Disqus - Latest Comments for Skip

Re: How Much Credit Should We Have in the World?

Skip — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:53:36 -0000

So would eliminating naked CDS's be sufficient regulation?

Re: Comment Registration At Hot Air

Skip — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:43:07 -0000

The problem with HotAir is the signal to noise ratio is very poor over there. And while your posts will probably improve it, I'm not sure it will be enough. I, like probably thousands of your readers, do a bit of blog reading at work when I have a minute or two of downtime. For me it's when I start building the application I'm working on. At that point I've got somewhere between 90 seconds and 2 minutes that I will usually read a blog posting or two.

Hot Air will never get those two minutes, because in the RSS feed I can't always tell whether something is video or audio, which I will never watch or listen to at work, or a text post. It seems that it's about 50/50 now, it used to be much less. It's also a problem because it's a partial RSS feed, not a full one. Full feeds get most of my quick reading time, and partial feeds only get looked at occasionally.

So basically, by moving over there you've gone from someone who I read most posts from, to someone I'll only occasionally read, and then probably only if someone else who has a full feed linked to you.

Re: Time For Spector To Get A Hobby

Skip — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:27:46 -0000

There has been a quite a bit of speculation about what's behind this on sports blogs. And it turns out that Specter has, as one of his largest donors, Comcast, who just happens to be in a huge fight with the NFL over the NFL Network right now.

http://www.opensecrets.org/...

There may be no connection, but it does stink to high heaven.

Re: Flopping Aces » Blog Archive

Skip — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:23:20 -0000

We're going to have that regardless. It simply cannot be helped. On average, every President gets to put one person on SCOTUS, and on average, about half of the ones that the Republicans put on go bad. So until and unless SCOTUS is term-limited that's not a solvable problem.

And using that as logic, you're basically saying "I don't care how bad a nominee is, if he's got the (R) after his name I'm supporting him." And that's certainly your right, but its not a good idea, in my view. You're focused on the short-term damage that another Clinton term would do. But the damage that McCain would do is long-term. By rewarding his behavior you'll be inviting everyone to move to the left. What happens when, in 2016 there are 5 senators trying to out-maverick McCain's record, to position themselves for a presidential run later? Even if the Republicans had a 60 seat majority they would be able to do nothing, because one of the 5 would be leading a break on every single issue of importance.

Also, people keep trying to bring up the spectre of another Clinton presidency. What did the first one give us? It gave us welfare reform, a Republican congress that actually remembered what it means to be Republican, and no real net change on the skew of SCOTUS. The country survived 8 years of Clinton 1, if necessary it will survive 4 years of Clinton 2.

Re: Flopping Aces » Blog Archive

Skip — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 13:01:04 -0000

The problem with using the ACU rankings is that they're not weighted at all, so every vote counts the same, and we all know that they aren't. So while they're a useful start, they're just that. A start.

Which would you rather have? An 80 percent ACU guy, but who on the other 20 percent leads the opposition, denigrates his opponents and drags others with him that might otherwise not have defected, or a 70 percent ACU guy, who's at least not hostile to the 30 percent he doesn't personally support.

That's the choice we're given here, and it's not particularly a good one.

One final comment. You say:

"But if he ends up being the nominee, we had all better rally behind him and band together against the kind of America that Democrats wish to have us living under."

I heard a bunch of similar talk before the 2006 midterms, and we saw how that turned out. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.

Will I, and the many thousand other people who have said we won't vote for McCain ever, under any circumstances, share in the blame for a Democratic administration? Of course. But we'll share it with the people who didn't believe us when we told them that.

Re: The Weekend Hot Seat: Can Mitt Make The Conservative Sale?

Skip — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:23:31 -0000

That kind of depends. With the honest RINO you know you're getting a liberal. With the guy who ran as a conservative, you may get a liberal, but there's some very small chance he can be held to what he ran on.

But neither is going to particularly get me fired up come election season.

Re: The Weekend Hot Seat: Can Mitt Make The Conservative Sale?

