He'll be on O'Reilly on Mondays, and other spots on other shows as they need a guest.

He's a funny guy. For years I was missing Howard Stern, but I think I like Carolla better. Not just politically (though he is a libertarian-leaning conservative; he doesn't know he's a conservative -- he thinks what he's saying is just "obvious common sense" -- but he doesn't understand there's an entire political movement devoted to repudiating obvious common sense).

In addition to being funny, he's frequently just an interesting critic and contrarian, and conducts good interviews.

Here's a stunt he started (though his fans carried it further). He hates the injection of passionfruit into everything. He doesn't want passionfruit iced tea; he just wants iced tea. And he's sick of restaurants asking him, "Is passionfruit iced tea okay?"

Well no. It's not.

Realizing that the only way to get your way in America is to gin up a hysterical health crisis scare, he has created a crusade to end deaths due to allergic reactions to passionfruit (something that doesn't seem to exist, but who cares).

So let's finally put an end to Passionfruit Allergies and the thousands of deaths they are not suspected to cause.

Come on, it's kind of funny.

Anyway, his podcast is free on iTunes. It's primary value is for housework and cooking and exercising/walking. Stuff like that.

Oh, and driving, of course.

If you have to do such things, throw on the podcast, so you're at least listening to something funny.

Thanks to Stuiec.

Posted by: Ace at 11:56 AM | Comments (156)
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Looks like Gallup is going to settle in the 3-5 point lead range. A nice night of polling for him fell off the seven day track yesterday, but it seems to have been replaced today by another good night.

A new poll in swing state Florida also has it 51-46.

Jim Geraghty is now predicting that Romney will win the popular vote.

I thought this was a good point:

We can debate whether those remaining undecideds, ranging from 3 to 8 percent in most of these polls, will break heavily for the challenger. In 2004, George W. Bush and John Kerry split the remaining undecideds roughly evenly. But the one scenario that political scientists deem virtually impossible is one where undecideds who have declined to support the incumbent all year suddenly break heavily in favor of him. For most of the remaining undecideds, the choice is between voting for the challenger and staying home.

There is some question about whether undecideds break evenly, or break largely against the incumbent, but it's worth noting there isn't much argument they break in favor of the incumbent. (By the way: If you want some analysis of that -- and why Nate Silver's model may have a very huge flawed assumption built into it -- read this guy's take on the Incumbent Rule.)

Frustratingly, Obama continues clinging to the same small, but crucial, two point lead he's had in Ohio for weeks.

For some pushback on that, Romney's team offers this analysis suggesting Ohio is breaking Romney's way.

They make a point near the end: Obama has a lead in early voting, but that's based on their urging of high propensity voters to vote early. Those people would have voted anyway, early or on election day. Turning them out early doesn't really help the cause (unless... they vote twice, which is always a live possibility in Democratic machine politics).

Meanwhile, Romney is pursuing a strategy of pushing low- to medium- propensity voters to vote early, trusting that high propensity voters will turn out on their own. Such folks might be non-voters turned into voters.

In Ohio, Independents Point To the Winner: A good point tipped by Lacy, noting that in past elections, whoever won independents won the state in Ohio.

Posted by: Ace at 11:00 AM | Comments (272)
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Is this actually Cokie Roberts? I don't know, but I'm laughing anyway.

She's really jonesin' for some sweet, sweet Applebee's dessert. If I'm following this right, she gave up on finding the nearest restaurant after Twitter didn't give her directions and went straight to looking for the recipe. Alas, it appears that didn't work either.

Maybe one of you morons could help her out.

Update: It looks like a spoof, actually. Still, it's hilarious.

Update 2: Now I'm not so sure. She has some famous early followers, including Diane Sawyer, Bret Baier and a ton of ABC/NPR/Politico newspeople.

Update 3: Her first follower was NPR News, where she works. I'm guessing they had her start one. So, I'm going with real after all.

Also, I'm spending far too much time on this... more...

Posted by: JohnE. at 10:35 AM | Comments (107)
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The Spectre gunships -- just to clarify, we're calling them "gunships" even though they're planes, because "gunplanes" sounds stupid -- were already in Libya. They did not have to deploy from Sicily (which itself would have been a four hour flight -- enough time, actually, to get involved in the seven-hour attack).

