I don't know. I'm not sure if this guy's behaving any differently than Alec Baldwin did when he chewed out his daughter as a "little pig."

Long story short (it's a seven plus minute video), the guy's daughter posted a long complainey post on FaceBook, objecting to the chores she was to do everyday, knocking the parents for "sitting on their asses" while watching her work, asking why she doesn't get paid for her chores, and also asking why the cleaning lady can't do the chores.

The guy posts this video response to her FaceBook page. His main objection is that she was disrespectful. Secondary objections concern the whining about the chores.

It's at 6:50 the video gets to its big moment.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:32 AM | Comments (203)
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Has he gone insane?

The revised Obama mandate will make religious groups contract with insurers to offer birth control and the potentially abortion-causing drugs to women at no cost. The revised mandate will have religious employers refer women to their insurance company for coverage that still violates their moral and religious beliefs. Under this plan, every insurance company will be obligated to provide coverage at no cost.

Essentially, religious groups will still be mandated to offer plans that cover both birth control and the ella abortion drug

According to Obama administration officials on a conference call this morning, a woman’s insurance company “will be required to reach out directly and offer her contraceptive care free of charge. The religious institutions will not have to pay for it.”

The birth control and abortion-causing drugs will simply be “part of the bundle of services that all insurance companies are required to offer,” White House officials said.

So here's how this works.

I'm an insurer. Here were your two options, before Obama's brilliant solution:

I could cover your employees for x dollars.

If you want birth control/abortifacient coverage, we'll add that rider for y dollars. So this option is x + y dollars.

Obama's genius solution is:

Hey, we'll cover your employees for x + y dollars as a baseline. But we'll toss in abortifacient coverage for 0 dollars.

Uhhh... That x+y is what it cost to have base insurance + birth control/abortifacient coverage. All that's being done here is that people are lying about the costs -- now the insurer and the contracting party lie and pretend the base insurance cost is x + y (which it isn't; it's x) and also pretend the cost for the birth control coverage is 0 (which it isn't; it's y).

All Obama's doing is mandating that employers enter into a contract with insurers in which both parties pretend that the base cost of the service is higher than it is, and that abortifacient coverage now costs zero dollars.

Obama's mandate solution is now just to force the conscience-objectors to lie about it. He

The old mandate was just to provide abortifacents. The "solution" just adds a new mandate on top of that one: That you lie about that fact in a legal contract.

This new "solution" is the same one you had before: You always had the option to lie to yourself that you were not part of the abortion providing industry, if you liked.

The only change is now that option is mandatory.

Obama's actual policy doesn't change, nor does the coercion against you. Just a new coercion is added -- that you lie about it -- to insulate him from the political consequences of his policy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (315)
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They're doing this at CPAC today, so let's compare and contrast.

If someone held a gun to your head and forced you to vote for one of these people today (or if you did it of your own volition) ...

Open thread in the comments.

Posted by: andy at 09:26 AM | Comments (276)
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When life hands you a lake full of invasive jumping carp, make invasive jumping carp-ade.
The only defect in this video are a couple of unfortunate nut shots. Next time they should wear cups.

Posted by: LauraW at 07:28 AM | Comments (235)
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So sayeth the King's messengers.

The White House has settled on a compromise in the dispute over whether to require full contraception insurance coverage for female employees at religiously affiliated institutions, a source has told CNN.

The administration will expand the religious exemption for religiously affiliated universities and hospitals, the source said. Individuals will be able to get contraceptive coverage directly from insurers.

President Barack Obama will announce the decision at 12:15 p.m. at the White House. The president briefed New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, on the decision Friday morning.

Now can he just finish his waffle?

Posted by: andy at 06:46 AM | Comments (302)
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Friday! Wooooooooo!!

Congrats to John Sexton of Verum Serum for getting Blogger of the Year!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (373)
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Forget The Tiger Mom - Here Comes the Escargot Mom

Or as Pamela Druckerman declares: Why French Parents Are Superior

After a few more harrowing restaurant visits, I started noticing that the French families around us didn't look like they were sharing our mealtime agony. Weirdly, they looked like they were on vacation. French toddlers were sitting contentedly in their high chairs, waiting for their food, or eating fish and even vegetables. There was no shrieking or whining. And there was no debris around their tables.

...Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life.

And what's so different about the French style? Well for one according to Druckerman the adults are clearly in charge:

They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are-by design-toddling around by themselves.

And Dr. Mischel, a professor of psychology famous for the 'marshmallow test', contrasts this with his own experience with an American family:

He and his wife had befriended an American couple and decided to spend a weekend away with them in Santa Barbara. It was the first time they'd met each other's kids, who ranged in age from about 7 to 15. Years later, they still remember how the American kids frequently interrupted the adults in midsentence. And there were no fixed mealtimes; the American kids just went to the refrigerator and took food whenever they wanted. To the French couple, it seemed like the American kids were in charge.

