Pretty much the same sketch as the first time, and therefore not nearly as funny or surprising, but still okay.

Contains a mention of Glen Beck and his gold advocacy, and not in a negative way. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:31 AM | Comments (67)
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Read it if you want. It's more of the same.

I just want to call out this Obama-propaganda lie:

If Republicans reject Obama-style fiscal stimulus, what do they advocate instead? A monetarist might recommend more money creation, even at the risk of inflation: “quantitative easing,” as it’s called. Yet leading voices in the Republican Party have convinced themselves that the country is on the verge of hyperinflation — a Weimar moment, says Glenn Beck. But if fiscal stimulus leads to socialism, and quantitative easing leads to Nazism, what on earth are we supposed to do? Cut the budget? But we won’t do that either! On Sean Hannity’s radio show, the Republican House leader John Boehner announced just before the election that one of his first priorities would be the repeal of the Obama Medicare cuts.

No one who claims this is anything but a liberal apologist for Obama. It's a lie, it was a lie the first time it was claimed, it has been exposed as a lie too many times since then to plausibly be anything except a deliberate lie on behalf of Obama, and to undermine conservatives.

Obama "cut" Medicare -- if we credit his future cuts as ever likely to actually happen. Which, based upon previous supposed cuts to Medicare which would take place in the future, we shouldn't -- see the "Doc Fix." Planned future cuts to Medicare's reimbursement of doctors (now past planned cuts to Medicare) have been "delayed" for ten years running now, and will likely be delayed forever.

But more importantly, Frum is suggesting that Obama made actual cuts to the budget which the Republicans would undo. That's simply not true-- Obama may have "cut" $500 billion from Medicare, but only to impound that money for purposes of funding his exciting new government social welfare program, ObamaCare.

This is not a "cut" in the budget. It's simply a redistribution of wealth.

Frum deliberately lies to readers, suggesting that Obama has made an important, prudent, budget-hawk type cut, when in fact all he did was take money which was to pay for seniors' health care and dedicate it to paying for non-seniors' health care. One could argue, if one believed in it, that that is a defensible re-ordering of priorities -- but what one may not argue under any circumstances, except the desire to willfully lie, is that this constitutes an actual "cut."

And yet Frum is crediting him for just that, and claiming that a Republican repeal of this measure would harm the budget. It would not. It would have zero effect on the overall budget -- it would simply be moving $500 billion from being spent in one category to being spent in another category.

David Frum can have all the emotional hissy-fits he likes, but I personally draw the line at outright lies.

Posted by: Ace at 06:32 AM | Comments (99)
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Can you hear the goosestepping too?

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) warned Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) of "disloyalty" to President Obama if she should seek to distance herself from the White House in her re-election campaign.

Cleaver, who's seen as the likely next leader of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), cautioned the centrist senator of distancing herself from Obama, the way many endangered incumbents had done in the closing weeks of the 2012* election.

“Any attempt to extricate herself from him will be an act of disloyalty,” Cleaver told McClatchy in a piece profiling McCaskill's re-election campaign. “She will not do that at all.”

"She will not do that at all...or else", is how I read that final observation. Yes, 2012 campaign season is in full swing before we even know the final results of the 2010 election.

The Democrats, as a party, had no good response to individual Democrat candidates who decided to run against unpopular President Obama. Clearly, they're hoping to avoid that particular dilemma in 2012.

*I assume this is a typo and the writer meant "2010 election." Otherwise, I'd hope he'd just tell us the outcome in 2012 and save us the trouble.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:50 AM | Comments (58)
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Someone in the book thread last week (can't remember who, sorry) suggested that I do a "true crime" thread this week. Unfortunately, I haven't read many true-crime books. About the only two I can think of off the top of my head are Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry.

I remember trying to read Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song a long while back, but never finished it. I've never liked Mailer, and I found his obvious sympathy for the fairly reprehensible Gary Gilmore to be very off-putting.

My mom sure loved the true-crime books, though. She had just about everything that Ann Rule ever put out. What kinds of bloody madness do you morons read about?

Posted by: Monty at 05:04 AM | Comments (112)
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Nothing good can come of thisÂ…at least if I can help it. First up, tonight's sermon:

More down below.... more...

