Big dangling question mark there, because in a socialist state, the Friends of the State have Privileges.

But.

Critics also point to Media MattersÂ’ still mysterious calls and meetings with White House officials, which could prove problematic if the organization is privately sharing information with President Barack ObamaÂ’s staff.

“If a section 501(c)(3) organization is privately providing to the Democratic Party information for their use in their political activities, that’s a contribution to the party. Maybe not for FEC [Federal Election Commission] purposes, but certainly for IRS purposes, and would violate their 501(c)(3) status,” one tax law expert told The Daily Caller.

“If, on the other hand, they are compiling information and publishing it for anyone to use, including the Democratic Party, that’s a different thing.”

“But if they are privately providing something of value to the Democratic Party, that’s a revocation issue.”

Also, an exempt "educational" organization is supposed to be non-partisan, and addled wack-a-doo Brock is increasingly upfront about MMFA's combatant status in the partisan wars...

Because Brock has referred to Fox News as a political organization and the “de facto” leader of the GOP, Gray and other critics have argued that Media Matters is engaged in the kind of direct political activity forbidden by IRS regulations.

Many right-leaning organizations, like the MRC (Newsbusters), rely on the 501(3)(c) exemption. They follow the rules. But I think they get nervous when they see people go headhunting for MMFA, because they know the left will soon be contriving a case against them.

Not a reason to permit MMFA to break the law, of course.

Meanwhile, business is good at David Brock's million-dollar-a-year-in-rent wack shack.

Media Matters signed a ten-year lease on its office space, ending June 30, 2020. Beginning in 2011, its annual rent was more than $1 million. The organization went on a $362,000 furniture spending spree in 2010: At the end of 2009 it reported owning less than $22,000 in “office furniture and fixtures,” but by the end of 2010 that number was above $384,000.

At the end of 2010, Media Matters and Media Matters Action had a combined $11.5 million in assets, including more than $3.9 million in cash and cash investments and $2 million in “publicly traded securities.”

Media Matters reported at the end of 2010 that $612,500 of its assets were “restricted” by donors to be applied to “gun and public safety issues.” During this time, The Daily Caller has already reported, Brock’s personal assistant was carrying a holstered and concealed Glock handgun when he accompanied Brock to events.

Posted by: Ace at 09:27 AM | Comments (71)
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I almost hate to point out stuff like this. It's pathetic that the world at large gives Global Warming more credit than Lysenkoism. But it's still taken seriously by people who try to run our lives so I must ridicule them again.

One of the more serious consequences of Global Warming would be the Himalayan glaciers melting away. They're a source of fresh water for a huge chunk of Asia.*

Previously, we were treated to the spectacle of the UN's IPCC beclowning themselves when it came out that the prediction of the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 was based on ... nothing really. But even that didn't mean that they wouldn't melt - just that that prediction was made up. What about the actual measurements of glaciers melting much faster than their replacement rate?

Now we learn that those measurements represent a pathetic grade of science.

New satellite measurements reveal...

... glaciers in the high Asian mountain ranges - the Himalayas, the Pamir and the Tien Shan - have been losing much less ice than was previously thought. Researchers visiting the region on the ground have previously suggested that the Asian mountain ice was depleting at rates as high as 50 billion tons per year, but Wahr and his colleagues' results show losses in the area of just 4 billion tonnes annually.

And that's with an error range of 20 billion tons! That is, the net melt is likely between 24 billion and MINUS 16 billion. (That range of error means they don't even know if the glaciers are growing or shrinking.)

But why were the previous estimates so far off? Take a deep breath...

One possible explanation is that previous estimates were based on measurements taken primarily from some of the lower, more accessible glaciers in Asia and were extrapolated to infer the behavior of higher glaciers. But unlike the lower glaciers, many of the high glaciers would still be too cold to lose mass even in the presence of atmospheric warming.

ASSHOLES! (a full paragraph of cursing deleted)

These sons-of-bitches want to run (and wreck) the world economy to control Global Warming because GW has serious consequences. And they base that program on research like this!?

