Moon Dust

…could cloud our lunar ambitions.

Mitt Romney

…is the new John McCain.

What make him think that anyone needed a new John McCain? Hasn’t he noticed that it took someone other than him or John McCain to defeat the Democrats? Or maybe neither of them really cared about defeating the Democrats?

[Update a while later]

Justin Amash has proven to be quite a disappointment to this libertarian.

One more thing, J-Am, where are your libertarian principles regarding illegal surveillance on American citizens? On Illegal FISA warrants, national security letters, human intelligence assets being placed around a political campaign by the unelected political bureaucracy? The jack-booted fedgov strong-arming people to plead to process crimes? U cool with that bro, because TRUMP?

I’d like to see someone confront him along those lines.

The Steele Dossier

The “verified” document that wasn’t.

Someone’s (more than one someone) got a lot of ‘splaining to do.

[Update Monday morning]

How the FBI broke its own rules:

In the fall of 1975, FBI agent John Connolly met with Bulger in the agent’s car on an abandoned Boston street corner. What would follow was the FBI’s greatest scandal involving a confidential informant subverting the vast powers of the government in order to target his enemies. This stain on the history of the Department of Justice should have led to effective reforms but instead it only foreshadowed more of the same.

Well, to be fair, it was politically convenient to do the same thing with Steele.

[Update a while later]

Spy versus spy versus spy: How Comey, Clapper, and Brennan are turning on each other.

I hope they all rot in jail.

[Late-morning update]

Trey Gowdy says that there is a potential game changer if certain transcripts are released.

And thoughts on a tale of two coups:

The fact that the losers in this election appear to have attempted to undermine the winners is an extremely bad precedent because it leads to the winners deciding to take it out on the losers next time around and that in turn leads to people not relinquishing power short of being turfed out with violence – see Venezuela and any number of Latin American, Central Asian and African dictatorships. In fact allowing the losers to come up with one way after another to try and delegitimise an election they lost is bad on its own because the ability to “throw the bums out” is a key feature of democracy. If voters can’t trust that their votes will be respected they are likely to resort to other methods of expressing their displeasure with the current set of rulers and that is something that these rulers may come to regret. The good news is that the New AG seems to be doing his job and turning over any number of stones that various parties would have preferred remained unexamined.

Let’s hope.

Light Blogging

My desktop computer is FUBAR. I can’t boot it. Getting it fixed is my highest current priority.

[Friday-afternoon update]

It seems to be a hardware problem. I built a clean install of Fedora 30, and the machine froze in the middle of the first software update. I’m running a memory test on it now, but I suspect it’s a motherboard issue. Which of course means CPU and memory replacement as well, unless I can find a used motherboard, because they don’t make AMD FM3 boards any more.

Any recommendations?

[Saturday-morning update]

Sorry, hadn’t realized that site wasn’t taking comments. It should work now.

[Saturday-afternoon update]

OK, it was WP-Spamfree plugin. Try it now.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!