#ObamaCare’s Past Schadenfreude, But The Democrat Wreckage Is Still Good

Posted on | December 14, 2014 | 20 Comments

by Smitty

The cumulative damage the Democratic Party has suffered, as well as the casualty rate — half of the 60 senators who supported the bill are since deceased, defeated or retired — has brought its leaders to an unhappy inflection and reflection point. Two years ago, President Obama was reelected to the surprise and delight of Democrats who believed that, not only would his unique coalition provide them with dominance in presidential cycles for the foreseeable future, but that perhaps the ACA backlash had passed. After losing their Senate majority and watching the GOP cement gains across federal offices, statehouses and regions Democrats might have lost for generations, however, buyer’s remorse on healthcare reform has led to angry division inside the party.

The long term economic and societal damage from ObamaCare remains to be seen. It’s too grim and widespread for schadenfreude to be appropriate. Careers have been ended, but the worst perpetrators are still around.

And the fundamental behavior pattern of having legislation move through Congress with the suddenness and subtlety of a mudslide is still prevalent, as the CROmnibus showed.

The sad part is that the conceptual flaw of Progressivism–that any of this federal over-reach was a good idea in the first place–remains unquestioned. Maybe when he’s the last Dem standing, Chuck Schumer will reflect that maybe modeling the American people as a flock of sheep for planning purposes was too simplistic.

via Hot Air

Category: Democrats, Health Care

50.137.181.253, Beaverton, Oregon

Posted on | December 14, 2014 | 57 Comments

A certain troll using the name “Bilibob” decided to post three comments on a post called “Emerging Awareness Update,” but don’t look for them now; all three have been deleted. A check on the IP address indicated the troll is using a Comcast connection from Beaverton, Oregon.

When I checked to see if there had been previous comments from the same IP, I found comments from a certain “Bubba” (fake email address [email protected]) who had commented on “Lubricating the Slippery Slope: The Intellectual Astroglide of the Elite” (Sept. 1, 2013) and also on “New Concept of ‘Rights’ in America: If You’re Not Gay, You Don’t Have Any” (Aug. 22, 2013).

Given the similar thematic content of those three posts, it can be assumed that “Bilibob”/”Bubba” of Beaverton, Oregon, is some sort of sexual deviant who doesn’t like anybody suggesting it’s wrong for his computer hard drive to be full of sick pornography.

Certain people like that are dangerous and others are not, and I cannot say for certain whether “Bilibob”/”Bubba” of Beaverton, Oregon, is a menace to society, but I do get tired of them constantly making accusations of bad faith (mala fides) against those of us who call attention to evidence of increasing degeneracy in our society.

If “Bilibob”/”Bubba” of Beaverton, Oregon, wishes to create his own blog to advocate the pleasures of sodomy, nobody is stopping him. However, this cowardly pervert seems to imagine he has a right to use my bandwidth and a flimsy alias in an effort to harm my reputation by recycling an old smear dating back more than a decade.

Longtime readers of this blog well know that in, September 2009, I fought a two-week blog war with Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs after Johnson, for his own peculiarly hateful reasons, decided to hurl all that stale “white supremacist” crap at me. Everyone who watched that conflict will recall quite well which of us was left standing, and who it was that slithered away to discredited obscurity.

That was more than five years ago now and, even before it began, the “white supremacy” smear against me was already more than five years old. At the time this first came up, via the Southern Poverty Law Center, Duncan “Atrios” Black and Michelangelo Signorile, I was employed as an assistant national editor at The Washington Times.

In that position, I was “a man under authority,” and my supervisors more or less ordered me not to respond to the accusations, as any denial or rebuttal by me would only serve to publicize their smear. This enforced silence was difficult for me to bear, as it is not my nature to tolerate insults and, furthermore, I doubted the wisdom of their policy of not responding. Certainly, I have always been capable of defending myself in controversy, and the ludicrous accusation that I was a “white supremacist” (what does that even mean in the 21st century?) was never difficult to refute. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that the best response in such a situation is to take the antagonist head-on, but my bosses had a newspaper to run, and my job was not to offer them P.R. advice and so I stayed silent.

Subsequent to that, after I had been promoted to Culture Page editor, there began a series of intrigues inside the Unification Church, which owned The Washington Times. Although those intrigues had nothing to do with me and I knew nothing about them at the time, they ended up having a significant impact on the future of the newspaper and also my career. Basically, there was a struggle inside the Unification Church as to who would control the church’s various assets after the death of the church’s founder, Sun Myung Moon. Although I neither knew nor cared about any of that, there were certain disgruntled and/or ambitious persons (among them some members or ex-members of the Church who had originally gotten their jobs through those connections) who saw this as an opportunity to advance themselves or else to settle personal grudges against others.

