Last time we checked in on @Soledad_OBrien (D-CNN), she was getting the Wikipedia definition of Critical Race Theory whispered in her ear because Breitbart.com's Joel Pollak came to her show prepared to do battle.

@Soledad_OBrien's ignorance/deception about Critical Race Theory, her combative posture in the interview, the Wikipedia cite and subsequent edit-war, and some has-been comedian who was also a guest on the show's accusing Joel Pollak of being a racist resulted in a massive amount of Twitter traffic pointed at @Soledad_OBrien.

It seems @Soledad_OBrien didn't like that very much and asked people today to "stop tweeting me, we've moved on". Now, I don't even know what "tweeting" is, but it apparently makes @Soledad_OBrien very, very angry.

So angry, in fact, that she sought to further shore up her prior piece on Critical Race Theory by bringing Dorothy Brown from @EmoryUniversity on to explain it to us. And by explain, I mean lie.

Soledad invited Emory University professor Dorothy Brown to talk about Critical Race Theory because sheÂ’s written about it: Fighting Racism in the Twenty-First Century. HereÂ’s an excerpt, courtesy of Rightsphere:

Although CRT does not employ a single methodology, it seeks to highlight the ways in which the law is not neutral and objective, but designed to support White supremacy and the subordination of people of color.

Which IÂ’m pretty sure was Joel PollakÂ’s definition as well. The one Soledad kept sputtering about, to stall for time while her intern Googled it. And yet this morning, Brown said CRT had nothing to do with that stuff.

OÂ’Brien: One of the things you heard Mr. Pollak say, he said that Critical Race Theory is all about white supremacyÂ… So youÂ’re a professor, you teach this theory, youÂ’ve written a book about it. Is it all about white supremacy?

Brown: No, it’s nothing about white supremacy. When I hear “white supremacy,” I think of the Ku Klux Klan. Critical Race Theory is the opposite of that. So, honestly, I have no idea what he was talking about.

Perhaps, Professor Brown, he read what you wrote.

Now, I'd never want to encourage such a thing, but if you can figure out how to "tweet" in the first place and then send one in such a way that @Soledad_OBrien would see it, I really don't have any way of stopping you. more...

Posted by: andy at 04:28 PM | Comments (284)
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Disapproval at 47%

Looks like that giant contraception distraction worked great, hunh?

First Rasmussen, then ABC, now CBS. Two out of three of these are usually the "rescue pollsters" we joke about. CBS gives Obama an edge over both frontrunners, but that edge has narrowed considerably. The President led Romney 48-42 in the previous poll, that has shrunk to 47-44. He also leads Santorum, now 48-44, down from his 49-41 lead.

I have officially upgraded from "meh" to "eh".

UPDATE- A moron emailed me asking what would take me from "eh to yeah?".
It would take state-level polling data showing a return to the Fall of 2011, when President Obama was watching his margins in light-blue states like Michigan, Maine, Connecticut and the like evaporate. When those states are harder for him to keep, the purple ones (OH, FL, VA, NC, NH, CO, IA, NV) are already gone, and I can stop breathing from the Bag of Visions.

Posted by: CAC at 03:28 PM | Comments (277)
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The old one was starting to smell like ace's feet, so it's time to move on.

I got nothing, so here is that famous quote from Alexander Tyler. Every time I read it, I want to weep for our country:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

"Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage."

Attributed to Alexander Fraser Tyler

Posted by: Code Red at 03:21 PM | Comments (85)
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He's going after Sarah Palin again. He's been doing this for years. Maybe there is something I don't understand about politics, but shouldn't you be at least a bit, um, political if you're going to get into that game? He's a campaign manager, for goodness sakes.

“For me and the experience I had on this campaign is that there are worse things than losing,” Schmidt said. When he was asked to spell that out, he said, “When a result happens that puts someone who’s not prepared to be president on the ticket, that’s a bad result. I think the notion of Sarah Palin being president of the United States is something that frightens me, frankly. And I played a part in that. And I played a part in that because we were fueled by ambition to win.

Could he possibly be more un-political?

Who would ever hire this guy again, knowing that if he gets cranky and doesn't get his woobie he's going to start backstabbing? Even if you had legitimate reasons for feeling negatively toward your candidate, you wouldn't go around trashing them afterwards like this. Right? What am I missing here?

Thanks to commenter "kbdabear."

Added: Commenter "Jeff B." has a theory:

His career was already over. He's been toxic for quite awhile now. The simple fact is that any GOP candidate who hired him would immediately get swamped by a wave of negative publicity from the conservative grassroots -- and this was the case long before the movie ever came out.

Schmidt knows this. He knows he has nothing to lose. He's positioning himself for a punditry gig at this point, and building his "bipartisan" credentials with an eye towards that.

Follow me on Twitter.

Posted by: rdbrewer at 12:21 PM | Comments (503)
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The propaganda documentary forthcoming from Team Obama, narrated by Forrest Gump and directed by Al Gore's co-conspirator Steven Guggenheim, has already given us priceless moments such as this clip where Guggenheim said there was nothing negative in the 17-minute film because Obama was just too perfect and the only negative has been the obstructionist Republicans.

Now as the buildup continues before the release Thursday (admit it, you're very excited), along comes Bill Clinton in a supporting role, admitting he'd hoped to have been as shrewd as Obama by ordering a daring raid on terror kingpin Osama bin Laden.

Former President Bill Clinton says in a forthcoming Obama campaign documentary that he hopes heÂ’d have made the same decision as President Obama to authorize the daring raid that killed Osama bin Laden.

