The lowest-rated show on a low-rated network. What can the Talent-Free do to attract attention to themselves?

Well, on MSNBC, the typical practice is to gin up hateful, disgusting rhetoric cruder than what you'd find at a Klan rally, and hope to get linked by progressive blogs.

Martin Bashir has long thrashed about trying to peddle the most noxious, puerile, crude carnival-barks to his dull-witted audience.

But he's recently achieved a new low.

Lots of people didnÂ’t approve of Palin likening government borrowing to the awful legacy of buying and selling African-Americans.

But Bashir chose to tell his audience of the diary of a plantation overseer in Jamaica named Thomas Thistlewood.

“In 1756, he records that a slave named Darby ‘catched eating kanes had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, sh** in his mouth.’

“This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of inhumanity. And he mentions a similar incident in 1756, his time in relation to a man he refers to as Punch. ‘Flogged punch well, and then washed and rubbed salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper, made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.’”

And that brings Bashir to his disgusting denouement: “When Mrs. Palin invokes slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.”

ThatÂ’s right. Wrapped in the language of literary allegory, Bashir is saying heÂ’d like to see someone assault and abuse Sarah Palin in this horrifying fashion.

And no one at MSNBC bats an eye? This is deemed acceptable discourse?

What would MSNBC say if a conservative had talked about defecating on, say, Hillary Clinton?

Bashir apologized. MSNBC has not suspended him. Apparently it's worse to call someone a f*g than suggest that a woman should be sexually and excretorially degraded.

Leftist politics, I maintain, are not a politics at all, but a psychological response to one's shortcomings and feelings of failure. Leftist politics are, simply put, a way of getting even with a world that's done one wrong -- and most people carrying about such grievances against a world that's done one wrong are psychologically broken.

These fairytale "politics" give them an avenue to vent their rages and turmoils about their failures and inadequacies in a way that is deemed, incorrectly, to be socially acceptable and even high-minded.

If a man were raving on the street in this fashion -- about his hopes that someone would literally sh*t in a perceived "enemy's" mouth (a perceived "enemy," who, crucially, he's never actually met) -- most of us would shake our heads in secondary shame. Some of the more empathetic of us would call social services and attempt to have the madman brought in for psychological treatment.

But the left -- Martin Bashir, Chris Matthews, Daily Kos, all of the hateful, raging, vibrating-with-resentment left -- does this sort of thing in the guise of "political commentary" and no one makes the connection between this broken-souled primal screaming and mental unwellness.

That's their cover. They just call their inner rages "politics" and their antisocial behaviors "activism," and then they pretend to be normal, well-adjusted people.

By the way: While his colleague Martin Bashir calls for someone to sh*t in Sarah Palin's mouth, Chris Matthews has a rage-stroke over a different matter of incivility: Dick Cheney saying that Obama lied when he lied.

See, when you say someone who lied lied, that's racist.

The host continued, "Well, now what was condemned as historic bad behavior comes snarling out of Dick Cheney's mouth and nobody says to shut up." Matthews hinted, "Is this, calling the President a liar, the new language of American politics. Or is it a language specially treated for the country's first African-American president?"

It's specially treated (what? Speak English much?) for people who lied 40+ about getting to keep your policy.

UPDATE: [DiT] MNF post down yonder *points down yonder*

Posted by: Ace at 04:03 PM | Comments (268)
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Pull up a chair and listen up, 'cause you're fixin' to get a healthy plate of learnin'.

via @allahpundit. more...

Posted by: JohnE. at 03:15 PM | Comments (167)
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Wuh?

This is Obama's and Sebelius' HHS firing on all cylinders. People would be happier, you see, if women just calmed the eff down during fights.

This isn’t about who wins the argument – but a study of hot marital fights indicates that when the wife calms down, the couples are more happy. Researcher Lian Bloch of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Palo Alto found that in a study she did at the University of California, Berkeley. She looked at data that included recorded arguments by long-time husbands and wives.

“The marriages that were the happiest were the ones in which the wives were able to calm down quickly during marital conflict.”

Bloch says calm wives were able to look constructively for ways to deal with the emotions and talk about ways to solve the problems. Happiness didnÂ’t change if the husband calmed down quickly.

Okay... I think this is probably true, but:

1. Thank God the #Shutdown is over so we have government workers back to updating websites with crap that's already on Jezebel and PopSugar and all the Mommy Blogs.

2. I cannot think of a worse thing to say to an angry woman than "Calm down, you're being too emotional." Or a not-angry woman. Basically, only a virgin Pointdexter scientist would think this was something he should tell a woman.

