I started renewing last year's group but probably screwed that up, so here's a new one. Over at Yahoo, pick sports, fantasy, College Bowl Pickem.

Group id is 30165

AceofSpadesHQ 2012 Bowl Games

password is paulanka

To keep it interesting (relatively) I decided we'll do confidence points again, so you pick a winner and assign a point value from 1 to 35 (yes, there are 35 friggin bowl games) to each pick which represents the total number of points you get for a correct pick for that game. So for example if you're not sure about Notre Dame vs. Alabama you'd probably assign a low point value like 1, and if you just know in your heart that Fresno State is gonna kick SMU in the balls you'd assign them a high point value. Say for instance, 35.

Something like that. Sign up, enjoy. Talk shit. You know, the usual stuff.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 11:40 AM | Comments (54)
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I mention GLaDOS, the hilarious voice of the Portal series, because I love her so. She's so funny I didn't even play the games -- I just watched YouTube clips of her wisecracks. It is in fact the Voice of GLaDOS, same actress, same musical/mechanical effect added to her voice.

Well, thereÂ’s a reason many people were getting a GLaDOS/Portal vibe from the clip. ThatÂ’s because it actually IS GLaDOS. The voiceover work is done by GLaDOSÂ’s Ellen McLain. ItÂ’s not just her however, sheÂ’s had her voice run through nearly the exact same alteration process as in Portal, which is why the two sound identical.

This isnÂ’t breaking news, as Guillermo Del Toro announced Mclain would be an AI back in October, though I donÂ’t think anyone anticipated the voice would be exactly the same. Many were confused after seeing the trailer and might not know that it literally is GLaDOSÂ’s voice rather than just a copycat interpretation.

My new General Rule is that All Movies Suck -- it's just a question of degree, really --- but how bad could this one be?

Here's GLaDOS signing at the end credits of Portal, explaining that she has to murder people in "science experiments" (which really are simply techy sadism) "For Science!" and "for the benefit of the people who are Still Alive."

On the downside -- there was a time, long ago, when Japan ripped us off.

Neat: The most recognizable actor in this movie is a Video Game Character. And not like a Video Game Character appearing in a movie about that video game franchise. Of course Nathan Drake would appear in a Nathan Drake movie. But instead a Video Game Character leaving her own fictive universe to star in some other movie. Just cast because they wanted "a GLaDOS type," so they just hired GLaDOS.

Has that happened before? It happens in, like, William Gibson books, where some fictive entity becomes a celebrity, but has it happened in the real world?

Posted by: Ace at 10:23 AM | Comments (317)
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Punchy.

Savile was cheerfully unburdened. Rather than a celebrity who happens to be a pedophile, he seems to have been a pedophile who became a celebrity in order to facilitate being a pedophile. Robbers rob banks because that's where the money is. In the Sixties, Savile became a star disc jockey in Britain's nascent pop biz because that's where the 14-year-old nymphettes are. In the Seventies, he became a kiddie-TV host because that's where the nine-year-old moppets are. He became a celebrity volunteer with his own living quarters at children's hospitals and homes because that's where the nine-year-olds too infirm to wiggle free or too mentally ill to protest are. He persuaded various institutions to give him keys to the mortuary because that's where the nine-year-olds unable even to cry out are. (Stoke Mandeville Hospital is now investigating whether he "interacted inappropriately" with corpses.)

Steyn doesn't really write about what I'm really interested in-- which is the vicious weakness and malevolent cowardice of the BBC staff and British governmental establishment which enabled serial pedophilia and serial pedophilic rape for four decades.

I'm not terribly interested in Savile, the Pedophile Rapist. I assume that such types are operating in our society at all times.

It's not the single pedophile rapist that fascinates and sickens me -- it's hundreds of people in a position to act who nevertheless facilitate the ongoing rapes and molestations, because -- why? Why exactly? It's good for their career? They've got an eye on a rather minor promotion and they don't want to jeopardize it by bringing up this whole "rape" business?

Why?

We saw this at Penn State. But Penn State's football program was small, and everyone knew each other. It was intimate.

