Tasty.

Full poll data here.

Some points: His approval is 41%. Usually you don't get these numbers adding up to 100%, but here you do (59% + 41%). In addition, they say 1% are undecided.

Of the 59% who disapprove of Obama, 36% strongly disapprove.

On the other hand, his positive rating, such as it is, has fewer people strongly approving of him -- only 14%.

He's also underwater on personal favorability, 42% favorable, 51% unfavorable.

Another poll, the Morning Consult, which is a health care tracking poll, finds that undecided voters are slightly opposed to Obamacare... and when I say "slightly," I mean they oppose Obamacare more than they support it by a whopping 40% margin.

Among those who describe themselves as likely but undecided 2014 voters, Obamacare approval sits at a robust (25/65) ...

Overall, likely voters oppose Obamacare by 53 to 41.

It's a two-edged sword, though, this "40% underwater on Obamacare among the undecideds" stat.

If so many of them disapprove of Obamacare -- 65% disapprove, to only 25% approving -- what the hell makes them undecided as to which party they'll be voting for in November?

It's could that they disapprove of Obamacare but don't really care all that much about it, in the same way that your neighbor may disapprove of the way the zoning commission is treating you but he's also not going to lose sleep over it. It's not his problem. And a large chunk of the population may see Obamacare as a problem, but a problem, so far, affecting only other people -- people with employee health care plans may not have yet heard that Obamacare is gunning for them, too.

Of course that might be because Obama has delayed various parts of the law that affect those with employer-provided insurance, until after the elections, at least.

It could also be that people just don't like the GOP for other reasons.

Posted by: Ace at 01:27 PM | Comments (282)
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The old one was getting a bit musty.

Also, from the sidebar, this seems like a good punishment for Phil:

Punxsutawney Phil said 6 more weeks of winter.... I say Punxsutawney Phil is for dinner. pic.twitter.com/YDlFwWEURZ

— John Riggins (@riggo44) March 25, 2014

Posted by: Slublog at 11:37 AM | Comments (179)
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OUT: A healthy democracy requires a responsive government and a well-informed citizenry

IN: Go F*ck Yourself Peons

They claim that it will take too long to review and redact so many documents.

Apparently Republicans shot back that they should prioritize this, and assign more personnel to the task, if that's what it takes.

Democrats, meanwhile, chose to question the propriety of investigating alleged government harassment of citizens at all.

By Stephen Dinan, the Washington Times

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said Wednesday that he wonÂ’t be able to produce all of former employee Lois G. LernerÂ’s emails and those of other key employees by the end of this year, pushing it beyond this yearÂ’s congressional elections.

In a heated exchange over whether he and his tax agency employees are cooperating in CongressÂ’s investigations into tea party targeting, Mr. Koskinen said the amount of time it will take to look through and redact private information from the documents could last years.

...

Some Democrats objected to the congressional investigation in the first place, saying it has cost millions of dollars for the IRS to upgrade its computers and to designate staff to review and reply to records requests.

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (282)
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You guys know that I've been hard on Republicans in general and the House GOP in particular, from time to time. No, it's true.

But credit where it's due (hold on to that concept for a minute), they had a really clever graphic on Twitter today to mark the latest ObamaCare delay.

It was so clever a number of GOP members of Congress used it today in their twitter feeds.

As I said, credit where it's due, right?

Ok, here's where it's due.

Running out of room here... pic.twitter.com/f5HLESD8IB

— Slublog (@Slublog) March 26, 2014

Compare to the GOP's version (resized):

Hmmm, they look awful similar, no? Why, other than the font they are...exactly the same.

Now I'm not saying someone on the House GOP social media team just copied Slu's work and pretended it was their own. I'm just saying you'd have to be an idiot if you think anyone would believe you if you said it was just a coincidence that the House GOP social media folks had the same idea a few short hours after Slu's worked appeared.

Contrary to what some people seem to think, I'm not an idiot. Are you?

In the spirit of full disclosure, John Ekdahl tracked down the members who used the image (and it's not their fault) and that the source was the House GOP's Twitter feed.

Furthermore, Slu wanted me to make it clear the original idea for the image came from a group discussion and that he makes no claim to being the sole originator of the idea.

Related, Slu is a very nice guy who is far too modest.

We contacted the House GOP caucus asking for comment but they declined. The original tweet has been removed from their feed.

Hopefully we all can agree that that best way to handle these types of situations in the future is simple attribution.

Post Edited By Ace. I added a blow-up of the GOP's image, so people can see how similar it is to Slu's, and the sentence introducing that ("Compare...").

