They're burning them in Afghanistan, because they've found that the local savages are too savage to tolerate a book without resorting to beheadings.

Understandable, I guess. But it seems to me that we're not burning some books and burning others based on the violent psychopathy of the same group of people, and I'm getting plenty damn sick of it.

Meanwhile, check out the DoD guidance on the Koran:

Item 4, “Handling”:

Clean gloves will be put on in full view of the detainees prior to handling.

Two hands will be used at all times when handling the Koran in manner signaling respect and reverence. Care should be used so that the right hand is the primary one used to manipulate any part of the Koran due to the cultural association with the left hand. Handle the Koran as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art.

Know what reverence means, specifically? Apart from the religious connotation, which is overwhelming here, it also means...

1: honor or respect felt or shown : deference; especially : profound adoring awed respect

2: a gesture of respect (as a bow)

3: the state of being revered

4: one held in reverence —used as a title for a clergyman

Although "adore" now mostly has a secular meaning -- "I adore those shoes" -- its main meaning, still the primary one, is about religious adoration.

Every word in this definition is basically about paying worship to a god. And then add in "deference." In handling their blood-soaked rape-book, we're supposed to show deference to their god and even act as if we adore him (original meaning).

Meanwhile, we're burning Bibles. In both cases, we are modifying our behavior to appease psychotics.

Video at the link. Sickening.

We're not showing respect to the Koran. We're showing respect for the threat of terrorist violence.

That is what we are showing respect for, and they know it. So if they want respect, we've incentivized them to keep on killing us.

Posted by: Ace at 01:14 PM | Comments (272)
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The lawless Obama and lawless Holder are refusing to release documents relating to the murder of a US citizen. Claiming... something. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, claims the release of the documents could somehow compromise 20 active investigations.

[I]n an April 13 letter to Issa, Assistant Attorney General Ronald Welch cited the Justice Department’s policy not to disclose details about “ongoing criminal investigations” as a reason not to comply with the document demand.

Issa says the objection is spurious.

“We are not conducting a concurrent investigation with the Department of Justice, but rather an independent investigation of the Department of Justice,” Issa says in his April 20 letter, citing three historical examples of congressional oversight of Justice Department investigations, including during the Teapot Dome scandal in 1922.

ATF did provide access to four documents for “in camera” review at Justice Department headquarters, Issa says, but the documents were “general” and did not “directly pertain” to Operation Fast and Furious, in which guns were permitted to be smuggled to Mexico.

Issa's hunch (almost certainly right) is that it's "unfathomable" that such an operation and such a policy could have been enacted by the permanent bureaucracy, on its own initiative, without getting a greenlight from the "top officials," by which I think he means political appointees. So Obama's refusal to comply is not based on any legitimate law enforcement purpose but is due to his simple desire to protect his political appointees.

Who approved this operation? That's a simple question and could not possibly jeopardize any prosecutions.

So why isn't that basic question answered?

Pretty obvious, huh? That's the question they really don't want to answer, but an answer that has nothing at all to do with jeopardizing any prosecutions.

Posted by: Ace at 12:58 PM | Comments (66)
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Interesting topic. A speech by a guy named Dr. Robert Lustig making this case below the fold, naming the fructose component of sugar as teh primary villain.

There's also this article about it.

This writer, Gary Taubes, is an in-the-bag Atkins theory believer (and concedes as much in this article, disclosing that). He was the guy who, more than anyone, set off the Atkins craze of the 00's with his big article in the New York Times Sunday section on fat, provocatively headlined, "Have we been wrong all along?"

The Atkins thing had been around since the seventies, but it was that article that turned it into a craze.

I think (I haven't read the whole thing yet) is that Taubes is of the opinion that sugar (and other carbs) are the villains, whereas Lustig is more selective in choice of villain, and thinks it's mostly just fructose. But apart from that point, they're mostly on the same page.

I haven't read the whole article yet or watched the full lecture, so I don't know if I buy the Villain Fructose claim.
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Posted by: Ace at 11:42 AM | Comments (410)
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Check Newsbusters if you want a transcript, but I think you have to watch the video to see the stupid.

