At Hot Air, Schumer continues this line of thought to say that they didn't say extend the Bush Tax Cuts for the wealthiest Americans, but let's just focus on that first part.

He concedes the electorate did demand a repeal of ObamaCare. And a reduction in the size of government.

What is his justification then for refusing to join an override against Obama's veto of a bill repealing ObamaCare?

Posted by: Ace at 01:17 PM | Comments (27)
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Isn't that like catnip to them? Tell them they can't do something and it guarantees they will?

Gird your loins.

The four-star general chosen as South KoreaÂ’s new defense minister said on Friday that the South would use airstrikes against North Korea if it carried out further attacks.

“If the enemy attacks our people and territory again, I will use force to punish the enemy to make sure it doesn’t even dare think about it again,” the minister-designate, Kim Kwan-jin, said in confirmation hearings on Friday.

...

Last week Mr. Lee accepted the resignation of his defense minister, announced plans to reinforce the islandÂ’s defenses and revised the rules of engagement to make it easier for South Korea to respond to a North Korean attack with greater force.

The problem I'm seeing is that Western-type civilizations always want to be merciful and use proportionate response. Escalate up. Give the enemy a chance to repent. Like good guys do in movies.

But that's not going to work on North Korea. If you hit them at all, they, being evil, are going to hit back really, really hard. They won't drop the nuke right away (that's step... three) but they'll shell Seoul.

If you're going to hit them at all... maybe it's just best to anticipate that they're going to wildly escalate and commit to wild escalation in the first place. Decapitating strike, destroy the border troops and artillery with Daisy Cutters.

I don't know how much punch South Korea has -- anyone who does, please put me some information.

Posted by: Ace at 12:15 PM | Comments (217)
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Um... you're welcome?

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (63)
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What is "sex by surprise"? Well, that still sounds like rape, but the Swedes have a charge for a guy who says he'll use a condom but then doesn't.

Gizmodo claims that that's what Assange is accused of, according to Assange's lawyer.

Police reports obtained by the Daily Mail show that Assange met the two women who denounced him at an August 11 event that was held in Stockholm by the Social Democratic Party. The first woman denounced him because the condom broke while having sex at Assange's apartment. Both were seen acting normally the next day.

The second woman's statement to the police is strange: The 27-year-old photographer said she went to the event because she's fascinated by Assange. She managed to get into a lunch with him and other people. Two days later they talked on the phone and she invited him to her apartment 40 miles from Stockholm, paying for his ticket because—according to her—Assange had no cash or credit cards.

She complained that "he paid more attention to his computer rather than me" on the train ride, and that "the passion and excitement seemed to have disappeared" when they arrived to her apartment. They had sex using a condom. The next morning, they had sex again, but this time Assange didn't use a condom. According to the New York Times, friends of the woman say that he did not comply with her appeals to stop when the condom was no longer in use. Assange claims that she didn't force her and that sex was always consensual. She didn't accuse him of rape, but of not using a condom.

Huh.

Thanks to Dave @ Garfield Ridge.

Related: Krauthammer says use every legal tool against Assange, and then some.

Hmmnm... From AOLNews:

True, one of Assange's accusers sounds tailor-made for those who think Assange is being set up in Sweden by dark CIA-backed operatives who want him smeared or silenced for his document dumping with WikiLeaks. She's a 31-year-old blond academic and member of the Social Democratic Party who's known for her radical feminist views, once wrote a treatise on how to take revenge against men and was once thrown out of Cuba for subversive activities.

But others say Assange, who denies any wrongdoing and says the sex was consensual, may have just run afoul of Sweden's unusual rape laws, which are considered pro-feminist because of the consideration given issues of consent when it comes to sexual activity -- including even the issue of whether a condom was used.

In fact, the current prosecutor, Marianne Ny, who re-opened the case against Assange, has been active in the proposed reforms of Swedish rape laws that would, if passed, involve an investigation of whether an imbalance in power between two people could void one person's insistence that the sex was consensual.

I linked it for that last paragraph. Think about that. An "imbalance of power" can void consent.

Posted by: Ace at 09:39 AM | Comments (234)
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"Sorry Keith We Can't All Be As Perfect As You."

Accusing me of hypocrisy is by now, an old canard. What Mr. Olbermann lacks in originality he makes up for with insincere incredulity. Mr. Olbermann fails to understand that in order to have credibility as a spokesperson, it sometimes takes a person who has made mistakes. Parents warn their children about the mistakes they made so they are not repeated. Former gang members travel to schools to educate teenagers about the risks of gang life. Recovered addicts lecture to others about the risks of alcohol and drug abuse. And yes, a teen mother talks about the benefits of preventing teen pregnancy.



I have never claimed to be perfect. If that makes me the "worst person in the world" to Mr. Olbermann, then I must apologize for not being absolutely faultless like he undoubtedly must be.