3. If this were a Republican President's HHS linking this, what would the Left's and Media's (but I repeat myself) #WarOnWomen Threat Alert System be up to now? Red, right?

Picture of shaved alpacas courtesy of @rdbrewer4. I just think they're cuter when they're shaved.

Posted by: Ace at 10:15 AM | Comments (374)
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14 websites -- $4.4 billion dollars. Only the US Government can spend that much money and produce nothing but a heaping pile of failure.

Quick, let's put them in charge of everything.

The Obama administration gave states roughly $4.4 billion in taxpayer dollars to set up their own ObamaCare websites, according to a new analysis, in the latest revelation about the faucet of federal spending switched on by the 2010 passage of the health care law.

Some of the states even took federal money, then decided to let the federal site handle enrollment.

So it was just another Obama slush fund.

Meanwhile, as regards the several hundred million dollar healthcare.gov pile of rancid garbage, Obama's team has a great idea: Let's just skip the website altogether, and tell people to contact insurers directly.

On a mission to help people bypass distressed health-insurance websites, the Obama administration said it may allow big insurers to directly sign up those who qualify for tax credits, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Currently, customers who are eligible for subsidies can get them only when purchasing coverage on the exchanges.

Wow, sounds like another deployment of Unilateral Executive Lawmaking.

As you probably know from @benk84, Obama has a hot new way to define a 100% functioning website: as an 80% functioning website.

he Washington Post reported on Sunday that the Obama administration will consider the new online marketplace a success if 80 percent of users can buy health insurance. That is absurd. First, it's another broken promise. The president and his advisers responded to the disastrous rollout last month by vowing to deliver an Amazon.com-quality website by the end of November. (If history remembers President Obama for one thing, other than his barrier-breaking 2008 election, it might be the outsized and unmet expectations that paved the path of his presidency.) Second, in what other line of work is 20 percent failure considered a success? If one out of every five meals served by a restaurant is inedible, the joint goes out of business.

This is similar to, but more generous than, his previous guarantee that 100% of you could keep your insurance if you liked your insurance, which actually meant about 40% of you could.

That could mean that 1 million of the 5 million of the people who've lost their insurance due to Obamacare are prevented from getting new insurance altogether, at any price. They won't even be able to pay the sticker-shock prices that everyone else will be subjected to.

Update: An Administration official says 80% functionality is the best case scenario. more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:12 PM | Comments (215)
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There has been a lot of chatter about the extent to which the Obamacare debacle changes the nation's philosophical attitude to the soft, easy blandishments of progressivism. Does it damage them a little, or does it more fully discredit them?

This Gallup poll seems to indicate the damage to progressivism will be heavier than some minor setback.

For years the public had been split on the issue, repeating the easy progressive line that "we owe it" to the less fortunate to shift the costs of their healthcare to our own back accounts. Much of the public went along with this... because they weren't confronted with the actual costs of their gestural support for the nice-sounding proposition.

And further, of course, Obama promised them there would be no costs to be borne at all. In fact, Obamacare would save each of them $2,500 per year.

It has long been my contention that it makes no sense to poll questions simply about the "goodies" of Obamacare, like "do you support free health care for the poor or sick." Everyone's in favor of that. Including myself.

Yes, I'm in favor of that, and so are all of you -- if we do not ask the question in connection with the costs. Of course I'd like everyone to have free health care; in fact, since we're asking about things I just want, I'd strongly prefer to live in a disease-free world where no one ever gets sick at all.

But questions of policy are only answerable in consideration of the costs. Do I favor a manned mission to Mars? You bet I do. Do I favor such a mission, if it costs $60 billion over ten years? No, I don't.

And for a polling company to ask the question without asking about my sensitivity to the cost of it, and then to report me as being in favor of it, is misleading and stupid.

You can only gauge someone's actual support for a policy by informing that person of the likely costs they'll be forced to bear to have that policy. But for four years, virtually everyone in a position of responsibility sought to hide those costs from the public.

And then they took the public's acquiescence to a policy sold has having no costs at all to them as being support of the real policy, with the real costs to be shouldered by themselves.

Well, that lie is now exposed.

So now when pollsters ask the question, the public is thinking about the costs, and saying "No, that's not the government's responsibility."

By which they mean: "No, as a taxpayer, it's not my responsibility to subsidize others with greater and greater fractions of my income."

[Added JohnE.]

Be sure not to miss the partisan breakdown of this poll, especially as it compares to 2010, which saw sweeping Republican victories in Congress.

Republicans are more or less unchanged (aside from the odd dip in 2011), but Independents have risen 6 points to 55% disapproval since the 2010 election.

