MSNBC's new "Lean Forward" ad doubles as an ad for the Democratic Party.

Richard Wolffe -- once of Newsweek, now of MSNBC -- says the only reason one could oppose Susan Rice's nomination is racism.

CNN's Don Lemon says that any suggestion that Obama gave his coalition "gifts" is "just hatin' -- drinking the haterade.

Remarkable on that last one. Obama ran on a platform of deliverables, often in the form of cash, for his base but it's now "haterade" to note that.

I guess he ran on Big Picture Ideas, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 03:46 PM | Comments (269)
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You had me at "Cop Beats Up Activist Dressed As."

I don't know what sort of activist he was. They say he was chasing cars with a squirt bottle. more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:05 PM | Comments (430)
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That's how I read this.

I don't think Obama wants the nominee to have to make a series of promises about disclosure on Fast & Furious.

Posted by: Ace at 01:53 PM | Comments (47)
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Cold dead hands, cream-filled goodness, some assembly required.

RT @CNBC BREAKING: Hostess and Bakers Union agree to mediation, preventing shut down.

Update to Rubio Story: Allah points out that 58% of Republicans, 39% of Independents, and 41% of Democrats think God created man in current form within the last ten thousand years, and those percentages increase when you include those who think man evolved but with divine guidance.

Which means, as he says, that if Democrats were asked this question point-blank, they'd have some political liability too, as Darwin might look great on a bumper sticker but he wouldn't look so good on a political platform. But the media never asks, because the media never asks Democrats wedge-issue questions. Democrats are allowed to vaguely drift along with their chips on multiple numbers at once, while the Republicans are forced by close questioning to place their chips on only a single number.

Posted by: Ace at 01:20 PM | Comments (177)
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Eh. It's a story, I guess.

GQ: How old do you think the Earth is?

Marco Rubio: I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

Seems like an attempt to create a per se bar to fundamentalist Christians serving in political office, or any sort of public position, period.

I don't know if this is a good answer but maybe, when confronted by the typical "crazy fundamentalist Christian beliefs" stuff, a Christian could reply, "I believe in a lot of crazy things. I believe that a loving God has a plan for us, and that He gave His only son to redeem us. The Bible tells me crazy things like that we should feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and that I should love my neighbor as I would have him love me. I'm a zealot with the same crazy beliefs as Isaac Newton, Alexander Hamilton, St. Augustine and C.S. Lewis. I'm filled with crazy ideas like the notion that we should all aspire to be worthy of God's gift of life, in our personal lives as well as how we conduct our affairs of office." *

Eh, I don't know. It's a tough thing. For every person who believes there is another person who either actively disbelieves (and thinks the believers or crazy) or thinks of religion like he thinks of straight vodka -- a sip here and there in public gatherings is okay, but no more than that and never when you're alone, or else you've got a problem.

* Just for disclosure, I'm actually not a believer. I'm just a little annoyed at those of the nonbelievers who have Things All Figured Out and are as intolerant as a pilgrimage of Aztecs.

Posted by: Ace at 12:04 PM | Comments (632)
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And other things you were already pretty sure of. But he gets more specific than your hunch probably was.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, says the unclassified talking points put together by the CIA changed when they got to administration appointees:

"[T]here was not an intelligence failure," Rogers told "Meet the Press" on Sunday.

"The intelligence community had it right, and they had it right early. What happened was it worked its way up through the system of the so-called talking points, which everyone refers to, and then it went up to whatÂ’s called a deputyÂ’s committee...It went to the so-called deputyÂ’s committee, thatÂ’s populated by appointees from the administration. ThatÂ’s where the narrative changed. And so how that thing got back to (Susan) Rice, I think, is probably another question."

And so the White House worked strenuously to provide the American public with a false narrative about the events in Benghazi.

I have this strange notion that whenever someone is assiduously working against the truth, the truth probably does not favor that person.

Posted by: Ace at 11:03 AM | Comments (195)
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Stone's 10 part rehabilitation of the Soviet Union's besmirched reputation is playing on Showtime (a division of CBS).

It's a lie from front to back. As Mohnihan notes, there's nothing "untold" about this. It's the same crap that Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky and the rest of them have been saying since 1945. Every horrible thing the Soviet Union has ever done was done defensively in response to something the US did, or, more often, done defensively in response to something they feared the US would do.

See, they were just trying to be a peaceful aggressive worldwide insurrectionist movement, combined with a peaceful nationalistic expansionist Empire, and the US just kept threatening and "encircling" them with hostility and so they did some things which they're not proud of but you know, we had them against the wall, or we threatened to have them against the wall at some future point.

Posted by: Ace at 10:10 AM | Comments (247)
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In 2010, the GOP attempted to thwart a perfectly electable candidate -- Marco Rubio -- to push a moderate who was also electable, but who was also, unfortunately, Charlie Crist. This produced a lot of blowback (I remember going nuclear on this site), and the GOP decided to stay out of primary contests more or less entirely.

They're rethinking that now, and I think they should. I don't want them protecting incumbents from worthy challengers, and I don't want them always championing the more-moderate candidate on the theory that more-moderate candidates are more electable.

