October 11, 2010
— Ace On a local TV station.
No, this isn't the radio interview at Hot Air. That's here.
The more interesting, red-meaty clip there is the second, where Barney Frank insists that the Tea Party does not want to compromise. Why, I never heard something so absurd! Okay, so maybe it's true, but fuck you anyway Barney.
Oh, and read Dick Morris, who is becoming even more forward leaning in his predictions.
If I'm reading between the lines right he's kinda-sorta predicting 72/11 which strangely enough is my prediction (and like me he's calling that his lowball, conservative, not-crazy-sounding prediction, but maybe it's not his real prediction, either, wink-wink).
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06:13 PM
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— Maetenloch Today's Army: Smart, Middle Class, and Southern
It's long been a well known fact among the media and political elites that the military is made up of the dregs - poor, dumb minorities who were forced to join up and fight only because of the poor state of the economy. Except none of this is actually true.
A recent study of recent Army recruits by the National Priorities Project found the racial makeup of recruits reflects the nation as a whole and they are smarter and better educated than their peers. And they're not poor - the middle class is in fact over-represented while the wealthy and poor (top and bottom 20% income brackets) are under-represented. Furthermore the study found that the quality of recruits did not vary much with the unemployment rate which undercuts the idea that it's economic desperation that drives people to sign up.
They note that the South continues to generate relatively more recruits than other regions. Nationally the US recruitment rate is 1.47 active-duty recruits per 1000 youth and here is the breakdown by region:
Now the NPP is a lefty group but given that the results of their study go against the usual liberal biases and conceits, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt in this case. You can read the full report here.
So that's where Army recruits are coming from - but where do they end up?
Well here's a map showing the most military states based on the number of active military personnel per 10,000 people:
And on the whole members of the military tend to be stationed predominantly in the South and West although Alaska comes out on top due to its relatively small non-Palin population. more...
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05:42 PM
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— Dave in Texas Allen West ad on the occasion of Obama's visit to FL to raise money for Ron Klein.
"You and Ron Klein should leave that high-roller closed door fundraiser and drive by our shuttered businesses and foreclosed homes. I'll go anywhere you wish to debate your failed big government failed. Heck, I'll even debate you and Klein together if that's what it takes."
Nice dig. Funny thing about infantry artillery officers. They don't scare easily, and aren't easily impressed.
RCP shows FL-22 as a toss-up. This is one we could and should push over to our side, with some cash and some organization.
Updated, commenter Ironsides pointed out he's a graduate of the Field Artillery School at Sill. His last command while deployed was Bravo Battery, 6th Field Artillery Regiment. Also served as Battalion Task Force fire support officer for 2d Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment.
So he knows how to rain hot steel on your nary ass too.
Update to the Update: commenter NM Hick (game over man!) adds a link to his contributions page.
I swear, I used to know how to do this whole political blogging thing.
Sorta.
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04:57 PM
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— Ace Amazing stuff, and the Jawas beat the MSM, of course. (But that's not saying too much: The MSM is glad to be scooped on anything "icky" like this.)
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03:47 PM
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— Ace On the "dysfunctional homosexual" line: He didn't actually say it. This is known fact. It was in his prepared remarks, and Newsday erroneously reported he said it. He didn't. When he got to that part, he just skipped over it.
So where did the line come from? Well, apparently the remarks were prepared by the conservative Rabbi whose congregation he was speaking to:
I reported earlier that Paladino campaign manager Michael Caputo said the remarks were prepared by hosts who'd invited the candidate to Orthodox Jewish areas of Brooklyn, and Rabbi Yehuda Levin, who was helping him navigate the area, backed that up to the Jewish Week's Adam Dickter. Levin is a conservative figure in the community who's strongly anti-gay rights and anti-abortion.However, there were other lines in the speech - saying Andrew Cuomo set the wrong example by marching in the gay pride parade, where the focus is not solely marriage equality, and saying kids shouldn't be "brainwashed" into thinking a gay lifestyle is "valid" and "equally successful" - that were criticized. Dickter's headline referred to the speech broadly as "anti-gay."
Yeah, well, I don't think any of those latter lines are bad at all. The gay community has to understand that, contra their desires, they will not likely be wholeheartedly embraced by traditionalists, and should stop insisting that that be the goal or the bar for "tolerance." Unless they gay community thinks that 70% of the country is "anti-gay" (and a lot of the gay community does think that, of course), this goal has to be considered perhaps one to shoot for one day, but it can't be made the standard for determining who's "anti-gay" or not.
So, does this explanation get Paladino off the hook? Answer: Yes. I don't get this whole business of delegating campaign communications to outside parties he hopes to court -- and I hope he abandons this bizarre experiment with outsourcing forthwith -- but assuming he's telling the truth, and it does appear confirmed he is, then he had nothing to do with this statement, except hold a piece of paper containing it in his hand.
Which is the same level of culpability of the newspaper reporters who seized on the unstated statement.
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03:40 PM
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— Ace No, not in the sense that he's interested in the Birth Certificate conspiracy. But rather to ask, if Obama's people want to go on a fishing expedition with the Chamber of Commerce and "disclose everything," where is the leadership from the top on this?
He starts asking about the birth certificate in the last two questions, but the whole interview with Axelrod is worth reading.
John McCormack from the WS sniped on Twitter: "David Axerold just demanded that the Chamber of Commerce produce its long-form birth certificate."
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03:07 PM
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— DrewM Alternate headline, Harry Reid is a sub-moronic ass.
Asked to name "a greatest living American" most of us would name a person who is objectively "living" and an "American", the greatness being a bit more open to interpretation. Harry on the other hand goes with two guys who are dead...Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd.
