Month: January 2012

I am afraid that I disagree with Sen. Jim DeMint about Ron Paul.

That the good Senator is apparently at least considering the idea of endorsing Mitt Romney is one thing: everybody does endorsements, they’re not always going to be for your candidate, so suck it up and walk it off. But – unlike the Senator – I want Ron Paul out of my darn primaries.  Yesterday, if possible.  The non-Republicans that he’s bringing in won’t vote for our candidate – shoot, I don’t expect even a third of them to vote for Ron Paul – and the Republican ones… well, I can’t fault a person for making a protest vote. In the primary.

And I’ll tell you this: as long as Ron Paul is in the race the less crazy things that he likes to talk about are going to continue to be ever-so-slightly radioactive among the general public, simply because it’s Ron Paul Of The Newsletters saying them.  Like it or don’t like it, as you please: this simply is.  It is my opinion that libertarians (which I am not, although I am definitely libertarian-leaning) would be better suited to find somebody else to be their public face, because Ron Paul isn’t going to win the Republican nomination and he’s going to promptly implode once he tries that third party run that everybody quietly expects…

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

#rsrh QotD, From the Mouths of Tavis Smiley/Cornell West Edition.

There’s a lot of damned nonsense even in the portion of the interview that I watched before the eye-rolling got too bad – Cornell West was in it and not being constantly mocked, to give you an idea of how non-serious the whole thing was – but Tavis Smiley did in fact raise one interesting point:

“This White House,” Smiley observes, “more than any in recent memory to me at least, this White House does not like being critiqued. They don’t like being criticized. They’re very temperamental about this. Especially from black folks.”

No!  Really?  Sorry about the sarcasm, there – but the truth of the matter is that the current President of the United States has never had to learn how to handle either critiquing or criticism; and he’s surrounded himself with people who don’t know how to do it for him, either.  So of course he and they are bad at either. Continue reading #rsrh QotD, From the Mouths of Tavis Smiley/Cornell West Edition.

Come, I will conceal nothing from you. [LINK FIXED.]

[Sorry, guys. The link’s fixed: and, yeah, it’s about the DC food truck crackdown.]

There are so many things already wrong with the District of Columbia’s local government system that the wrong thing that’s going to start piss off government/government-derived/political workers, starting tomorrow, is not really high up on my list.  So the grease trucks are going to get harassed out of existence?  Wow, excessively intrusive government regulations just suck, huh?

Admittedly, there are plenty of small-government DC workers out there who are getting hammered by this, too.  Them I have more sympathy for.  And the grease trucks themselves, of course.

#rsrh Politics Ain’t Beanbag Watch, 01/12/2012.

If you’re wondering why various and sundry folks aren’t really too heart-broken about Mitt Romney being called a “vulture capitalist*,” it’s because of little things like this (via @GOP12):

As in so many other things, one of The Laws of the Playground applies here: Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.

Moe Lane

Continue reading #rsrh Politics Ain’t Beanbag Watch, 01/12/2012.

…And then there’s this.

People ask me – usually rhetorically – When’s the last time you’ve ever seen a Lefty who likes the Second Amendment?… and then they look shocked when I blink and say Umm, last Saturday?  Seriously, join the SCA and you’ll end up seeing every counterculture fusion there is.  Gun-toting hippies.  Neo-pagan Republicans.  Women who might think that your science fiction jokes are funny.

Plus, there’s beer.

Moe Lane

Book of the Week: “How to Lie With Statistics.”

A colleague recommended How to Lie with Statistics to me, and despite the fact that it’s from the 1950s (with numbers/examples to match) it’s one of the more entertaining books I’ve read recently.  It’s a basic book – very basic; it assumes that you don’t know the difference between mean, median, and mode – and it’s telling that the negative reviews mostly involve either that detail, or the fact that the examples are dated. I didn’t find said dating to be particularly difficult to get my head around, so I can suggest this book for anybody who needs to have an introduction to the subject.  From what I can tell, you could generate a rather long list from the Internet without even trying hard.

Well, maybe that wasn’t the nicest way to put it.

And so, adieu to Monster Hunter International.

This is the single most insane thing that I’ve seen today.

Oliver Willis being screamed at for approving of Osama bin Laden’s double-tapping*. Link via @keder because I’d prefer not to give the screamer direct traffic from my site.  Not that Willis has entirely clean hands: Bush, for the record, was not “evil.”  In fact, his GWOT policy was much like Obama’s, only more competent…

Moe Lane

*For the record: I have very little problem with the idea of Barack Obama starting out each month by ROATSing a random terrorist or terrorist-enabling dictator.  I won’t even mind him taking credit for monster-killing; because, you know, the end result would be less monsters.