Posted by: Genghis at 06:15 PM | Comments (665)
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A writer over at ThinkProgress, a liberal website that drives a lot of conversation for the lemmings on the Left, summarizes Eric Cantor's recent trip to Israel and meeting with PM Netanyahu:

CantorÂ’s office stated that the presumptive Majority Leader would fight the Obama administration on behalf of Israel.

In fact, the statement from Cantor's office says no such thing. Here's what it said:

Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington. He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other.

Nothing in there at all about advocating "on behalf of Israel." Nothing in there that you could even stretch to sound a teensy bit like Cantor said he'd advocate for Israel. ...Unless you're a liberal with paranoiac fantasies about "traitor Jews" and no, I'm sadly not kidding about that. Legal Insurrection has a round-up of so-called Lefty thinkers, who like ThinkProgress must be illiterate or liars, including our old pall "Rick Ellensburg" who say that Cantor is a felon or a traitor.

The Left has long been losing its shit over Eric Cantor (e.g. the DNC's 2008 campaign-season game of Pin the Tail on the Hebe) and I expect it will get plenty worse once he's Majority Leader. They just can't help themselves.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:33 PM | Comments (109)
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UPDATE [DiT]: we're at the place. Walk in, head right for the back room. Take your chances with the rest of us.

Still happening this weekend, even though we all hate each others asses now. It's going to feel like Thanksgiving at your in-laws, but fortified with 1/3 more cranky mutants.

This Saturday afternoon, 11/13. Information is up at the CT Meetup site. Bring defensive gear.

I'm going to wear an extra layer of protection inside my MoronHelmet™ and wipe down the hunchback with cooking oil to frustrate any attempts at capture.

laurawtips at the gmail thingy.

Posted by: LauraW at 02:00 PM | Comments (259)
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It wasn't inevitable at all-- but Google has turned mission creep positively creepy. An information service provider that people use to search for bargains on cat trees and give them email accounts is being transformed, without our asking or our consent, into the world's biggest private espionage organization, where the targets are ordinary citizens, and the clients are... well, everyone, from stalkers to thieves to collections agents to murderers.

It's worth remembering Google's CEO's self-servingly creepy beliefs about privacy. Other people's privacy, that is-- he vindictively vindicates his own.

Schmidt's philosophy is clear with Bartiromo in the clip below: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." The philosophy that secrets are useful mainly to indecent people is awfully convenient for Schmidt as the CEO of a company whose value proposition revolves around info-hoarding.

When CNET attempted to put Schmidt's theories to the test -- by publishing info they had gleaned about Schmidt from Google searches -- he blacklisted them.

Since then it's been revealed he was quite serious about his credo about (other people's) privacy.

Google is hardly the only offender in privacy terms. Social networking media like Facebook also have privacy questions they need to answer. But of all organizations online, Google is the only one to have roamed the streets taking data from the airwaves. That puts them in a lamentable category of one. We must not let them off the hook; if Google can get away with this, more companies will follow in their intrusive footsteps and your privacy will become a fiction.

Google denies that anything’s wrong with Street View per se. “It’s nothing you couldn’t see walking along the street,” defenders say, as if we are all ten feet tall and have panopticonic vision which permanently records everything around us in glorious Technicolor, beaming it to the internet for later review at our or anyone else’s leisure.

Big Brother Watch supporters have told us of their concerns about (for example) images of their homes and gardens being online, showing the distance of their gate to the childÂ’s paddling pool or the motor bike in the garage, the angles from which the pool or the bike can be seen from the house, and the type of alarm they have on their house.

This has terrible repercussions. In the UK, a murderer, Steven Hodgson, used it to target his victimÂ’s home this year before breaking in. Then there are the more everyday privacy issues. The little boy Google showed naked in June. Or before that, another boy in March.

Then there is the sort of unpleasant and unfortunate moments in time which are bound to occur when images are captured everywhere: Ashleigh HallÂ’s family were very upset by images of her captured on Google Street View shortly before she was killed by the man who had stalked her on Facebook.

Pictures are only the start of Google's new mission to make everyone's personal lives searchable. For reasons that I don't think have been explained yet, Google roamed the streets intercepting people's wi-fi signals, stealing their emails, passwords, and credit card numbers.