"What struck us, and bothered us, was that the parents never said 'no,' " the husband said.

Well I'm normally skeptical of these kind of articles but... and as much as this pains me to say - and boy does it! - the French may be on to something here.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:23 PM | Comments (533)
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Right. And Jabba the Hutt was always supposed to be a gigantic space slug despite the fact they filmed him in the first movie (deleted scene) and he was just a fat dude in barbarian furs.

And Lucas always had nine chapters planned from the beginning. Don't believe nine? Okay, how about six?

Lucas just keeps making stuff up.

In a chat with The Hollywood Reporter (via /Film), Lucas said, "The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in Episode IV, what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn't. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down."

My, you have to be sitz-tinkler to get all worried about the message you're sending by having Han "gun Greedo down" like a "cold-blooded murderer."

For one thing, you know, Greedo had a gun on him, and announced, clearly, that he intended to kill Han in the next few seconds.

This seems "bad ass" only because of silly movies in the fifties and stuff when singing cowboys always let the bad guy have the first shot. That continued for decades.

It became accepted that Good Guys Always Let the Bad Guys Shoot First. So that in a movie like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, it seemed cold-blooded that Clint Eastwood would whistle for some Bad Guy's attention, then kill them before they had time to reach for their guns.

But it was never really "cold-blooded." Given the context of the fictional scenarios this was occurring in -- these guys were trying to kill the main characters. It wasn't murder. It was just the good guys deciding they're not going to be Total Saps and give away a crucial advantage in a gunfight.

Anyway, this seems more "cold-blooded" than it is. To the extent these films have anything remotely to do with "realism," it's more realistic that you'd just shoot a guy who's aiming to kill you. Without granting him the advantage of getting to shoot first.

Raiders of the Lost Ark? Shocking only because of the movie convention. In real life, if some Swarthy Foreign Heavy with an enormous Ali Baba sword challenged you to a swordfight-- despite your not having a, you know, sword -- what would you do? Engage him in fisticuffs?

Or shoot him? A sword is a deadly weapon, right? It's not like he was only threatening to use harsh language.

None of this would have seemed surprising had it not been established as a movie convention -- and only a convention in the movies -- that good guys are morons who are willing to risk a bullet to the head in the interests of Being Good Sports About This Whole Trying To Murder Each Other Thing.

George Lucas is just really, really silly, and lives in a world of Yes-Men who never call him on his nonsense.

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Posted by: Ace at 04:24 PM | Comments (343)
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You can only have a brokered convention if no one captures a majority of delegates, and that can only realistically happen in a primary in which three candidates split most of the delegates, not two.

With Santorum now tied with Gingrich -- neither beating him, nor being beaten by him -- and each of the major three candidates with his own regional power-block, it's possible, but still unlikely, we'll have a brokered convention.

If the regional splitting continues -- Romney winning the Northeast and West, Gingrich the South, and Santorum Pennsylvania and the Midwest -- and if Ron Paul plucks off around 100 delegates here and there, then...

...we have a situation where no candidate has more than 900 delegates, and three have more than 400. In that situation, no one would be able to lay claim to the mantle of presumptive nominee. The convention would eventually deadlock, and an outside candidate could emerge.

One other thing that's needed for this scenario to unfold is for California to break for different candidates, too. California awards most delegates by congressional district, so if Romney just takes the lion's share of delegates there, he'd squeak in for a win. If, however, different districts favor Santorum or Gingrich, the rest to Romney, it's possible no one wins a majority.

It's fun to think about. If we could just pick anyone we wanted, who would we pick as presidential and vice presidential candidate?

My problem with this scenario, though, is that we could wind up picking a gutless prick who didn't have the stones to run. That's kind of of important, isn't it? Guts and drive?

A Cold Rope & A Lonely Place 2012

Meteor? Science-fiction farce. Medically induced coma? Absurd.

Let's get back to the basics. The way our forebearers did it.

There ain't nothin' in the Constitution about a meteor or a coma.

Posted by: Ace at 03:50 PM | Comments (357)
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Perry, at CPAC.

There are teleprompters beside the podium, but he seems to be delivering the speech off his written notes.

More: Once Ed takes the video out of the "private" category, you can watch him interview Perry.

Perry says he might run again in 2016 which is, what's the word, irrelevant. I cannot even contemplate the horror of Obama winning and serving another four years.

Posted by: Ace at 01:59 PM | Comments (289)
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