As a result of this situation — and keep in mind, I knew nothing about what was going on behind the scenes at the time — certain disgruntled malcontents began seeking to undermine our editor in chief, Wesley Pruden, and his deputy, Francis B.. Coombs. Both of them are newsmen par excellence, veterans of the industry who played key roles in the success of “America’s Newspaper.” Mr. Pruden was and is a man with a low tolerance for bullshit. Fran Coombs was the straw that stirred the drink and the cog that turned the wheel of the news-gathering operation at The Washington Times. He had impeccable news judgment and a keen sense for finding the kind of story the liberal media preferred to ignore, grabbing hold of it, breaking an exclusive, and then follow up! follow up!

Fran knew what he was doing, and pushed everybody to do it his way, and there were some people who resented his success. So when it was rumored that Mr. Pruden would soon be retiring, certain of those resentful enemies decided to make sure that Fran did not get promoted as Mr. Pruden’s successor. The absurd accusation that I was a “white supremacist” (really, can someone please explain what that phrase means in the 21st century?) became one of the weapons those enemies used to sabotage Fran. Basically, these people spread the rumor that because I was secretly some kind of KKK ideologue, and hadn’t been fired for it, Fran and Mr. Pruden were protecting me because, of course, we were all part of the Vast Neo-Confederate Conspiracy that was going to re-institute Jim Crow or whatever.

As ridiculous as that seems, it was taken seriously enough that Max Blumenthal (yes, the infamous nose-picker) convinced his editors at The Nation magazine that he could write an investigative exposé of this racist cabal at The Washington Times. Blumenthal’s “investigation” turned out to be the biggest fizzle since the invention of Coca-Cola, but it did serve to embolden Fran Coombs’ enemies and to add more ammunition to the raging behind-the-scenes battle within the Unification Church over future control of the newspaper.

Finally, in January 2008, it was announced that Wes Pruden would retire, that his replacement would be John Solomon, previously of the Washington Post, and that Fran Coombs would be leaving the newspaper with a generous separation agreement, so that Solomon could bring in his own deputy to “transform” The Washington Times.

This was devastating news to many of us inside the organization and, after this had been announced in a big meeting of the entire newsroom, I went outside to have a cigarette with one of our investigative reporters who said, in her Kentucky drawl, “If I’d have wanted to work for a f**king Postie, I’d have applied at the f**king Post.”

Exactly so. If there was one thing that united us as a team in the newsroom at The Washington Times, it was our absolute contempt for that worthpless crosstown paper, The Washington Post. Now here the owners had decided to pass over Fran Coombs for the job of editor at a newspaper to which Fran had dedicated more than 20 years of his career, in order to give that job to a f**king Postie.

Immediately I resolved in my mind to resign.

There were other factors involved. At the time, I had three weeks of paid vacation due which I was planning to use for a freelance project that would take me to Uganda, on assignment for a publisher to help a first-time author with research for his book. After I got back, I’d planned to use my nights and weekends to complete that project, which was going to be very difficult, but now that plan was unworkable. Imagine working 70-hour weeks while under the eye of a new editor.

No, this was a divine portent. I’d been at the paper more than a decade, and I would have gotten a gold watch if I had stayed another four months. (The Washington Times awarded gold watches to 10-year employees at its anniversary celebration each May.)

“It was like God said, ‘Go,” as I wrote in my resignation notice and a few weeks later, I flew off to Kampala, Uganda.

So that is the backstory of how I went from The Washington Times to my subsequent freelance career online. I’ve since traveled all over the United States covering political campaigns, debates and events of various kinds. From Kentucky to New Hampshire, from New York to Nevada, from Alaska to Florida, to South Carolina and North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan — it’s been a wild ride.

That old “white supremacist” smear is so far back in my rearview mirror now I seldom even think about it, but it’s amazing how stupid trolls think they can discredit me by bringing it up. “Asked and answered!”

Don’t these fools ever learn anything from their failures? I’ve explained everything that ever needed to be explained to everyone who asked, and yet these idiotic trolls can’t seem to figure out why the repetition of the same stale stuff never really damages me.

There are five A’s in “RAAAAACISM!”

That accusation has been flung around by liberals so haphazardly for so long as to have lost whatever meaning the word ever had. More than six years after Barack Obama’s election as president, we all know that “racist” is just another synonym for Republican.

