Author: Moe_Lane

#rsrh I’m going to go with “No extra cameras…”

“…for C-Span.”  The current system fixes the cameras on the floor podium and Speaker’s dais, which adequately covers the ostensible reason for C-Span coverage.  Allowing the cameras to pan out from there… well, this means three things will happen:

  • More candid shots of Members of Congress picking their nose.
  • More temptations for outside groups to disrupt the proceedings with staged antics.

Both of these are merely aesthetic issues, and easily survivable.  But here’s the real problem:

  • Control over the cameras means that C-Span gets a vote in deciding what is newsworthy.

I find that I don’t want C-Span’s input on that, actually.  They do an excellent job of presenting the actual business of the government with a calm, impartial eye; I don’t want them having on the spot editorial authority.

Moe Lane

PS: Yup, they do commentary.  And opinion pieces.  But they don’t get to muck about with the raw feed.

#rsrh Our (former) woman in Luxembourg.

OK, I’m not overly inclined to be hypocritical about how the White House made a major campaign contributor Ambassador to Luxembourg.  I said it before: that’s how this works.  The prestige posts – and the Western European ambassadorships are automatically ‘prestige’  – are Presidential largess.  Sure, it’s business as usual and the President said that he wasn’t going to be business as usual… but, seriously: everybody knew that he was lying, right?  Nobody smart actually believed that nonsense?

What, that person over there is saying that he did believe that Obama was different?

(pause)

Doofus.

But I digress. Continue reading #rsrh Our (former) woman in Luxembourg.

Lila Rose fights the Man.

Choice of phrase deliberate: one of the most entertaining things about today’s state of activism is that the Professional Left is just now starting to realize that they have somehow become the agents of reaction without ever quite noticing how it happened.  Lila Rose, on the other hand?  Her pro-life organization Live Action is a classic guerrilla theater operation designed to target the weaknesses of a frankly sclerotic tool of the Establishment… in this case, Planned Parenthood.  It’s not quite the same as the Sixties groups, though: the Right has never been all that interested in getting our opponents to admit that we were right and they were wrong.  Winning is sufficient validation, thanks.

And this is where I think that the above Christian Science Monitor article featuring Lila missed the fundamental point.  In my opinion, the CSM author approached Live Action’s program in terms of an attempt to sway public opinion; which is after all how the Activist Left always does it.  But the reason that the Left always does it that way is because the Activist Left always has to convince a majority of the American public that their ideas are correct.  The Right doesn’t have that problem in this country.  To use this specific example: Live Action doesn’t have to start by convincing people that abortion is disgusting, because people already find abortion personally disgusting.  All Live Action has to do is show that the horrid things said about abortion providers and abortion advocates are actually true. Continue reading Lila Rose fights the Man.

#rsrh NBC is a bunch of humorless toads.

Which you knew already – MSNBC, after all – but CrunchGear confirms it with this report that NBC has canned the person who uploaded the Couric/Gumbel video from 1994 where they were asking what this ‘Internet’ thing was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI&feature=player_embedded

CrunchGear went on to note that people weren’t laughing at Couric & Gumbel, just with them.  Well… possibly there was a little bit of laughing at them, but nothing malicious, I swear.  In 1994 I was just starting to use Mosaic (remember that?) to look up things at school while relying on AOL* for most of my online needs.  No Google.  Hell, no Yahoo.com until later.  I don’t want to go all stone knives and bear skins here, but this was back in the day, computationally speaking.  Just because those questions sound stupid now didn’t mean that they sounded stupid back then.

But you know what is stupid?  Making this thing more of a story than it needed to be.  Firing somebody for uploading 89 seconds of slightly embarrassing video could end up being a bit more of a hit to NBC’s reputation than the video itself…

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh NBC is a bunch of humorless toads.

Book of the Week: Marque and Reprisal (Vatta’s War)

Marque and Reprisal (Vatta’s War) is actually the second book in Elizabeth Moon’s space opera/war/trade series, but I’m still waiting for the first one in the mail and the reviews all seem to think that this was a better book than the first one anyway.  It’s space opera; it’s a good read; and I’m not really all that amused at what recently happened to Elizabeth Moon… despite the fact that she doesn’t like people like me very much.  But that shades into politics.

And so we remove Betty Crocker’s New Cookbook from the oven, and allow it to cool.

#rsrh Cutting the deficit.

So Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) wants to cut 500 billion dollars from the deficit.  And people are freaking out about it, because there’s stuff on his list that people don’t want to cut.  Everybody’s got something on that list that they don’t want cut, including me.  Here’s the problem, though: if we don’t start cutting now – because that half a trillion bucks is only 1/3rd of our current yearly deficit – when we start cutting later it’s going to hurt worse.  And it’s not going to be a straight-line progression kind of hurting worse; there is a curve, and it’s upward.  And yet… knowing all of this, I still blanch at the thought of cutting, say, aid to Israel.

And that’s why it’s so hard to cut spending.

#rrsrh Bench-marking foreign aid?

There’s a bunch of stuff I agree with in this Harsanyi article about Egypt – and a bunch that I don’t – but the thing that I like most about it is that the author is freely admitting that both he and most of his professional colleagues do not have any more of a clue about Egypt and the Middle East than the rest of us do.  This is actually very useful: when you don’t know much about a situation, and you know that you don’t know much about a situation – this is what Donald Rumsfeld would call a “known unknown” – you tend to defer to ostensible experts, because, hey, isn’t this why we keep experts around?  The problem in this strategy is, of course, implied in the use of the word ‘ostensible:’ a lot of people opining on the problems in the Middle East are very confident, very expressive… and very, very much without a clue.

All of which leads up to the observation that if the only reason you disagree with this notion:

Rather than abandoning allies who share our principles and face growing threats from nations like Iran, why not use Israel’s political and capitalistic system as a benchmark. You’re welcome to our aid if you can match Israel’s political and economic freedoms. How many countries would qualify?

…is because some guy in a suit on Sunday television has just solemnly told you that this is impractical, well, you may want to get a second opinion on that.  Preferably, your own.

Moe Lane