Month: July 2013

Tweet of the Day, I Might Actually Move It Lower Edition.

The craft/gaming room is acquiring enough wall art and whatnot that I should start considering the overall aesthetic and not just throw up everything everywhere. Still, pretty cool, huh?

Average Twitter user has 208 followers?

Interesting, if true.

followers_count_distribution

I’ll be honest: the numbers on these have always been a bit too vague for my liking. And by ‘vague’ I mean ‘seemingly arbitrary.’ I mean, I’m sure that there’s a distribution curve; but how do you compensate for the spambots and and long-term-inactive accounts? …To give just two examples, right off the top of my head.

Quote of the Day, Why Can’t The Onion Do This More Often? edition. (NSFW)

The single most annoying thing about the Onion is not that it generally consists of not-particularly-subtle, not-particularly-fresh, and not-particularly-good reheated slacker-Democrat humor.  It’s that, every so often, somebody wakes up over there and creates something absolutely hysterical.  Case in point, from their “Biden Has Guy Named Worm Sit In For Him At Cabinet Meeting:”

…OK, let me shove the quotes under the fold.  Language, and all that. Continue reading Quote of the Day, Why Can’t The Onion Do This More Often? edition. (NSFW)

I’m happy to see the Online Left pretend that #obamacare rates are going down.

As Hot Air notes, extensively, what’s actually happening is that the rate of increase has been cut in various states: i.e., your insurance rates are still going to go up.  It’s just that the various states that were dumb enough to sign up for Obamacare exchanges are engaged in wholesale price-fixing.  That itself will work – briefly – but the insurance companies are not in business for the purpose of going out of business; they’ll drop out of the exchanges if they can’t make payroll.  I sometimes think that we should take every person who wants to run for public office, dump them in Río Gallegos with enough money to last the month, and tell them that they have to walk, ride, or drive back to the USA before they’re eligible for public office (no trains, planes, or boats [unless they’re a deckhand]).  The sudden application of applied reality might improve the worldview of all those lawyers and poly sci majors: plus, they’d also learn at least a little Spanish along the way.  Couldn’t hurt, frankly.

But I digress.  The real problem here for the Left, of course, is that while you can tell people that, say, a lowered rate of increased spending is equivalent to a spending cut it’s because most folks think of the budget as being Other People’s Money.  Those voters will have a different opinion when their take-home pay goes down.  Which it will, and never mind what Barack Obama said:

Get used to hearing that: because if you think that the Right is not going to remind the American people that their promised $2,500 rate cut got translated to a rate increase, then you have seriously underestimated just how pissed the average activist is over this.

Moe Lane

PS: I don’t care what the GOP establishment is going to do, or is alleged to be planning to do, or is wildly rumored as plotting to do.  This is grassroots business.

“It’s a good life, having idiots hate you.” (You want to buy a print of that.)

I have actually wanted to put up this comic here for, like, forever: because it is so true…

2004-12-07-084

…but it never occurred to me to check to see whether reproducing it was permitted.  Turns out that it is, as long as I linked back.  So here you go.  Also: you can get this as a print.  Which I have just done, so go ahead and do that yourself. It’s practically a perfect motto of the blogosphere.

@NancyPelosi is being FAR too modest about her protection of FISA.

I admit, Nancy Pelosi talks a good game about how she hates FISA on general principles:

When contacted, a Pelosi aide did not dispute the minority leader’s assertive role in influencing Democrats, but passed along a letter Pelosi sent to the president today raising skepticism about the NSA’s surveillance powers.

“Dear Mr. President,” reads the letter. “Although the amendment was defeated 205-217, it is clear that concerns remain about the continued implementation of the program in its current form. Although some of us voted for and others against the amendment, we all agree that there are lingering questions and concerns about the current 215 collection program.”

The letter goes on to question whether the bulk metadata collection program sufficiently protects the privacy of Americans, whether it could be tailored more narrowly and whether the law is being implemented in a manner consistent with Congress’s intent. An aide later emphasized that Pelosi did note declare an official leadership position against the amendment, meaning there was no whip or count established to see how Democrats would vote.

The amendment was, of course, Rep. Justin Amash’s amendment to alter NSA/FISA procedures: and as the above shows, it failed by a razor-thin margin. Foreign Policy pretty much summed up what happened in the title of the first linked article (“How Nancy Pelosi Saved the NSA Surveillance Program”), but perhaps we need to be a bit more explicit about things, here.  God forbid that Nancy Pelosi avoid credit for being such a tireless defender of FISA; we wouldn’t want her light to remain under a bushel.
Continue reading @NancyPelosi is being FAR too modest about her protection of FISA.