Skip — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 12:19:32 -0000

Right. McCain's problem is the opposite of Romney's. With Romney I basically don't believe what he says, but he's saying the right things. With McCain I do believe him, and that's why I don't support him.

Re: The Weekend Hot Seat: Can Mitt Make The Conservative Sale?

Skip — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:18:27 -0000

Now that Thompson's out of the race, I'm very reluctantly on board with Romney. But the deal is that I fully expect to be stabbed in the back by him if he's elected. Now, this wouldn't be a backstab in the manner of McCain, who would spit in your eye and tell you where to go while he was doing it. Instead, it's going to be more like Bush Senior, who ran on his 'No New Taxes' pledge, and then was seduced by the dark side into breaking it.

I believe that Romney intends to govern as a conservative. I just don't know that I believe that he is one, at his core. And without that core it will be hard to resist the McCains and the Kennedy's in the Senate.

Re: Progress On Pork From The GOP

Skip — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:24:19 -0000

I disagree, Ed. The Republicans haven't learned anything at all, except that they need to try to fool the small government types. This is a meaningless reform. There are two possible outcomes here:

1. The Democrats turn the deal down. This lets the Republican porkers continue, but lets them use it as a campaign issue.
2. The Democrats accept the deal, then break the terms of it. This lets the Republican porkers continue, but lets them use it as a campaign issue.

The third possibility, of the Democrats accepting the deal and actually keeping it is so remote as to not even be considered. So this is just politics as usual, trying to fool small government types.

Re: McCain's Daunting Task With Conservatives

Skip — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 14:32:01 -0000

While some might feel that way, let's look at things for the next 8 years. It's unquestionable in my mind that McCain would be damaging to the country. How much? It's hard to say, but in my view he'd be at least half as damaging as the Democrat, if not more.

So if McCain's the nominee and wins, you'd be looking at a best case of damaging the country at least as much as one term of a Democrat. And if he lost after four years of squishiness, it would be one and a half times the damage of a Democrat term over the course of eight years.

On the other hand if McCain is the nominee and loses, there's some chance that in four years we could have a nominee that would win and repair some of the damage that the four years of a Democratic administration had caused.

Using that logic, when you realize damage is coming, allowing the Democrat to win may result in less total damage to the country.

Re: Will Glen Johnson Get The Last Laugh?

Skip — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 11:30:43 -0000

It would only be a winning message if it were an honest one. And I have a hard time believing that it would be. Not to pick on Romney here, but in general, guys don't get into politics to reduce the authority and power of the offices they're seeking.

Just look at the Republican presididents over the last few decades. How many of them could have used that as an honest message? Nixon, Ford, Bush 1 and 2? Nope on all four. The only counter-example is Reagan.

How many of the current candidates could run on that? Two. He Who Must Not Be Named and Thompson. GIuliani might, just might be able to, based on cutting taxes from extremely high to slightly less high but still extremely high, but it's a stretch. Romney can't, based on his tenure in Massachusetts, McCain can't based on, well, just about everything, And Huckabee certainly can't.

Re: Another Tired Anti-Mormon Diatribe

Skip — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:52:09 -0000

While that particular email is ridiculous, one thing that needs to be understood is that the target audience for it is not small. Particularly in the South, Mormons are put in the same category of people as Moonies, Branch Davidians, etc. Rightly or wrongly, this simply is a fact. How large is this contingent? I'd guess it's somewhere north of 10 percent in the rural South. Less so in the urban south, but those are typically the Dem strongholds in otherwise red states anyways.

Arguing that it shouldn't be is fairly useless. It's simply a fact that would have to be recognized, and overcome. Now, when I ran the numbers and looked at it, the South is so solidly Republican that it would only be likely to switch one or two small states. But it would absolutely require all of the other swing states to swing our way, and I'm just not sure I see that happening.

Having said that, if Romney's the nominee, I'll vote for him. What bothers me about him is not his religion. It's the fact that I don't believe a thing he says. But given a choice between a liberal running proudly as a liberal and a liberal running as a conservative, I'd have to vote for the one claiming to be conservative, and then attempt to hold him to what he ran on.

