Obviously, racists.

Meanwhile, via Hot Air, the donation gap may be a real problem with real voting-booth level effects.

According to The Washington Post, President Obama has spent more than $91 million on television ads in eight swing states as of July 6. Over the same time Mitt Romney has spent just $23 million. True, conservative groups have spent some money against Obama closing the gap a little (in Pennsylvania, for example, Obama has spent $5 million, Romney nothing, and Karl RoveÂ’s Crossroads GPS has spent $2.3 million).

But conservative groups have far outraised and outspent liberal groups this year and that trend shows no signs of abating (American Crossroads, the 527 organization affiliated with Crossroads GPS, has already booked $40 million in advertising time for the last four weeks of the election.

Worse for Obama, the latest fundraising numbers show he will not be able to outspend Romney forever. Romney and the Republican National Committee raised $106 million in June, while Obama and the Democratic National Committee raised only $71 million. Romney will eventually reach parity with Obama on television spending and will probably surpass him.

Is Romney husbanding his dollars for a shock and awe blitz?

Did I just think of a random, provocative question to try to add some juice to a couple of links?

I did.

Posted by: Ace at 03:51 PM | Comments (315)
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Tom Junod was frightfully upset when American troops were raiding terrorist houses and killing terrorists.

He dreamed of a better way -- a more Obama way -- and he got it.

And now he's whining about that, too.

Additional thoughts on this from Ed Driscoll and Jonathan V. Last.

The argument is over whether an Obama Super Fan (and read Moe Lane's quote; he was almost certainly in love) is required to renounce his support if, in his hysterical worldview, "murdering" American terrorist traitor al-Awaki (and, as collateral damage, his 16 year old son, who was present at the location struck) is, well, just murder by executive order.

I have to sort of bow out of this discussion because the word I chose above -- "hysterical" -- is well chosen. I find these people to be hysterics, and there is no point attempting to probe the reasoning faculties of a hysteric.

I'm not sure what point there is. They continue wishing away the fact that discomfits them so -- that terrorists are real, and quite dangerous, and not simply bugaboos of a Rove-created False Consciousness. Since they can't acknowledge simple reality, it's pretty futile to probe their reaction to real-world events too closely.

They did not vote for a President; they voted for a Redeemer, a Christ figure, who would bring Peace to Earth. These moral quandries weren't supposed to exist anymore, according to their religious-zealot thinking. We were supposed to enter our Thousand Year Reign of Christ on Earth.

Well... Christ isn't here yet. Sorry about that.

Maybe later, guys.

But keep on pumping out your religious tracts and prophecies. One day, you'll get a prophecy right. Law of large numbers, after all.

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Posted by: Ace at 03:25 PM | Comments (89)
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Boring headline, I know.

Watch the video.

I'm thinking she's going to get caught. And have some kind of endorsement or Movie of the Week deal.

Thanks to Dr. Spank.

Better Vid: It starts with a long shot. Like a runway shot.

Updates: Taiwanese video; plus, she already turned herself in. Video also embedded below.

Update: A picture of Tonee Walker (of course she's got a stripper name).

Thanks to @rdbrewer4 and Sgt. York for the updates on this important story.

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Posted by: Ace at 02:28 PM | Comments (178)
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The possum (or "oppossum," whatever) has a protein that neutralizes "almost all" poisons.

Seriously -- almost all poisons. Even those that are completely human-manufactured, so you'd think "Oh, there's no way the protein could protect against them."

The BittelMeThis blog goes into further detail, explaining that scientists then injected mice with the LTNF protein and subjected the rodents to venom from otherwise deadly creatures, including Thailand cobras, Australian taipans, Brazilian rattlesnakes, scorpions and honeybees.

When the venom did not kill the mice, the mice were then exposed to deadly poisons, including ricin and botulinum toxin. And again, the LTNF [Lethal Toxin-Neutralizing Factor] protein was able to diffuse the poison, leaving the mice unharmed.

I like that these scientists just subjected these mice to a welter of the most deadly toxins in the world, and they survived, and rather saying "Okay, these mice have been through enough, let's retire them and give them apples and Cheerios every day for the rest of their natural lives, as a thank you for services rendered," they just say, "Okay, now let's hit these bastards with botulinum and ricin."

That's a Honey Badger frame of mind.

The next step will be a scientist asking, "Gee, I wonder if the protein protects them against being smashed to pieces with large hammers. Let's test that."

Thanks to LauraW.

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (151)
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Reminders of Egypt's pagan past.

Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sunni Sheikhs” and President of National Unity, Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, called on Egypt’s new president, Muhammad Morsi, to “destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what the Sahabi Amr bin al-As could not.”

This is a reference to the Muslim Prophet Muhammad’s companion, Amr bin al-As and his Arabian tribesmen, who invaded and conquered Egypt circa 641. Under al-As and subsequent Muslim rule, many Egyptian antiquities were destroyed as relics of infidelity. While most Western academics argue otherwise, according to early Muslim writers, the great Library of Alexandria itself—deemed a repository of pagan knowledge contradicting the Koran—was destroyed under bin al-As’s reign and in compliance with Caliph Omar’s command.