Here we have a pedophile -- and actually, a pedophile who frequently made jokes (not so much jokes as cocky admissions) about having sex with underage girls -- who was reported to the police several times. And who literally hundreds of people worked around, and were therefore in a position to notice little things like him going up to his office, or out to his Sex Caravan, with underage girls.

Here we have a man suspected of pedophilia being given the keys to a children's hospital -- and I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean he asked for, and was given, his own set of keys to the place, to all the wings, to the places where the mentally handicapped girls were. And his own office in the place, too. And Bedrooms Too: His own bedrooms in multiple children's hospitals. Because... he had to nap? Thanks to Tasker.

Because he was a Celebrity. And did some fundraising. I have never heard of a fundraiser who needed the keys to the secure wings of a children's hospital, though.

No one seemed to ask why he couldn't raise children's spirits - or whatever he claimed -- during normal daylight working hours when there were witnesses around. No one asked why he needed keys to access wings once they were shut down for the day and the children were sleeping and there were only a few nurses to keep an eye out over the whole place.

Apparently children especially need some spirit-raising at night, when they're sleeping.

What sort of vicious weaklings does the BBC hire? What sort of malevolent cowards are attracted to that organization?

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (264)
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One of his examples of "wild statements" the press was too soft on Republicans for was "putting women in binders."

Safe link to Newsbusters.

via @scottjw

I know this is pie-in-the-sky and I don't think it will happen, but here is what we desperately need: We need a coalition of biliionaires to simply buy a network and make sure the news division reports things objectively.

Not like Fox, which is a self-styled alternative to what was once called the Mainstream Media.

No, we need an operation -- we need to capture an institution -- and not label it an alternative to anything. So that it stands on its own. Not as an "alternative" to Mainstream Media, but as Mainstream Media itself.

And yes, a Mainstream Media which just so happens to report things objectively. As an actual Mainstream Media should.

Oh: Glenn Reynolds just wrote about this in the NYPost. I know it's been going around the comments, too.

He suggests a lower-cost option than buying a network: Buying women's magazines or at least websites.

My suggestion: Buy some womenÂ’s magazines. No, really. Or at least some womenÂ’s Web sites.

One of the groups with whom Romney did worst was female “low-information voters.” Those are women who don’t really follow politics, and vote based on a vague sense of who’s mean and who’s nice, who’s cool and who’s uncool.

Since, by definition, they don’t pay much attention to political news, they get this sense from what they do read. And for many, that’s traditional women’s magazines — Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, the Ladies Home Journal, etc. — and the newer women’s sites like YourTango, The Frisky, Yahoo! Shine, and the like.

The thing is, those magazines and Web sites see themselves, pretty consciously, as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. So while nine out of 10 articles may be the usual stuff on sex, diet and shopping, the 10th will always be either soft p.r. for the Democrats or soft — or sometimes not-so-soft — hits on Republicans.

When a flier about getting away with rape was found in a college men’s bathroom, the women’s site YourTango (“Your Best Love Life”) led with the fact that the college was Paul Ryan’s alma materin a transparent effort to advance the Democrats’ War on Women claim that Republicans are somehow pro-rape. A companion article was “12 Hot Older Men Who Endorse President Obama.”

Similar p.r. abounded across the board: Sandra Fluke is a hero; Sarah Palin is a zero. Republicans are all old white men (women or minority Republicans get mocked or ignored).

This kind of thing adds up, especially among low-information voters. They may not know or care much about the specifics, but this theme, repeated over and over again, sends a message: Democrats are cool, and Republicans are uncool — and if you vote for them, you’re uncool, too.

My only thought here is that you don't need to buy a woman's website; you could just build it from the ground up. That might work out cheaper.

Reynolds is right about how bias works, how these media institutions sell politics-- 90% of this stuff has nothing at all to do with politics. It's the 10% they throw in that does.

So why can't we do the exact same thing?

I think a lot of conservative writers would love writing about something other than politics, at least some of the time.

Posted by: Ace at 08:35 AM | Comments (350)
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From @benk84's headline thread.

I was struck by this excuse for non-coverage. Note Wemple explains away the media's non-interest from 11am to 9pm based on a Hannity appearance occurring at 9pm.

