About noted heartthrob Kim Jong-un.

The People's Daily ran a 55-page photo spread of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un after he was declared The Onion's Sexiest Man Alive for 2012.

He is shown riding horses, holding children and greeting his troops.

The spread is accompanied by tongue-in-cheek quotes from The Onion about the "Pyongyang-born heart-throb".

"With his devastatingly handsome, round face, his boyish charm, and his strong, sturdy frame, this Pyongyang-born heart-throb is every woman's dream come true," the People's Daily quotes The Onion as saying.

"Blessed with an air of power that masks an unmistakable cute, cuddly side, Kim made this newspaper's editorial board swoon with his impeccable fashion sense, chic short hairstyle and, of course, that famous smile."

Posted by: rdbrewer at 02:41 PM | Comments (81)
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I've been under the weather since Saturday. I'm going to nap some.

Posted by: Ace at 12:32 PM | Comments (438)
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Best available intelligence and other words that don't apply to the White House.

Rice's statement:

In the course of the meeting, we explained that the talking points provided by the intelligence community, and the initial assessment upon which they were based, were incorrect in a key respect: there was no protest or demonstration in Benghazi. While we certainly wish that we had had perfect information just days after the terrorist attack, as is often the case, the intelligence assessment has evolved. We stressed that neither I nor anyone else in the Administration intended to mislead the American people at any stage in this process, and the Administration updated Congress and the American people as our assessments evolved.

Uh-huh. Unfortunately the "spontaneous protest" was already debunked well before Rice went on TV to talk it up. And, of course, Obama was still talking that up days later, on Univision.

Jay Carney is annoyed to even have to answer questions about this:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney grew testy with reporters Tuesday over questions about UN Ambassador Susan RiceÂ’s role in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack.

“What is the point of the focus on this,” Carney asked of questions about Rice’s comments on the five Sunday shows days after the September 11, 2012 attack that killed four Americans signaling it was a spontaneous event.

Posted by: Ace at 11:44 AM | Comments (224)
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And shouting some of those highly-complex arguments that won't play on talk radio, to wit, "Boehner, Boehner, don’t be a dick. Budget cuts will make us sick.”

You see, not even Cicero could digest that arcane an argument into a three hour talk radio slot.

Now, via @slublog, you can also see the unplixelated version of this august display, if you dare.

Out: The long march through the institutions

In: The saggy march through the institutions

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (334)
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She met with the senators behind closed doors (not under oath), and they say they're "more disturbed" than they were before.

“Bottom line, I’m more disturbed now than I was before (by) the 16 September explanation about how four Americans died in Benghazi, Libya by Ambassador Rice,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). …

“We are significantly troubled by many of the answers that we got and some that we didn’t get concerning some of the evidence that was overwhelming leading up to the attack on our consulate,” McCain said. …

Ayotte echoed Graham, saying she was “more troubled today having met with the acting director of the CIA and Ambassador Rice.”

More at the link, including video of the senators talking to the press.

Posted by: Ace at 09:56 AM | Comments (166)
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A commenter suggested this and it sure seems to cut to the heart of the matter.

Not really related, but kinda-sorta, is this article about the natural political advantage of Democratic "solutions."

Through the eighties, and nineties, and naughts, liberals were fond of claiming that Republicans won elections only because their messages were so simplistic and easily-understood by dummies. This is always the reason offered as to why conservatives thrive on talk radio, but liberals fail: Well, you see, it's because conservatives' messages are so simple they lend themselves to fifteen second sound-bites. Whereas liberals' messages are so dashed complex they couldn't possibly be explained in a verbal format (even in a three hour radio show!); no, they're so impossibly complex they can only be explicated in thick academic volumes with lots of charts and integrals.

Which always struck me as precisely ass-backwards: Conservatives like Limbaugh were talking about very indirect, and thus abstract, benefits of capitalism. Capitalism doesn't directly put money into your pocket the way AFDC does, but by creating an environment of economic vigor, it creates more jobs, and hence creates a Seller's Market for labor, thus increasing wages and also increasing worker's bargaining power, and so on.

Meanwhile, liberals' messages were all about a very simple Kindergarten concept -- fairness -- and very direct effects. Vote for this guy, he'll give you the Life of Julia.

You don't need an argument to explain how a government check in your name increases your wealth. It's quite a direct process, requiring no elaboration at all. Your Government-as-Father send you a check, you deposit it. You have more money. You need no more explication or argument about this concept than a college kid needs regarding the getting a loan from Dad to pay for "books."

The benefits of capitalism, on the other hand, are indirect and mostly unseen; Adam Smith had to create a metaphor with tangible form and heft -- "the Invisible Hand" -- to explain this. If something is complicated and abstract enough it can only be explained via metaphor, it's not "simple."

This article discusses that advantage in simplicity of messaging.

Let's concede that those who are pushing to expand government have one huge advantage. Their advantage is that their solutions are immediate, direct and easy to explain.

...

Being correct, however, isn't the same thing as being persuasive. The conservative is rightly concerned with incentives and the long-term effects of any government program for relief, which are vital concerns for workable policy. The liberal is far less abstract: Here are some food stamps so your children don't go hungry tonight.