Even more incredible, since Obama's inauguration in 2009, Democrats' disagreement that government should be responsible for providing healthcare to all has risen an amazing 7 points. Think about that.

Posted by: Ace at 12:57 PM | Comments (295)
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During a city council meeting, he rushes towards, presumably, an opponent voting to strip him of some his mayoral powers, and knocks over an old woman who's in the path of his Chris Farley-like tornado of destruction.

He does help her back to her feet -- apparently she was not the target of his Tommy Boy-like incoherent wrath -- but damage done. Video at the link, and also now embedded below. Worth a watch.

The backstory on this is that Ford is refusing to resign, so the city council is reducing his power. Because: Crack.

Curiously, while Rob Ford has confessed to smoking crack, he denies, and this is quite real, that he ever said he wanted to eat a former advisor's p*ssy.

Yes, that's what he said. He had been accused of offering this unwelcome compliment to a former advisor. Supposedly said "I banged your p*ssy, now I'm going to eat you out."

The advisor herself denies he said this, and denies that she slept with him. A different ex-staffer makes the claim that Ford said this.

Ford also denies having snorted lines of coke at a restaurant and having hosted a prostitute in the mayor's office. He says the woman accused of being a prostitute, "Alana" (no last name mentioned), is a friend. A friend who blows him, for money.

No just kidding. I have no idea.

But he also admitted to maybe driving drunk on occasion.

So, if you're keeping track of what Ford's admitted and denied:

Smoking crack? Admitted.

Being a total drunk? Admitted.

Driving drunk? Admitted.

Doing coke at a restaurant? Denied.

Having a hooker visit him in the mayor's office? Denied. She's a friend.

Eating a staffer's p*ssy? Vehemently denied. He says he has "more than enough to eat at home," alluding to his wife, and, apparently, her ample, voluminous vagina.

Most of this meltdown seems to have happened St. Patrick's Day, 2012. Oh, he also apparently hurled racial epithets at a taxi driver.

I think Ford will soon be resigning to spend more time with his Van. Down by the River.

Thanks to @slublog.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Comments (306)
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"Leadership" -- fostering an environment in which underlings do not tell you the truth, because you're not capable of handling the truth.

As the story of the Obamacare website fiacso unfolds, senior administration aides tell me that the president is “mad, frustrated and angry.”

Mad that his signature legislative achievement is stuck at the gate, frustrated that he’s running out of time to fix it, and angry that he’s got a second term agenda now going nowhere. He’s so furious, in fact, that he stepped out of character to vent to an assembled group of top aides. “If I had known [about the website problems] ,” the steaming president reportedly said, according to the New York Times, “We could have delayed the website.”

All of which begs the real question: how could he not have known?

Gloria Borger is a reliable liberal spinner, so take this with a grain of salt:

This much is clear, after speaking with both past and present senior administration officials: no one was really in charge, so no one knew for sure how bad the overall picture was.

Yes that's the Administration's favored line when it comes to disasters -- "no one" was in charge. Which, conveniently enough, means no one can be blamed.

What’s more, and—perhaps most telling—no one wanted to even hint to the president that this techno-savvy administration possibly had a website stuck in, say, 1995. “People don’t like to tell him bad news,” says an ex-White House staffer. “Part of it is the no-drama culture.”

This may seem like a deadly indictment but in fact it's Obama's favored spin. Remember, he doesn't have many good options here-- he's either lying, or lazy, or completely incompetent. Claiming that he doesn't like "bad news" is in fact a knock on him -- but it's preferable to the alternatives.

After all, this particular spin suggests an easy remedy: The president can just announce he's going to deputize people as Official Truth Tellers to inform him properly. Problem solved!

Here's some evidence of my statement that Gloria Borger is a general transmission station for liberal memes:

And yet, as the dry-runs continued to produce red flags—over and over—the president remained in his steely cocoon. If this were the presidency of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, the obvious theories would abound: the chief executive is disengaged. Or incurious. Or worse. But since Obama is none of the above, what gives?

What evidence is there that Obama is "none of the above"? He is incurious as to how his Administration does business and completely disengaged from it -- something he's said, from his own mouth, a dozen times, frequently telling us he learned about all this when you did, from the morning papers, and always speaking as if he's not the President in charge of the Executive, but just a spectator sitting outside of it, critiquing it.

As if he's the National Ombudsman of the government: No actual responsibility for the Administration's functioning (or, more often, malfunctioning), but ready, willing, and able to criticize it as if he were an outsider whose only job it was to comment on the government's performance.

Sure, Gloria Borger could easily imagine theorizing that stupidity or incompetence or laziness (both in terms of industry and intellect) were the culprits in a Republican Administration, but in the case of Genius of the Republic Barack Obama? Why, it's inconceivable.