Yet if folks are truly scandalized by the lack of generalized media outrage about Crowder’s treatment, they should take a second look at Crowder’s actions. Though he appears to have carried himself nobly while under attack, he’s gone buffoonish since then. He said on Twitter yesterday that this is “getting fun.” He challenged his assailant to a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fight. And he has generally sounded as if he’s enjoying this boost to his career prospects, in a way that his Halloween-candy-exposes-the-fraud-of-income-redistribution stunt did not.

Given how Crowder has carried on, I, too, may well pass on the story of his beating, were I a network executive producer.

Yes, indeed. And this is rule which is applied without any political bias. For example, when Sandra Fluke engaged in a great deal of partisan political agitation with a strong component of self-promotion (hiring a PR firm, for example!), the media completely shut her out.

Yup. That's exactly what they did.

The media offered the same excuse for not covering Benghazi-- Oh, we wanted to cover Benghazi, and would have covered it, but then Mitt Romney tried to raise it as an issue for us to cover, so we couldn't of course cover it.

Liberal sort of logic here, eh? If a conservative wants a genuinely newsworthy story covered (as Wemple admits this is, before these defend-the-media paragraphs), then the liberal media is required to shut that conservative out. The story becomes non-coverable simply because an important actor in it -- a conservative -- wishes it to be covered.

And if that conservative attempts to get the media interested in the story, or shame them out of their embargo (and the media embargoed this from the moment it happened), that is... well, a reason to continue the embargo they had already decided upon.

Again, note that a liberal can be quite self-promotional, and even hire a promotional PR firm for the explicit purpose of promotion to the media, and the media doesn't consider that buffoonish, or attention-seeking, or cloying, or whatnot.

When Sandra Fluke does it, it's not cloying. It's just confirmation that she's a Superstar Hero with a Big Story To Tell.

Posted by: Ace at 07:33 AM | Comments (288)
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As we inch closer to the inevitable "tax hikes now, savings later (and by later we mean never) deal, it would be nice if the GOP thought outside the box and tried to get something of real value from the deal.

If you're going to get rolled, you might as well try and get something crazy, right? Something like this.

Aided by a structure that facilitates spending increases and discourages spending cuts, the inertia in Washington is currently to spend--and spend--and spend. Most spending bills come to the floor prepackaged in a manner that makes it as easy as possible to advance government spending and programs, and as difficult as possible to make cuts.

Again, this is not a new problem. But if we're serious about confronting the challenges that lie ahead for our nation, it's totally inadequate.

I propose today a different approach. Let's do away with the concept of "comprehensive" spending bills. Let's break them up, to encourage scrutiny, and make spending cuts easier. Rather than pairing agencies and departments together, let them come to the House floor individually, to be judged on their own merit. Members shouldn't have to vote for big spending increases at the Labor Department in order to fund Health and Human Services. Members shouldn't have to vote for big increases at the Commerce Department just because they support NASA. Each Department and agency should justify itself each year to the full House and Senate, and be judged on its own.

Who's is the crazy, tea party nut job that came up with that idea? Uh, John Boehner about a month before the 2010 mid-terms made him Speaker.

And...that's the last we heard of that idea.

As Boehner himself said, there's a structural bias against spending cuts so why not do something about it? Without that kind of structural change, any savings from discretionary accounts in the out years are going to be phantoms.

Actually, re-reading that, this is something Boehner could do himself but hasn't. So yeah, I'm sure we'll get a great deal out of him negotiating with Obama.

While I'm in the Let It Burn camp, I do think the GOP should try for a Hail Mary of a deal....

1-Hike taxes on people making more than a million dollars a year MORE than Obama wants.

2. Cut taxes on everyone making between $45,000 and $100,000 per year. Leave the rates alone between $100,000 and $1,000,000.

3. Lower the floor of the lowest current tax rate to force more people onto the tax rolls.

4. Eliminate the Earned Income Tax Credit and all other refundable tax credits (if you don't pay enough in taxes, you don't get a check back to cover your credit. It only works to lower a taxes owed liability).

Pass something like that (I don't care what the CBO score is, it's all BS anyway) and leave town.

