would have in 2008…

Moe Lane

Apparently, it’s all about planned economies: former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm is for ‘em.

“We operate as though we are not in a global economy,” says Granholm. “In theory, free markets and laissez faire make perfect sense, but in practice, our competitors are eating us for lunch.”

(pause)

Remember, this was supposed to be one of the Democrats’ smart ones.  One of the people that was supposed to make you wistful that we only let native-born citizens be President (Granholm was born in Canada).  Kind of alarming that she’s now talking about how free market capitalism just isn’t practical? – Because unless Jennifer Granholm had a stroke recently or something, this is probably not a new opinion for her.  Which means that she probably had that opinion while she was running the state of Michigan.  Which explains the current state of Michigan rather handily, really. (more…)

Down Under, Men at Work

This has been stuck in my WIFE’S head for the last week, actually.

STOP! Hammertime!

…Oh, relax, it’s Mary Katharine Ham.

…right now.

(Via Hot Air)

Let me explain this one: there’s a debate Thursday that’s being sponsored by FoxNews & Google.  Google is letting people submit questions via YouTube – frankly, this has more than a slight whiff of gimmick about it, but let’s roll with the notion for a moment.  The preliminary survey of submitted questions indicate that the top two categories of questions submitted are “Government Spending” and Debt (17%) and “Jobs & Economy” (16%), with “Social Issues” (12%) and “Energy and Environment” (9%) being the next two.  By my calculations, that means that roughly 54% of the questions being submitted involve one of those four topics, which I think that we can all agree are legitimately of interest to Republican voters, yes?

Well, WE HAVE YET TO HAVE A 2012 REPUBLICAN PRIMARY DEBATE WHERE FIFTY-FOUR PERCENT OF THE QUESTIONS WERE LEGITIMATELY OF INTEREST TO REPUBLICAN VOTERS.  We have, instead, had inane questions at worst and invitations to intra-debate sniping at best. I for one am getting tired of it.  And, apparently, I’m not the only one, either. (more…)

(Via Hot Air) And here I thought that Eric Holder was a humorless toad.  This is some high, high humor that he’s laying down, here:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that the Obama administration will do its utmost to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay before next year’s presidential elections despite political opposition.

Holder said at the European Parliament that even if the current administration fails to close it ahead of elections, it will continue to press ahead if it wins the November 2012 presidential vote.

Two things:

1. No, they’re not going to close Gitmo.  But if you believe that the While House really will this time, just because they promised to and everything, then please give me money instead of Barack Obama.  He and I are equally contemptuous of you, you understand – but I’ll just spend the money on roleplaying game supplements and the latest Terry Pratchett BBC miniseries, which means that I won’t be spending it on anything that actively harms or upsets you.  Obama won’t make that promise!
2. “If.”

Moe Lane

Now that we’ve had some time to digest last week’s special election results – or, in the Democrats’ case, have the equivalent of a gallstone attack over them – I think that it’s a time that we look at some of the House’s special election results over the last two election cycles generally.  Partially because we’re starting to get enough samples to do a laughingly pseudo-scientific analysis of them; and partially because doing so will allow us to destroy the Other Side’s laughingly pseudo-scientific analysis.  Less cynically, there are general trends that might be discernible, down there in the muck.

Below the fold is a look at every special election to date in the 111th and 112th Congress.  I chose not to look at the 110th Congress because I’ll readily enough concede that the net +3 Democratic gain was part of that party’s generally successful 2008 election strategy -  although I note with some amusement that the three seats (IL-14, LA-06, & MS-01) all flipped back in the 2010 election, which means that it was a wash overall anyway.  I also didn’t include LA-01′s flip (and flip-back), mostly because while Cao’s win looked like a special election it really wasn’t.  Likewise, it was also a wash.

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However, it failed.  Nobody in a (hypothetical) Perry administration will still ever return your calls, for (justified) fear of their jobs.  The (hypothetical) Perry White House will visibly despise Washingtonian cocktail circuit insiders from the first day to the last; and you’re on their (hypothetical) PNG lists.  Right at the top.  How bad is it?  Let me put it this way: I will have a better shot than you at getting information out of the (hypothetical) Perry White House, and I’m a stay-at-home dad who just sort of… fell… into this political blogging stuff, and wonders sometimes just how that happened.

Have a nice day.

Moe Lane

Jim Geraghty (in the Jolt; no direct link), in the process of deconstructing Toni Morrison’s commentary about Bill Clinton being the first black President.

I’m just saying that if at some point some future president was described as “displaying almost every trope of Irish-American-ness: a heavy-drinking, hot-tempered, backslapping, gregarious chatting, bar brawling, easily weeping, potato-eating boy from the New York City suburbs,” well, I’d be furious. (And probably drunk, perpetuating the stereotype.)

Erm.  These are bad things?  Not that I brawl in bars*.  Or drink heavily, any more (who has time, when you have kids?).  But the rest of that?  Spot on.  I make no commentary on the validity of African-American stereotypes, mind you: but speaking as one the culture has kind of pegged the purebred Irish-American.  It’s just that we Sons of the Sod consider these things to be lovable quirks of our ancient and honorable ethnic heritage, and they’ve certainly not kept us from doing quite well for ourselves in Olde Americay.  Except for that damned excuse for amateur drunkenness holiday that the rest of you insist on celebrating in March…

Well, at least Jim didn’t mention the flatulence.  It’s the potatoes and the whiskey and the beer, you understand.

Moe (15th/16th Irish American**) Lane (more…)