Say it with me ... UNEXPECTEDLY!

[CBO cited] new estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cause a larger than-expected reduction in working hours - eliminating the equivalent of about 2.3 million workers in 2021 versus a previous estimate of an 800,000 decline.

If only someone could've cut through this manure beforehand, but we had to pass the law to find out what was in it. Or so I'm told. more...

Posted by: andy at 06:43 AM | Comments (415)
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Happy Tuesday.

Surprise, surprise: the Arab Spring, relying as it did on radical Islam, expanded the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.

Glee: Democratic operatives are pissed at DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for admitting that Dems aren't going to take back the House.

Silly: Rush Limbaugh added his voice to those who didn't like the Coca-Cola ad. "I said, 'Whoa, who got hold of this advertising campaign? The Republican leadershipÂ’s gotta be doing this.'"

Stupid: Obama says that Fox News is "absolutely" being unfair to him for asking about Obamacare failures, Benghazi, and the IRS scandal. Absolutely.

Neat: Endgadget, citing a Korean source, reports that South Korea is using Microsoft's Kinect sensor to help guard the DMZ.

Don't forget to grab last week's podcast with Townhall political editor and Fox News contributor Guy Benson. And send your Ask the Blog questions.

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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (253)
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UTA Flight 772: The Most Beautiful And Least Accessible Memorial On The Planet

UTA Flight 772 was a scheduled flight operating from Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo to Paris CDG airport in France.

On Tuesday, September 19th, 1989 the aircraft exploded over Niger in the Tenere region of the Sahara Desert. French investigators determined a suitcase bomb planted by Libyan terrorists to be the cause. All 170 people on board died.

And 18 years later in 2007 families of the victims gathered at the remote desert crash site in Niger and built a memorial by hand.

The site can be seen on Google Maps here.

And if you weren't already convinced that Gaddafi was a monster, you might want to read some of the details of his national system of rape dungeons.

Slate: In Atlanta Even the Snow is Racist

Because the city's voters rejected a light rail system, like to live in the suburbs, and vote Republican. Therefore racist snowpocalypse. QED

Oh and apparently there are Snow Truthers out there who believe the snowpocalypse was caused by fake snow. Made by the government of course.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:45 PM | Comments (603)
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Via john ëkdahl.

Posted by: Ace at 05:39 PM | Comments (69)
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• Part Of The Obamacare Software Was Written By Developers In Belarus
  
• Michelle Obama's 500 Million Anti-Obesity Effort Accomplishes Nothing
  
• Massachusetts Considers Denying Constitutional Rights To Innocent Arrestees
  
• Woman Who Can't Afford Her Own Birth Control Scrapes Up Money For Congressional Run
  
• Are Immigration Reformers Talking Down Chances So Opponents Will Drop Their Guard?
  
• America Headed Back To The Moon
  
• ABC Plants Guns Among Toys And Candy, Shocked That Kids Touch Them
  
• The GOP's Immigration Delusion
  
• Ukrainian President Returns From Sick Leave
  
• Is Heroin Use Soaring?
  
• Will Piers Morgan Apologize For Spreading A Racist Hoax
  
• Billionaires Start Lining Up Behind Hillary Clinton
  
• Moron AmishDude Named Checked By Rush Limbaugh
  
• Mitch McConnell Could Lose His Primary
  
• Salon Defends Communism
  

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:08 AM | Comments (307)
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This relates in a way to the post Ace put up just below.

A fellow co-blogger wondered why the GOP House doesn't have someone like the UKIP's Nigel Farage in its ranks, a fearless firebrand who'll denounce the Democrat agenda in ringing tones.

You can thank the two-party system for some of that. Farage can be a firebreather because he's operating in a parliamentary system and only has to represent the UKIP, which has a fairly narrow and well-defined platform. The GOP and the Democratic party don't have that luxury -- they have to represent broad swathes of voters, many of whose points of view not only differ but are in fact sometimes in direct opposition. Even in "conservative" districts, a Representative is bound to some extent by his Party. The Tea Party is about as fractious as the GOP gets, and we've all seen how the rest of the GOP likes those people.

The Democrats benefit more from this kind of situation than the GOP does, for the simple reason that the Democrat platform has always depended on buying votes with broad-brush populism (the "party of the poor", the "party of the common man", all that rot). Democrats are perfectly comfortable using coalition-building to govern because they really have no core, animating philosophy. The latter-20th century Democrat party was explicitly tied to Marxism (whether they admit it or not), but when the USSR imploded Marxism took on a bad odor and the Democrats had to cast about for something else, and that something else turned out to be "gender/class/race" and "social justice". It's the same old wine in a new bottle, really, but it helps that most Democrats don't even believe their own bullshit for the most part. They are a coalition of interest groups, and always have been. Their power lies in giving each interest group a big-enough slice of the pie to keep them from bolting: women, minorities, unions, eco-nuts, "intellectuals", etc.