Meanwhile, Joe Biden, the most embarrassing buffoon on the face of the earth, offered his most dignified consolation to the bereaved father.

Mr Woods told Mr Beck that he was disappointed by his meeting with senior officials at the event marking the return of the dead men's bodies.

He said that Mr Biden had acted inappropriately, asking the Woods family in a 'loud and boisterous' tone, 'Did your son always have balls the size of cue balls?'

Mr Woods asked, 'Are these the words of someone who is sorry?'

A man's son is dead, and you're asking jovial questions in a "loud and boisterous" tone of voice?

Ground-Pounder: The Spectre gunship is just a killer. When it's deployed against ground troops, it just obliterates them.

The Spectre has a a single mission, and that's to pour firepower on to ground targets. It's not a fighter. It's not fast. It's not super-high-tech.

It's just heavily armored (for a plane) and heavily armed to deal death to troops on the ground.

My point here is that ground troops have two reactions to the Spectre: They either flee, or they die.

It seems very strange that these planes were not deployed to end the attack at any time during the seven hour assault.

There were also two Predator drones loitering over the battle. Were they not armed? Even if they weren't (which I doubt), we seem to have had a fair amount of intelligence during the battle.

Commenters... are objecting that we don't know the Spectre were still in Libya.

It's a fair point and I concede it. We don't know this. They may have been moved out of country by this time.

Of course that raises the next question: Why would you do that?

So we do need some questioning on this: Were there Spectres in Libya?

Spectre and Spooky, Clean Up: Andy tells me commenters are right, it's "Spectre" (British spelling) not "Specter" (American spelling), and that "Spooky" is the nickname of a Vietnam-era plane that is entirely unrelated to the Spectre. [Update - Andy: It seems they un-retired "Spooky" for a variant of the AC-130. Whatever you call it, those guys needed one.]

Corrected: Tyrone's father is named Charles Woods, not Mark, as I mistakenly believed.

Posted by: Ace at 10:07 AM | Comments (379)
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As @benk84 pointed out in his headlines, there is a massive and repulsive scandal at the BBC.

I'll sum it up. This guy, Jimmy Savile:

...who looks like a monstrous pedophile, was, it seems, a monstrous pedophile.

He was a top BBC figure, the host, I believe, of their Tops of the Pops show and other crap of that kind. So, being a major player at Britain's state-run media, he was permitted to go on a rampage of abuse for decades.

When I say that he exceeded Jerry Sandusky's offenses, I'm not overstating things. By pure count of victims alleged -- alleged, but not proven -- he exceeded Sandusky's offenses by an order of magnitude.

The number of possible sexual abuse victims being investigated under Operation Yewtree is now understood to be approaching 300.

He did a lot of charity work, visiting hospitals to, supposedly, raise the spirits of mentally unstable girls (whose credibility would be in doubt if they said anything).

And... right there at the hospitals, he's alleged to have molested them.

Former patient June Thornton said that when she was recovering from an operation there in May 1972 she saw Savile molest a brain-damaged girl.

"I thought at the time that he was a relative but then he started kissing her neck, running his hands up and down her arms and then started to molest her," she said.

For reasons I could not possibly guess at, he was put in charge of Broadmoor psychiatric hospital (despite being a DJ without any qualifications in psychiatry or, well, anything) and given literally gold-plated keys to the whole hospital.

He once boasted of having a "bedroom" at the hospital.

I suppose we should throw a flag of caution here -- in the nineties, we had our own Molestation Panic, and most of that turned out to be pure nonsense.

One thing, though, that suggests this is legit is that Savile had a few accusations made against him in the past, before this became a cause celebre. In 1959, for example, he paid off cops to get them to drop an "interference with young women" charge made against him when he was a nightclub promoter. A woman accused him of rape right in his caravan at the BBC center. Another woman came forward in the 90s to allege he'd molested her in the 70s.

And throughout his career "rumors swirled," as they say.

Savile died in 2011. Recently, reporters at the BBC's Newsnight (which I gather is a news-magazine type show, like 60 Minutes) was preparing a report on all this -- and the report was killed by higher-ups. The next week the BBC ran a series of tribute documentaries to Savile.