Me, I was a “racist” before being a “racist” was cool. It was my ironic fate to be accused under circumstances that prevented me from addressing the accusation directly at the time and at this point, nearly a dozen years later, I accept that this was God’s will.

While I don’t pray often, I have never doubted that God answers prayer. We may not always be happy with God’s answer, and the way our prayers are answered may confuse or disappoint us, but the sincere prayer of a broken spirit, God will surely answer.

All the evil that my enemies have done against me has harmed me no more than God was willing that I should be harmed. If it was his will that I should be chastised, I thank God for the chastisement.

Yet I always knew this: Whom God would save, no man can destroy, and whom God would destroy, no man can save. God knows my heart, and I have many friends who can vouch for my character. My faults and weaknesses are known to my friends as well as are my strengths and ability. Why is it, then, that my enemies believe they can harm me with an old smear that has not harmed me yet?

“Asked and answered!” All of that was put to rest years ago, and any fool who can’t be bothered to research my vindication is probably such a fool that there’s no point trying to dissuade him from his folly.

Hate? Hell, I don’t hate anybody. Hate is against my religion. However, it is also against my religion (and here I speak of my own deep beliefs, rather than the doctrines of any particular sect) to let an elite bunch of self-appointed Moral Arbiters tell me what to think.

Do you think I’m intimidated by such intellectual busybodies? I’ve been through the Valley of Death doing 11o mph in a rented Nissan with a 40-ounce Budweiser between my knees, flipping cigarette ashes out the window and jamming Skynyrd on the stereo.

Shall I call witnesses to testify to my fearlessness? Buddy, I got sued for $1 million by the notorious bomber Brett Kimberlin. I called him a liar to his face in open court, and walked away a winner.

Given my reputation for fearlessness, for independence of mind and a willingness to say what I think without regard for who might be offended, let me ask an obvious question that these damned trolls never bother to ask: If I’m such a “white supremacist,” where is the evidence of this doctrine in anything I’ve written on my blog since 2008?

You can’t find it, because it doesn’t exist.

Seven years of absolute editorial independence, with no supervisor or editor to tell me what I could or should write. And yet at no time during the nearly seven years since I’ve been running this operation — we’ve had more than 17,000,000 visitors — have I ever written anything that would suggest that I am a “white supremacist,” whatever the hell that phrase is supposed to mean in the 21st century.

See, this is what gets me: Anybody who actually is a “white supremacist” is pursuing the futile politics of nostalgia. Even if anybody did want to “turn back the clock” to 1962 or 1953 or whatever reset point they might choose, there is no feasible way to do it. Americans living in the here and now might not be happy with various aspects of the political, economic, social and cultural status quo, and it may be that their study of history leads them to believe that some things were better in certain ways many decades ago, but they know you can never go back to the past, even if they wanted to, which most people don’t.

The United States is nation of (small-d) democratic political tradition, and while conservatives wish to restore and maintain the governing principles of our Constitution, this is not a nostalgia trip, but rather a belief that limited government — the rule of law — is essential to preservation of our fundamental human liberty. The problem is that most of our citizens, especially younger people, have been indoctrinated in a liberal/progressive worldview in such a way that they fear liberty far more than they fear government.

Well, it was not liberty that killed Eric Garner, was it? No, it was a police officer, an agent of the government of New York City, who put Eric Garner in that fatal chokehold. “I can’t breathe!”

Yeah, we’ve been getting slowly strangled to death by government for years in this country — all of us, black, white, whatever — and all these idiotic protesters who want to blame Garner’s death on racism have to wonder why that black man got choked to death in New York City rather than, say, Wetumpka, Alabama, or Sevierville, Tennessee.

Haven’t we all been told, for many years now, that the rural parts of America where people vote Republican are hives of racial hatred? The last time I checked Census Bureau reports, more than half of black Americans lived in the South, a place of conservative tradition where nearly every governor and U.S. Senator is a Republican. And yet we see that in 2014, a black man was choked to death by a cop in New York City, one of the most liberal places in the entire country.

Doesn’t that tell us something very important? Would it make me a “racist” if I suggested we should consider whether liberalism is really more dangerous to black Americans than racism? To make such a suggestion is not to excuse or defend racism, of course, but merely to say that the dangers fostered by liberalism may be the greater threat to the lives, safety and prosperity of black Americans.

See, we can’t even ask questions like that — we can’t be permitted the liberty to “think outside the box” about our nation’s problems — because liberals insist that to question liberalism is to endorse hate.

