Evenin' Moron Nation. You learn something new everyday and today I learned that there is actually a word that describes those photos when someone who wasn't supposed to be in it ruins the picture. The word according to the Urban Dictionary is photobomb.

This collection of photos is a twist on that phenomenon. Here are your 12 Hilarious TV Photobombs.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:38 PM | Comments (563)
Post contains 738 words, total size 7 kb.

It's pretty dangerous to be one of Muammar's kids.

It has been reported that Colonel Gaddafi's son, Saif al Arab Gaddafi, has been killed in a Nato-led airstrike.

It is believed that he was killed at his home in the capital, Tripoli, but his wife and the leader - who was at the house at the time - are in good health.

He was the sixth son of the Libyan leader and has been viewed as the most low profile of his sons.

So, I'm still unclear if the purpose of the NATO mission is to topple the regime and/or kill Gaddafi or just protect civilians. I'm not a military expert but I'm not clear on how bombing someone's home protects civilians hundreds of miles away. Actually, I do (no Gaddafi, no danger) but I was told by the President that killing Gaddafi wasn't part of our military strategy. It's almost like Obama and the rest of the NATO leaders are saying one thing but acting very differently.

Don't get me wrong, we should have offed Gaddafi years ago but I seem to remember something about Presidents lying and people dying not too long ago. If I recall correctly, it was a bad thing (even though there weren't any actual lies back then). Now suddenly talking out of your ass about policy and military goals is a good thing, Smart Diplomacy one might say.

Let's just be honest...we want this guy dead and we're going to kill him. Is that so hard?

Posted by: DrewM at 03:24 PM | Comments (255)
Post contains 276 words, total size 2 kb.

As part of my continuing campaign to prove I Know What Black People Think,* I'll link this interesting interview on Laura Ingraham.

"Meat so red," Allah says.

One thing Ingraham says is that blacks have generally hung together on Obama. Based on this and that Blogging Heads I linked, I'm thinking that it's more they've outwardly hung with Obama, while privately starting to say, "Hey, this guy's kind of, uh, what's the word? Bad."

Yes, yay team and all, but this guy is a failure.

* Oh, and if Baldilocks comes in to tell me differently, I'll just ignore her, because one of the benefits of Knowing What Black People Think, as I obviously so do, is that I don't have to listen when black people tell me what black people think, since I already know. To listen would just be condescending.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (345)
Post contains 166 words, total size 2 kb.

What are these, exactly? Because it sounds as if the government has given a huge break to this industry specifically, doesn't it? But nobody says what they are.

(I'm ignoring, for the moment, the stupidity of increasing the price of any commodity because we all know that price is passed on to the consumer.)

Every time prices increase (and often as a result of their friggin stupid policies such as shutting down drilling in the gulf, nixing pipelines and the GODDAMN MOSQUITO AND MOOSE RESERVE ANWR), we hear Democrats bang this "no more subsidies for big oil" drum like monkeys on crack.

Well what's a "big oil tax subsidy?" I know of one. Section 199. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:14 AM | Comments (103)
Post contains 403 words, total size 2 kb.

Okay, it's probably not the last chance, but the movie is struggling, and will soon be exiting theaters.

I delayed seeing it myself -- I kept meaning to, but didn't -- but I'm seeing it tomorrow.

Find the nearest theater here.

The critics lashed the movie scornfully, but what did anyone expect?

“Critics, you won,” said John Aglialoro, the businessman who spent 18 years and more than $20 million of his own money to make, distribute and market “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” which covers the first third of Rand’s dystopian novel. “I’m having deep second thoughts on why I should do Part 2.”…

...

“Why should I put up all of that money if the critics are coming in like lemmings?” Aglialoro said. “I’ll make my money back and I’ll make a profit, but do I wanna go and do two? Maybe I just wanna see my grandkids and go on strike.”

Now, the producer has changed his mind since that peeved reaction to the critics' peevish reaction, and says he'll go ahead with Parts 2 and 3.

And he defended his film Wednesday by accusing professional film reviewers of political bias. How else, he asks, to explain their distaste for a film that is liked by the audience? At Rottentomatoes.com, 7,400 people gave it an average 85% score.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, though, gave the movie zero stars, and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it one. A dozen others were equally dismissive.

"It was a nihilistic craze," Aglialoro said. "Not in the history of Hollywood has 16 reviewers said the same low things about a movie.

"They're lemmings," he said. "What's their fear of Ayn Rand? They hate this woman. They hate individualism.