The BBC claims (or at least they initially claimed) they hadn't "killed" the story, they had merely told the reporter to keep digging and finding more evidence and that sort of thing.

The reporter disagrees with that claim:

Mr Rippon stepped aside from his job on Monday after the BBC said his explanation of why Newsnight dropped its Savile investigation was "inaccurate or incomplete".

In the email, Ms MacKean wrote: "Having commissioned the story, Peter Rippon keeps saying he's lukewarm about it and is trying to kill it by making impossible editorial demands."

She reportedly claimed: "When we rebut his points, he resorts to saying, well, it was 40 years ago ... the girls were teenagers, not too young ... they weren't the worst kind of sexual offences etc."

Here's the NYT connection. Mark Thompson was the Director-General of the BBC, from 2004 until currently. So he was the top man at the BBC when the decision to kill the Savile story was made.

He was just hired as CEO of the New York Times Company (the parent corporation which owns the Times and a smattering of other properties.

His story about what he knew and when he knew it has already changed:

“I was not notified or briefed about the Newsnight investigation, nor was I involved in any way in the decision not to complete and air the investigation,” Thompson said in a statement released Monday. He added that during his tenure as director general, he “never heard any allegations or received any complaints about Jimmy Savile,” and believed that the decision to cancel the investigation “was made solely for journalistic reasons.”

Margaret Sullivan, The New York Times’ public editor, was skeptical of Thompson’s blanket denial, asking “how likely” it was that he “knew nothing” about the Savile investigation. “A director general of a giant media company is something like a newspaper’s publisher,” Sullivan wrote. “Would a publisher be very likely to know if an investigation of one of its own people on sexual abuse charges had been killed?”

Thompson has now amended his original statement, claiming that he did, in fact, discuss the investigation at a 2011 Christmas party. But, he said, the journalist who mentioned the report “did not go into what Newsnight was investigating.” On Wednesday, Thompson told the London Times that he had “formed the impression” and was intuitively “aware that they have been looking at allegations of abuse of some kind related to Jimmy Savile,” appearing to contradict his previous denials.

Meanwhile, the BBC is "at war" with itself, with another magazine style show, Panorama, shredding the BBC's official corporate statement about the killing of the story.

Posted by: Ace at 09:43 AM | Comments (122)
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It's on FoxNews now. Livestream here.

Posted by: Ace at 09:24 AM | Comments (114)
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I hope you understand I don't mean anything bad by "disobeyed orders." I think their action casts doubt on the orders themselves.

This is bizarre.

The military was never ordered to act, and even the local CIA was ordered to stand down.

Stevens and Smith were literally left to fend for themselves, against a terrorist attack conducted by, what, 15-20 people (or more), all armed, including with mortars and RPGs.

Fox News has learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. Consulate and subsequent attack several hours later was denied by U.S. officials -- who also told the CIA operators twice to "stand down" rather than help the ambassador's team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.

Former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods was part of a small team who was at the CIA annex about a mile from the U.S. Consulate where Ambassador Chris Stevens and his team came under attack. When he and others heard the shots fired, they informed their higher-ups at the annex to tell them what they were hearing and requested permission to go to the consulate and help out. They were told to "stand down," according to sources familiar with the exchange. Soon after, they were again told to "stand down."

Woods and at least two others ignored those orders and made their way to the Consulate which at that point was on fire. Shots were exchanged. The quick reaction force from the CIA annex evacuated those who remained at the Consulate and Sean Smith, who had been killed in the initial attack. They could not find the ambassador and returned to the CIA annex at about midnight.

At that point, they called again for military support and help because they were taking fire at the CIA safe house, or annex. The request was denied. There were no communications problems at the annex, according those present at the compound. The team was in constant radio contact with their headquarters. In fact, at least one member of the team was on the roof of the annex manning a heavy machine gun when mortars were fired at the CIA compound. The security officer had a laser on the target that was firing and repeatedly requested back-up support from a Specter gunship, which is commonly used by U.S. Special Operations forces to provide support to Special Operations teams on the ground involved in intense firefights. The fighting at the CIA annex went on for more than four hours -- enough time for any planes based in Sigonella Air base, just 480 miles away, to arrive. Fox News has also learned that two separate Tier One Special operations forces were told to wait, among them Delta Force operators.

