Author: Moe_Lane

The Lame Duck Cubicle Farm: A warning.

This article from the WSJ provides us with a look of the final special indignities being heaped upon those legislators of the 111th Congress who will not be joining their colleagues for the 112th Congress.  Essentially, said legislators have been removed from their offices and relegated to a temporary cubicle farm in the bowels of the House office building.  They get two chairs apiece (plus space for two more staffers elsewhere), a phone line, office supplies… and, for those who weren’t retiring anyway, no doubt the furtive, repulsion-based pity of their peers.  There’s over ninety freshmen Members of Congress coming in next year, after all: and almost seventy of those freshmen represent flipped seats.  So there’s no real interest in keeping folks out of the cubicle farm.

I bring all of this up because there are two things that I would like to note towards House freshmen (and their staffers) in this matter.  The first thing is, Isn’t this great? The second is, DON’T. LET THIS HAPPEN. TO YOU. Continue reading The Lame Duck Cubicle Farm: A warning.

Movie of the Week: The Princess and the Frog.

What can I say? I liked The Princess and the Frog, despite the fact that the jazz soundtrack could have used some work.  It had a refreshing lack of The Idiot Plot, one of the more sensible Disney heroines, and the 1920s is an underused milieu for animation.  Plus, they pushed the envelope just a little, in places.  Subtly.

Also: gunfire.

And so, good-bye to A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

#rsrh House GOP boringly kills Globowarming committee.

(Via Hot Air) Just to be clear: it’s not enough to simply shut down the House Select Committee on Global Warming. (OK, real fast: the Democratic leadership created a committee in 2007 to pontificate on study global warming; said committee has been pretty much a exercise in grandstanding ever since, and the new Republican House leadership is going to get rid of it just as soon as they can.  Hence, ‘shut down.’)

Oh, no.  That’s too nice.  And not nearly ritualistic enough. Continue reading #rsrh House GOP boringly kills Globowarming committee.

#rsrh ‘Compromise?’ On raising taxes?

I fail to see why the Republicans are obligated to ‘compromise’ on raising taxes.  If the Democrats want to not raise taxes, they already have the votes that they need to do that for another month.  They can do anything that they like, in fact: raise the marginal rates to 60%; create a VAT; and even tax our air, light, thoughts, and dreams for humanity if they can figure out how to meter such things.  What they can’t do is make us agree to give them cover for doing something that we don’t want to do.

Regretting yet that eagerness in 2009 to go tell people “I won,” Democrats?

Admittedly, Ezra Klein sort of knows all of this already.  It’s just that he’s kind of incapable of admitting that something bad can happen in Washington that wasn’t caused by a Republican.  Sort of how recent European history… no, no: that’s a nasty analogy to make.

Moe Lane

Obama administration renews drilling ban. Of course it did.

Contra the Washington Post, the seven-year moratorium on new Atlantic, Pacific, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico oil drilling that will be announced today does not particularly mean that we’re going to allow new drilling in any of the other areas available to us, either*.  It merely means that these were the bans that the administration had to get on with right now before an annoyed Republican-controlled House – and a deeply frightened Democrat-controlled Senate – started asking pointed questions.  Well, one question, really: Why are we making suboptimal domestic policy decisions based on the belief structure of a very strange, and frankly not very pleasant, fringe religion?

Well, all right, we know the reason: it’s because the Greenies are always two short steps away from painting themselves with hallucinogenic moss and going out to firebomb a bulldozer for Mother Gaia.  It’d still be nice to see a little more secularism in this administration, and a good deal less fuzzy thinking.  But I shouldn’t complain: having gas prices go through the roof in 2012 will likely have a different, and much more satisfying, political result in 2012 than it did in 2008…

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*The rest of the Gulf and the Arctic region.

SEIU healthcare fund abandons children.

Please note, not every SEIU healthcare fund*. The specific one doing the abandoning is a New York fund for 1199 SEIU, which parent organization lobbied heavily for Obamacare… let us briefly walk this one through.  SEIU needs more members if it wants to cover its underfunded obligations.  So it went heavily for Obamacare.  Obamacare includes mandates on expanding coverage for dependents to age 26.  Rates went up – the health care provider claims that this is unrelated to the previous sentence, but the union itself is using the dependent coverage situation to explain away the situation – so the fund dropped coverage of minors as being too expensive.  And, as the topping on the cake: this hits lower-income workers the hardest, of course.

The union wants to blame New York state for not increasing its coverage of the union’s obligations, but is taking the time to also insist that it’s NOT BECAUSE OF OBAMACARE.  Megan McArdle would like to know why they’re writing explanation letters otherwise; I’ll just note that if SEIU spent more dues money on helping their members and less money on being a raddled shill for the Democratic party then they would have been able to cover the rate hike.  In fact, they can still do that.

Not that SEIU will.  It’s still barely easier for them to lobby for taking other people’s money.  Besides, nobody at the national administrative level is going to be harmed by this, anyway.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Yet.