As the Democrats plan to undo the public will via lawsuit, this vote in the 4-3 conservative majority is crucial.

You can volunteer here. I don't know if you can donate.

Allah's worried. So am I. I'm not in Wisconsin so I don't know -- are conservatives getting mobilized for all of this? I know the left is.

Posted by: Ace at 04:04 PM | Comments (140)
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Quick round up on the Moron bracket contest and a bonus thingy.

Top 10 Top 10s (rank, name, wins out of possible, points, and possible points)

1 Jonjo jon.gurr 37 of 60 73pts 121pts
2 Sarahcuda's Bracket RisaK 42 of 60 72pts 120pts
2 My BigEffinDeal Bracket KenM 42 of 60 72pts 88pts
2 boone85 Scott Nadeau 37 of 60 72pts 120pts
5 Boeheim's Aneurysm DALE 41 of 60 71pts 119pts
6 Chuck U. Farleigh's All-Aces cuf 39 of 60 69pts 69pts
6 DFL Scott Anderson 35 of 60 69pts 86pts
6 Francase Place MICHAEL 40 of 60 69pts 69pts
9 phreshone punitivedamages 40 of 60 68pts 68pts
9 Rabid Redneck Republican 2 garrenshipley131 40 of 60 68pts 84pts

I'm cemented at 35 of 60, 55 points is all I'll ever see. Gosh, I hope Obama did better.

So it's Connecticut and Kentucky, VCU vs. Butler.

Also, there's NCAA women's action tonight. Final Four almost set, UCONN vs. Duke tonight, followed by Baylor and Texas A&M. Stanford's in, Notre Dame's in.

I've been following the BU girls again and I'm going out on the limb and sayin they take another National Title.

One of the more amazing players on the team more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:40 PM | Comments (84)
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Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a member of the Democratic Senate leadership, got on a conference call with reporters Tuesday morning without realizing the reporters were already listening in....

Schumer instructed the group, made up of Sens. Barbara Boxer of California, Tom Carper of Delaware, Ben Cardin of Maryland and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, to tell reporters that the GOP is refusing to negotiate.

He told the group to make sure they label the GOP spending cuts as "extreme."

"I always use extreme, Schumer said. "That is what the caucus instructed me to use."

Someone must have finally told Schumer that the media were listening and he stopped talking midsentence.

The key point is less about the message coordination and more about Schumer scheming to shut the government down, and preparing a rehearsed justification for it, claiming it's the other guys who won't negotiate.

Seems to me he's already well beyond negotiating and already digging bunkers.

Posted by: Ace at 12:37 PM | Comments (370)
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Here Rachel Sequoia pitches her "Share The Air" business to entrepreneurs and VCs at the first Venture Capital Fundraising Club of Silicon Valley (VCFC) event held in Palo Alto, CA last month. And she's clearly channeling her inner Billy Madison since I definitely felt dumber after having listened to it.

But after laughing and mocking I started thinking about her plan. Clearly her initial $100 price point is too high but if she could get it down to say $5 or $10 she might have something. Because after all people do go to oxygen bars and buy Twilight crap - so why not boutique air?

Some say her pitch is real while others say it's just a clever satire and I go back and forth myself. Even if it is satire, it's still only slightly dumber than a lot of startup ideas.

Rachel may be a kooky hippie chick, but she also might be kooky like an endangered island fox.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 10:49 AM | Comments (239)
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Obama made this claim in order to rebut critics who say he dithered indecisively:

To summarize, then: in just one month, the United States has worked with our international partners to mobilize a broad coalition, secure an international mandate to protect civilians, stop an advancing army, prevent a massacre, and establish a No Fly Zone with our allies and partners. To lend some perspective on how rapidly this military and diplomatic response came together, when people were being brutalized in Bosnia in the 1990s, it took the international community more than a year to intervene with air power to protect civilians.

That is misleading to the point of being a lie. He is trying to claim that he acted more promptly, assembled a military coalition more swiftly.

In fact, he did not. He refers to "air power" -- the establishment of a shoot-down no-fly zone created by UN Resolution 816 on March 31, 1993. A previous UN Resolution, which banned military flights in Bosnia, as set forth in Resolution 718, passed on October 9, 1992. But this resolution, while purporting to establish a ban, did not authorize the undertaking of any actual action to enforce that ban -- what it seemed to do was authorize "monitoring" and the recording of violations. By the time the second, shoot-down authorizing resolution was passed, the Bosnian War had been going on for a while.

Is Obama telling the truth, then?

No. Because while air power is usually the first sort of power to be injected into a theater, with ground troops coming later (if at all), in Bosnia, air power was the last to enter.