Say a scientist calculates that the sun will expand and engulf the earth in 2 billion years. Then better calculations are done and the new time frame is 1 billion years. Not A Big Deal. That doesn't change how I live. These Global Warming Cultists want me to pay carbon taxes! They want to choose what kind of cars are for sale! If you're going to take that kind of control over people's lives you'd better be right on your data!

*BTW, that's also in dispute but that's not the subject of this post.

(put into draft 2/12/2012)

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:27 AM | Comments (267)
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Follow 'The Daily DOOM' on Twitter: @AoSHQDOOM.

Rush Limbaugh mentioned Paul Rahe's "American Catholicism's Pact With the Devil" on his show recently, and I thought Rahe's essay was so masterful that I wanted to link it here even though it doesn't exactly meet the DOOM charter. (If you read my Sunday book threads, you'll remember that Rahe is the author of Republics Ancient and Modern as well as many other books and essays.)

Americans seem to have difficulty imagining a time when there was no pervasive government-run welfare state. Yet there was such a time -- and it was not so long ago in the great sweep of history. There was a time when the arm of the federal government did not reach far at all, and citizens had to rely on themselves, their friends, their families, and their communities for help and support. And you know what? It worked, mostly. If there was some massive outbreak of starvation, the elderly and lame being cast out to die in the streets, or orphan children roaming the countryside in packs, it didn't seem to make any of the papers. Yes, there was misery and hardship in the old days; but there is misery and hardship now too, and probably in greater measure. Misery and hardship is the lot of humanity on this earth. Yet our forbears managed to not only get by, but to build the greatest nation in the history of the world...and they did it without an overbearing, interfering, smothering nanny state monitoring their every breath. There was a time before the welfare state, folks. Honest.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:36 AM | Comments (326)
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Happy Wednesday.

Just one item this morning: nearly half of business owners say they're not hiring because of potential healthcare costs (48%) and government regulations (46%). Never fear, business owners, on both counts it's something a Republican president can help with.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:51 AM | Comments (191)
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Thanks to today's blog excitement tonight's ONT contain 29% fewer words.

State of the Internet 2012

Well we're still dealing with the DMCA which is primarily abused by businesses but most people lack the resources to fight back:

A study from Google indicated that 57% of all the claims it received were abuse by targeting a competing business, while 37% were simply not valid copyright claims. Dealing with these claims costs businesses working time and money, of course - probably more so than the infringing copyright would have cost the claimant anyway.

And then there's SOPA which despite its widespread unpopularity is merely on hold.

So basically the state of copyright protection vs. user rights is pretty much this:

And thanks to the Copyright Protection Act and further proposed laws it's unlikely that any work created after 1925 will ever be in the public domain.

So expect all the current online copyright issues to only get worse as the years go by.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:39 PM | Comments (819)
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In Iran.

Progressive.

“The conversion to Islam is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism, which I was born with. It means I have accepted Muhammad and other prophets,” Stone told AFP.

...

According to the Tehran Times, in order to convert one must recite the shahada, or the Islamic “profession of the faith,” and believe it in order to convert to Islam: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger.”

Apparently Sean's as stupid as his jackass father. He's not rejecting Christianity and Judaism, just rejecting them.

Posted by: Ace at 01:51 PM | Comments (324)
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They didn't go forward with the plan (as far as we know).

I imagine only because people in the leftwing media -- who would be the next targets, of retaliatory digging from the right -- warned them off.

But this is where their heads are at.

“We must take Fox News head-on in a well funded, presidential-style campaign to discredit and embarrass the network, making it illegitimate in the eyes of news consumers.”

What Frisch proceeded to suggest, however, went well beyond what legitimate presidential campaigns attempt. “We should hire private investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox News anchors, hosts, reporters, prominent contributors, senior network and corporate staff,” he wrote.

...