My basic argument is that you can’t really have freedom unless people are free to hate whoever they feel like hating. Certainly, I prefer love to hate, but the Federal Bureau of Love hasn’t been getting the job done. As a matter of fact, they’ve got us all so worked up into spasmodic paroxysms of racial antagonism that it will be a miracle if we can avoid having major race riots in the near future.

This blog is read daily by many thousands of men and women all over the country, of all races and religions. Perhaps most of them are white Christians, but there is nothing here that would (or should) offend a black person, a Hispanic, an Asian or a Jew. Probably some adherents of Islam might not like my opinion of The Religion of Peace , but as long as they’re not in favor of violent terrorism or the annihilation of Israel, I’m probably more in agreement with the Muslim than I am with any white liberal anyone would care to name.

As long as you hate liberal Democrats, we’ll get along just fine.

Nearly 3,000 words ago, I started this blog post by calling out “Bilibob”/”Bubba” of Beaverton, Oregon, the troll who decided he needed to use the comment space here to insult me by repeating accusations that were frankly answered long ago. The ignorance and sloth of others — who either don’t care what the truth is or else are too stupid to find it on their own — cannot compel me to explain once again what I have long ago explained to the satisfaction of anyone who ever really cared to know the truth. I can’t help what certain other people cut-and-paste on their web sites (that nobody even reads), but no one can bring that trash onto my site to insult me by imputing that I am hiding some secret “hate” from my friends and readers.

So “Bilibob”/”Bubba” of Beaverton, Oregon, with the IP 50.137.181.253, you go spread the word to all your “progressive” friends with whom you share political beliefs (and maybe some illegal porn files) that they need not waste time attempting to harm me. You’ll be lucky if your deliberate evil does not come bouncing back on you.

At least one young fool who thought he could destroy me is awaiting sentencing on federal charges next week. Karma is a bitch, baby.

Irreverent humor is considered "smart" when liberals mock morality and patriotism..Irreverently mocking liberalism? That's called "hate."

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) December 13, 2014

Category: Racism

Our Oppressed Elite

Posted on | December 13, 2014 | 32 Comments

Because I’m about 1,500 words into another long treatise about feminism that I know I can’t possibly finish tonight, I reckon I should give y’all a little something to laugh at in the meantime. Liberalism is a joke in search of punchline. We have rich white Harvard students protesting racist police brutality, and Ed Driscoll says it best:

I’d say we’ve definitely spotted the next leaders of Freedonia, but alas, these are the future leaders of us.

If you ever think liberals couldn’t possibly become more absurd, just wait. Somehow they always find a way to surprise you.

Category: Education, Liberals

God Bless Senator Mike Lee

Posted on | December 13, 2014 | 14 Comments

by Smitty

Half the battle is showing up. The other half is staying engaged:

. . .as rotten as the CROmnibus before us is, I want to state for the record that this week leaves me with nothing but optimism. Optimism about the prospect we have for real reform and revival in the coming years. The miserable process we’ve witnessed this week represents the last gasping throes of a discredited Washington status quo. 10 years ago, this bill would not have been controversial. 5 years ago, an easy majority would have been purchased with earmarks. This week, with the full weight of both party’s leaderships it barely made it over the finish line.

I hope that Boehnerdict Arnold hears these words, and understands the Mene, Mene, Teqel, Upharsin behind them.

Update: more positive thinking from Da Tech Guy.

via Breitbart

Category: Republicans

As UVA Rape Story Falls Apart, Feminists Try to Save ‘Rape Culture’ Narrative

Posted on | December 12, 2014 | 72 Comments

Reporting by the Washington Post and ABC News is steadily ripping to shreds the gang-rape story “Jackie” told Rolling Stone‘s Sabrina Rubin Erdely. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a good summary of how the story is unraveling. It seems clear that editors at Rolling Stone did not adequately vet the story and, as Eric Wemple says, “Erdely’s mission appears to have been to present as sensational and damaging an account of fraternity excesses as she could gather.”

