He’s reportedly going to oppose HR 1.
But in case Lugar’s just had a major mental malfunction and still plans to run… hey, you know how I’ve decided to try not to get involved in primaries whenever I can help it?
Yeah, well, I guess that I can’t help it.
Moe Lane
PS: Lugar has hastily dropped his opposition to HR 1. I’M WATCHING YOU, DICK.
And I’m being told that my copy of Dragon Age 2 – Bioware Signature Edition has a street value roughly one and a half times of what I paid for it. I should have bought four, sold two, kept one for myself and upgraded my wife’s copy.
Hmm. Maybe I’ll do that for Mass Effect 3, if/when they offer an upgrade. Except that my wife won’t need a copy for that one.
This is, after all, what writer Neal Stephenson calls “The Age of Scrutiny:” there is no such thing as a private conversation or opinion any more. Like that fact or hate it, but you must accept it: too many cameras, too many people who can afford them, and data storage just gets cheaper and cheaper. It is also an age that has elevated hypocrisy to the first rank of sins; better by far to be a forthrightly unpleasant person in public than to be one who is unpleasant in private, but who never acts on it in public. Combine the two, and hi-jinks ensue.
Continue reading NPR’s Ron Schiller: Ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray.
Who I like, remember. But when she writes something like this:
We should be looking for ways to make teaching more open to part-timers and people in second, third, or eighth career cycles, and to make it easier for teachers to move around between schools and districts, and between teaching and other industries.
It’s just too damned easy to respond with this:
Well, that’ll happen over the union’s dead body.
…and the conversation ends there. Look, it’s not my fault that public sector unions exist; that they have metastasized throughout federal, state, and local governments; that they are now adjuncts of the Democratic party*; and that we can no longer afford to give them more and more free stuff every year while private sector wages and benefits stagnate, if not retreat. It’s also not my fault that the well of my sympathy is dry. And it is certainly not my fault that public sector unions have dug in their heels and refused to admit that you can’t be simultaneously a noble collection of independent secular saints and avowed political partisans.
But all of these things are true, and they are now affecting the political environment, and by ‘affecting’ I mean ‘destroying.’ We can talk about how to maintain the system after we’re done making the most critical repairs to it. And that involves breaking the Democratic party’s control over government infrastructures. We have to, if for no other reason that they completely suck at running them.
(H/T: Instapundit)
This one goes out to Hot Air Headlines. I believe that the appropriate comment here is “Neener, neener.”
Let me set the scenario: the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has unfortunately realized that the 2010 election cycle – which would be where the DSCC spent 97.8 million and went into debt for 8.9 million in order to lose six Senate seats and gain zero – demonstrates handily that the DSCC cannot be trusted to come in out of the rain; wipe its own nose; or, indeed, wear its underpants underneath its outer clothing. Accordingly, the DSCC is now outsourcing to actual functional adults every possible function that it can… which includes finding a slogan for the DSCC. Seriously: as the Politico puts it, “…DSCC Chairman Patty Murray (Wash.) is looking for a pithy catchphrase to rally the troops…” The Politico then proceeds to mock the DSCC for this, which is unusual – but, given the truly insipid slogans that the DSCC considering, perhaps the Politico simply could not help itself.
Certainly, I could not, so here’s mine. I feel that it is pithy, actually conveys the message that the DSCC is attempting to convey, and even uses a historical/pop-culture reference to make it, in its way, a truly honest slogan in a way that most political slogans cannot be. So, here we go:
Is there going to be a small prize for the winner?
Moe Lane (crosspost)
“I teach it to hate.
I teach it to win .”
Stone-cold, there.
Moe Lane
PS: I assume, of course, that I should never pick up this game if I ever want to have free time again, or see the Sun.
…At least, that’s how I’m interpreting this letter from the Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader to (hiding) Wisconsin Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller, in response to Miller’s request for a face-to-face meeting to discuss a possible compromise that would allow Wisconsin senators to came back home with something roughly approximating their dignity intact. Fitzgerald’s letter starts as follows:
Sen. Mark Miller
Parts Unknown, IL
…and pretty much continues in that vein for six paragraphs’ worth of what has to be one of the better official political letters that I have read, and I unfortunately have to read a lot of these. Read it for yourself: it’s a treat. Then again, any official document where the words and phrases ‘bizarre,’ “We all deserve better than this,” and “I hope you are enjoying your vacation, and your vacation from reality” usually is.
Couple this with Governor Scott Walker’s response – short version: No; slightly longer version: Heck, no* – and you might be forgiven for thinking that the Wisconsin GOP is not going to back down on this issue…
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*With a dollop of implied “We’re talking to Senate Democrats that aren’t you, you know.”
A story that clearly involves somebody’s pain and loss.
Via email.
…Which they are, of course: just not to HuffPo. Which is why that the “strike” that some of them are invoking because they aren’t getting paid for their freely-provided content is so… well, it’s kind of cute. Diagnostic of a sad mass delusion of the relative worth of their provided free content, when contrasted against the difficulty in acquiring new free content of equal or greater value, but cute.
More seriously, when you have a site of HuffPo’s size, then you will get people who are happy to trade free content in exchange for free publicity. Some of those people will be good enough at what they do to be usable. You cannot compete with those people unless you first accept that they are in fact being compensated for their work, and adjust your pitch accordingly. Just the way it goes, folks.
Moe Lane
