Moe Lane

Grim War was written by Greg Stolze and Ken Hite for the Wild Talents superhero RPG, and it promises to be full of the occult-meets-mutant-meets-Cold-War goodness that I would expect from those two.  I’m a sucker for horror/occult spy stuff, to be honest*; I dunno if I’d run a game using that sort of thing, but then one of the deep, dark secrets of the roleplaying community is that we read this stuff for fun even if we’re not going to do an actual campaign about it.

Moe Lane

*If you are, too: Declare.  Tim Powers.  If you haven’t read it yet, do so if you wish to have a pleasant few days.

I dunno why, and I fully admit that I could be wrong; but I just read this, and something clicked. It just sounds… plausible, somehow.

Via

Wow –> RT @ron_fournier: “Yes, I iced a source and my only regret is I didn’t do it sooner.” bit.ly/Z2TrKK

— Jon Henke (@JonHenke) February 28, 2013

The more things change…

‘I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.” Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people’s faces. They seem determined to shut people up.

[snip]

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech that they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

(more…)

Barbara Allen, Joan Baez

One of the first ones I ever memorized.  Learned this one off of a scratchy LP in a college library two weeks before the formal start of classes…

…Sorry.  My mind was elsewhere for a couple of minutes.

I guess that it hasn’t: if it had, I… all right, ALL RIGHT, I admit that I would have gone to see it.

I’m not proud to admit it.  But for some reason I still thought that it came out last year.

John Podheretz speaks for me here:

If confirmation hearings actually served as the job interview for the Senate — which must approve a presidential Cabinet appointment, under the rules of the Constitution — Hagel would’ve been dead in the water. But of course they rarely do.

What that hearing did do was give the lie to all those who said there were no grounds on which to oppose Hagel. By the hearing’s end, there was precious little ground to do anything but oppose Hagel — except for the key fact that the president wanted him.

Well, he has him, and mazel tov.

Although I’m going to add: there’s probably a bunch of Democratic Senators looking at the Obama/Woodward meltdown right now and thinking Wait.  I did this President a favor by voting for that schlemiel?  What was I thinking?

Answer’s easy, of course: they weren’t.

Either way, my response is going to be… a shrug.  Just another as-close-to-Commie-as-he-dares strongman thug – which, frankly, was and is a lot less than Chavez’s fan club either thinks or thought.  I’m being a little temporally vague there because as soon as Chavez is actually dead he’ll rapidly be abandoned as an inspirational figure by guilty norteamericano liberals and supplanted by whatever as-close-to-Commie-as-he-dares strongman thug takes his place.  They come, they go, and weep for Latin America, which never seems to catch a break on this for too long.

Via RCP: “I Have No Idea What Republicans Are Doing – Jonathan Chait, NY Magazine”

…Good.

Via Drudge: “Just as Nixon went to China, should Obama go to Iran? – Howard LaFranchi, The Christian Science Monitor”

…No.

What’s on your menu? Just got off the phone with my health care provider asking them to explain why my premium jumped up. No good answer!

— Donna Brazile (@donnabrazile) February 27, 2013

…

…

…

I got nothing, sorry.

My post about Barack Obama as a power gamer was referenced in National Review Online, with my use of the term ‘munchkin’ quoted (as well as the meme of The Gun Is My Skill List).  By the way, both terms originate[*] in the seminal and influential work Munchkins Guide to Power Gaming…  wait a second: sixty-three bucks new?  Steve Jackson Games should do a reprint.

Anyway, this is a moment of quiet pride for me.  It’s like I’m rust!

Moe Lane

*For the sake of accuracy, this point from @sjgames is well-taken:

@moelane Minor correction: “munchkin” as a gaming term predates the Munchkin’s Guide by at least a decade. -AH

— Steve Jackson Games (@SJGames) February 27, 2013

…although as I noted in my response, the Guide really is what at least popularized the term.