Month: November 2010

Hey, remember ‘liberaltarianism?’

Yeah, turns out that it was Newspeak for ‘libertarians can call themselves what they like, as long as they vote for progressives.’  As soon as the 2010 election results came in that was out, and spitting on libertarians was in.

No, really.

Moe Lane Continue reading Hey, remember ‘liberaltarianism?’

#rsrh Sarah Palin’s… book tour itinerary (DUN DUN DUN!)

Let me sum up this story (via Hot Air Headlines): the America by Heart book tour of THAT WOMAN – who has not yet announced whether or not she is running for President – does… not include any stops in the state of New Hampshire.  This apparently confounds a large variety of professional political observers, even though THAT WOMAN is not particularly popular in New Hampshire and is not running for anything at the moment.

(pause)

I know that this is going to sound like a radical, wild-eyed theory: but have people considered the notion that a state with a total population of 1.3 million people and no major cities might not be the most cost-effective place to hold a book media event?

Moe Lane

#rsrh Why the filibuster will probably survive.

(H/T Instapundit) Senator Harkin of Iowa and the two Senator Udalls of Colorado and New Mexico are trying to push a last-minute, lame-duck change in the filibuster rules, presumably so that the President will find it easier to push through appointments between now and 2012.  James Taranto points out the obvious flaw in that plan: which is that once the rule is changed, it stays changed.  And, given that the Class I Senatorial class (the ones up in 2012) consists of 23 Democrats/pretend-independents to 10 Republicans, the odds of the GOP getting a net of at least +3 are pretty good.  Couple that with a win in the White House, and you get the Democrats’ Nightmare Scenario:

Imagine a Senate split 50-50, along party lines, on the ObamaCare Repeal Act of 2013, with Vice President Marco Rubio casting the deciding vote. That would be a satisfying outcome of the Harkin-Udall-Udall effort.

Indeed it would.  Fortunately or unfortunately (depends on how you look at it), there are enough Democratic Senators out there with the wit (or the staff with the wit) to see the aforementioned flaw.  Including possibly the plan’s sponsors: it’s instructive that all of the three Senators involved are up for re-election in 2014, not 2012.  That’s plenty of time for the backlash to fade.

Moe Lane

Kicking the can that’s Afghanistan.

Well, it’s official: there will be no withdrawal from Afghanistan prior to the 2012 Presidential election.  Not that there will be a withdrawal from Afghanistan after the 2012 election, either – and I invite anyone who wants to argue that point to first remember how the closing of Gitmo went, or more accurately, didn’t – but there are rules to this game, and the first is to pretend that you believe the press releases.  NATO did President Obama a favor on his domestic front by endorsing a 2014 plan; I have no idea what the President gave up in exchange, but with any luck it was something that he should have been offering them anyway.  That’s one of the few advantages to having an administration as weak as this one is on foreign relations; expectations are, as they say, lowered.

If one is wondering why Reuters was reporting that no decision had been reached on a 2014 timeline hours before the President himself confirmed that a 2014 timeline decision had been reached (and a week after  it was reported {via @DavePoff} that a 2014 timeline solution had been reached), that’s actually easy to explain.  Reuters must have talked to an administration official affiliated with the antiwar movement.  Those poor unfortunates are locked out of any meaningful policy oversight and generally given the mushroom treatment; it’s no surprise that they end up with a generally skewed vision of the universe. Continue reading Kicking the can that’s Afghanistan.

So, KOTOR II fell into my shopping cart.

Craziest thing, really: didn’t notice until I was home, too. And it seems like such a drag to return it and everything. Guess that I’ll have to keep it, then.

So the question I’m asking is, am I going to regret installing  Knights of the Old Republic 2 and firing it up prior to the end of Thanksgiving weekend? It’s a bit of a puzzler.