Posted by: Ace at 11:22 AM | Comments (349)
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Firing the weapon at the car is definitely a fireable offense.

But everything up to that? It seems like the mother kept escalating things.

They were trying to give her a speeding ticket. That's all. I assume she was speeding, given her subsequent, you know, high-speed flight from police.

And she just kept driving away from the stop or trying to drive away.

I don't know how the police can be faulted for their actions before the discharge of the weapon (which, again, is a fireable offense). What are police supposed to do if someone keeps fleeing after a traffic stop? If you support the rule that they're supposed to just let the person flee (in order to reduce the number of potentially-deadly confrontations), you've just incentivized fleeing police.

It's a pretty riveting. The mother seems insane to me. It's never occurred to me to flee the police over a speeding ticket.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:53 AM | Comments (332)
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Obamacare hits like a ton. 15% say they view the law "very favorably." That's the Democrats' super-base.

45% view it very unfavorably. That's very close to an outright majority. And people "very" concerned about an issue will vote on that issue.

David Frum -- yeah, I know -- writes about repeal scenarios and says -- yeah, I know -- that outright repeal is a "fantasy." He's paid to say things like that. Still, it's worthwhile to consider the difficulties that face Obamacare opponents:

Over the past month, as the Obamacare exchanges have bounced and crashed, some 400,000 Americans have enrolled in Medicaid or S-Chip, the children's health program....

If a "repeal ACA" president takes office in 2017, he or she will face a reality in which repeal means stripping millions of people—potentially up to 10 million—of a government benefit they will by then have enjoyed for more than three years. Such a move would be the most radical reduction in social coverage ever seen in a democratic country. Ronald Reagan never tried anything even close to that.

He goes on to discuss "reform," which I personally don't want anything to do with.

Here's the problem, which he doesn't seem to realize: Obamacare is, as he says, a "fact" on the ground. While it remains in force, any effort to "reform" Obamacare is doomed, because Obama will simply insist that any "reform" meet the baseline goals of the law in place, Obamacare. He will agree to a certain amount of streamlining and that sort of thing, but only to the extent of preserving Obamacare's goals of taking from groups not in his coalition to deliver to groups in it.

And, naturally, he will welcome Republicans taking ownership of and responsibility for an unworkable mess of a law they do not want.

Frum poses as "reasonable" on this, as smart, as "realistic." But he seems to be entirely ignorant of the first law of negotiation -- never negotiate against yourself. Which is precisely what any attempt to "reform" Obamacare while the full dreadful law remains on the books would become. It would consist of Republicans bartering a way to achieve Obama's transformational, redistributionist goals in a somewhat more workable manner.

This must be rejected.

Even to the extent Frum is right about the impossibility of ending the Medicaid expansion, it must still be done in the context of full repeal. Permit a year-long extension of Obamacare on this plank (and any other difficult-to-repeal parts, like the under-26-"children" part) but which sunsets after a year. This would mean the GOP would have a full year to work out a different solution while not disrupting the current regime -- but, as these parts of Obamacare would sunset without action in a year, we would not be under the gun as far as making concessions to Obama. If Obama won't work with us, then we do nothing, and just let it all sunset and go away.

Rather than coming at the law with a full-scale "replacement" (which would have to compete with Obamacare as far as deliverables to Obama's coalition), come at it with a year-long extension plus sunsetting, during which time a workable replacement could be fashioned.

Or, if not, then the whole thing goes away.

I think this is more salable politically -- the American people seem to favor "delay" actions over making definite actions. So let's put our repeal on delay, as far as the more popular parts of Obamacare, with those parts of it extended but scheduled to be sunsetted. The GOP can sell this (honestly) as giving them time to work things out while not throwing millions off Medicaid without their own alternative.

The American public prefers half-steps to full steps. They like hedging. They like buying time and hoping some Miracle Solution arises which has none of the drawbacks of the Democratic and Republican plans.

Of course, that's a fantasy, but if the public is hungry for fantasy, feed them fantasy.

A repeal of most of Obamacare (mandates, etc.) while sunsetting the rest is a full measure disguised as a half-measure that I think can be sold.

And that would give us the space to actually "reform" health care law without having to compete with Obamacare. Given the sunsetting, if the Democrats and Obama won't come to terms, then we just do nothing at all. Then we can share ownership with the Democrats as far as killing Obamacare. Something I don't mind sharing credit on, so long as Obamacare is dead.

Frum article thanks to @benk84.

Posted by: Ace at 09:51 AM | Comments (282)
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Do with it what you will.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:56 AM | Comments (333)
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