"I'm going to get a picture of Ebert and Travers and the rest of them so I can wake up in the morning and they'll be right there. They're revitalizing me with their outrageousness."

Aglialoro said he had to scale down his ambition for the film to be in 1,000 theaters this weekend, so it will likely be closer to 400. During its opening weekend, the movie took in $5,640 per screen but then only $1,890 in its second. Through Wednesday, the film had grossed $3.3 million since opening April 15.

This whole situation frustrates the hell out of conservative filmmaker Ladd Ehlinger, Jr.

Before I say this, please don't take this as carping at you -- it's carping at myself. Well, it's carping at all of us, including myself. I could have seen this April 15th and should have but I didn't. Because, in the end, I just said, "Eh, I'll wait."

On the one hand, Ladd wants to make conservatively-themed movies.

On the other hand, conservatives say they want to see conservatively-themed movies.

But on the other other hand, conservatives tend to not actually see the movies they say they want to see, and wind up instead only weakly supporting video rebuttals to Michael Moore -- that is, conservatives aren't seizing the initiative and supporting movies which can actually positively, proactively inject ideas into the public market, but tend instead to watch attack-videos on the liberal media, which is well and good -- but that's a negative, reactive posture. A pushback against a meme that's already been positively established by the media, not an actual pushing forward of the conservative idea in the first instance.

Over the course of many years I have tried to explain to you that you need to stop feeding Michael Moore.

I understand the need to drive up hits. And writing a blog about the Fat One's latest outrageously stupid comments or shenanigans is always a sure-fire way to get the faithful whipped up into a frothy frenzy.

But this is a short-sighted and harmful strategy in the cause of Liberty. It's even counter productive. Sort of like tinkering with the books to make your stock look better to investors.

When you feed the Fat One, you only make him stronger.

Meanwhile, filmmakers who are concerned with Liberty are left to die on the vine. Take, for instance, Andy Garcia.

He made a wonderful indie film called The Lost City back in 2005. Ever hear of it? No, because you were too busy carping about Michael Moore.

Congratulations, you screwed the cause of Liberty.

The Lost City was about the Cuban revolution, and more specifically, its effects on the musicians, dancers, and other artists in Havana. It deserved far more press than it got, and deserved far more air than Michael Moore's jockstrap got that year.

Ayn Rand is not, of course, what most of us would recognize as some sort of mainstream conservative. She's not.

But her main message of individualism, achievement, drive, and the natural rewards for such accruing to those who actually create things -- and her dire warning about the well-meaning slavery imposed by a state determined to coerce people into its conception of perfection -- is as conservative as it gets.

The dystopia depicted is claimed to be in 2016, after a hypothetical second term of Barack Obama, for crying out loud. It is essentially blaming Obama's policies for the dystopia.

And we're gonna pass on that?

Ultimately, Hollywood is, as John Landis said in an excellent documentary on grindhouse/exploitation movies called American Grindhouse, pretty reactionary. If something is proven to stoke audience interest and make money, there will be movies about that, whether it's nudie cutie exploitation films, or excessively gory exploitation films, or black-power pimp exploitation films, subversive/punk/biker exploitation films, or... or even conservative-ideology promoting films.

On the other hand, if topic is proven to be a box office loser, they won't make such movies.

Yes, I know, this is not an iron-clad rule because Landis didn't seem to know (or want to admit) that Hollywood has a strong liberal bias and will tend to make movies it knows (or should know) will lose money, as long as they can be proud of the message (Stop Loss, Lions for Lambs, and on and on and on), and will not make movies they know (or should know) will make money, if they disagree with the message (Passion of the Christ, which everyone passed on, and wouldn't even agree to exhibit in theaters).

Still, the bottom line is always important. There are in fact film-makers who want to make conservative movies. Furthermore, there are plenty of wealthy conservatives who would love to invest in a conservative movie... as long as they think there's a reasonable chance of getting at least most of their money back, and, who knows, maybe even turning a profit.

Like I said, I'm not scolding you. I'm writing this mostly to myself, because I've had the opportunity now two weekends running to support a conservative film and I just haven't. I've put up links and stuff but a link isn't a review. A link is just a Do as I say, not as I do.

I think many conservatives have just tuned out of a hostile culture to such an extent that they've fallen out of the simple habit of supporting arts and entertainment, the habit of just going to a theater to see a movie. If almost everything in the theaters is either politically hostile, or simply stupid and made for 14 year olds, why not just drop that habit entirely?