By the time Resolution 816 authorized NATO shoot-downs of aircraft violating the ban on flights, there had been boots-on-the-ground peacekeepers in the region for over a year.

Obama's attempt to draw a contrast with the previous alleged tardiness of world response in Bosnia is dishonest. A coalition of countries was assembled to provide the thorniest sort of protection possible, boots-on-the-ground separation of hostile forces:

The UNPROFOR was composed of nearly 39,000 personnel, 320 of whom were killed on duty. It was composed of troops from Argentina, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany , Ghana, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Lithuania, Malaysia, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, the Russian Federation, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom and the United States.

"Air power" did indeed come later, but ground power had already been organized to attempt to protect civilians and keep opposed forces separated, the same type of civilian-sparing humanitarian mission Obama hopes to achieve with the airstrikes. Air power was added later in Bosnia partly as an expansion of the old ground-based humanitarian effort to the skies but also partly in an effort to end the war by destroying the combatants' ability to make war.

It is simply not true, as Obama implied, that it took a year for the international community to respond in Bosnia. They had responded far more quickly than that. It took them a year only to decide to add air power -- a decision that was probably slowed by the fact that there tens of thousands of foreign peacekeepers already on the ground who would be natural magnets for retaliation when shoot-downs and airstrikes began. In other words, we already had almost 40,000 would-be hostages in the region.

Notice the dainty preciseness of his deception -- he speaks only about the introduction of "air power," and it's technically true that shoot-downs did not begin until a year later. He conveniently fails to mention, however, that the much more dangerous commitment of tens of thousands of peacekeepers (acting under extraordinarily restrictive ROE's) were already in place by then, and had been for over a year.

By the way, the AP's "Fact Check" missed this one.

Corrected: I originally wrote it was more than a year before the first UN ban on flights and the second, authorizing shoot-downs. In fact, I got very simple math screwed up; it was in fact less than half a year. I have rewritten that passage to elide the error.

In fact, Obama seems to be getting the "more than a year" thing from the date of the resolution authorizing boots-on-the-ground peacekeepers:

UNPROFOR was created by UN Security Council Resolution 743 on 21 February 1992.

Feb 1992 to March/April 1993 = "more than a year."

But of course he can't mention that date-- that would scotch his whole deception. If he's being precise about matters, he'd have to say "It was more than a full year before air power was authorized in Bosnia, after a full year of boots-on-the-ground peacekeepers were in place, who'd been organized rather swiftly after the outbreak of war."

Sort of undercuts his whole "I acted super-fast" comparison.

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 AM | Comments (117)
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Commenters are recommending an rdbrewer cat-vid in the sidebar.

It's better than you might think. These aren't just cute cats; they're skilled burglars. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:40 AM | Comments (63)
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You've set this interview up as a trial, she says. So I demand justice.

Allah had this yesterday and offers some ruminations.

There are three types of prominent people in her country today, it seems: Taliban, those recently killed by the Taliban, and those being threatened with death by the Taliban. SheÂ’s in neither the first nor second category, so she must be in the third. And so she is.

Quoting from that last link of Allah's:

MalikÂ’s media manager, Sohail Rashid informed that the letter was sent by a man called Maulana Ahmed Masood, who claimed to be the head of Tehreek-e-Taliban.

According to the Express Tribune, a media house in Pakistan handed over the letter to Veena and they confirmed the authenticity of the source.

"The letter says that Tehreek-e-Taliban has taken a decision as a Muslim to punish Veena Malik soon. We want our daughters and sisters in our homes only and Veena Malik, who is humiliating Pakistan's name in India, will be punished soon," Rashid quoted from the letter.

"We are soon going to punish Veena Malik so that our future generations may be afraid of going to India. It is the responsibility of all Pakistanis and Muslims, but now we are going to accomplish it," he read.

So in that context, understand that she was risking -- risking isn't the right word -- guaranteeing Taliban "punishment" by not rolling over for this absurd bearded fascism-monkey and instead listing the litany of immoralities he's responsible for -- such as rape of children in their psychopathic death-cults, and, of course, terrorism.

She also begins reciting stupid edicts from this grotesque monster's religion about his needing to be punished for looking upon her more than once ("in her present condition," she says, which I guess means with her face and neck visible).

If you watch one video all week, make it this one. You don't often see good and wisdom clash directly on camera with evil and stupidity, and you usually don't get to see good decide to drop the politeness act and get mean.
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Posted by: Ace at 09:21 AM | Comments (163)
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One of the most prominent parts of the story concerns the shooting of two armed men on a motorcycle. It's prominent, chiefly because the team took video of the shooting; that is, since it's hot video of course, if you're trying to sell magazines, it has to be featured prominently in the story.