Re: Bush Mulling Over The Earmark Question

Skip — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 14:31:26 -0000

I'm not sure he cared. He didn't even bother to show up and vote on the bill.

Re: The Eggnog Factor

Skip — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:41:57 -0000

Just think of it as another Christmas present from Hillary.

Re: The Eggnog Factor

Skip — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 11:58:55 -0000

The Federal Government, of course.

Re: Let's Be Fair

Skip — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 20:20:39 -0000

That was his point. That the public wouldn't complain about the taxes because they wouldn't see them.

But of course it ignores basic economics, and adds incentives to move all operations overseas. Under that scenario what's to stop a company from closing its US presence 100%, and then only selling it's products to middlemen for what they sell for now. And then those middlemen raise the price slightly. At that point, you have higher prices than now, but only a fraction of the profits are taxed.

That's why you'd have to go to some sort of a VAT, and everyone knows those are a mess.

Re: National Review Picks Romney

Skip — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:44:42 -0000

This is very disheartening. I can follow their logic, but they've basically excluded all the actual conservative candidates as non-viable. So given the choice between a liberal and a couple of moderates, they chose to endorse a moderate. They should have sat this one out instead.

If NR is right, 2008 is already lost for conservatives, and 2012 isn't looking so good.

Re: ACU Endorses Romney?

Skip — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:46:17 -0000

Massachusetts centrism? Is that like a New York Times conservative?

Snort.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Skip — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:43:00 -0000

FSX actually did that on purpose, as did FS9 before it when it shipped. The intent was to have something that would have several years of life in it. As for the scenery bugs, eh, not terribly surprising. There's zero chance of being able to eyeball everything in a product that covers the whole world. The road data comes from USGS and they just automatically generate things. And anything like that has to be changed by hand. There are probably thousands of tunnels worldwide that are the same.

The strange texture choices of the ground in flyover country bothered me a bunch more. There are areas I know that are prarie/grassland that are presented as desert, for example.

Re: Why Does Vista Suck?

Skip — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 11:34:39 -0000

I can't say that I'm terribly surprised. Compaq used to have this very bad habit of replacing/extending portions of Windows on the versions that it shipped, and they were usually memory hogs and not very stable. I always avoided them as a result, or if I couldn't, would wipe them and reinstall from scratch. This also had the benefit of getting rid of the gigs of trial/adware and such that come preloaded that I didn't want. The internet explorer problems are probably coming from a toolbar or other addin that either came preloaded by compaq or you inadvertently loaded. And they may, actually be related to the DNS problems - there may be something trying to 'phone home' and hanging because it can't do a name lookup.

So I'd attack the DNS problems first. DNS in general isn't a problem - it's used extensively by windows networking, so if it were failing in general like that there would be zero businesses anywhere able to use it. The first thing I'd check would be to make sure that the vista systems and the XP systems are in fact using the same DNS servers in the same order. One note - I'm not actually running vista anywhere here, there's been no reason to upgrade any of my systems. But I'm sure my next PC will have it. The techniques should still work to troubleshoot though. BTW, I don't mean to insult your intelligence if you've already tried this stuff.

To check this, open up a command window on both systems and run

ipconfig /all

one of the things listed will be the DNS servers. Both systems should have the same addresses listed, and in the same order. Either the order being different or a different set of servers listed could be the issue.

If that's not it and you want to pursue it further, drop me a note offline, assuming you can see my email address from the profile. If not, let me know and I'll send you a note.

Re: Comments Policy Update

Skip — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:48:37 -0000

As a different opinion, I like threaded comments. I especially like the way Redstate.com does them. when I hit refresh I can see all the new replies labeled as such. But alternatively, something like /.'s comments where I can pick and choose how to present them is fine as well.

Re: Comments Policy Update

Skip — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 18:26:04 -0000

For whatever it's worth, I got no email to use to verify with when I just created a registration.