But there's a drawback to that, as is the case here, when a smart, well-intentioned conservative movie comes along, but still no one's really animated to go to the theaters and support it. Sure, we support it with good feelings, but good feelings don't pay production and distribution costs. Cash-money, which does.

Actually, the arrangement the producers of the film currently have with most exhibitors is that the producers are paying them a flat fee to show it, and then collecting the ticket receipts for it. Which means if each screening isn't reasonably well-attended, they're losing money, and not just on the film itself, but each time they show it to a mostly-empty theater.

Anyway, I really should have seen this two weeks ago. I'll see it tomorrow, promise. And I'll probably write an overly-long review that spills out into irrelevant tangents.

Still in theaters, for now.

Reviews From the Comments: Andrew Breitbart has probably read these. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:45 AM | Comments (472)
Post contains 1808 words, total size 11 kb.

The AoSHQ crew is off somewhere carefully studying this diagram.

Talk Whisper amongst yourselves.

Added: [rdbrewer] More realistic hangover poster below the fold.
more...

Posted by: andy at 05:04 AM | Comments (141)
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

Evenin' Moron Nation and welcome to another weekend. Genghis seems to have been tasered while trying to chug a can of beer while upside down so I'm stepping into the breach to fill in.

Well, I guess there was some kind of big wedding today. This picture kind of stood out to me. Coincidence?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:15 PM | Comments (786)
Post contains 688 words, total size 6 kb.

Yeah, he's running, as Allah figures too. The politics of it are actually a bit riskier and more complicated than I would have guessed (ending PP funding puts the state's whole Medicaid federal kickback in jeopardy), so one supposes it would have been easier for him to reject the funding cut-off.

As has been noted many times before: Although Mitch Daniels keeps (incomprehensibly) talking up a "truce" on social issues, he is in fact pro-life and has governed that way. He hasn't just talked it up as his own "personal choice" the way others do. When the question is put to him in a tangible way, either up or down in legislation or executive policy, he almost always chooses the pro-life position.

I don't think this "truce" idea is smart politics, and I ding him for that, but on the actual issue of abortion he's pretty solidly red.

(Not that I care or reward him for that; that's not my issue. But, just setting the record straight.)

Posted by: Ace at 03:58 PM | Comments (278)
Post contains 185 words, total size 1 kb.

Jesus, this is getting out of control.

Prayers for anyone caught in the melee.

Thanks to Johnny. I think that's John McCormack's picture; I hope he's okay. I'll email him to make sure.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:53 PM | Comments (332)
Post contains 294 words, total size 2 kb.

I don't believe him. He doesn't have a psuedonym and a blog.

He said the layers cited by doubters are evidence of the use of common, off-the-shelf scanning software — not evidence of a forgery. “I have seen a lot of illustrator documents that come from photos and contain those kind of clippings—and it looks exactly like this,” he said.

Tremblay explained that the scanner optical character recognition (OCR) software attempts to translate characters or words in a photograph into text. He said the layers cited by the doubters shows that software at work – and nothing more.

“When you open it in Illustrator it looks like layers, but it doesn’t look like someone built it from scratch. If someone made a fake it wouldn’t look like this,” he said.“Some scanning software is trying to separate the background and the text and splitting element into layers and parts of layers.”

Tremblay also said that during the scanning process, instances where the software was unable to separate text fully from background led to the creation of a separate layer within the document. This could be places where a signature runs over the line of background, or typed characters touch the internal border of the document.

What would a forgery look like?

“I’d be more afraid it’d be fake if it was one in piece. It would be harder to check if it’s a good one if it’s a fake,” Tremblay said.

That's exactly what Nate Goulding, NRO's tech-guy, said, but we won't believe these guys, because they know what they're talking about.

This Market-Ticker guy, though. He knows. He knows. And also, the Kenyan Birth Certificate, signed by Dr. Color-Safe Tide, that's the real one.

And: Before I get more whines that I shouldn't be posting about this, that I should let people have their delusions rather than splitting the party -- fine.

Then how about I don't have to read about this batty bullshit in every thread?

If it's in a thread, then it's being put out to the public, and then I have the right/duty to call nonsense and made-up horseshit for what it is.

If it's some sustaining privately-held fantasy, fine, but then we don't have to keep hearing about this dopiness every ten minutes, either.

Posted by: Ace at 02:44 PM | Comments (215)
Post contains 404 words, total size 3 kb.