Extending tax cuts: rhetoric meets reality.

The basic situation?  The Democratic party is facing a dilemma of more or less its own doing with the looming end of Bush-era tax cuts.  The party generally ran on a program of repealing them for the ‘rich,’ which was rhetorically useful (if not fiscally so); and some Democratic legislators are beginning to worry about the political effects of that.  The problem – which the Right has been saying all along – is that raising taxes on the top two tax brackets will affect an indeterminate number of small businesses.  Democratic legislators apparently plan to solve this problem by demonizing the Republican party’s position on tax relief while simultaneously coming as close to it as they dare. Continue reading Extending tax cuts: rhetoric meets reality.

#rsrh Tattooed vegan arrested for… guess.

Yup. Arson. Supposedly he calls himself “Lone Wolf” and is responsible for burning down a sheepskin factory, a leather factory, and a restaurant that sells foie gras*. A real eco-guerrilla, by all accounts.

So meet Lone Wolf:

(pause)

Ayup.

Moe Lane

PS: Actually, I think that it’s great that they’re starting to self-identify themselves in public like this, for the benefit of normal people.

*Which is admittedly kind of a not-nice food – force-feeding, and all that – but, shoot, it’s just ducks and geese.

Book of the week… A bit of a problem, actually.

I just finished it; it’s part of an alternate-history series (Renaissance fantasy subtype) which I like in spite of itself.  The only problem is the copy-editing and proofreading was… surprisingly bad, for a book that’s from a major SF/Fantasy publisher.  I suspect that standards have slipped a little for the publisher in question.

I got nothing to replace it with, so we’re going to keep The Evolutionary Void for another week. Sorry.

New DA:O DLC: ‘Golem of Amgarrak’?

That’s the word from the San Diego Comic-Con, at least: details here and here.  High-level dungeon crawl, apparently; I’ll need to tweak my Elven Mage/Arcane Warrior/Battlemage/Spirit Healer for full Things Go Boom Now effect.

It’s interesting to see the way that complaints about the DLC for Dragon Age: Origins change every single time a new one comes out.  I’m not used to the computer RPG social scene, oddly enough: this is the first game that really has had my wife and I aware of its larger online community.  We were trying to figure out why there was so much acrimony lurking in forums for corporate decisions about a game that nobody was being forced to buy, until we realized that said acrimony was mostly fueled by a general desire to complain…

Moe Lane

PS: Mind you, Return to Ostagar should have been longer.

QotD, Maureen Dowd edition.

Yes, Maureen Dowd.

We may not have a “nation of cowards” on race, as Attorney General Eric Holder contended, but we may have a West Wing of cowards on race.

Although I’m somewhere between Holder and Dowd on this one: we have a national political party of cowards on race, and it’s the Democratic one.  As we’ve just had Andrew Breitbart graphically, if perhaps not quite deliberately, demonstrate. Continue reading QotD, Maureen Dowd edition.

#rsrh TN-09 Update.

(Via Instapundit) The race-baiting, trash-talking Steve Cohen (D, TN-09) may continue to enjoy the effects of earned karma* by facing yet another candidate in the Democratic primary ready to win it by… race baiting and trash talking.  May Cohen have everything he deserves in the next two weeks.

That is a… hold up. 

Charlotte Bergmann for Congress.

That is all.

Moe Lane

*He may also continue to pog mo thoin.

“I’m just playing my character!”

The video below should be useful material for any gamers out there trying to convince their GMs that, yea, indeed, their character with the peg-leg can do that ridiculously acrobatic thing after all:

Remember: your PC does have that high a level in his or her dexterity/coordination/agility stat, and he or she does have his or her dancing/acrobatics/tumbling skill maxed out. Or he or she should, at least, if you’re trying to justify tap dancing with a peg-leg to a GM.  The point is that your PC really is a beautiful and unique snowflake; that’s part of the point in playing a roleplaying game in the first place*.

Moe Lane

*For the non gamer geeks: this assertion is not… universally held.