Month: July 2013

Hey, how do you turn 200 full time jobs into 100 full-time, 100 part-time ones? (#obamacare)

(H/T: Hot Air) Oh, did I give the answer away in the title?  My bad.

Earlier this year, Contra Costa County won the right to run a health care call center, where workers will answer questions to help implement the president’s Affordable Care Act. Area politicians called the 200-plus jobs it would bring to the region an economic coup.

Now, with two months to go before the Concord operation opens to serve the public, information has surfaced that about half the jobs are part-time, with no health benefits — a stinging disappointment to workers and local politicians who believed the positions would be full-time.

The Contra Costa County supervisor whose district includes the call center called the whole hiring process — which attracted about 7,000 applicants — a “comedy of errors.”

Ha. Ha. Ha.  But wait!  It gets ‘better.’  Apparently the employees took this job on the understanding that it was full-time work. At least according to one anonymous employee, who says that they were told of their new status after they took the job – yeah, when you hear stuff like that? That’s when you save yourself some trouble and just up and quit right then and there.  Why? Because inevitably things like this happen. Continue reading Hey, how do you turn 200 full time jobs into 100 full-time, 100 part-time ones? (#obamacare)

Woo-hoo! My Dogs Playing D&D Kickstarter print arrived.

Well, more accurately the  Dogs Playing Call of Cthulhu Kickstarter print – God bless the guy that decided that he was willing to spend four hundred bucks to ensure that, and possibly I should have followed suit for In Nomine or something – has arrived.  In all its significant glory:

cthulhu

Normally, I’d display a photo of it all mounted and framed and whatnot, but I’m on extended kid duty and am still recovering from a cold.  The trick will be to get it up before I leave for the RedState Gathering next week, in fact.  Still: awesome Kickstarter, this was.

So I guess @toure is *actually* arguing that George Zimmerman is Indio…

…and thus not entitled to the same consideration that a good liberal should provide to European or Mestizo Hispanics. Hey, don’t look at me: I’m not the one making the dang distinction.

Toure, a liberal MSNBC analyst, argued today that George Zimmerman is Peruvian-American, not actually Hispanic, and that Republicans “are in their mansions because they don’t care” about the black community or black-on-black crime.

Toure explained that Republicans are “talking about black-on-black crime to block the conversation around a Peruvian-American, not a Hispanic, a Peruvian-American shooting a black man.”

Continue reading So I guess @toure is *actually* arguing that George Zimmerman is Indio…

Quote of the Day, Ed Snowden Is *Still* A Damned, Dirty, Anti-American Scumbag edition.

Sorry about the title, in that I’m not actually sorry for my impolitic yet true observation that was made for explicitly provocative purposes; but polite society dictates that I offer a pro forma apology in such circumstances sort of way.  Anyway, Joshua Foust being sensible on Ed Snowden:*

Russia is a state that is arguably even less mindful of its citizens’ rights than China; human rights groups are unanimous in their criticism of the country, for its persecution of civil rights activists, its harsh crackdown on protesters, its growing harassment of gays and lesbians, and years of unchecked murder of journalists. It is a strange place to seek refuge when one’s complaint is that America is a creeping police state.

It’s only strange if that’s your real complaint.  When your real complaint that America is, well, America then it makes perfect sense to seek refuge with America’s avowed rivals.  That said rivals are distinctly inferior places to live is irrelevant: that’s never bothered people like Snowden or Glenn Greenwald before, so why should they start now?

(Via Hot Air Headlines)

Moe Lane

*But not being sensible on Bradley Manning.  Ach, well, nobody’s perfect.

I recommend a good trade school.

Particularly if you’re a guy: good money, useful work, and in a decade or so the tilting gender demographic in the college-educated demographic means that you’ll end up marrying well anyway. By 2050 “blue collar” might have the same connotations that “pink collar” had in 1950: a category where men work until they can get married to a high-earning member of the professional class.

What? Just reacting to Megan McArdle’s “Why Your Little Alma Mater May Go Extinct” (via Instapundit).  I know that I’m being callous to the education industry by shrugging at their looming collapse, but then it feels like half of those people scream invective about my side of the political spectrum at any opportunity and all of them pretty much hate my side’s guts.  What am I supposed to be, St. Francis of Assisi?

…Well, yes, I am supposed to at least try; but I’m getting over a cold.  The best I can do is recommend that colleges start offering degrees in plumbing and welding and other useful things.  Take the money out of the social sciences department… dang, I’m being mean again.

No, the 2016 election cycle has *not* started…

…at least on the Republican side. It has on the Democratic side, because the Democrats already know their (and I use the term loosely) talent pool: it’s Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, Andrew Cuomo, and that’s it*. No, seriously, that’s it: nobody in the Senate or about to be in the Senate is going to be the Democratic nominee in 2016.  Even the Democratic party leadership can learn, if you hit them in the head enough times.  And as 2008 showed, they retain ultimate control over their party’s nomination process.

But the reason why the 2016 election cycle has not really started for the Republicans is for the same reason why it has for the Democrats: the 2014 election cycle will only have an effect on the GOP field.  Even if you assume that the Democrats will somehow manage to reverse their utter disaster in 2010 when it came to gubernatorial races – and yes, they’re aware about how badly they mucked that one, and how it bleeds them every day – a new crop of governors elected in 2014 will not be ripe by 2016.  2020, sure; but right now a sitting or recently retired governor  with a successful re-election bid under his or her belt is going to walk into 2016 with an advantage.  The Democrats don’t have many of those that are viable; O’Malley and Cuomo are the best of a distinctly substandard lot. Continue reading No, the 2016 election cycle has *not* started…

If you are an *official* Republican operative, read this.

I am always happy to act as an emergency consultant for felicity of style. I can repair your grammar, tighten your prose, fix your scansion, organize your bullet points, and generally clean up your writing. And, best of all, my rates are reasonable. I insist on you paying those rates in full, and up front – no personal checks, please – but they’re reasonable.

I’m being perfectly serious, by the way.

Tweet of the Day, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Liberaltarian edition.

MSNBC just can’t help themselves, poor things.

The fascinating part is the way that a progressive network so casually went for the disemboweling stroke on libertarians, there. Which is unsurprising: the alternative is to face that Detroit is the way that it is because the most rabid ideological elements of [the] Democratic party had no opposition to its will and desires there for a half-century. And dear God, but it shows.

I see that Aaron Williams is still bitter about I Am Legend.

Can’t say that I blame Williams much, but I understand that it’s not completely Will Smith’s fault: I Am Legend had a proper ending, but the focus groups hated it. Which is something that I totally think should be the focus groups’ problem, but I didn’t get the tie-breaking vote there.