Ah, but if the story is not true, this doesn’t mean that feminists are prepared to abandon their precious narrative about how college girls live under a regime of sexual terror caused by savage males who brutally impose their phallocratic supremacy on helpless victims. At Slate.com, Amanda Hess coins the phrase “rape truthers” to describe “social media misogynists” she uses in a straw-man argument:

There are people on the fringe who believe that any rape story with any discrepancies is evidence of a vast feminist conspiracy aimed at inventing rapes and vilifying innocent men, but these rape truthers are not reasonable people, nor are they most people, and it is unwise to mold the conversation around their fantasies. I am, however, concerned with how some feminists and progressives have responded to the ever-expanding holes in Rolling Stone’s story.
At this point, it is clear that Rolling Stone failed to meet its basic journalistic requirements many times over. There is also compelling evidence that Jackie herself fabricated all or parts of her story. Neither of these scenarios serves to dismantle the anti-rape movement. Journalists have messed up reporting on rape since they began reporting on rape. In addition, there have been false rape allegations in the past, and there will be false allegations in the future. Any successful anti-rape activist or movement must be willing to accept that false accusations are not a “myth” and grapple with how to handle them appropriately. Whatever really happened at UVA one Saturday night in 2012 cannot possibly undermine a social justice movement because any understanding of justice must accommodate the truth. . . .

You can read the rest, but notice what Hess has done here:

Imputed irrational paranoia to those of us “people on the fringe” who see evidence of “a vast feminist conspiracy” in the interminable campaign against “rape culture” that has, among other things, imposed a weird “affirmative consent” law on California campuses. To say that feminists engage in propaganda campaigns, and that they do this in an organized manner with the assistance of politicians and journalists, is merely to state a fact. Feminist rhetoric routinely vilifies innocent men, as the whole point of the “rape culture” meme is to say that any word or deed that offends feminists — from caustic sarcasm to “the male gaze” — makes men complicit in rape. And, as far as this Rolling Stone UVA story is concerned, whether or not a rape was fictionalized out of whole cloth, feminists did manage to turn an egregious example of biased agenda-driven “reporting” into a hysteria that caused the university to shut down fraternity life on campus. Like the old joke says, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
Accepted as valid the need for an “anti-rape movement” organized around the concept of “social justice,” which is exactly how we get episodes like this UVA fraternity witch-hunt.

Could somebody ask Amanda Hess to identify the pro-rape forces in society which necessitates this kind of anti-rape movement?

Pardon me if I sound like a “rape truther” in asking such a question, but rape has been a crime under Anglo-American common law since time immemorial, and this crime is punishable by very long prison terms. All law-abiding citizens support rigorous enforcement of our nation’s laws against rape, and so the question of how “social justice” requires an “anti-rape movement” ought to be asked.

Nobody is denying that rape happens, nor is anyone denying that college girls are sometimes the victims of these crimes. The problem is that the prevalence of rape on campus has been deliberately exaggerated by feminist ideologues who claim 1-out-5 college females will be sexually assaulted during their undergraduate careers.

Critics have repeatedly exposed the problem with this bogus statistic, yet it keeps being repeated as gospel, while feminists denounce as “rape apologists” anyone who points out the actual facts.

In a report this week, the Justice Department made clear that rape is less common on college campuses than elsewhere in society.

According to the report, the actual number of rapes of college-age females is 6.1 per 1,000, a drastically smaller number than 1-in-5. Meanwhile, non-college-attending females in the same 18-to-24 age group had about a 20% higher rate of rape (7.6 per 1,000).

To put it quite bluntly, there is zero evidence to support feminist claims of a “rape epidemic” on U.S. college campuses.

To put it even more bluntly, feminists are lying about rape.

Whether these feminist lies are evidence of a conspiracy, or merely a common habit among feminists, I’ll leave for my fellow misogynistic “rape truthers” to debate amongst themselves if they’re not too busy. Oppressing women is a full-time job, y’know.

BREAKING: Rape Hoax Girl #JackieCoakley: “You Should Be Very, Very Afraid of Me” http://t.co/H70M2VKNiE pic.twitter.com/aWteNBT32c

— Got News (@GotNewsDotCom) December 12, 2014

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism, Journalism, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

We Are So Doomed

Posted on | December 12, 2014 | 32 Comments

If you’re an optimist, you obviously don’t have young children, especially daughters. To be a parent in 2014 is to know for a certainty that the social fabric of our civilization is rapidly unraveling:

An 11-year-old girl from Arkansas gave her family the scare of their lives last week when she ran away from home after stealing $10,000 and jumped into a cab hoping to travel to Florida to meet a boy.
When Brent Waller discovered that his daughter Alexis was gone December 5, his first, terrifying thought was that she had been abducted. . . .
The 11-year-old girl had swiped $10,000 in cash from her grandmother’s sock drawer, crept out of the family’s Bryant, Arkansas, home in the middle of the night and hitched a ride with a stranger to a gas station in Little Rock.
Alexis then called a cab and asked the driver to drive her to Jacksonville, Florida, located about 830 miles away.
The girl said the taxi driver did not ask her any questions beyond her final destination and whether or not she had the $1,300 fare.
Alexis said she decided to make the long journey halfway across the country because she wanted to see a 16-year-old boy she met on vacation two years prior and had been talking to ever since.
The Florida teen said he knew nothing about Alexis’ plan. . . .