Don't worry, though -- reason shall prevail. More moderate voices call out for merely covering them in so much wax they'll appear as shapeless blobs.

Meh. Fine. How about you just sell them, so an American investment consortium can move them brick-by-brick to, say, Death Valley or Arizona? (I prefer Arizona so that it turns Steve Martin's King Tut -- "Born in Babylonia, moved to Arizona" -- into a sort of prophecy.)

Then we can see the Great Pyramids in relative safety, and let Egypt dine on zero dollars.

Lunacy, of course. And a lunacy that will only be cured by a genuine epochal calamity. I just hope that calamity is mostly restricted to the lunatics, and doesn't bring the too much woe to the non-lunatics.

via @rdbrewer4

Posted by: Ace at 01:04 PM | Comments (325)
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An economist named Pedro Schwartz reviews Krugman's book -- which I believe is this recently-released one, End This Depression -- to his beady-eyed, trollish face.

The review is not a positive one.

This is a debate, but each speaker gets to speak his entire thesis (15 minutes or so) while the other just sits silently.

Krugman is red-faced in anger, and reportedly did not shake Pedro Schwarz's hand at the end of the debate.

Pedro takes the stage at 35:00 (or thereabouts). Krugman begins responding at around 48:00. Worth watching; maybe mark it for later.

Key quote:

Keynesians got us into this mess and now we (non-Keynesians) have to sacrifice our principals so that they can get us out of this mess.

Later on, around 1:06, they start going at it again. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (170)
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From a fairly consistent ca. 35% of respondents saying they had a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in TV news from 1994 to 2001, and then a steady decline in confidence.

That figure is now a mere 21%, the lowest level since Gallup started asking the question in 1993.

(1993's survey showed 46% expressing high confidence in TV news -- but that dropped to 35% the next year, and stayed at about that level until it began to fall in 2001. Seems maybe 1993 is just an outlier, unless the Gingrich Revolution was accompanied by a sharp fall in confidence in TV news.)

Is there any other industry that has fared as poorly as the media these last 20 years? Can you think of an entire industry (well, not entire, but you know, 90%) so discredited and exposed as fundamentally corrupt and dishonest over this timeframe?

Banking, maybe. Congress, I suppose.

A big part of this would be the silly shit from the left. Among the most dubious memes ever put forward by the left is that the media is biased towards the right.

Now, no one ever knows how serious they are about that. Most think they are lodging the charge strategically, to "work the refs" and counter any charges from the right that they are biased to the left.

Nevertheless, some of the dummies actually take this seriously.

And hence, starting in 2001 or so, not only did the right become more aware of persistent and pernicious media dishonesty in favor of one political party, but the left, too, suddenly began bleating about the "Conservative Media."

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (144)
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There is no other fair way to read it.

The group calls itself, portentously, The Message.

Their message is racial discord.

According to a news release, The Message said it plans to use videos to "say things that Democrats are afraid to say, connect with young voters-many of whom are alienated by today's political climate, and give smart and insightful voices an opportunity to contribute to the debate."

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Posted by: Ace at 11:37 AM | Comments (171)
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The RNC is pushing its own Outsourcing site -- noting, for example, that that $500 million for Fisker electric cars went to Finland, to employ Finnish workers.

Poor Andrea Mitchell was inadequately briefed by the White House on what Talking Points she should offer. Sununnu chuckles at her by the end:

Sununu: [laughing] You're struggling, Andrea. You're struggling.

Thanks to JackStraw.

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Comments (109)
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Really great article you shouldn't miss, even if you're looking at that lame headline I just wrote thinking "Huh?"

George Lakoff is a tip-top thought leader among progressives. His new book -- titled as a tip of the hat to Chairman Mao's Little Red Book -- contains further elaborations and prescriptions. Corrected: I incorrectly stated he wrote What's the Matter With Kansas?, too, a similarly smug read on politics. But in fact that was a completely different asshole, name of Thomas Frank.

It would be unfair to say George Lakoff is a one-trick pony; he has, fully, three tricks. Though these tricks are interrelated, so maybe it is just one trick.

When you hear progressives bleating that it's not their policies or policy outcomes that lose voters, but only their messaging, that's them echoing George Lakoff. All he's about is "messaging" and "narrative frames." Now it's true that he didn't invent that whine, but, being some kind of cognitive scientist, he's added a great deal of faux-scientific authority to it. He's made it proper and scientifically respectable to lose and lose and lose and just keep saying "our messaging failed us."

I'm going to quote Zombie extensively (and Zombie and PJM: I'm only doing this to sell this whole article to my readers!) The whole thing is worth a read (maybe bookmark it for later), but here's something fun:

According to [Lakoff's] analysis, conservatives are conservatives because their minds and morals have been twisted by cruel parenting, and they seek to reconstruct this pathological family unit on a grand society-wide scale; whereas progressives naturally were raised by wonderful, caring co-parents to become wonderful, caring adults who seek to replicate this loving family environment for all mankind...