Posted by: DrewM at 10:15 AM | Comments (440)
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Eh, MSNBC chiefly exists to provide easy content to right-wing bloggers and Tommy Christopher.

Politico's Dylan Byers charts MSNBC's fall.

There are only so many ways to say MSNBC sucks. Let's try it in graph form.

Pictured (L to R): A black line, a red line, and a yellow line;
and another black line, another red line, and another yellow line

MSNBC suffered harder loses in 2013 -- in terms of both viewership and revenue -- than either of its competitors at Fox News and CNN, according to Nielsen data featured in a new Pew Research report. Primetime viewership declined by a staggering 24 percent (nearly twice the loss sustained by CNN and four-times that sustained by Fox News). Daytime viewership fell by 15 percent, even as it rose at both of the other networks.

On the revenue side, MSNBC was projected to decline by 2 percent, while both CNN and Fox News were projected to experience growth of 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively. MSNBC was expected to bring in $475 million in revenue: less than half what CNN will make and roughly one-quarter of what Fox News will make.

Politico's article is mostly taken from a Pew report on the State of the Media.

In bad news, network newscasts actually gained viewers, but at least NBC lost them:

In the evening, an average of 22.6 million viewers tuned into one of the three commercial broadcast news programs on ABC, CBS or NBC, a 2.3% increase over the average viewership for 2012, according to Pew Research analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. The ABC World News increased 2.2% to 7.7 million viewers on average and CBS Evening News increased 6.5% to 6.5 million viewers. NBC Nightly News, the ratings leader, was the only evening news program to decrease, dipping 0.7% to 8.4 million viewers on average.

Byers' blames MSNBC's woes on the relative decline of the only story the network cares about: Bush Bad, Obama Good (or perhaps, Obama God).

With Bush now out of office for over five years, and Obama's presidency looking like, at best, a "slog" (the media's term), and at worst, an unmitigated disaster (everyone else's term), they're trying to get by on Outrage Porn alone.

And Ronan Farrow. Who was a Rhodes Scholar, you know.

Posted by: Ace at 08:56 AM | Comments (427)
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This story is a year old, but I missed it last time. I don't know how I came across it now.

The bad news: As you can tell from the video below, this isn't even a prototype yet. All the pictures are mock-ups, and the video is CGI. The actual plane, the Terrafugia TF-X (the X stands for "Awesome"), is ten years away.

The good news: The company has made flyin' cars before, or, actually, "roadable aircraft," which are just planes that can drive on a highway. I don't really count these as a flyin' car, because, well, they look like planes even when they're on the ground. But the company is at least putting out product.

They've also got a contract from DARPA to make a "flying Humvee" so they can't be total morons.

Better news: the proposed vehicle, in the video below, is also a roadable aircraft, but it looks a bit more like a car to me, so I'm going to count it as an odd-looking and early-model genuine flyin' car.

Even better news: It's a VTOL so you can skip the trip to the airport. The ability to take off from anywhere -- not just an airstrip -- is really a must-have for me, as far as my own flyin' car checklist. If you have to drive to an airport (or have some other convenient airstrip to take off from and land on), then what's the point of having a roadable aircraft? You can just as easily park a car at the airport and then fly your plane.

It doesn't really seem to give the driver that freedom that a real flyin' car does -- the ability to literally just pull off the road and take off into the sky on a whim. Or to land wherever he likes (within reason) by his destination and drive the rest of the way there.

The TF-X, if it is ever made, will cost probably a half a million dollars, if not more.

A Bonus Is This Something? under the fold. more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:00 PM | Comments (245)
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I made up "Step 1," sort of. Though it's obvious that Obama prefers light engagements when it comes to war, drones and planes and missiles, rather than heavy ones with tanks and ships and soldiers and seamen.

Which makes it absolutely baffling that he's cutting Tomahawk purchases to 100 in 2015, and then canceling production entirely in 2016.

This will leave us with enough Tomahawks to get us through 2018... maybe. Assuming we don't have to use more of them than we were expecting.

President Barack Obama is seeking to abolish two highly successful missile programs that experts say have helped the U.S. Navy maintain military superiority for the past several decades.

The Tomahawk missile program—known as “the world’s most advanced cruise missile”—is set to be cut by $128 million under Obama’s fiscal year 2015 budget proposal and completely eliminated by fiscal year 2016, according to budget documents released by the Navy.

...

The Navy will also be forced to cancel its acquisition of the well-regarded and highly effective Hellfire missiles in 2015, according to ObamaÂ’s proposal.

