Two days left on the Deadlands Bundle of Holding.

Deadlands is, for those who don’t know it, Weird West horror (with a side order of steampunk) roleplaying.  So if you’ve ever wanted to play an undead Texas Ranger who clawed yourself out of the grave in order to find and send on to Perdition the no-account bushwhackers who put you there… well, maybe you already have the books.  But, as usual, having the PDFs at essentially 10 – 20% normal price is a pretty dang good deal.  A bunch of these I didn’t have already, even in print.

Check it out.

Elizabeth Esty (D, Connecticut-05) seems… worried… about her electoral chances.

You have to wonder.

  • First off, the DCCC is planning to dump about three quarters of a million dollars in ad buys for Esty’s campaign.  This is a little surprising, because the actual Republican candidate for that district is still kind of up in the air.
  • There’s also more than a touch of scandal potentially looming over Esty’s general campaign this year: back in 2013 she had to return campaign contributions that turned out to have come from companies and individuals who were simultaneously dealing with husband Dan Esty, in his role of state energy/environmental commissioner (Esty has since resigned his position).
  • And now Elizabeth Esty is voting like a North Carolina Blue Dog trying to keep a shaky seat.  Delays on Obamacare mandates (while still voting against repeal of the law). Voting to force Eric Holder to appoint a special counsel on the IRS scandal.  And the latest: Esty’s fervent nega-embrace of ousted VA Secretary Eric Shinseki.

All in all, things sound like Elizabeth Esty is not happy with her internal polling.  Which, if it is bad, would also have to be truly awful, given that we’re still waiting on the aforementioned GOP candidate for that district.  Is there another shoe set to drop in that race, or is this just first-term jitters by the Congresswoman?  Guess we’ll find out pretty soon.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Oh, wow, ThinkProgress did a 2006 article on the VA healthcare system.

And it is everything that you would expect it to be.  Hold on: let me screenshot this brilliance by Matthew Yglesias (with able assistance from Mark Kleiman and Philip Longman).  You know.  Just in case there’s a sudden server malfunction, or something.

VA-marker

Continue reading Oh, wow, ThinkProgress did a 2006 article on the VA healthcare system.

Dear God: please make Hispanic-basher Alan Webber Susana Martinez’s opponent. Amen.

That would be, like, absolutely perfect, thanks.

“So I’m asking you for your help, we need to make Susana Martinez a one-term governor. We need to send her back to wherever she really came from,” says [Alan] Webber in a video obtained by The Weekly Standard.

Continue reading Dear God: please make Hispanic-basher Alan Webber Susana Martinez’s opponent. Amen.

Eric Shinseki out as Veterans Affairs Secretary.

And the President actually dug himself in a bit deeper with the resulting press conference.  Maybe I’m just being a weary cynical partisan about this, but the man’s continuing ‘surprise’ over every bad thing that ever happens grates on me.  Listening to him, you’d never know that Barack Obama campaigned on the Veterans Affairs issue…

Moe Lane

PS: On a more general note? Don’t appoint antiwar partisans to important positions.  As Eric Shinseki just demonstrated, they’ll only screw it all up.

‘Ship Of Fools.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQqlnQDD6_U

Ship Of Fools, Robert Plant

I barely remember what it like to be the teenaged ‘me’ who thought that this song was Deeply Significant.

Moe Lane

PS: I actually went to see him in concert.  Shame I don’t coherently remember a damned thing that happened after we stopped for pre-concert beers at a Manhattan bar that apparently didn’t care that I was underage.

‘Sotomayor has a decent arm for a Supreme Court Justice.’

That was my first thought when looking at this extremely unscientific look at ceremonial first pitches. Apparently, you want either George W. Bush or Snoop Dogg for your fantasy celebrity/political baseball league; I am going to be charitable and not mock the people who did much, much worse.

Largely because, honestly? I’d probably be one of them. Baseball was never one of my core competencies, to put it mild.y.

Tweet of the Day, Turns Out Michael Moore DID Do Something Useful, Once edition.

And it was pretty dang useful, at that.

To quote the philosopher: oft evil will evil mar.

Economy actually *contracted* 1% in 1Q 2014.

Well, this isn’t good.

Last month, when the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that gross domestic product had grown at a lead-footed rate of 0.1 percent in the first quarter, economic analysts could focus on two pillars of hope. The first was that the winter weather was unusually awful, and first-quarter growth probably reflected that. And the second? This was a very preliminary number, and it seemed reasonable to think that it might be revised upward.

The operative word is “seemed.” Now the BEA has provided its first revision, and things only get more dismal: The economy actuallycontracted in the first quarter instead of just lying down on the sofa and feeling all mopey and sad. Key areas of decline were exports, inventories and nonresidential fixed investment. In other words, whatever happened was happening on the business side.

Megan McArdle is not yet ready to say that we’ve hit the iceberg, and that’s fair: after all, it’s not OFFICIALLY a recession until the economy contracts two quarters in a row.  Then again, even if the economy does contract two quarters in a row it still may be a while before we ‘officially’ call it a recession, if you know what I mean (and I think that you do). One of Megan’s points here, though, is that the situation is sufficiently bad that the economy just doesn’t have any margin any more.  Essentially, we’ve been drifting into iceberg-infest waters for some time now.  Will one hit? Will we miss them all?  I don’t know! Neither do you!  And certainly, neither does the President!

Whee!

Moe Lane

PS: This is one reason why we like to have people with actual executive experience run for President. A governor may or may not know how to fix a problem – see pretty much every Democratic governor in America for examples – but at least he or she understands the parameters of it.  In contrast, Barack Obama is still peevishly waiting for the person to come in and tell him what he has to do while the real experts fix things.  At least, that’s how it’s always worked in the past.