#rsrh Tear down this wall.

AoSHQ (and Sarah Palin) reminds me of this:

Not the event itself: but the details behind it. It’s a little jarring to realize that there are people who can vote (and soon, drink legally) in this country who don’t have personal memories of the Berlin Wall; or what it represented.  I was seventeen when this speech took place; and like the AoSHQ writer I considered Ronnie Raygun to be a fool.  Because, you know, maybe the Commies weren’t as powerful as we thought in 1980, but they weren’t going anywhere.  Right?

Yeah, seventeen and stupid. Continue reading #rsrh Tear down this wall.

‘The Buck Stops… with me.”

I just noticed that the President kind of likes to use that phrase a bit.  I wonder if he realizes that it makes him look like a bit of a narcissist?  Particularly since he’s clearly using that phrase in all those occasions to argue that while bad things that happen under his watch are always his responsibility, they’re never his fault.  Even the Christmas bombing attack was declared by the President to be ultimately the fault of a pre-Obama watch list system.  It’s frankly a far cry from ‘The buck stops here,’ which is at heart an admission that policy decisions flow from the top, and failures in policy are in fact in some way the fault of the people who are ultimately responsible for them.  Then again, Barack Obama is also a far cry from being another Harry S Truman.

I look forward to the hate mail that will implicitly validate my argument.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Interior Secretary Salazar lies about drilling peer review.

I’m not affiliated with this administration: I don’t have to use the weasel term ‘misrepresented.’

Basically, what happened was that Salazar added language to a report on the Gulf oil spill, and that said language called for a drilling moratorium. That’s not the lie: the Interior Secretary is allowed to make his own recommendations, even when they’re dunderheaded recommendations. No, this is the lie:

Salazar’s report to Obama said a panel of seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, which included a six-month moratorium on permits for new wells being drilled using floating rigs and an immediate halt to drilling operations.

“None of us actually reviewed the memorandum as it is in the report,” oil expert Ken Arnold told Fox News. “What was in the report at the time it was reviewed was quite a bit different in its impact to what there is now. So we wanted to distance ourselves from that recommendation.”

Continue reading Interior Secretary Salazar lies about drilling peer review.

President begging GOP for doc fix favor.

Not just “No.”
Not even just “Hell, no.”

The background: Obamacare assumed in its ‘official’ numbers cuts in Medicare payments to doctors; this has been scheduled for some time, but every year there was a ‘doc fix‘ to keep the cuts from being enacted.  The merits of the doc fix can be argued later: what is important here is that the Democrats used these supposedly planned cuts to make Obamacare look fiscally responsible, and the Republicans loudly pointed out that the Democrats had no intention of actually making the cuts, thus giving one more data point to support the argument that Obamacare was a passel of lies.  There was even a memo (later frantically declared fake, but never confirmed fake) noting that after the passage of Obamacare there’d be time to do the doc fix, so no need to talk about it at the time.

Lo. Obamacare has passed, and the President wants to talk about stopping the doc fix. Continue reading President begging GOP for doc fix favor.

Your reading this…

…demonstrates that the replacement computer is up and running – and that the Internet connection works, although I don’t know why.  Frankly, it should not.  It didn’t work for hours and hours last time I had to upgrade my computer system.

Hey, English major.  I just tap on the keys and let the magic box do its thing.

My Green Jobs suggestions.

You know, at first I was probably just a touch annoyed that the White House has spent billions – this is not an exaggeration; billions – on encouraging ‘green jobs’ without knowing what the heck a green job is:

Buried deep inside a federal newsletter on March 16 was something called a “notice of solicitation of comments” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics at the Department of Labor.

“BLS is responsible for developing and implementing the collection of new data on green jobs,” said the note in the Federal Register, which is widely read by government bureaucrats and almost never seen by the general public. But the notice said there is “no widely accepted standard definition of ‘green jobs.'”

But then I saw this:

To help find that definition, the Labor Department asked that readers send in suggestions.

Suggestions?  Oh, I have suggestions: Continue reading My Green Jobs suggestions.

Ehh. It’s not that big a deal, Penny Arcade.

People do Renn Faires all the time.  Mind you, in terms of finding good homemade booze and attractive women who read science fiction it’s nothing on an SCA event* – but then, Gabe’s married with a kid anyway, so I guess that the point is moot.

Moe Lane

*I’m not sure how it works as compared to science fiction conventions: I made it a point never to attend one unless I was accompanied by a date.