To Mr. Olbermann let me say this: you can attack me all you want. But you will not stop me from getting my message out about teen pregnancy prevention. And one day, if you ever have a daughter, you may change your mind about me.

If you ever have a daughter. Hmmmm... How do we know he didn't have a daughter? I'll get to that in a bit.

There are a couple of things here. First, Olbermann often reacts to Jon Stewart's jibes. He semi-retired this "Worst Person" segment based on Stewart's attack on it; when Stewart calls him out as an incivil hyperpartisan, he comes on TV the next night to justify his behavior.

For some reason, Jon Stewart is treated as a voice of reason/elder statesman on the left. Well, maybe that's churlish -- perhaps he should be given a bit of that status, as he does call fouls on his own side. (Of course he doesn't find fault with himself, but a willingness to call out the worst on your own side is still a virtue.)

Less than two weeks ago Stewart laid down the law about the Palin kids: leave them alone.

He noted that the left's vicious attacks on the Palin kids make him, uncomfortably and unwantedly, actually sympathetic towards Palin.

So it's curious to me that Jon Stewart, acting in his Voice of Reason and Civility role, laid down this rule, and Keith Olbermann chose to violate it almost immediately.

Questions, then: Did Olbermann violate the Stewart Rule, despite having some respect for him, because 1, he's so deranged and nasty he can't help himself, or 2, because he finds these spats with Stewart personally useful, because he gets ratings out of it and also can play Progressive Tough Guy to Stewart's Mewling Milquetoast?

If you watch that Stewart clip, by the way, you can see that Stewart lays down "rules" for others he doesn't follow himself -- he plays the Situation/Palin clip for the studio audience, with mocking mugging, encouraging the audience to laugh at Palin. He attempts to square the circle by only making verbalized jokes about The Situation, but he's put the Palin red meat out there for the audience to feast on.

So maybe that's why Keith Olbermann felt comfortable defying Elder Sage Stewart -- because Stewart likes to lay down high-minded-sounding rules of behavior but is pretty hypocritical.

There is another thing going on here, which no one talks about. Well, William Saletan at Slate did. What is notable about Bristol Palin isn't that she got pregnant, really. Based on his statistical noodling, he guesses that quite a few unmarried daughters of presidential and vice presidential candidates have gotten pregnant during their fathers' periods of public service.

No, what's notable about Bristol Palin is that her pregnancy became public because she didn't abort the child, which at least a few of the curiously-never-pregnant daughters of presidential and vice presidential candidates must have.

Put aside Saletan's control group and instead look at the media which loves to criticize her for this. All these women -- and men! -- living in the sexually-latitudinarian New York/Washington axis, not getting married until later in life, but of course sexually active through their 20s, 30s, and 40s... and yet, miraculously, not a single notable unplanned pregnancy among the entire media cadre.

Were they all super-duper careful about birth control? Did they all get special NASA-designed condoms, unavailable to the public, that never break and never spill due to fumbling withdrawal? Do they all have high-tech birth control pills each implanted with a digestible microchip and minispeaker that announce "Take me at 12:30 PM today, don't forget!"

Or is it much more likely that a fair number of them -- say 35% or more -- actually have become pregnant (and I mean the men as well) but simply... destroyed the evidence before it could become public?

That, I think. It is a statistical impossibility that the group of Katie Courics, Contessa Brewers, Keith Olbermanns, et al. have never in their lives gotten unexpectedly and unwantedly pregnant.

So what are they all really mocking Bristol Palin for? Not that she became pregnant out of wedlock; at least 35% of them (if not more) have gotten pregnant out of wedlock, too, so if they were mocking her for that that would be hypocrisy, and we know they can't be hypocrites, because they themselves are using the hypocrisy card to justify attacking Bristol Palin.

So what are they mocking her for?

Only for one thing: For not getting an abortion, like any smart career-minded media woman, or media man, like Keith Olbermann, would do. Or advise. Or cajole. Or insist upon. Or pay for, and I don't just mean for the costs of the procedure.

Really?

Am I to believe all those unmarried, sexually-active honies on CNN or MSNBC (or Fox, for that matter) can actually mock Palin for getting pregnant without having a tiny little busted-up skeleton in their own closets?

Posted by: Ace at 09:12 AM | Comments (270)
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Speaking now to the troops in Bagram.

Good for him for going and spending some time with the troops as the holidays approach.

Just a reminder....you can do something to help remind the troops they are cared about, remembered and appreciated.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:11 AM | Comments (29)
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Pretty much just a technicality that doesn't really matter much.

Eleven of the 18 members of President Obama's fiscal commission voted Friday to embrace a bipartisan commission's controversial plan to slash deficits by nearly $4 trillion over the next decade -- too few votes to command quick action in Congress, but far more than even the panel's most ardent supporters had predicted just a few weeks ago.

...The chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), also voted yes, and Durbin predicted that Conrad would use the commission's report as a basis for constructing the party's next fiscal blueprint early in 2011.