On the other hand, there does seem to be some dysfunction in the primary process. I think the electorate has decided that "electability" is a dirty word, and, given a choice of several contenders, almost goes out of its way to nominate the weakest possible candidate. I do think that the dirty-word of "electability" has to be given consideration in primaries. I am not of the belief that defeats are filled with nobility.

The GOP is trying to figure out some kind of half-step way to keep out of these things, while also getting into them a bit to prevent further Akins, Mourdocks, O'Donnell's, and Angle's.

The link is to Commentary, though these quotes are from Politico:

The first-term Moran, who was elected to the spot last week by his Senate colleagues, tapped incoming Texas freshman Sen. Ted Cruz as a vice chairman for grass roots and outreach. The plan, according to party leaders, is to employ CruzÂ’s tea party star power to help win over activist groups that may be wary of the NRSC and help unify the GOP behind a single candidate in crucial Senate races.

Eh, that'll help some.

In an interview, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the NRSC chairman in the past two cycles, said the party needs to ask itself whether the goal is to prop up the most conservative candidate or push through the most conservative candidate that can win a general election. He said the party is reevalating its approach.

Jim DeMint speaks of "training" candidates to speak in "sanitized soundbites," but I'm not sure if it's just a case of telling people to fudge and maybe lie a little.

One problem in our primary contest right now is that there is no pushback from the middle against the right. Now, hear me out on this: If someone in a debate had turned to Akin and asked about the exception for rape, we would have heard about this, possibly, far earlier in the process, and voters could have adjusted their vote at that point. However, because the primaries are now largely a competition to get to the furthest right (or to appear that way, at least), no one asks a question like this. To ask the question would be to brand oneself as a moderate, and thus lose votes.

But that's the only way to actually flush someone's edgier opinions out, to question them about those opinions. Otherwise, the question never gets asked in the primary...and then three days after a primary a reporter asks it, and there you go.

It's not that I want the moderate to win these things. (Although if a candidate is simply too conservative to get elected, then yes, I'd support the moderate.) It's that normally in politics there is something of a struggle between wings, a debate, an airing of distinctions between candidates, and if everyone is going to posture as The Most Conservative Candidate we're not going to actually find out much about the candidates -- like who is actually moderate posing a conservative, who is conservative and electable, and who is aggressively conservative and possibly unelectable even in a red state like Missouri.

What I'm really talking about is the primaries as a method of gaining information about the candidates -- something I think which has been missing.

One possible way to extract information from candidates (who have an interest in not providing it) is to have at least one debate in every primary contest moderated, by, get this, conservatives. Conservatives understand conservative politics. Liberal reporters do not. (And questions asked by liberal reporters tend to be discounted by conservatives, as conservatives think they are hostile forces simply trying to undermine conservatism, which they are, of course.)

But if every cycle at least one debate was moderated by a 1-3 member panel of genuine conservatives attempting to flush out distinctions between candidates, the voters would 1 hear their positions and the distinctions between them and 2 better trust the information elicited as being prompted by a sympatico, rather than hostile and subversive, questioner.

Posted by: Ace at 08:30 AM | Comments (427)
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Via Instapundit (with obligatory joke), a geneticist believes human brains were more powerful back when we were hunting mastodons than now when we're hunting to find a new episode of Hoarders.

His argument is based on the fact that for more than 99 per cent of human evolutionary history, we have lived as hunter-gatherer communities surviving on our wits, leading to big-brained humans. Since the invention of agriculture and cities, however, natural selection on our intellect has effective stopped and mutations have accumulated in the critical “intelligence” genes.

“I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions, with a good memory, a broad range of ideas and a clear-sighted view of important issues,” Professor Crabtree says in a provocative paper published in the journal Trends in Genetics.

“Furthermore, I would guess that he or she would be among the most emotionally stable of our friends and colleagues. I would also make this wager for the ancient inhabitants of Africa, Asia, India or the Americas, of perhaps 2,000 to 6,000 years ago,” Professor Crabtree says.

Well no duh on that last one. I'm not sure you can even have petty neuroses in dangerous environment filled with genuine sources of stress and hazard. If your brain is predisposed to worry and stress, it's going to have a lot of serious threats to worry and stress about. There's no such thing as a hypochondriac when the plague is in town.

There's a theory -- I don't know if this is a real theory or just the sort of thing that Adam Carolla says -- that as our environment and diet get cleaner, we actually become more sensitive to allergens. Fear and neurosis almost certainly works that way.

Posted by: Ace at 09:20 AM | Comments (281)
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It's not even Thanksgiving yet, and they're already putting up the Obama figurines.

But it might not be as bad as you think. They apparently also made a bunch of Romney figurines, which are now being sold on deep discount after his loss. In other words, I mean, they might be equal-opportunity blasphemers. Might be more of a jokey thing for the impious than an actual Cult of Obama rising in the bosom of Catholicism. (Which would make me start thinking about The Omen and jackals.)

Thanks to @consligierte5.

Posted by: Ace at 07:59 AM | Comments (148)
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