He's trying to disprove the thesis that spending is the problem, not revenues, and to prove that, he talks up a chart plotting revenues and spending which... proves that spending keeps increasing every single year (and increasingly increasing in the past three years) while revenue is variable but mostly fluctuates up and down around the same static line (depending on the economy, of course -- good economies = high income = high tax revenue).

I mean, his own frickin' chart shows that the variability in revenue has a flat trendline and only goes up or down depending on an expanding or contracting economy, whereas the only thing that's steadily increasing is the red "spending" line.

And he just talks past that. I don't think he's lying; I think he actually doesn't even understand the lines in front of him.

Oh, he lies on top of that, mis-dating the timing of falls in revenues (for example, revenues fell beginning in 2000 not because of the Bush tax cuts (which were still a year and a half in the future) but because of the Clinton recession.

And he gets flummoxed when the lines aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing (like the revenue line going up big in the middle of Bush's term, thanks to the high tax revenues generated by a growing economy even with a lower tax rate).

But look, he's obviously stupid, and I don't expect him to understand these complex inferences from his stupid chart. But the big picture, right there in front of him in pretty colors? That much I think that someone paid to lecture people ought to get.

"Even I can understand what these lines are doing," he says, self-deprecatingly, but not quite self-deprecatingly enough, because, in fact: He doesn't understand what these lines are doing.

If you say something like "even I'm smart enough to get this" but in fact you're not smart enough to get it, you're not being self-deprecating. You're making an empty boast.

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Posted by: Ace at 10:54 AM | Comments (124)
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At Hot Air. A bad poll for Obama, even with a big Democratic skew.

Even among Democrats, Obama isn’t a slam-dunk. He gets 70% of that 35% to commit to his re-election bid, but 12% “definitely” plan to vote against him. Obama-cons are in short supply as well, as only 3% of Republicans in the survey will vote for the incumbent. Nearly a majority of independents have made up their mind to oppose Obama, 47%, with only 32% planning on casting a vote for him and 21% undecided.

The problem is that white as a whole are moving away from him. And, specifically, working class whites, who were never really a strongly pro-Obama group, are even less supportive of him now than they were in 2008.

Even back in 2008, in the primary between Hillary and Obama, working class whites were a tough get for Obama.

Recent voting patterns underscore Obama's continued poor performance with these voters, who are often pivotal in general election swing states like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

I won't quote the now-irrelevant specific numbers from an old poll, but it was basically a 60+/35 split among the white working class for Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Check out this bias from this article:

The AP-Yahoo poll shows less educated whites present a problem to Obama in part because of who they are. Besides being poorer, they tend to be older than white college graduates — and Clinton has done strongly with older white voters.

Yet political professionals and analysts say more is at play. They blame Obama's problems with blue-collar whites on their greater reluctance to embrace his bid to become the first black president, and his failure to address their concerns about job losses and the battered economy specifically enough.

Notice how casually this imputation of racism is made. The white working class were not terribly impressed by the abstract, almost-entirely-irrelevant agenda item of getting a half-black man into the Oval Office, but instead sought concrete, wallet-level proposals from Obama on how to actually fix the economy.

I would suggest it was the Always Bet on Black contingent that was more racist, the white working class that wanted some concrete policy details that wasn't racist. But, whatever.

Now, in the actual 2008 election, Barack Obama did fairly well with with whites (and white working class voters, too). Not enough to take these groups outright -- few Democrats manage that. But the trick for a Democrat is not to win whites, but to lose them by a narrow enough margin that the huge Democratic margins among minorities and college-educated single women can put him over the top.

He did that in 2008 -- he lost whites by a small enough percentage that single women and minorities gave him a comfortable majority. But he's losing them now. Or, past perfect again: Has lost them.

[P]olls consistently suggest he may struggle to match the modest 43 percent support among whites that he drew in 2008, according to the Edison Research exit poll. In the 2010 mid-term election, according to the Edison exit poll, just 37 percent of whites backed Democrats in House races, while 60 percent supported Republicans-the highest share of the white vote Republicans have won in a House election in the history of modern polling. Obama's approval rating among all whites in the Pew survey stands at a similar 38 percent.