“He took the harder and more honorable path,” Clinton says in a newly released excerpt of “The Road We’ve Traveled.” “When I saw what had happened, I thought to myself, ‘I hope that’s the call I would have made.’”

In 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing killed six people.

In 1998, the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa killed 224.

Both were the work of al-Qaida and bin Laden, who in 1998 declared holy war on America, making him arguably the most wanted man in the world.

In 1998, President Clinton announced, “We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes.”

NBC News has obtained, exclusively, extraordinary secret video, shot by the U.S. government. It illustrates an enormous opportunity the Clinton administration had to kill or capture bin Laden. Critics call it a missed opportunity.

Remember the Clinton fury over "The Path to 9/11" and the subsequent revisions to it? Sure seemed like he had plenty to obfuscate about his action, or lack thereof. And let's not forget about Sandy Berger. Or have we already?

If you can stomach it, here's a clip from the Guggenheim puff-piece: more...

Posted by: Guest Blogger at 11:41 AM | Comments (167)
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You just can't trust anybody.

After claiming in March of 2009 he "absolutely would not switch parties," Arlen Specter defected to the Democrat party the following month. Because, after all, it's not about being a Republican; it's about holding onto power. And saving your own skin. He later went on to give Obama the 60 votes necessary to pass Obamacare--against the wishes of the majority of voters.

Former Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) writes in a new book that President Obama ditched him in the 2010 election after he helped Obama win the biggest legislative victory of his term by passing healthcare reform.

Specter also claims that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did not uphold his promise to grant him seniority accrued over 28 years of service in the Senate as a Republican.

Poor guy. They treated him like this, and he was such a nice man.

Rick Santorum just emailed to say, "That's right. Arlen Specter, he's a stand up guy." more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 10:52 AM | Comments (228)
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Don't get me wrong -- I've got nothing against people enjoying their sex lives to the fullest. I am simply against forcing people to pay for the free choices, sexual or otherwise.

Sen. Nina Turner claims she was "concerned" about men's "sexual health" when she wrote a bill that men using insurance for hard-on drugs ought to be screened to ensure that they aren't just looking to up their game at the expense of others.

I see nothing wrong with a requirement that only those having a legitimate need for getting any prescription should be able to offset those costs using an insurance pool.

This Senator makes a mockery of the already painfully trite legislative process, insofar as this particular bill is both purely retaliatory to the "heartbeat" bill, and is also chock full of angry feminist silliness...

men would have to see a sex therapist, receive a cardiac stress test and get a notarized affidavit signed by a sexual partner affirming impotency... [and] receive counseling about possible side effects and receive information about “pursuing celibacy as a viable lifestyle choice.”

But the content of the bill isn't as important to the story as the context of the bill vis-a-vis serial slattern* Fluke's campaign to force other people to pay for her eagerness to avoid having a baby-daddy.

Coming out against the bill will give radical feminists and their co-ideologists of dependency on the left the cover of ideological consistency. Of course, that consistency boils down to the base leftist imperative that the "other" should pay for the choices of the "protected".

As an aside, it is once again reprehensible how deeply the media is entrenched with their ideological activist brethren. Witness how in describing the Senator they repeat what is for all intents and purposes the lie that not wanting to pay for a woman's choice of sexual activity is a state-sponsored limit on that activity:

A critic of efforts to restrict abortion and contraception for women.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:58 AM | Comments (150)
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Below is the information you will need to sign up for the AoS Brackets. It's first come, first serve. Please limit yourself to one entry so there is room for your fellow morons.

Go here and sign up.

Group 1
League ID: 118996
Password: hobo

Group 2
League ID: 119176
Password: hobo

Group 3
League ID: 119804
Password: hobo

Follow me on Twitter, for every follower I get, I will donate a dollar to my beer fund.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:10 AM | Comments (228)
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The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League's (PIHL) Open Cup state championship took place last Thursday. I know, I know. You don't care about highschool hockey in Pennsylvania. However, something awesome happened at the game.

First a little background information. It was held at the Robert Morris University Arena which is far smaller than the local NHL arena(Consol Energy Center). As such, the RMU arena doesn't have all the bells and whistles that a professional arena does. For example, it doesn't play the national anthem before non-collegiate games.

The PA announcer apologized for the lack of a national anthem and asked if anyone would like to volunteer. The entire crowd took him up on that offer.

Video below the fold.

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:45 AM | Comments (240)
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You know how they keep going back in the archives and finding things Mitt Romney said in the past that aren't consistent with his current positions? Well check out this gem:

I got the chance after I lost to John McCain last time, to go over to -- that was the good part of losing -- I got to go to the Olympic Games in China. It's pretty impressive over there how quickly they can build things, how productive they are as a society. You should see their airport compared to our airports, their highways, their train systems. They're moving quickly in part because the regulators see their job as encouraging private people. It's amazing. The head of Coca-Cola said the business environment is friendlier in China than in America. And that's because of the regulators. That's because of government.

If you had elided out the part about losing to McCain, I'd have sworn that was one of Tom Friedman's recurring pieces of bilge extolling the wonders of China. Example (safe link to Reason):

There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

Another great lover of the Chinese "enlightened autocracy" is, of course, the SCOAMF:

“Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, ‘No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.’”

Awww, poor Barry.

Oh, well. At least Mitt has done a 180 since making that statement and changed his stance on China to branding them a currency manipulator on day one of his administration. I mean, it's not like he said this yesterday or something. more...

Posted by: andy at 04:42 AM | Comments (307)
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