I've wondered about the Specter option before. It's the perfect plane for this sort of thing -- it loiters slowly over a target. It's heavily armored (for a plane). It's got huge guns for obliterating ground target.

One guy was aiming a laser on a ground target, painting it for a plane to see. To drop a bomb, to attack with very heavy machineguns.

But the laser itself is nothing, absolutely harmless.

So he sat up there on the roof, risking his life to paint a target with laser light, and no one bothered to send anything to hit that target.

Who Gave The Order To Let My Son Die? Asks Charles Woods, father of slain SEAL Tyrone Woods.

Woods continues: “Apparently even the State Department had a live stream and was aware of their calls for help. My son wasn’t even there. He was at a safe house about a mile away. He got the distress call; he heard them crying for help; that’s why he and Glen risked their lives to go that extra mile just to take care of the situation. And I’m sure that wasn’t the only one received that distress call—you know, come save our lives … I’m sure that other people in the military, in the State Department, in the White House, received that same call that he would receive. And I’m sure that most military people would jump at the chance … to protect that life [and] not leave anyone behind.”

Maybe they should arrest Charles Woods. He's engaging in dangerous speech.

Corrected: Tyrone's father is named Charles Woods, not Mark, as I mistakenly believed.

Posted by: Ace at 08:16 AM | Comments (709)
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I don't know what data we need to get these guys to make a major play for this state.

Only 2% are undecided in this poll. I suppose that's something that suggests you don't necessarily bother with a lot of ads. But GOTV personnel can be moved there, maybe.

Romney/Ryan are now outspending (by a fair amount) the Democrats across battleground states.

This week alone, Republican groups are combining to spend $59 million across 13 states. Obama and two other Democratic groups are spending a comparatively paltry $36 million across 10 states. Collectively, the Republican side has spent $115 million more than the Democratic side — $539 million versus $424 million, according to sources watching the advertising market.

But the big advantages in ad spending are in states we're now sort of assuming Romney wins (Florida) or where we already knew he was fighting hard (Ohio).

Not in Wisconsin.

Posted by: Ace at 07:49 AM | Comments (224)
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If you were a red blooded, heterosexual, American male striding the earth like a Colossus between, say 1976-1983, then you knew two things:

1) Stevie Nicks was an absolute goddess and
2) Never take your truck to a Fleetwood Mac concert, because Fleetwood Mac sucked the chrome off of trailer hitches.

How to square this circle? You did like I did...you made a "Jefferson Bible Mix-Tape" of Fleetwood Mac songs, keeping anything Nicks sang and ditching anything fronted by the rest of the band.

Had Obama done this (and I cast no aspersions as to why he might not have...I'm not HillBuzz, after all) he would undoubtedly have heard the classic Nicks song "Gold Dust Woman". And he would have learned a couple of things that would have served him well in the closing days of this campaign.

Fortunately for all of us, he didn't. more...

Posted by: Jack M. at 06:55 AM | Comments (283)
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• Florida Sun Sentinel Flips From 2008 And Endorses Romney
  
• Nork Army Minister Executed With A Mortar Round
  
• Romney Places TV Ads In Minnesota
  
• Mooch Wakes Up Jimmy Kimmel In Dopey Skit
  
• Taylor Swift And Conor Kennedy Break Up.
  
• Current TV Is Up For Sale
  
• When Americans Saw The Real Obama
  
• GOP Enthusiam At An All Time High
  
• Obama Supporters Rally Around Anti-Mormonism
  
• October Surprises Flop
  
• Brilliant Rachel Maddow Is Brilliant
  
• Dem Rep's Son Under Criminal Investigation After James O'Keefe's Video
  
• CNN Ripping Obama?
  
• Obama Endorses Same Sex Marriage Initiatives In Three States
  
• Meatloaf Endorses Romney (warning video)
  
• Adelson Cuts A 10 Million Dollar Check To Romney PAC
  
• In Case You've Missed It, There Is A Massive Scandal At The BBC Right Now
  
• Romney Winning Whites 60-37
  

Follow me on Twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:12 AM | Comments (290)
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