But remember the 2010 electorate was probably much whiter than the 2012 electorate will be.

...

Obama's best group in the white electorate remains well-educated women, who tend toward more liberal positions on social issues as well as greater receptivity to government activism. In the new poll, 56 percent of college-educated white women said they approved of Obama's performance. That's a slight improvement from the 52 percent of such women who voted for him in 2008, according to the Edison Research exit poll. It's also a big improvement from the 43 percent of college-plus white women who backed Democratic House candidates in 2010. (Well-educated white women provided substantially more support for Democrats in some key 2010 Senate races, including contests in Colorado, California and Wisconsin.)

Good Lord. Well-educated white women. If you're wondering how Obama's job approval stands at 45% or better, this is the group that's screwing everything up.

(Present company excepted, of course!)

The rest of the white electorate remains deeply cool to Obama, the Pew survey found....

Obama's approval rating in the Pew survey stood at just 34 percent among white women without a college education-the so-called waitress moms. Democrats have often had high hopes for capturing those economically-strained, culturally-conservative women, but the new result only underscores their consistent Republican tilt: Obama won just 41 percent of them in 2008, and House Democrats just 34 percent of them in 2010.

The toughest group for Obama remains white men without a college-education-the blue-collar workers who constituted the foundation of the Democratic electoral coalition from 1932 to 1968. Just 35 percent of them said they approve of his performance in the Pew poll. That's below even the 39 percent of them Obama carried in 2008, though slightly above the Democrats' microscopic 32 percent showing with them in 2010, according to the exit poll. All of these results suggest that the gap between Obama's support among college-educated white women and non-college white men-which stood at a formidable 13 percentage points in 2008-might easily widen even further in 2012.

All told: If you're in a liberal-leaning group and are comfortable enough economically to only care about more abstract things like social issues (abortion forever), racial solidarity (gotta give our brother a second chance), racial condescension (wouldn't be fair to boot out a black guy just because he's unqualified and a failure), and also don't care about taxes, you're pro-Obama. Plus, anyone getting handouts from the government, or whose jobs depend directly on a large government.

Everyone else is moving away. Way too slowly for me to feel comfortable about it, but it does look like there's movement away.

Obama needs to do better with one group that has turned strongly against him: older whites. Older whites were never big fans of his, but since ObamaCare and everything else they have turned strongly against him.

And that, of course, is the reason the GOP is going to talk up Ryan's proposal but only in abstract, let's-have-a-conversation terms, and that's why the Democrats are going to run on that like there's no tomorrow. This is the big swing group in this election -- if older whites can be persuaded that no one's worth voting for in 2012, or, even better, that Obama, for all his failures, will keep Medicare intact (right until the moment it implodes and the checks stop entirely), he can actually win this thing.

Posted by: Ace at 09:42 AM | Comments (243)
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The WSJ confirms what's apparent.

In an interview, Mr. Trump said people are finally realizing he is serious. "Originally they said, 'Oh, Trump is just having a good time,' " he said. "Then they were saying, 'Well, this is getting interesting.' Then, as of today they are really taking it seriously. I'm not playing games. I am totally serious."

Mr. Trump called one of Iowa's leading evangelical leaders last week, and has put out lines to tea-party groups in the state. He also is contacting prominent national religious leaders, while checking off other boxes typical for GOP contenders, such as agreeing to sign the Americans for Tax Reform pledge to never raise taxes.

"Donald's as serious as a heart attack" about running, said Tony Fabrizio, a top Republican pollster who has been in frequent contact with Mr. Trump.

Here's are the benefit of Trump, and the likely downfall of Trump: He's a relentless self-promoter, has a hustler's mentality of saying what is needed to close the sale, and has the overconfidence of a billionaire.

All of those things are actually positive -- to an extent -- in a candidate. They all come with high negatives, though.

I'm particularly worried about that "hustler" thing. Closing the deal is the be-all end-all for a certain type of sharp operator, and if it means fudging a few things here and there, so be it.