Google admitted in May its Street View cars had snatched 600 GB of e-mail, passwords and browsing data from thousands of users in countries all over the world for the last three years.

Google apologized and made nice with countries by installing a privacy director and new data-collection rules. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Canada and U.K. gave Google a pass.

And here's some change you can believe in:

The FTC said Oct. 27 it ceased its investigation of the Wi-Spy incident because of Google's improved privacy practices and assurances that it had no plans to use the data it collected.

The FTC's decision came just days after Google discovered Street View collected whole e-mail, passwords and URLs, and after a $30,000-per -person fundraiser for President Obama hosted by Google executive Marissa Mayer at her home.

This proved to be an unacceptable slap on the wrist for the National Legal and Policy Center, which claimed Google was given a pass because of its supposed sway over politicians on Capitol Hill.

Third order of business for the incoming Congress (after passing a repeal of ObamaCare and cutting $100+ billion plus per year from the budget): Investigate the hell out of Google, put them all under oath, and put Obama's men under oath too.

Posted by: Ace at 12:21 PM | Comments (193)
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He did three things wrong here. Can you name them all?

Posted by: Ace at 12:02 PM | Comments (66)
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You just knew it was coming. Nancy refuses to fall on her sword for the mid-term tidal wave, so someone in the Democratic leadership was going to be left without a real job. Shockingly, it's Jim Clyburn, the top ranking black member in the Democratic House leadership.

House Democrats have reached a deal to keep both Reps. Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn in the leadership, with Hoyer (D-Md.) serving as minority whip and Clyburn (D-S.C) taking a new, as-yet-still-undefined number three position.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calf.) who is seeking the minority leader's job in the next Congress, reached an agreement with Clyburn on late Friday night, and Democratic leaders quickly announced the deal.

Clyburn's title and responsibilities were not specified in the announcement from Pelosi's office, and Democratic leadership aides scrambled to explain the deal to reporters.

No title, no identified responsibilities? But it'll be super seriously important!

It's funny how everyone took a step down in leadership except the number 4 guy, John Larson who is the caucus chair. When push comes to shove, who gets the squeeze? Clyburn. He's the guy the Democrats are going to knock out of his job? Not Pelosi or Hoyer?

But hey, Democrats are keeping up appearances and that's what counts.

A source close to Clyburn said one of his "primary concerns was maintaining a diversity in leadership that reflected" the makeup the Democratic Caucus. More than one-fifth of House Democrats will be CBC members in the 112th Congress, making it one of the most powerful bloc of votes from Democratic leaders.

This source added that "a significant number of members withheld their support for either candidate because they did not want the whip contest to come to a vote."

"This solution honors the diversity of the caucus as well as the wishes of a majority of the caucus that he remain number three in leadership," the source said.

As of late last night, not everyone in the CBC was thrilled with the idea of Clyburn losing a substantive position for...well, whatever this new job is.

And yet blacks will vote for Democrats at a rate of 95-98%.

Keep in mind, that Democrats are going to be in the minority and that means less money and fewer stafffers. Now, to keep the band together they have to divide those already limited resources among even more offices.

Now, do I really think race is that big of a factor in this? It might be but who knows. The main thing is Democrats are the ones always going on about minority empowerment and yet when push comes to shove...who gets a fancy new title and no responsibility? Why it's almost like the mean racists in the GOP are running the House Democratic caucus or something.

Yes the GOP may wind up tossing Michael Steele out of office but let's be honest, we won big this year in spite of him, not because of him. Also, Republicans aren't about keeping score on skin color, we hold people to account on performance and let's be honest, Steele has left quite a bit to be desired on that front.

I've seen absolutely no complaining in the MFM about Clyburn getting the racial shaft but I bet if Steele gets the boot or even a serious challenge, they'll be plenty of stories about how Republicans hate blacks.

Such is the reality of our "objective" media.

Added: I really wondered whether this post was over the top in terms of racial language. My main point is that Democrats talk one way on race relations when it comes to Republicans and act another way in their own choices.

Any doubt I had about the appropriateness of my attack was dispelled when I saw this. According to Chris Matthews and two Democratic congresswomen the real racist in this situation is...Rush Limbaugh.

I'm sick and tired of the MFM double standard.

Posted by: DrewM at 11:52 AM | Comments (52)
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