The new laptop has arrived!

It is being stripped for action even as we speak.

Thanks again to everyone who helped out with that; I’m not done with all the sonnets*, but hope to be so fairly soon.

Moe Lane

*I’m still selling them for $20/sonnet:

Nothing political that I wouldn’t agree with anyway.

Democrats: taxing health insurance back on agenda?

Why not? It’s not like this would affect them any.

WASHINGTON – The Senate’s top tax writer said Tuesday he is considering limits on the tax-free status of job-based health insurance to help pay for President Barack Obama’s plan to cover all Americans.

Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., described his idea as senators began to grapple with how to pay for the costs of the plan, which independent experts put at about $1.5 trillion over 10 years. There are no easy options.

Baucus is carefully not saying at what income level this would start at, which is of course Senatorese for “a lot lower than you’d expect from earlier rhetoric.” Which should come as an unpleasant surprise or two to folks entering the workplace after it comes into effect; well, the ones who aren’t union employees or government workers, at least. Your standard ‘kids out of school, with first real white-collar job’ types, in other words; if this passes, it’s going to be reduced health benefits for new hires, less take-home pay to cover the taxes, or the joys of negotiating with the central government for elective health procedures. None of which is going to be very fun for them.

No, avoid schadenfreude. We want them voting their class interests, remember?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

Can this Carrie Prejean thing be over now?

Speaking as somebody who is actually for same-sex marriage: has my side mucked things up enough, or do we want to really go for the gusto and alienate still more people?  She’s not getting tossed, her detractors are not going to get a social conservative crusade declared against her (mostly because the social conservatives that they think that they were aiming at don’t actually, you know, exist), and now we get to be reminded that the current President is prepared to do anything for same-sex marriage except actually stand up for it.  Let’s quit while we’re behind, OK?

Moe Lane

PS: Do you know what would help?  Going out and working to pass actual SSM legislation such as Maine’s (via Slublog).  That doesn’t bother people like judicial fiat or ‘shut up, he explained’ does.  Strange but true.

Crossposted to RedState.

Speaker Pelosi has a new excuse for not opposing waterboarding.

It sort of stops working after the third try, you know.

The Speaker of the House has come up with yet another reason for why she didn’t say anything about waterboarding at the time:

Pelosi defense: couldn’t object in ’03

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi learned in early 2003 that the Bush administration was waterboarding terror detainees but didn’t protest directly out of respect for “appropriate” legislative channels, a person familiar with the situation said Monday.

The Pelosi camp’s version of events is intended to answer two key questions posed by her critics: When, precisely, did she first learn about waterboarding? And why didn’t she do more to stop it?

Because, apparently, “All along” and “because it didn’t poll well at the time” won’t satisfy anybody at this point. Both Cold Fury and AoSHQ have a good deal of righteous scorn on this one; I’m just going to touch fairly briefly on what this means, going forward. Continue reading Speaker Pelosi has a new excuse for not opposing waterboarding.

Changeling? I don’t suppose that an actual one is involved…

…no, probably not.

Anyway, Ace of Ace of Spades HQ has an interesting review up – OK, he has two interesting reviews up, but I’m working under the assumption that I’ll see Doubt more or less by accident* – of Changeling, which looks like it just came out. Ace liked it a lot, but it clearly lacks the exploding starships and/or gun fu that I normally associate with Good Movies; anybody else who saw it have an opinion?

Moe Lane

*I assume that what will happen is that it’ll be on or about to be on, somewhere, just as I’m wandering by; and then I’ll watch it. And then I’ll agree that it was a good film, and that I enjoyed it.

Need to fly somewhere?

But you can’t afford a flight, these days? Well, Jack Murtha is ready to help! – At least, the NRCC takes the attitude that he should be making the offer, and it’s hard to fault their logic. Actually, it’s impossible to fault their logic: Murtha did funnel all that money to ‘his’ airport for his own convenience, so the least he can do is give you some, too.

(See also The Sundries Shack for more background)

Crossposted to RedState.