Republicans have always had a tougher sell. The party was born simply as an oppositional force: the Not-Democrats. The GOP was created because the Whigs failed, and the two-party system needed two parties. The GOP's "animating philosophy", to the extent that it even has one, has changed several times over the decades. During the Cvil War, it was maintaining the Union and preventing the secession of the South (The GOP was born as a big-central-government, anti-Federalist party. How's that for irony?) Then it became the party of plutocrats and robber barons during the Gilded Age. Then Calvin Coolidge made the GOP what it still is in some respects: a pro-defense, pro-business, low-tax, minimal-federal-bureaucracy party (at least in theory). But the GOP has never really learned how to govern by coalition, not even during the Reagan years. The Tea Party focus on federalism, small government, and government restraint is actually a fairly new development in GOP thinking. Ronald Reagan shared this vision to some extent, but it's never been widely held by the Party as a whole.

Then there's the fact that "collegiality" trumps principle in Washington, D.C. Most Congresscritters dream of being Senators or Governors some day, and you don't move up the ladder (or raise campaign funds) by pissing people off.

Posted by: Monty at 04:05 PM | Comments (174)
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Via @rdbrewer4, an interesting post by Jonah Goldberg, using a review of a history of liberalism as a jumping off point for various thoughts.

A new book claims that liberalism was born out of the wreckage of progressivism. Progressivism championed the ever-growing power of the state, to do Mighty Things in Many Ways. However, the book argues, progressives themselves became disillusioned with their former advocacy of the Super State due to World War I -- and the truly authoritarian measures beloved progressive Woodrow Wilson used to jail dissidents. Some of whom were truly dangerous and ought to have been jailed, but others of whom were just dissidents.

And so, the book claims, liberalism adopted a strain of "radical libertarianism" as regards personal rights, especially those involving speech and sex, as a tonic, or talisman, to prevent the resurgence of Woodrow Wilson World War I progressivism.

Goldberg calls the alternate historical reading "interesting," but he's not convinced. He's especially not convinced that liberalism contained any strain of libertarianism at all -- he argues it was really a non-libertarian (that is, authoritarian) urge to impose a competing set of values, not to protect all possible values.

As I said: Interesting.

Another interesting thing is that the left tends to shy away the label "liberal" now, but has embraced the label "progressive" -- even though progressivism was previously discredited due to its authoritarianism and grandiosity and incompetency and innate disrespect for the individual human being outside of his corporate capacity as a cell of the state.

Posted by: Ace at 03:05 PM | Comments (138)
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This was a real ad -- real! -- that ran during the Super Bowl, in the local Savannah market.

He used to be a criminal defense attorney. But as Jamie Casino is going to tell you, after the death of his brother, he is now out for justice.

And he defines "justice" as "personal injury litigation."

You will literally not believe.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (265)
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A video about a talented goldsmith and jeweler specializing in bespoke jewelry.

What's bespoke? I got this; I just looked it up last week. It means "spoken for" as in "per a specific client's request." Bespoke clothing is tailor-made per client request, as opposed to off-the-rack clothes.

As you will see in the video, she has no hands.

She says people wonder how she can make jewelry without fingers. She says she doesn't understand how people can make jewelry with fingers -- "They must get in the way," she says.

Posted by: Ace at 11:58 AM | Comments (203)
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Senators briefed by Secretary of State John Kerry say his private remarks are at odds with the administration's public statements about the status of the US' policy on Syria.

The most surprising thing about this is we apparently have a policy on Syria. That whatever it is isn't working is not a surprise.

“[Kerry] acknowledged that the chemical weapons [plan] is being slow rolled, the Russians continue to supply arms, we are at a point now where we are going to have to change our strategy,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, who attended Kerry's briefing with lawmakers on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference. “He openly talked about supporting arming the rebels. He openly talked about forming a coalition against al Qaeda because it’s a direct threat.”

KerryÂ’s private remarks were a stark departure from the public message he and other top Obama administration officials repeatedly have given in public. Shortly after the meeting ended, Sens. Graham and John McCain described the meeting to The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, and Bloomberg View. Given newly-released intelligence on the growing al Qaeda presence in Syria, as well as shocking new evidence of Syrian human rights atrocities, the senators said they agreed with Kerry that the time had come for the United States to drastically alter its approach to the Syrian civil war.

Let's be honest, the US lost any leverage it might have had when it failed to follow through on retaliatory attacks against the Assad regime following the use of chemical weapons.

And you know what? That's ok.

Had the US attacked Syria last summer we wouldn't have leverage as much as a giant mess that would have involved either attacking and not removing Assad or the attacks would have been the start of an ever more robust effort to remove Assad.

Either way, it would have been a bigger mess only with US finger prints all over it.

Yes, the humanitarian toll of the Syrian civil war is immense. The toll of every war is beyond what people should have to endure. The fact is, some wars have to be fought to the bitter end. The question before us is should the US be involved in that fighting? To me, the answer is clearly no. We should do whatever we cant to help Assad and al Qaeda groups continue to bleed each other dry. Then you can call me when they are both dead or too exhausted to continue. Once that's been accomplished we can talk about helping the Syrian people get back on their feet. Until that time, it's their fight to win or lose.

Posted by: DrewM at 01:40 PM | Comments (310)
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