(Well of course he would say that, wouldn’t he?)

Police obtained phone records and were able to trace Alexis’ call to the Little Rock cab company, where officials said the girl wore heavy makeup and appeared to be 17 or 18, according to Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

(Parents: If your 11-year-old daughter is wearing heavy makeup, she’s planning to steal grandma’s money and run away.)

Before long, they reached the taxi driver the girl had hired, who told them they were driving in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia.
The 11-year-old’s parents immediately hit on the road, driving nine hours to pick her up.
In retrospect, Alexis Waller said she was glad her parents were able to track her down bring her home safe.
‘I knew I made a mistake after a while and I didn’t have a phone,’ Alexis told KARK-TV.

Isn’t that special? She steals $10,000 from grandma, calls a cab so she can run away to be with a teenage hoodlum she met on vacation two summers ago, but when she gets caught? “Mistake!”

She made a boo-boo, an oopsie. Just a lonely fifth-grade girl committing grand larceny to be with the 16-year-old boy she loves.

Doomed. We are completely doomed, I tell you . . .

For This Nightmare I Blame Al Gore, Who Invented the Internet http://t.co/h5viX7bmiS #tcot @instapundit

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) December 12, 2014

Category: Crime, Culture, Doomed Beyond All Hope of Redemption

Secret Wars And Silos

Posted on | December 12, 2014 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

I thought I’d already read David Drake’s What Distant Deeps, the eighth book in his Lieutenant Leary/RCN series, but I was wrong, and gladly so. Drake has become a master of filing the serial numbers off obscure historical events, repainting them, and turning them into decent adventure novels, and What Distant Deeps is another one of these. Leary and his crew (including Adele Mundy, Deadliest Librarian in the ‘Verse) are hired to carry the new Cinnabar commissioner to his post on a rather barbaric planet on the border with the Alliance, but as usual things go pear-shaped as it seems one of the Republic’s clients would like to reignite the recently-concluded war between Cinnabar and the Alliance. Skulduggery, mayhem and hilarity ensue.

Along the same lines, John Ringo and Julie Cochrane’s Sister Time is a wheels-within-wheels tale of assassination, theft, and inter-species trade war that brings “Iron Mike” O’Neal’s daughters Cally and Michelle together against a rogue human mentat who’s obtained what can only be described as a mind-raping device. Just to make things more interesting, the theft that begins the novel, where Cally snatches some extremely valuable code keys from a Darhel chief’s office, sets off an effort by the Tongs to badly screw a Darhel clan in the best way possible – costing them money and maybe, just possibly, a couple of clan chiefs. Probably the best of the three “middle” novels by Ringo & Cochrane dealing with the secret war between the O’Neal/Bane Sidhe and the Darhel, with the return of Mosovich and Mueller from the original Posleen War tetralogy as the cherry on the sundae.

I had high hopes for Hugh Howey’s Shift, which is the sequel to Wool but seems to be more of a backstory to the events in Wool. Maybe I’m just not in the mood for depressing stories right now, but this was reminding me entirely too much of an old novel by Howard Berk, The Sun Grows Cold, which tells the same sort of tale about the Apocalypse, and I just wasn’t feeling up to it.

On the other hand, Sam Schall’s Vengeance from Ashes is decent brain candy and worth checking out. I borrowed it from the Amazon Prime Lending Library and may be picking it up to keep next month when the loan expires; it’s that good. Basically, this is the tale of Marine Captain Ashlyn Shaw, framed along with her unit for war crimes and imprisoned in a brutal prison camp where abuse is the norm. A change in governments allows her friends and family to free her and her men, but can she trust them enough to help her find and impose justice on those who set her up to fall, even as a new war erupts on the frontier?

Thanks very much to everyone who bought stuff (not just books!) through my Amazon links these last couple of months; the commissions over the last couple of months have been really generous, and I can’t thank y’all enough. I really appreciate it. Remember that you have plenty of time to shop from the comfort of your home and get presents to your loved ones with Amazon Prime – ten more days with two-day shipping, and you can try it for thirty days for the amazing sum of NOTHING! Plus, free music, free streaming video, and the Amazon Prime lending library!
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Category: Books