The memo goes on to suggest new and unusual ways to harass Fox News: “detailed opposition research” on the network’s staff and executives, attacks against Fox News employees on Facebook and other social media, mailing anti-Fox News literature to their homes and placing “yard signs and outdoor advertising in their neighborhoods.”

At one point, Frisch suggests putting “a mole inside of” the network.

The cloak-and-dagger tactics seemed to make Frisch jumpy. “Fox is likely to retaliate,” he wrote. Media Matters should find “ways to protect the privacy of our employees and the security of our office.”

I like that after endorsing the notion that no one at Fox should have privacy, he follows up with a caution that Media Matters will of course have to take steps to protect its own workers' privacy.

Posted by: Ace at 12:59 PM | Comments (535)
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Palette cleansing. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:48 PM | Comments (70)
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As I pimped the concept, I also have to warn you away from the actual product.

I didn't see it, but these guys did.

While the absurdity is piled medium high, and a handful of the gags work beautifully, the movie gets so weighed down by a lost focus and its attempted poor manÂ’s political theater that the jokes get fewer, farther between, and facile.

It should have been a huge tip off when the President of 2018 is a Sarah Palin mock-off (Stephanie Paul) that the movie’s “relevant” comedy would be too easy and too blunt. It’s so on the nose that they should have gotten a mortgage on the left nostril.

...

When itÂ’s strident political commentary, the production comes off like a small child repeating a joke it heard on the nightly news. Plus, that small child just happens to have written the joke on a hammer and is swinging it repeatedly at your face.

...

Beyond getting stuck on a tired, one-note joke for its second half, the movie is plagued by being average. It never swings for the fences. Had it been offensively bad, it might still have been entertaining. As it stands, itÂ’s so bland that shrugging seems like it would be giving it too much credit.

...

Frankly, there aren’t enough jokes and there aren’t enough jokes that work. If there were a stronger plot, it could take some of the burden, but it doesn’t grow much beyond “There are Nazis on the moon, and they are going to attack.” At the same time, even with the high concept, the damned thing is overly complicated. It shifts from one group of characters to the next, trying hard to find which one is consistently funny, and no one is to be found.

...

WhatÂ’s worse is the completely misguided swerve into intelligent humor. The script just isnÂ’t smart enough for it, and cramming lame political snipes into a movie thatÂ’s already established itself as throwaway zany fun with an army that goose steps in low gravity makes it even more obvious that the joke writers didnÂ’t get their own punchlines. The clown shouldnÂ’t try high satire, especially if the clown isnÂ’t that funny to begin with.

Having not seen it, I'll take a guess.

The Left is so averse to war (at least wars waged by the West) they cannot even make a silly, absurdist movie about it, without attempting to show you that Both Sides Are Bad. Lest you get the Wrong Idea and their entertainment push you into a Warlike Militaristic Extremism.

Even in a movie about space Nazis, this is apparently a big concern.

So they just can't have a movie about Space Nazis; they need to show both sides as being absurd and dangerous, and hence they shoehorn this apparently flailing "humor" about a Palinesque president to show you that War Is Never The Answer.

If a movie wants an adult to like it, it should treat the audience like presumptive adults, and not endeavor to add Cautionary Tales to absurdist comedies just to make sure that no one Gets The Wrong Idea Here.

The left is big on People Thinking For Themselves.

In theory.

When it comes to actual permit such a thing, they get cold feet, and make sure the Moral is well and truly hammered home into your skull.

Thanks to @slublog.

Brief Review: Mission Impossible 4 (Ghost Protocol).

The reviews all say this is unexpectedly good.

The reviews are mostly wrong.

There is nothing exactly wrong with Ghost Protocol. It's not a bad movie.

Similar to my mini-review of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, I'll say the same thing: It's a professional job. People showed up and got a check, and they mostly earned their checks.

But a professional job is not the same as an inspired one. There's just nothing of any special interest here. The villain is like the 70s Bond villains-- he just literally wants to destroy the world. He has a theory that extinction is a natural and vital part of evolution. Like Stromberg or Drax. He's not plausible, and he's barely ever on the screen, so he doesn't register as anything other than a Cardboard Menace.

