I finally got around to listening to a Ricochet podcast, which I’ve been seeing recommended around the webs for a month or so. Episode 5, recorded on Friday 02/26, features Rob Long, Peter Robinson, Mark Steyn, and Andrew Breitbart. They discuss – among other things – last week’s health summit, and humorless institutionalized leftism.

Ricochet’s a great listen if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s the perfect accompaniment to a game of Filler 2 on Kongregate.com! Or to a commute, if you have one of those Empee-three Players and a car that knows how to talk to it…

The New York Times confirms that, after President Obama’s Thursday Theater proved a helpful showcase for ideas Republicans have been touting since last summer, Nancy Pelosi is readying spoonfuls of sugar:

Seeing no prospect of a bipartisan agreement on health care, Congressional Democrats said Friday that they would make another effort to pass sweeping health care legislation on their own.

The Grand Old “Party of No” came prepared to a production that Obama’s people thought would make the same idiotic scam look less idiotic (or at least new), but don’t expect the left to retreat from their weak rhetorical position! It’s interesting that the Republican ideas which burst from the ether yesterday have already been deemed incompatible with the Pelosi & Reid definition of bipartisanship. Almost… almost as if the outcome was predetermined.

Throughout 2009 voters grew increasingly disgusted by the dishonest accounting and shameless favoritism Republicans criticized in the House and Senate bills… and Democrats, naturally, blamed the Republicans. Since Boehner et al didn’t have union-boss level access to the legislative process, the only way to do this was by drawing attention away from the awful legislation and towards the angry old white guys fighting Progress^TM.

Then Scott Brown took their seat in Massachusetts, and the leftists in control of Congress were suddenly not so in control. It was time for Obama to dust off a few old saws about bipartisanship, repeat them each a thousand times, and schedule a TV appearance wherein his rapier wit would disarm Republican opposition. That sounded like a good idea to someone, I guess?

Since that didn’t buy them any credibility, it’s RAMMIN’ TIME!

Ms. Pelosi described the steps she had in mind, saying: “What is the substance? That’s what we will be putting together, and we didn’t want to do that before we could hear from our Republican colleagues yesterday. Secondly, what is the Senate able to do with a simple majority? And then we will act upon that.

“I believe that we have good prospects for passing legislation,” said Ms. Pelosi, of California.

I believe you have got to lay off the recreational drugs, Nancy. With all the sugar in the world, it’d take far smoother operators than yourself and Harry Reid to make this medicine go down.

Yesterday’s Washington Times has a story from Mark Steyn about the increasing ridiculousness of government regulations, contrasted with America’s refusal to do anything about the threat from Iran:

It is certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s. It is far worse than Pakistan going nuclear, which, after all, was just another thing the CIA failed to see coming. In this case, the slow-motion nuclearization conducted in full view and through years of tortuous diplomatic charades and endlessly rescheduled looming deadlines is not just a victory for Iran but a decisive defeat for the United States. It confirms the Islamo-Sino-Russo-everybody-else diagnosis of Washington as a hollow superpower that no longer has the will or sense of purpose to enforce the global order.

Sure, there are people who insist the Iranian mullahs are saving their oil for later in order to focus a huge portion of their crappy economy on nuclear power. This is based, apparently, on little other than the cute way Iran follows every insane Ahmadinejad rant about nuclear enrichment with a speech by some diplomat about their peaceful intentions.

Oh, right, like the guy in a $4,00-dollar suit is gonna nuke anyone. COME ON!

So long as there are a few isolationist libertarians and pantywaist liberals insisting Iran’s just trying to keep up with the Joneses and not trying to incinerate the Joneses, Obama and the State Department seem content to mix the occasional harsh word in with their flowery diplomatic rhetoric. That would be totally fine, if dictatorships always meant the peaceful things they said and were only kidding about the violent stuff.

But when you’ve authorized successful mob hits on Salman Rushdie’s publishers and translators, when you’ve blown up Jewish community centers in Buenos Aires, when you’ve acted extraterritorially to the full extent of your abilities for 30 years, it seems prudent for the rest of us to assume that when your abilities go nuclear, you’ll be acting to an even fuller extent.

Read the full Steyn article, and remember that President Obama is busy trying to resurrect a leftist health insurance plan that a majority of Americans don’t want and zero Americans can afford. Foreign policy? He’s already not George W. Bush; what do you people want?!

Chuck Season Three, Episode 7 was incredibly stupid. It’s as if the writers made a list of all the creative things they could do, then lit them on fire and laughed as they re-hashed episodes from the first two seasons.

As I’ve mentioned, the writers could have easily taken the Chuck & Sarah relationship in a new direction with the start of season 3. Chuck gets super powers – as if he’s a new man! Alas, none of those powers provides for a spine, so when Sarah tells him everything he’s ever wanted to hear… he responds by being a total flake. Then, instead of patiently regaining her trust like someone over the age of 13, he gives up and starts making out with the next babe who comes along.

I’ll quote my roommate again, because the lame-ness of the new Chuck episodes annoys us both. He pointed out at the start of the season that Joss Whedon provided a perfect template for what Chuck & Sarah should be: Zoe and Wash from Firefly. Awesome, happy couple. Is that so difficult? If you’re a good writer with interesting things to say, there’s no need for an endless cycle of high school drama between every single male/female pairing on the show.

Or you could be like Chuck‘s writers this season, and liberally mix celebrity cameos into a perpetual mass of stupid love triangles. Maybe I’m underestimating them! Maybe the producers decided it would be better if viewers hated the main character.

Oh well; the end of Dollhouse was great, and Community continues to be hilarious!

Were you curious as to whether Ticketmaster is still an awful company? They are!

Tickets at Nationwide Arena are available exclusively through Ticketmaster. That should make it super easy to find tickets, and maybe even translate into reduced service charges for Nationwide events. It doesn’t.

For one, locating seats and figuring out what they’ll cost takes an elaborate hokey-pokey of clicking through calendars and lists. Is the game you’re interested in linked on the Jackets’ home page? I hope you didn’t expect that shiny red “Tickets” button to take you straight to a purchasing page for that game. No, it’s going to drop you on a screen listing all the games, with a separate link for each package deal. If you found a game next month on the Jackets’ site, you’ll have to find it again on Ticketmaster.com before you can search for tickets. If you want to compare prices for a package versus a block of individual seats, you’re going to click roughly 900 times.

And don’t forget! Ticketmaster’s website is so mind-bogglingly handy, they’re going to tack on a convenience charge – but only after you’ve completed the Seat Search Kabuki. Were you buying package seats because of their reasonable advertised price? Sorry, sucker!

When last I complained about the stupid fees Ticketmaster adds to the price of every ticket, it was $4 per ticket to order online. The “convenience” charge has since gone up 50% …in less than a year. Great way to keep people attending events during an economic slump! Charging nearly $200 for $150 worth of tickets is a perfect strategy for getting butts in seats.

The Jackets remain desperate for ticket sales, churning out new package deals – the “Ticket and Meal Deal,” “Guys Night Out,” various promotions around Christmas and New Year’s Eve – while the team stumbles and the organization tries to shake down the taxpayers. Would it make a huge difference if the cheapest tickets weren’t loaded up with a 24% convenience charge? Probably not… but it’d make me less annoyed, and it seems fair to guess I’m not the only one.