I'm a little alarmed at the breezy lack of candor in telling the GOP what he believes it wants to hear in order to, as they say in Glengarry Glen Ross, sign on the line that is dotted.

Check out his recent interview with CBN’s David Brody. Discussing his religious beliefs, he volunteered, “I think the Bible is certainly, it is the book. It is the thing.” That sounds more like a Larry King blurb than a declaration of faith. And can you just feel the passion when asked how often he attends church? “As much as I can. Always on Christmas. Always on Easter. Always when there’s a major occasion. And during the Sundays.”

Oh well, “during the Sundays.” Never mind then.

I don't believe that answer is really candid. I don't believe that Trump goes to church on "the Sundays." Some Sundays, maybe. "The Sundays?" The whole back half of that answer is Trump realizing that by saying he goes to church on Christmas and Easter he's actually telling religious voters he's not one of them, so he adds in what he thinks will close the deal -- he also goes to church on "the Sundays."

It's not candid. I'm a cynical guy so I can sort of go with this if this is our best shot at ousting Obama. I won't withhold support because of "the Sundays." The way I see it Obama is lying left and right and I'm not going to get squeamish if our guy is lying left and right too.

My problem with these serial fibs is not that I'm morally offended but that I think they won't work. I think they'll be understood, widely, to be less than candid, and thus Trump will get the reputation (if he doesn't have it already) of being a typical New York City sharp-operator/hustler who's willing to say whatever's necessary to con the rubes.

I mean, the abortion thing -- he breezily announced at CPAC "I'm pro-life; I bet you didn't know that." But he hadn't been pro-life until this declaration; he had been avowedly pro-choice.

When you flip-flop on an important gut/values question like that, you're supposed to have a story to explain your conversion (the elder Bush had a story about the "little brown ones" or something, his adopted grandchildren), and Trump is in fact checking that box with a story. But again, it doesn't really sound credible. It sounds like a hustle.

"A friend of mine, his wife was pregnant, in this case married, and she was pregnant, and he was going to—they were going to—he didn't really want the baby. And he was telling me the story, he was crying as he was telling me. They ended up for some reason—amazingly, through luck, because they didn't have the right timing—he ends up having the baby. And the baby is the apple of his eye. He says it's the greatest thing that ever happened to him . . . And I am pro-life."

Trump is like 65 and it's not credible that he has too many friends of any sort of age where they might be considering abortion. Of course the story is constructed such that Trump can always refuse to name his friend ("it's too personal"), but the suspicion rises that this "friend" is less than what we typically call "real" and more of what we call a "hypothetical construct."

Is this going to sell? I don't think so. The GOP base is rabid to punt out Obama (I know I am), but that very rabidness suggests we need to exercise some caution about who is most likely to achieve this task. (Nevermind the secondary goal of actually governing in a manner consistent with our aspirations and values.)

Trump has never had an interest in politics before, either. Not a real intellectual interest. He's flirted with the idea of running, but he's never been much for policy.

Some may call that a plus -- in a way, it is -- but it means his knowledge base is limited. Last week a reporter tried to ask one of those questions they only ask of Republican candidates, the pop-quiz "please get this wrong so we can start The Narrative that you're dumb" question. In this case, they asked Trump how many Representatives were in Congress, and Trump apparently didn't know, because he said something like "I'm not going to answer that, this isn't a history test."

Big deal? Well, not really, but they did an awful lot with lesser stumbles from Palin.

But going back to abortion, it's pretty obvious from this article in in LifeNews that Trump knows almost nothing about the policy question surrounding abortion. LifeNews headlines this as Trump "falters" on the abortion question, and it's hard to argue with that interpretation.

Businessman Donald Trump faltered when responding to a series of questions on abortion that saw NBC reporter Savannah Guthrie attempt to challenge him on the so-called right to privacy the Supreme Court invented to create a “right” to abortion.

“Is there a right to privacy in the Constitution?” Guthrie asked Trump.

“I guess there is, I guess there is. And why, just out of curiosity, why do you ask that question?” Trump responded, his tone of voice changing to one of skepticism.