Like other Mission: Impossible entries, the plot starts and stops as Cruise briefs us on the next objective, and quickie explanations are offered as to why interesting stunts must be performed. For the Dubai sequence: We need to break into the server, but we can't do it from the inside, just because. So, you have to go outside the building, 130 floors up.

This isn't super-objectionable. It's not the worst scripting problem you can imagine. But the story really doesn't proceed organically from one sequence to another (as it did in, say, Die Hard) but only via four Writers' Interventions.

And now we have to do this.

And now we have to do this.

And now we have to do this.

Eh. Not the smoothest scripting possible.

There's a ploy in this Dubai sequence, incidentally, that's very ham-handed and illogical. If you'll forgive my getting into the weeds of plot logic for a moment...

Basically, their initial planned ruse is to have a Courier meet an IMF agent pretending to be his Recipient, and have the Recipient meet an IMF agent pretending to be his Courier, so that both parties think the exchange has occurred, when in fact it hasn't, and then IMF walks off with the MacGuffin being delivered.

But Tom Cruise calls an audible, and insists the MacGuffin must actually be delivered from Courier to Recipient, and then they'll just follow the Recipient.

Fine. Except that for no good reason they then proceed with the ruse -- the false meeting con -- even though they could now just let it go forward, for real, because they're no longer intercepting the delivery at all. Now they're permitting the delivery, and following the parties afterwards.

But they go ahead with a complicated and dangerous ruse anyway (relying on the unlikely assumption that neither party knows what the other looks like) because I guess they think it's neat and they have to fill up fifteen minutes.

I don't pray at the Altar of Script Logic, and am willing to let things like this slide, but it's indicative of the Because The Writer Said So mode of plot evolution here.

There are a few neat tech bits-- they use a real-life-plausible Scrim and holograph-projecting camera to make a hallway appear empty to the guard watching it.

Honestly, though? A nuclear missile launch as the Big Threat, and a race to deliver the Abort Code?

Not really very original, is it?

The action is firmly bland. There's a neat-in-concept fight inside a mechanical parking facility, with cars being ferried up and down by robot action as villain and hero fight, but it's all a bit contrived, and feels more like Minority Report than Mission Impossible anyway.

To all the critics praising it-- seriously, you've overrated this. This is a very average spyjinks movie with no emotional arc or even much of a thrill-factor. I think you guys are just rooting for Brad Bird, to make sure he gets a shot at live-action cinema, after his good work on The Iron Giant and The Incredibles.

It's fine, but for people like me, who don't really love going to the movies, but would rather see it on DVD -- there's not much here that is compelling. I'm told the Dubai parts looked good on IMAX, but it's not in IMAX anymore (I saw it in normal projection) and there's no reason to rush out and see this in the cinema. DVD or HBO will do you just fine.

It's not bad. But it's not good, either. Two and a half stars.

If anyone hasn't seen it yet -- rent Mission: Impossible III instead, which is a surprisingly effective entry in the disappointingly dunderheaded series, with a truly malignant villain, and J.J. Abrams coaching a nearly-lifelike performance out of Tom Cruise.

Honestly, I think the positive buzz here is a combination of Brad Bird Boosterism plus genuine shock that an M:I movie could be good.

Which tells me that people didn't see M:I 3. M:I 3 was good. So to me, this wasn't "surprisingly good." This was a letdown.

Posted by: Ace at 11:35 AM | Comments (219)
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Yes, awesome, he's an extremist on stuff I'm a moderate on but a squish RINO moderate on the things I'm an extremist on, but I should support him, because, sweater vest.

We've come a long way since our onetime approval of the sentiment, "I want to make Washington, DC as inconsequential to your lives as possible."

Washington, DC

We're back, baby.

Posted by: Ace at 11:11 AM | Comments (409)
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