I didn't cite that when I excerpted the story because hot footage aside, it didn't seem out-of-the-ordinary.

Even Rolling Stone seems to concede as much:

The clip presented here is excerpted from 'Motorcycle Kill,' a video collected and shared by members of the “kill team” of U.S. soldiers who murdered civilians in Afghanistan and mutilated the corpses. The jumpy, 30-minute video – shot by soldiers believed to be with another battalion in the 5th Stryker Brigade – shows American troops gunning down two Afghans on a motorcycle who may have been armed. Even if the killings were part of a legitimate combat engagement, however, it is a clear violation of Army standards to share such footage.

Oh, it's a clear violation of Army standards to share such footage? Oh dear, that does sound serious. I bet some soldiers even have contraband pornography in their possession.

Were they armed? I can't tell from the video (I've tried to stop the video as the passenger raises his right hand to see if there's a gun in it but just as he raises it a US soldier steps out, in foreground, obscuring it.)

Yon said they were armed, and furthermore, this was not a case of waylaying a random cyclist; this was during an intense fight.

Rolling Stone commits a literary “crime” by deceptively entwining this normal combat video with the Kill Team story. The Taliban on the motorcycle were killed during an intense operation in the Arghandab near Kandahar City. People who have been to the Arghandab realize the extreme danger there. The Soviets got beaten horribly in the Arghandab, despite throwing everything including the Soviet kitchen sink into the battle that lasted over a month. Others fared little better. To my knowledge, 5/2 and supporting units were the first ever to take Arghandab, and these two dead Taliban were part of that process.

The killing of the armed Taliban on the motorcycle was legal and within the rules of engagement.

As they say, if it bleeds, it leads. Rolling Stone has footage of someone getting shot and damnit if they're not going to contrive a way to present lurid material as somehow important.

I call it "lurid" not because the soldiers' actions are themselves lurid, but because people like to see other people die. But Rolling Stone can't just be upfront about it (like that old death-porn site, Ogrish) and say "Check it out! A couple of guys get wasted on camera!" Instead it's wrapped up in this false narrative of political import.

Posted by: Ace at 09:03 AM | Comments (71)
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The optimists will say that there is no real debt problem at the federal and state level, that everything will work out fine. The public-sector pension and healthcare bomb is just a scare-tactic on the part of Republicans to score political points, they say. The federal government cannot go out of business, they say; neither can the states. Therefore, you cannot treat sovereign risk the same way you do that of private companies. It's virtually a certainty that all public debts will be repaid.

But then there are the dissenters (like me) who point out that sovereign states can and do go out of business all the time. Just read a history book. And this quite often occurs not because of invasion or plague, but due to internal factors like debt, debasement of the currency, and a failure of the economy to provide for the citizenry.

As the monk Cadfael often says in Ellis Peters' wonderful books, "Under the certainty of Heaven, nothing is certain".

The question that faces us as a nation now, really, is one of risk. Democrats (and even some Republicans) seem to think that we live in a "low to moderate risk" financial environment; the Tea Partiers, libertarians, many GOP freshmen, and me all think that we are living in a "moderate to high risk" environment. Our argument with each other is based less on dollars and cents than it is on questions of sustainability, viability, and funding -- particularly funding of our colossal welfare-state.

Many of us feel that the optimists are engaging in magical thinking -- that because we are the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, that this somehow insulates us from the more mundane realities that every other nation must deal with. Yet we only have to look to the cousins in England to find the answer to that fallacy: they were the mightiest empire the world had ever seen as recently as the 1880's. Now they are just another pauperized nation with an unsustainable welfare-state, a restive population, and no clear way forward out of the jam they find themselves in. How astonished a British subject of 1800 would have been to visit his country only two centuries later!

America may yet have its best days before it...if we act now to prevent this fiscal disaster from ruining us, and fracturing us into endlessly-arguing and bitter camps. E Pluribus Unum requires work and dedication; it won't just happen all by itself. A house divided against itself cannot stand, and right now we have two groups of people with very diametrically-opposed visions of what America is, and what it will be in the years ahead.

Nothing lasts forever -- not men, not institutions, not buildings or monuments. Even stones wear away in time. Nothing is forever. We would do well as a nation to remember that.
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Posted by: Monty at 06:33 AM | Comments (256)
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Coin operated self-destruct... Not one of my better ideas.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:51 AM | Comments (267)
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