...

Nearly 100 of these missiles are used each year on average, meaning that the sharp cuts will cause the Tomahawk stock to be completely depleted by around 2018. This is particularly concerning to defense experts because the Pentagon does not have a replacement missile ready to take the TomahawkÂ’s place.

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Seth Cropsey, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for American Seapower. “This really moves the U.S. away from a position of influence and military dominance.”

Cropsey said that if someone were trying to “reduce the U.S. ability to shape events” in the world, “they couldn’t find a better way than depriving the U.S. fleet of Tomahawks. It’s breathtaking.”

They're claiming they'll just put these funds into the development of the next-gen missile, the Long Range Anti-Ship Cruise Missile, but that is in development hell and isn't even planned to be ready for deployment until 2024. (And you know how schedules usually work out.)

This makes such little sense that I can only think -- or hope -- that Obama and possibly the Navy is playing a variation of Shutdown Theater here, canceling the thing that will grab your attention the most in order to alert you to all the cuts to the DoD's budget you might not notice.

As DrewM. has pointed out repeatedly, these sequester cuts are serious, and they will require genuine cuts, not merely "trims" or the like. Hard decisions will have to be made. (Like retiring an entire carrier fleet, and that's just for starters.)

But canceling the very weapons that President Dronestrike relies upon to carry the weight of warfighting as he cuts the rest of the military budget?

It seems so preposterous I can't believe it's all on the level.

Posted by: Ace at 07:35 AM | Comments (441)
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This is a major gaffe.

Sometimes things get hyped and blown out of proportion.

Well I don't think I'm overstating on this one. The headline really isn't juiced. The Democrats' candidate for Iowa Senate really says that he's one of You -- and he says this to a room full of trial lawyers, noting he's been "literally" fighting tort reform for 30 years.

He then disparages Chuck Grassley -- who would be the Senate Judiciary Chairman, were Republicans to take the Senate -- for having two fatal flaws:

1, "he never went to law school."

2, he's some "farmer from Iowa."

Note he's not content to just say Grassley is a farmer. (Though it's strange enough that he would disparage that occupation in Iowa, a state with a lot of farmers.)

He calls him a "farmer from Iowa," as if that last little fillip makes it all the worse.

Did I mention he's campaigning to be the Senator from Iowa?

Why this little dig at Iowa? Well, he was speaking to would-be donors from out of state. Specifically, Texas. So when he meets the trial lawyers from Texas, he has all sorts of dire warnings about "farmers from Iowa."

Not sophisticated, you know. They don't have the same "background," "experience," and "voice" that Braley and all his swell Texas Trial Lawyers do.

But now that his statement has been publicized, he wants you to know, he has the utmost respect for those corncob-smokin', cousin-pokin', chicken-chokin' inbred moronic Iowa farm-tards.

“I apologize to Senator Grassley and anyone I may have offended," he said. "I respect Senator Grassley and enjoy our working relationship, even though we disagree on some issues.

....

“My parents both grew up on Iowa farms during the Great Depression," Braley said. "It deeply influenced who they are and who I am, and gave me a profound appreciation for what farmers do for the world. One of my grandfathers was a charter member of the Iowa Farm Bureau. I grew up in rural Iowa, doing farm jobs and working a grain elevator.

"I have tremendous respect for Iowa farmers and appreciate how important they are to our state, and IÂ’m grateful to have the support of hundreds of farmers across Iowa," he continued.

Yes, he's happy these degenerate cornfolk, these dirty drooling Cob People, have found themselves a gainful trade that doesn't tax their limited capacity for higher thinking.

"IÂ’m grateful to have the support of hundreds of farmers across Iowa..."

Yup, hundreds sounds about right. Though that number may fall.

lolwut?

more...

Posted by: Ace at 06:41 AM | Comments (389)
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Happy Wednesday.

BuzzFeed's Chris Geidner reviews the Hobby Lobby argument at SCOTUS. The transcript for that is here, btw (PDF). And Sen. Mike Lee makes predictions on the Hugh Hewitt show, which is being guest hosted by Townhall's Guy Benson this week.

Internet millionaire and pirate Kim Dotcom bought a rare autographed version of Mein Kampf, says it's because he loves the Call of Duty games.

Here's the confession from Boston Bomber pal Ibragim Todashev. Well, at least the portion he got to before allegedly attacking an FBI agent who then shot him dead.

[RSS]

[On iTunes]

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:13 AM | Comments (229)
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I warned you that you'd get nothing but did you believe me...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:31 PM | Comments (823)
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