Author: Moe_Lane

Book of the Week: Mission of Honor.

Yeah, the title and the author (David Weber) tells you that Mission of Honor is part of the Honor Harrington series, which I stopped struggling against trying to not buy in hardcover years ago.  Because I am weak.  So weak that I know that I’ll buy this – somehow – when it comes out next June.

And so we say farewell to Sentry Peak. It had a longer run than normal, at least.

Moe Lane

Amazingly, ‘Orion slave girl’ is not a PC class.

Don’t look at me like that: it’s not the biggest target audience demographic for Star Trek Online, but there’s a contingent out there that wants to play a green-skinned seductress of death whose lack of armor (and, indeed, clothing) is more than compensated for by a surfeit of baroque ranged weapons*. That’s just the way it is.

[Interrupting]

Ahem: ‘Bayonetta.’

Bayonetta.

That’s right, ‘oh.’

Moe Lane

*Admittedly, these are harder to find in the Star Trek universe than in other places.

How you can tell that the Democrats are worried about Brown/Coakley.

They don’t want to risk a loss slopping over on the President.

President Obama has no plans to travel to Massachusetts to campaign for Democrat Martha Coakley in the home stretch in the special election to fill the US Senate seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy.

Presidential press secretary Robert Gibbs said today in response to a question at a briefing in the White House that the “president doesn’t have any travel plans to campaign in Massachusetts,” because “it’s not on our schedule to go to next week.”

But he sent out an email!  That’ll teach us rascally Republicans.

Moe Lane

PS: Via a very bitter AMERICAblog. You’d think that they’d be used to the caustic taste of betrayal by now.

PPS: Scott Brown for Senate.

Crossposted to RedState.

Game Change is not Book of the Week.

I haven’t read it, for one thing.  But I might read Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime: it seems to have stirred up at least half a dozen hornets’ nests already, with reactions ranging from firm denials to shamefaced admissions. You have to respect that.

OK, you don’t, but the amount of trouble that Heilemann and Halperin have already caused impresses me mightily. I hope to be this much of a pain in the ass to at least one member of our self-appointed political elite before I die…

Moe Lane

Scott Brown (R, MA-SEN candidate) moneybomb today.

The Scott Brown campaign is aiming for $500K: they’ve gotten $488,724.25 $493,754.84 $499,219 (stop that!) as of 3:56 PM EST. No cavalry’s coming for this one, folks: we’re it.

…OK, they blew through over ten grand raised to hit over $500K in the five minutes that it took me to port this over to RedState.  So let’s just say that they’re aiming for $750K, all right?

Moe Lane

PS: It means enough that I put some cash up myself; the amount won’t take food off of my kids’ plates, but it’s important that I contribute something.

Home, thank God.

It was when the eldest child began to spontaneously manifest a cold that I realized that this extended mega-weekend Grand Tour was going to go all stress-y.  Not doing that again in a hurry, let me tell you.

Moe Lane

PS: The most annoying bit was that Bioware did not taunt me by releasing Return to Ostagar while I was away from my primary computer.  Taunting ends.

Gov Deval Patrick (D, MA) just gave the GOP three more House seats.

And I’m blaming the Governor for this one because I find it inconceivable that he would have let his subordinates set policy in such a nakedly partisan fashion without him first signing off on it.  Apparently the Democratic party just doesn’t care how many ‘moderate’ Democrats have to have their careers sacrificed to the leadership’s ambitions.   I don’t know where we’ll use this development – yet – but if you think that we’re not going to use this (win or lose):

The U.S. Senate ultimately will schedule the swearing-in of Kirk’s successor, but not until the state certifies the election.

Today, a spokesman for Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, who is overseeing the election but did not respond to a call seeking comment, said certification of the Jan. 19 election by the Governor’s Council would take a while.

“Because it’s a federal election,” spokesman Brian McNiff said. “We’d have to wait 10 days for absentee and military ballots to come in.”

Another source told the Herald that Galvin’s office has said the election won’t be certified until Feb. 20 – well after the president’s address.

Since the U.S. Senate doesn’t meet again in formal session until Jan. 20, Bay State voters will have made their decision before a vote on health-care reform could be held. But Kirk and Galvin’s office said today a victorious Brown would be left in limbo.

In contrast, Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell) was sworn in at the U.S. House of Representatives on Oct. 18, 2007, just two days after winning a special election to replace Martin Meehan. In that case, Tsongas made it to Capitol Hill in time to override a presidential veto of the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

…to hammer home the point that Democrats Lie, think again.  The ads write themselves, and even should Coakley win the speed with which she’ll be installed will still let us run those ads.  And she would be installed speedily: her party’s leadership doesn’t just lie.  It assumes that the electorate is dumb, too.

It’s not, by the way.

Moe Lane

PS: That SCHIP veto wasn’t actually overturned, by the way.

Crossposted to RedState.

It is Elvis’ birthday.

You know what that means.


Elvis Is Everywhere, The Pleasure Barons

In its way, this song says a lot about our technological development. Twenty years ago you could pretty much only find a version of this song by using a specialized novelty cassette-album vendor. Ten years ago my then-girlfriend, now-wife bought me an album with this song by using that newfangled ‘Amazon’ service. Today, the trick in listening to it is in deciding which version that you like the best.

Our technological development rocks on toast, in other words.