Incoming House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) has pledged to do the same, even though he and the two other House Republicans on the panel voted against the package. Their opposition was based primarily on the commission's implicit embrace of Obama's health-care overhaul.

Via Philip Klein of The American Spectator, here's how the votes broke down.

I get why Republicans voted yes on this, it was kind of free vote that had no real meaning but the alternative, voting no after spending a year campaigning on cutting spending and reducing the deficit, would have been problematic.

Like any plan of this nature (crafted by 'wise-men' from both parties invested in big government) there's far too much emphasis on taxes (one trillion in new revenue by 2020) and not nearly enough on non-defense spending cuts and entitlement reform.

There are some basic problems with the revenue portion of the plan.

There's really no way to guarantee that any money raised (assuming it materializes which is not a given) will be spent on reducing the debt and not new spending.

More problematic to me is the number...one trillion dollars. That's not even enough to cover the eventual costs of the DemocraticObama so-called 'stimulus' which will clock in at $3.27 trillion.

Personally, any plan that doesn't start with cutting discretionary spending back to pre-Obama levels and then cut from there is a non-starter.

Of course, all of that is just a drop in the bucket compared to what we are going to have to do with entitlements since that's where the real money and problem is.

So no, the debt commission didn't get enough votes to force a vote in the Senate but nothing is stopping Harry Reid from bringing it up this afternoon for a vote (it's good to be the Majority Leader) but it was never designed to be voted on. Democrats (and yes Republicans) have run up astronomical spending numbers, they aren't about to let a handful of 'commissioners' undo it all with one vote.

Now that this charade designed to give cover to Democrats for their two year long spending binge in the run up to the midterms is behind us, we can get on to the serious business of building a plan that can actually get some votes in Congress. I have my doubts that's even possible but we'll see.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:45 AM | Comments (27)
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November's unemployment numbers were released today, with the latest stats showing a rise to 9.8% and much lower than expected job growth (39,000 vs. the predicted 150,000). According to the household data, there were 173,000 fewer people employed this month than last month.

These are terrible numbers, and they come at a terrible time of year. They're starting to make Geithner's already-dismal prediction of unrelentingly high unemployment numbers look too optimistic.

So it's time, Tim. You're a clever, if not competent, guy, so I'm sure your bags are already packed. Time to hit the road in what's turning out to be a slow but thorough purge of Obama's economic team.

Now you can add "Bus Undercarriage Inspection" to your resumé.

Posted by: Geoff at 07:52 AM | Comments (107)
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From a Biz/Tech blog by Brier Dudley at the Seattle Times. It appears the statement was released sometime yesterday afternoon by Amazon Web Services. From the blog post:

”Amazon.com is finally explaining why it stopped hosting the latest batch of WikiLeaks content, saying it wasn't because of pressure from the government. The Seattle company was in a bind over the State Department files, which were moved to Amazon's self-service Web hosting service after WikiLeaks released them on Sunday. Amazon tries to take a neutral stance toward content sold and stored on its infrastructure, but it removed the WikiLeaks material after complaints were raised, including protests by Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.”

Dudley goes on to quote pretty much the entire Amazon statement, which is pretty short and to the point, mostly concerning legal issues. And, as he states, they do deny that there was any government pressure on them to pull it from their servers, but they also go on to say that, wellÂ…this:

”There have also been reports that it was prompted by massive DDOS attacks. That too is inaccurate. There were indeed large-scale DDOS attacks, but they were successfully defended against.”

The statement is linked on the blog but here it is in its entirety if you have trouble reading it there: Amazon statement.

One thing that doesnÂ’t get mentioned is the rather large public relations hit that they took and whether or not that had any impact on their decision to throw WL under the bus. I suspect that had a lot to do with it as well. Thousands of pissed-off customers e-mailing their displeasure to the company tends to have that effect. After all, if they werenÂ’t pressured by the guvmint and the DDOS attacks were ineffective then what was it that made them pull the plug? A sudden moment of moral clarity? Patriotism? Bad hair day?

Doubtful, but whatever the case they finally did the right thing for whatever reasons (most likely self-preservation and damage-control)

As to whether Lieberman or any other elected or non-elected official had anything to do with it, there are voices of concern about that as well. Such as in this article by Rebecca MacKinnon from the New America Foundation on CNN.com this morning.

ItÂ’s an interesting piece. You wonÂ’t agree with some of it. I didnÂ’t, but at least she didn't defend Assange or dispute the fact that Amazon had the right to take action against WikiLeaks. It's mostly about the reasons why and concerns political intervention (Note I said "political" vs. "judicial" or "administrative." There is a distinction and Amazon is supposedly angling for some fat federal contracts) But thereÂ’s plenty of stuff there to debate about in the thread.

Posted by: Genghis at 05:20 AM | Comments (104)
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Like the old days. Murder, mayhem, a couple of laughs.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:53 AM | Comments (158)
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