And yet his new Little Blue Book is supposed to be an instruction manual on how to convert wavering conservatives and undecideds to the liberal worldview — even though insults and mockery are an integral component of that worldview. To summarize Lakoff’s presentation in one sentence, he essentially says, “Hey, you ignorant yet diabolical rubes, shut the hell up and submit to an incessant barrage of our vacuous euphemistic leftist slogans, because you’re too stupid and evil for an honest debate.”

The eternally vexatious problem which drives Lakoff to distraction and which inspired him to write (along with one of his researchers) The Little Blue Book is that despite their psychological pathologies and awful moral structure, conservatives somehow still manage to occasionally win elections. Lakoff has come to the conclusion that this is due not to the superiority of conservative philosophy, but to superiority in conservative messaging.

IÂ’ve designed a little chart to clearly illustrate what I call LakoffÂ’s Paradox: Why is it that conservatives still manage to sometimes win public opinion and elections despite being so vastly inferior? Behold:

One more interesting point: You know how liberals and conservatives often talk right past each other, speaking in completely different words and ideas and thus not addressing each other's central points? Lakoff recommends that. He actually recommends not addressing conservatives' key points at all, and specifically forbids progressives from even mentioning them.

His idea is that progressives can just fill the air with their own words and "narrative frames" and thus crowd out conservatives' (stupid conservatives actually repeat their rivals' words and frames, in order to argue against them!) and he also suggests that this tactic will suggest that conservatives' arguments are beneath the dignity of civil debate. Which will, in theory, persuade independents, by a stealth process: Progressives utilizing the Lakoff Method won't actually convince such people on an intellectual level (as he specifically forbids intellectual engagement), but they will get the subliminal message that there is simply nothing in the conservative argument to be intellectually engaged at all.

As Zombie notes, this makes no sense. It's my own heuristic, for example, that when I don't know much about an issue, and am just trying to find my bearings in a political dispute I know nothing about, I'll listen to two Talking Heads arguing with each other on TV. And, in this Collecting Very Basic Information Mode, I assume that if one of the Talking Heads refuses to address the point made by the other, and changes the topic, then that point has been conceded as largely correct.

My reasoning is extraordinarily simple: If you had a good response, you would have offered that good response. If you instead flee and change the topic, you don't have a good response, but do not have the intellectual honesty to admit "that's a fair point," and are trying to sound like you're responding when in fact you're not responding at all.

I believe I share this heuristic with 98% of the non-drooling population of the planet.

Now, as I become more aware of a subject, I'll wind up discovering better defenses than that first Change-the-Subject Talking Head offered. And yet my position will have been substantially shaped by his inability to offer a good defense. And, of course, most of the persuadable, non-rigorous voters will never see anything except, at most, a single Talking Head debate on the subject.

And yet Lakoff -- Thought Leader for the Bien Pensant Left -- advises just this strategy of childishly changing the topic. Well, he says change the "narrative frame" by refusing to even note any points made in a conservatives' "narrative frame;" in practical effect, this means changing the topic. If the discussion is about abortion, and a conservative doubts whether it's a moral right to end another human life, he advises ignoring that point and discussing the "narrative frame" of "choice."

The Little Blue Book is being marketed as an “Indispensable Handbook for Democrats” to help them communicate their values more clearly. But I think that the marketing is itself a ploy. The Little Blue Book was not written to help liberals communicate; instead, it was designed as a feel-good mantra, a comforting rectangular teddy bear reassuring the left-wing audience that they are good people. The book’s real underlying message is this: We liberals are morally superior to our nasty and small-minded opponents; if everyone could just see what was in our hearts, we’d be more popular than those mean old conservatives.

That is the conceptual frame Lakoff embeds in The Little Blue Book: WeÂ’re better than you. Progressives can position it carefully on their coffee tables and feel righteous.

I really don't get this strategy at all. It seems totally jackass to me. He seems to be confusing what's actually useful (honestly debating an opponent) with what feels good (attempting some kind of stealth "shaming" and intellectual ostracism by running a cheap eigth-grade-alpha-girl game in which he never acknowledges his opponent's words or thoughts at all).

But, then, I was raised in a demented Strict Daddy family structure so I crave Authority Figures to Instruct me as to what's right and wrong.

Great article, and a good insight into the minds of the left.

Self-Hypnosis? A commenter going by "... is what JQ Public is thinking" notes:

One of the commenters over there had an interesting take. He thinks Lakoff - 'the thinker' - has a purpose beyond what seems to be a fairly stupid surface strategy. While the method might not convert non-believers, it makes the believers they DO HAVE absolutely bullet-proof from facts or reason. They are literally taught not to think - aka, 'indoctrination' in the darkest sense of that word. Such people can be made to do anything.

Ah, so it's not a hypnosis technique taught to readers, but a hypnosis technique directed at readers. If they themselves learn to "think" by never thinking, they can at least never be persuaded themselves.

Probably not his intention, but almost certainly his actual accomplishment.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (263)
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