Never mind the long-term costs and consequences of these solutions. Yes, the education loans that supposedly make college "affordable" actually drive its costs up faster than normal inflation. Yes, housing subsidies have saddled people with homes they cannot afford. And, yes, minimum-wage laws price the people who can least afford it out of the job market. The dilemma for those of us who oppose big-government solutions is that the true costs of these "solutions" are seldom clear until it's too late.

So what's a Republican to do?

Surely not to embrace higher taxes for the rich. Leave aside the impact of higher taxes on investment. The political problem is that raising these taxes does nothing to challenge the larger liberal narrative about government. Conservatives' top priority should be promoting an alternative—that in a highly competitive, global economy, the only real economic security for ordinary Americans is the security of opportunity.

The writer mentions Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" as the sort of thing we need to start doing again.

I have one depressing thing to say about that, though: "Free to Choose" aired on PBS. In 1980, while PBS was in fact liberal (of course), it also took its mission of presenting a lively exchange of under-reported ideas seriously. PBS gave wide exposure to another one of America's best-known rock-star conservative intellectuals (William F. Buckley, of course).

Now, in 2012, does anyone imagine PBS has any interest in airing something like Free to Choose? Or a William F. Buckley style tony conservative discussion show?

No. Liberalism has become, slowly, pure leftism. That is, while liberalism would consider it a positive political virtue to air contrary viewpoints, because such contrary viewpoints have an indirect, but real, salutary effect on our politics and discourse, the leftist mindset is much cruder and much more fixated on direct, immediate results. And that means that the old liberal idea of "balance" or "exchange of ideas" and "lively discussion" are idealistic follies, and the right course of action is simply direct and relentless propagation of the leftist message.

So while the author is right, partly, he understates the dimensions of the problem; it's not just about providing solid conservative content, it's now about finding any media through which to disseminate it. Doors once left slightly open in a liberal (classical sense) spirit are now shut tight, as crude, results-oriented leftism has displaced the last gasps of a more enlightened, process-oriented liberalism.

Today's PBS would laugh at the naivete of 1980's PBS permitting persuasive conservative voices to be transmitted on "our air."

Of course you see this same pattern -- enforced even more ruthlessly and remorselessly -- in academics. Whereas once it was at least thought that having the occasional conservative professor might be good provoking debate and keeping the intellectual climate vital and frisky, leftists have decided they no longer want to be in the same room as conservatives, do not want them spreading their lies in "their institutions," and have all but purged them.

The problem, as I keep saying, is larger than simple messaging, or about content, or about politics, even. It's about the complete capture of idea-transmitting institutions by the Gramsciite left and the almost complete blacklisting of any contrary voice.

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 AM | Comments (226)
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I know she can count on the votes of ten people in a parking lot.

One major advantage the leftists have over us is their domination of the media, of course. They can confer "Hero" status on any leftwing political actor, no matter how marginal, no matter how, frankly, whiny and cloying.

This was the real problem with Rush Limbaugh's "slut" comment. It wasn't that he called a woman a slut -- Bill Maher does that a lot. The problem was that the media declared Sandra Fluke a "Hero" and you cannot call a Hero a Slut, just the same -- almost exactly the same, alas -- as you can't shout and give the finger to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

So this whole problem was really the media's creation -- not Rush Limbaugh's mistake.

When Jake Tapper did a soft-focus Hero piece on Fluke, I asked him repeatedly what she'd done, precisely, to earn such status. I also asked him when ABCNews would be running an accompanying context piece analyzing the truthfulness of Sandra Fluke's various "stories" (stories she heard second or third hand, largely via posts on a website) of Birth Control Calamities. He kept saying such a piece was in the works, but it never aired.

At no point did anyone in the media seriously ask if what Sandra Fluke was saying was actually true. They didn't ask because, of course, the answer would not have been to her -- or their -- advantage.

The only relevant fact was that Sandra Fluke was politically aligned with them, and the general leftist attitude they call "pro-sex" (it's not; everyone's pro-sex; Sandra Fluke was specifically pro-subsidized-minor-expense-precautionary-birth-control, not pro-sex). Her "truth" was the vague "truth" of the allegedly pro-sex feminists, which was basically that anyone traditionalist or rightist is evil and backwards and sexually repressive. Since that "truth" they all take to be True Beyond All Contestation, they didn't feel the need to examine her actual claims in detail.

I've made this point before, but I think I'm going to keep on making it. The right cannot seek credibility only in the political realm. Politics are contentious when they're not boring. The best way to win on political points is to do what celebrities and the media do -- win a certain amount of goodwill or credibility in non-political areas, and then spend that capital of goodwill and credibility on politicking.

I saw in the Daily Beast a pointless, hackish article about Karl Rove's love of Argentinian fabulist writer Jorge Luis Borges. (One of his stories, "The Library of Babylon," can be read here. Alas, he's not on Kindle yet, at least not in English translation.) He's often called a fantasist, but this may be misleading for Americans whose idea of fantasy is shaped by someone like Tolkein. Tolkein wrote fantasy, whereas Borges explored the idea of fantasy, what it is, why it happens, what purposes it serves. More like Philip K. Dick than Robert E. Howard. One of his best-known stories concerns a man who creates a fictional world so detailed that other writers begin adding to it, until the time comes that the fictional world is so well detailed it is as real as the actual world. (I think maybe he got this idea from Lovecraft.)