Guthrie asked Trump how his newfound pro-life view “squares” with the so-called privacy right and Trump replied to the question with an answer that made it appear he doesn’t understand the legal arguments underpinning the abortion debate.

He said, “Well, that’s a pretty strange way of getting to pro-life. I mean, it’s a very unique way of asking about pro-life. What does that have to do with privacy? How are you equating pro-life with privacy? ”

NBC’s Guthrie then said, “well, you know about the Roe v. Wade decision” and Trump appeared to finally understand the context of the question. “Yes, right sure,” he said. “Look, I am pro-life. I’ve said it. I’m very strong there.”

Now, Roe v. Wade rests almost entirely on this suggestion of a "right to privacy" that extends to contraceptive choices and, by the next step in the reasoning daisy-chain, to abortion. This is all very basic. You don't have to accept this reasoning in order to know it, of course. Most pro-lifers are fully fluent with this line of argument -- they know the argument; they just reject it.

But Trump appears to not understand the central argument in the most divisive hot-button issue of the last 30 years.

And his conclusion -- "I'm very strong there [on pro-life]" -- is completely undermined by the fact he doesn't seem to get this. How can he be "very strong" on this issue if he's not even interested enough to read a four sentence digest of the holding of Roe v. Wade.

I find this whole answer very Freudian. Let me bold-face the part I think is telling.

NBC’s Guthrie then said, “well, you know about the Roe v. Wade decision” and Trump appeared to finally understand the context of the question. “Yes, right sure,” he said. “Look, I am pro-life. I’ve said it. I’m very strong there.”

That's what concerns me -- the "I've said it." The equating of actually believing in a position with merely saying you believe in that position.

I just find that to be a Freudian slip, unintentionally revealing his thought processes.

"I'm very conservative on ObamaCare. I want to repeal it. Look, I've said it."

"I just signed the promise to never raise taxes. I'm very anti-tax. Look, I've said it."

"I'm very religious. I got to church on the Sundays. Look, I've said it."

Yes, you have said it. The doubt is over whether you mean it.

Honestly, I've got nothing against Trump. I watch his dumb tv shows.

But it sounds and awful lot like he's just checking boxes off a list, and when questions are asked about his commitment to these positions or just his sincerity in expressing them, the answer seems to be "Look, I've said it."

Like: "Look, I said what you wanted me to say."

AllahPundit wondered why Trump's obvious insincerity is being given a pass while Mitt Romney is raked over the coals for similar (or less troubling) stuff. All Allah could figure is that Mitt Romney is trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, and they resent that and punish him for that, whereas Trump is so blatant in his hucksterism it's borderline honest.

And so people aren't holding it against him, because no one's actually deceived.

"Look, I've said it. I don't mean it and you know I don't mean it but at least I've said it. If you want me to say it, I've said it."

Is it going to work? No, I don't think so. And don't even get me started on what I think his soon-to-be-leaked divorce records will turn up.

I just don't understand why people who supposedly rank abortion as one of their top issues would rule Romney unacceptable because, in order to win a race in abortion-crazy Massachusetts, he said he was pro-choice, whereas Trump has always said he was pro-choice not to get anything out of the statement but, more likely,just because he really was, and just really thought it was the right common-sense policy.

I think people just want an aggressive posture towards Obama. I get that emotionally, but I think people are not asking themselves if a tough-talker is the best type of candidate to actually do the job that's necessary, of if tough-talk is emotionally pleasing and cathartic but actually not central to the important thing, which isn't talk, but action and victory.

This is why I keep pushing candidates with less-big personalities. Yeah, they're not exciting. But I don't want this election to turn on whether the public finds our candidate acceptable. I want our candidate's acceptability to be sort of the default position, not really the central question at all.

I want the election to turn entirely on Obama. We win that contest 9 out of 10 times.

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (246)
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(Someday I will finish part 3 of my econ series. Pinkie swear!)

The good news? Employment is ticking back up. The DOOM! news? Most of the jobs aren't going to take full advantage of that astrophysics degree you took on $200K in debt to get.

$1500 an ounce for gold, baby. As big a gold-bug as I am, this is ridiculous. This is fear-buying driving a bubble. In a way, I'm glad: when the bubble pops (and it will), there's going to be a lot of cut-price gold hitting the market. That's when I'm going to buy.