Call me crazy but I don't think a guy who got liquored up and killed a woman or a man who rose up the ranks of the Klu Klux Klan should be on anyone's list of "greatest American", living or dead.
Just remember though...Sharron Angle is an idiot who can't be let near the Senate. And according the Mensa member Harry Reid, Clarence Thomas is "an embarrassment to the Supreme Court".
FTR-I'm not sure who the greatest living American actually is but I'm willing to bet you have to go pretty far down the list before you come to a career politician. I'm positive this guy and his compatriots come way before just about anyone in the US Senate.
As always...SluShop courtesy of The Man, The Myth, The Legend.
Bonus fun...Reid aide may have used insider information to profit from legislation before the Senate.
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12:46 PM
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— Ace It seems far less of an all-electric drivetrain vehicle than claimed.
It also doesn't seem to post anything like the mileage and range claimed.
First of all, let's talk about fuel economy. In August of last year, we heard GM's then-CEO Fritz Henderson claimed with all the marketing might it could muster at a Detroit-area press event, that the Chevy Volt would get 230 MPG in city driving conditions. Now, as the Volt's being tested by the auto trade press, we're seeing some surprisingly low fuel economy figures amid the expected lavish praise buff books are heaping upon the Volt.Let's see what they've found out. Popular Mechanics saw just 37.5 MPG in city driving. Car and Driver apparently didn't choose to use their wheel time for any city driving — but found with all-electric driving:
"...getting on the nearest highway and commuting with the 80-mph flow of traffic-basically the worst-case scenario-yielded 26 miles; a fairly spirited back-road loop netted 31; and a carefully modulated cruise below 60 mph pushed the figure into the upper 30s."
Motor Trend, like the rest of the trade press other than Popular Mechanics, didn't appear to do any testing in city conditions, but did find that:
"Without any plugging in, [a weeklong trip to Grandma's house] should return fuel economy in the high 30s to low 40s."
They also parrot GM's new line of 25-50 miles of all-electric — a far cry from the 230 MPG they originally marketed — that the "Volt provides 25-50 miles of real-world electric operation no matter how hard you flog it."
But while even providing only 10% of the fuel economy initially touted, these more real-world figures are merely an exaggeration. The bigger problem is that, as Mr. Oldham now claims, is that GM lied to them about the powertrain.
The part about the powertrain is a sorta inside-car-baseball question of whether the car runs on all-electric, and only uses the gas engine to recharge the battery, or whether the gas engine runs to drive the wheels, which would make the Volt a bit like most other hybrids, and not really some new thing at all.
It appears the gas engine does run whenever the car approaches 70mph.
Which is good news and bad news for me. The bad news is that the vehicle does not use only its batteries, as promised, when approaching these speeds.
The good news is that I'm surprised it can approach these speeds.
Anyway, it looks like the finest auto engineers available in the White House Strategic Communications Office have produced precisely the sort of politically-engineered vehicle you would have expected.
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10:32 AM
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— DrewM Riot enough and the brave members of the media will get the message...a robust press and open debate are incompatible with Islam and/or your safety.
Last week's "Non Sequitur" cartoon featured a Where's Waldo? like book cover entitled "Picture Book Title Least Likely to Ever Find a Publisher...Where's Muhammad?" The catch...unlike the Waldo books, there's no image of Muhammad.
The mere mention of the name Muhammad was apparently enough to set alarm bells ringing in the executive suites of the Washington Post. Eventually decision was made to spike the cartoon.
Still, Style editor Ned Martel said he decided to yank it, after conferring with others, including Executive Editor Marcus W. Brauchli, because "it seemed a deliberate provocation without a clear message." He added that "the point of the joke was not immediately clear" and that readers might think that Muhammad was somewhere in the drawing.
The cartoon was "without a clear message"? The fact that the Post and other papers spiked it without even waiting for protests from Muslims is the message.
In fact CAIR, a group with exquisite sensibilities when it comes to offending Muslims doesn't seem to be bothered by it.
"The reference [to Muhammad] in this case was so vague that I don't even know if offense comes into it," said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based group that combats stereotyping of Islam and Muslims.
Of course this is exactly the point rampaging Muslims around the world and their supposed 'moderate' shills want us to get to...self censorship before we come anywhere near offending them.
Here's my modest proposal...there was talk at one point at creating a NATO medal for Courageous Restraint" for troops that didn't shoot. I propose there be a new Pulitzer Prize for Courageous Restraint, It will be awarded to papers and editors who preemptively surrender to Muslims. If they publish something and apologize after protest, they will not be eligible for the award, only acts of pro-active cowardice like this will be recognized. My guess is competition among MFM outlets for this prize will be fierce.
Congratulations to the Washington Post on their judgment, perhaps they will be killed last.
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09:51 AM
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— Ace
We plan on taking America Back from the fringe. The Tea Party Republican right will destroy everything Obama has Occomplished if we don't fight back. We will discuss strategies for getting out the vote and how we can use the Prime Party for America's website for connecting with friends and family. Please visit and sign up for a free account at www.primeparty.org and join us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/primeparty
This isn't an official thing or anything. But it's still absurd.
Obama has occomplished 10.1% onemployment with something like 18% of the population discouraged from seeking oployment or else onderemployed.
His partisanship has been ogregious.
His stimulus has left the country of Greek-style fiscal opocalypse.
And the public is about to deliver a repudiating ovaluation of his odministration.
So yes, by all means, let us celebrate his occomplishments. Whichever they might to turn out be.
Thanks to BillY.
Posted by: Ace at
09:19 AM
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