At any rate, this nothing of an article contained three points:

1. Jorge Luis Borges is a writer interested in the idea of fantasy.

2. Karl Rove likes him.

3. Karl Rove ergo has learned from Jorge Luis Borges the art of creating fictional realities for dumb Republicans to inhabit.

I have to stress there was absolutely nothing in this "article" -- really a blog post -- apart from a brief background on a writer, a slim newshook, and a paragraph and a half of the most hackish, tendentious "Republicans Are Dumb and They Lie" bullshit. Seriously, very low level, off-the-cuff blogshit.

Nevertheless, this squeaking fart of a piece was included in their "Books" section, part of their "cultural coverage." And why did I click on it? Because I like Borges. Why did others click on it? Because they like Borges. But instead of reading anything novel about Borges they got a full-face egg-fart about Lying Liars who Lie.

As I said, I'm going to keep stressing this. Conservatives cannot just keep expecting that politics itself moves people towards political choices. The left has created a virtually seamless full-spectrum messaging machine in which hardly a word can be said about any subject without the commentator putting in a good word for socialism or Marxism (or, far more frequently, attacking those who stand against socialism and Marxism).

The right-leaning media would be well-served in expanding its own range of interests to subjects other than politics qua politics, and maybe, at some point, do a little of its own leveraging of non-political credibility into political agitation.

Posted by: Ace at 08:22 AM | Comments (245)
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This is dri's link from the sidebar. It's a clip from a Brazilian prank show. They have an elevator rigged so a "ghost" can appear and terrorize people. It's pretty hilarious.

The scare here is strong so I'm not laughing at these people so much as I'm laughing in the knowledge that I'd be pretty scared too. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:40 AM | Comments (149)
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Erick Erickson has a great piece over at RedState today that's a must read for anyone interested in fixing the broken machine that is the GOP.

When consultants told rich donors who were funding them that they were not making money off the Super PACÂ’s that the rich idiots . . . er . . . donors funded, they were being honest. They probably were not.

But ad heavy Super PACs outsourced the ad buys, the mail, the data collection, etc. to other groups that got commissions and you can be sure that a lot of these supposedly noble consultants working for free were making a killing off of commissions, referral fees, etc. through their relationships with the commissioned vendors doing the actual work. ...

...

Just as important as making money for these guys was control over the data. In fact, in singular importance this campaign season has been the buzz word “data.” But what the hell is that data and why is it so important?

Read the whole thing for a great exposition into how to spend millions of dollars and have nothing to show for it.

And just to be clear, the issues Erickson points out and the digging into the Orca debacle we've done here at the HQ shouldn't be confused as an identification of the reason we lost the election.

There were a host of reasons, beginning with the candidate.

But we need to take this defeat apart like the NTSB does a plane crash and identify every failed component that could have led to the disaster. And just like with most crash investigations, I suspect we'll find that it wasn't a single failure but a chain of failures, many identifiable years earlier, that led to the result.

Posted by: andy at 06:52 AM | Comments (265)
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• Cuomo: Sandy Worse Than Katrina
  
• US Considered Detonating A Nuke On The Moon In The 1950s To Scare The Soviets
  
• Pravda: Obama's Soviet Mistake
  
• Elected But Still Campaigning
  
• Most Racial America: Anti-White Bigotry Goes Mainstream
  
• Professional Politician Open To Running Again In 2016
  
• Carville: We're Going To See Entitlement Cuts In This Deal
  
• Honduran Free Cities Nixed By Honduran Supreme Court
  
• Warren Buffet Should Write A Check And Shut Up
  
• Morsi Oppenents Rally In Tahrir Sqaure
  
• 401k's To Be Taxed?
  
• The Epistemic Closure Of The Epistemic Closure Pundits
  
• Fracking Showdown Approaches In Colorado
  
• Yasser Arafat Being Exhumed And Tested For Poisoning
  
• Rand Paul: Why Do We Have To Trade Tax Increases To Get Entitlement Reform
  
• Two And a Half Men Star Tells People Not To Watch The Show
  
• Mortgage Interest Deduction May Be On The Table
  
• Americans Can No Longer Trade On Intrade. American Freedom Is At 6% On Intrade Right Now
  
• Watch What Buffet Does, Not What He Says
  
• Soybeans And Gunships
  
• Syrian Rebels Gaining Ground, But Regime Still In Control
  

[Update] Pick'em Results

Yinz Guys
Hailmaryhector 99
Portnoy 98
Hondo's Swinging Nuts 95
Wing and a Prayer 95
Rdm 1155 94
the botnet 94
DaveinNC's SWAG Picks 94
Of course it's me 94

Staff
Andy 93
JWF 90
Ben 89
RD 82
John E 77
CDR-M 75
Russ 57

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:11 AM | Comments (251)
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