If Obama wants to play class warfare games, fine. Let's play bitches.

Posted by: DrewM at 05:58 AM | Comments (310)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:10 AM | Comments (108)
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Happy Thursday.

Republicans are now looking for a third option in the fiscal cliff debate. Most proposals involve taking tax cuts out of the equation by conceding on tax cuts for the wealthy (where we've utterly lost public opinion), but forcing spending cuts when the debt ceiling has to be raised (where we've not lost public opinion quite yet). One version is discussed here. Another interesting proposal is over here.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:55 AM | Comments (348)
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Lena Dunham Is Gonna Get $3.7 Million Dollars For This Crap

In case you've never heard of her Lena Dunham is the 26 year old Obama-loving creator of HBO's Girls - and pretty much the embodiment of everything Morons despise. It's like someone took the worst sockpuppet caricatures from all the comments and distilled them into one supremely annoying life form.

Here's just a sample from her Wikipedia entry:

Dunham was born in New York City. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter of "overtly sexualised pop art", and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is a photographer and designer who creates "disquieting domestic tableaux" with dolls. Dunham's father is Protestant, and according to Dunham, a Mayflower descendant; Dunham's mother is Jewish. She has a younger sister, Grace, who is a model and student at Brown University and who starred in Dunham's first film Tiny Furniture. As children, both Lena and Grace were babysat by photographers Sherri Zuckerman and Catherine McGann. Dunham attended Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2008, where she studied creative writing.

Recently she just got a $3.7 million dollar deal from Random House for a book of her musings on sex, travel, diet and pubic fat. And this deal was based on a 66 page outline consisting of instagram pics, her diet diary, and apparently a lot of 'nauseating and cloying precociousness'.

Well Gawker got a hold of the proposal and mocked it to shreds. When Dunham's lawyer threatened to sue them, they had to pull the proposal and edit her quotes into deliciously cruel fair-use versions. It's Gawker (I know I know) but this is some beautiful schadenfreudtastic blue-on-blue action.

Fully 13% of the proposal's pages are devoted to reproducing a diary Dunham kept of what she ate in 2010. And she intends to devote an as-yet-unwritten chapter to "a collection of emails that screw the pooch, jump the gun, and terrify men." Also, Dunham thinks she has the "beginnings of a FUPA (fat upper pussy area)" and wants to write about that, in her book of advice for women.

I'm pretty sure you could get 66 pages of better material by cherry-picking the better satire in the comments here during any two week period. But then we're not "rare literary talents" with all the right connections, credentials, necessary politically correct views, narcissism and lack of shame to pull this off with a straight face either.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:21 PM | Comments (704)
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This guy was the expert of money management?

Obama and his allies spent less on advertising than Romney and his allies but got far more — in the number of ads broadcast, in visibility in key markets and in targeting critical demographic groups, such as the working class and younger voters in swing states. As the presidential race entered its final, furious phase, for example, millions of college football fans tuning in to televised games saw repeated ads for Obama but relatively few from the Romney campaign.

All told, from June through Election Day, the Obama campaign and its allies aired about 50,000 more ads than Romney and his allies, according to the research firmÂ’s data.

...

Romney not only paid more for his ads but also missed crucial opportunities to advertise, for instance during the political conventions and on Spanish-language television, according to the campaign officials and analysts. Spending by super PACs — such as Restore Our Future, set up by former Romney campaign officials — compensated for some of the advertising shortfall, but even with those expenditures the Obama campaign had a clear advantage.

...

Obama outpaced Romney in several advertising categories, including many considered critical to winning in swing states. For instance, Romney ads were far less visible on Spanish-language television. The organization said Obama ran 13,232 spots on Spanish-language TV stations, compared with 3,435 for Romney.

Also, between Oct. 22 and 29, Obama and his main campaign ally, the Priorities USA Action super PAC, aired more commercials in most of the top media markets despite being outspent by the Romney campaign and its main ally, the Restore Our Future super PAC, by about 30 percent.

His ads were horrible, too, but you can't quantify that.

Posted by: Ace at 03:40 PM | Comments (509)
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