Some valuable insight on who pays taxes and who doesn't. A point I want to stress is that paying taxes is a utilitarian issue, not necessarily a moral one. Paying more in tax (or less in tax) does not make you a better (or a worse) person, a priori. The problem is not with the taxpayers; it's with our maddeningly complicated and outdated tax system. (And with a government that squanders too damned much of the taxes we do pay.)

Annals of the boned: apparently, California's pension debt is "imaginary". It's just...why, it's just crazy-talk to suggest otherwise! Lies! Lies and base perfidy!

Over in the private sector, though, the ugly truth is becoming too obvious to ignore even for unions long isolated from the realities of the marketplace. (Private-sector unions are also learning -- again, the hard way -- a basic truth of investing: you can't rely on the twin genies of compound-interest and ever-increasing valuations to make up for a lack of contributions to your savings.)

More on the "new spirit of public service" in the Golden Age of His Majesty Barack Obama: pre-emptive retirement.

I put this in the sidebar yesterday, but it needs to be posted again: we're making war on our young people.

In their 2004 book, The Coming Generational Storm, authors Laurence J. Kotlikoff and Scott Burns accurately predicted the immensity of today's entitlements imbalance, and lamented its impact on younger generations.

"This is not just a moral crisis of the first order," they wrote. "This is the moral crisis of our age. We are collectively endangering our children's economic futures without giving them the slightest say in the matter. We are doing this systematically and with malice aforethought. Worst of all, we are pretending not to notice."

If this were a more moral age, we'd be ashamed of ourselves.

Frankly, I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news. Boomers apparently aren't leaving much to their kids when they shuffle off this mortal coil. Legacies are important to many families, and this news does tend to somewhat confirm the stereotype of Boomers as being selfish and self-absorbed, but then again I've always thought that people value their wealth more when they earn it as opposed to inheriting it. I think Junior is better-served by making his own fortune in the world, however spendthrift Mom and Dad choose to be. And there's more to a legacy than money. Values, morals, honor...a sense of family. You can't buy that stuff at any price. (Via Insty.)

The EU Commission: We must have fiscal responsibility! Austerity! A tough approach to solving our debt problems! Also, we need a 5% increase in our budget. Why? Because it will help to avoid squandering more money...somehow or other. Apparently. I guess.

And you know those sky-high gas prices? Yeah, they're not going down any time soon.

[UPDATE 1]: Keith Hennessey on what the recent S&P warning on American debt really means. Well worth a read. (And notable mainly for the fact that S&P finally saw something that was obvious to most of us years ago.)

[UPDATE 2]: Give your hearts to Barack the Just, my children. For He shall make money flow forth as a river to the dry and parched land. Selah.

[UPDATE 3]: Obama in public: That S&P warning means nothing. Nothing! Obama in private: Please, please, S&P, keep our rating at "stable"!

[UPDATE 4]: The GM bailout wasn't quite the success-story for taxpayers that Uncle Sugar hoped it would be. But hey: at least they're selling a lot of cars...in China.

[UPDATE 5] Tom Friedman, 1999: Amazon is doomed! Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon: How's my ass taste, Tom?

[UPDATE 6]: Why are we collectively DOOMed? Look right here, children. We love our bennies. But paying for them? Not so much.
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Posted by: Monty at 05:08 AM | Comments (404)
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Tower, this is Ghost Rider requesting a flyby.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (141)
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From 40 years ago, a dramatization of the typical AoSHQ discussion thread:

..fritz..

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:48 PM | Comments (58)
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So Which Foreigners Can Speak English The Goodest

Turns out it's the Scandis by far. Which fits with my experience that all Scandi-types are completely fluent in English (the ones that claim they aren't are just lying nordic bastards). This of course helps explain how they've managed to infiltrate every decent country in the world.

As for the other areas of the globe - in Asia the Malaysians are the best English speakers while in South America it's Argentina. And within the US it's probably every single 7-11 and dry cleaning establishment.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:18 PM | Comments (655)
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