• Iran: WH Lying About Details Of Nuke Deal
  
• Obama Admits the Obvious Then Whines About Our Political Environment
  
• Colorado's Enrollment In the State Exchanges Is Barely Half Of The Worst-Case Projections
  
• VDH: The War On Human Nature
  
• Obama Approval At 34% In Ohio
  
• Obama Going Back To His Old Chicago Ways
  
• Mitch And Murray Decide Alec Baldwin Needs To Hit The Bricks
  
• Fearing A Healthcare.gov Holiday Crash, WH Urges Allies To Hold Back
  
• College Student Harassed By Administrators For Speaking Out About Obamacare
  
• Excuses, Excuses: The Dog Ate Obama's Healthcare Reform
  
• Opinion: Why Hawks Should Love The Iran Deal
  
• SF Protestors To Obama: Please Be A Dictator!
  
• Holding Foreign Visitors To Their Promises
  
• We Are The 55%
  
• Another Scientific Study Finds Something Obvious
  
• This Makes No Sense To Me. At All.
  
• Don't Date A Girl Who Teaches
  
• Asian Arms Race Continues Apace
  
• Wife Of Wannabe Honduran Dictator Loses Democratic Election, Will Likely Not Concede And Cause Violence
  
• First Book Printed In America Sells for $14.2 Million
  
• New Army Drone Looks Like A Bird
  
• Give Thanks To George Mason And The Bill Of Rights
  
• Check Out This Speech By Daniel Hannan Or At Least FF To The Last Q&A Question (video)
  

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:11 AM | Comments (237)
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Have a happy Thankgiving, and safe travels.

New and improved, now with bonus content. [Purp]

Did you know the US Army conducts joint disaster training with the PLA?

MARINE CORPS TRAINING AREA-BELLOWS, Hawaii (Nov. 20, 2013) -- Soldiers from United States Army Pacific, Hawaii Army National Guard and Army Corps of Engineers along with representatives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency participated with the People's Liberation Army in a Disaster Management Exchange, Nov. 12 -14 at Marine Corps Training Area-Bellows, Hawaii.

The 2013 DME is a subject matter expert exchange focused on an international Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief operation.

The highlight of the DME was a Practical Field Exchange Nov. 14. There was also Expert Academic Discussions, based on an international humanitarian and disaster relief scenario calling for U.S. and Chinese military cooperation to provide assistance in a fictional third country...

..."After each practical field training event we stopped and discussed the procedures we used and why things were done a certain way. For every event we [U.S. and China] picked up something," said Maj. Bill Flynn, Hawaii National Guard, CBRNE Emergency Response Force Package...

Posted by: andy at 03:47 AM | Comments (266)
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Because I'm entering Holiday Mode you get le ONT en advance.

Bicyclists Are Terrible

As I've always said I like bicycling but not bicyclists. There's something about putting on spandex and taking an enjoyable pastime just a bit too seriously that brings out the ugly part of human nature in people. Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard agrees:

Late last August, along the coast of New Hampshire, Kevin Walsh, police chief in the town of Rye, got a lecture on law enforcement from a bunch of grown-up bicyclists. Local law requires bikers to ride single-file when there is traffic. But this day, a pack of a dozen or so bikers were racing down Ocean Boulevard, at high speed, up to five abreast, according to an interview the chief later gave. Walsh decided to flag them down and tell them what they were doing was unsafe, "out of control," and "an accident waiting to happen."

He stood in the middle of Ocean Boulevard and signaled them to stop. The bikers blew past him in a whoosh! of Lycra, sweat, and profanity. Walsh got in his cruiser and cut off the bikers four miles up the road. When he stopped them, they began to chew him out. "You almost killed somebody back there, standing in the middle of the road," one of them screamed at the cop. "Do you understand we can't stop? Do you understand we can't stop like a car?"

And Sunny Bunch points out the obvious - that physics works against bicycles:

I just like that anecdote because it so perfectly captures the self-righteousness of the bicycling class and their utter refusal to deal with the simple physics of the situation they find themselves in. When it comes to roads, bicycles can neither accelerate properly nor decelerate properly nor defend themselves properly from the 3,000 lb. behemoths on the roads.

As does Bookworm:

My thinking has always been that the bicyclists believe that their environmental chops mean that they are wrapped in an invincibility cloak, one that allows them to ignore the law of physics.  That is, I've thought that, in their overweening bicyclist arrogance, they truly believe that, even as they break all known traffic rules, they cannot be hurt because they're on the side of angels.

Oh and Bike Lanes Are Racist Too.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:00 PM | Comments (923)
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From Democrats +8 to GOP +2 in CNN's latest poll. The Real Clear Average of all recent polls has the GOP up by +1, a seven-point swing in two weeks.

From the CNN poll:

Democrats a month ago held a 50%-42% advantage among registered voters in a generic ballot, which asked respondents to choose between a Democrat or Republican in their congressional district without identifying the candidates.

...

But the Democratic lead has disappeared. A new CNN/ORC poll indicates the GOP now holds a 49%-47% edge.

The Obamacare "Winners" and "Losers" seem to be realizing who, exactly, is who:

"It looks like the biggest shifts toward the Republicans came among white voters, higher-income Americans, and people who live in rural areas, while Democrats have gained strength in the past month among some of their natural constituencies, such as non-white voters and lower-income Americans," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

"If those patterns persist into 2014, it may indicate that Obamacare is popular among those who it was designed to help the most, but unpopular among the larger group of voters who are personally less concerned about health insurance and health care," Holland said.

Democrats have gained strength among non-white voters? I saw several polls showing a big drop in Obama's and Obamacare's approval among Latinos, and his popularity with blacks seems so high it cannot be improved; so which minority voters are all aflutter to vote Democratic? Asians only?

I was always a little baffled by Democrats', and the media's, and Establishment-aligned Republicans' worry about the shutdown. Yes, there would be some damage; but did they really all imagine this would be permanent damage?

Have they talked to Americans lately? Americans seem hardly capable of remembering who their Vice President is, let alone a 16-day shutdown of 17% of government which happened (from the point of view of the 2014 elections) more than a year ago.

But it does seem that the Democrats think that these microissues will pay huge dividends for them. For example, Greg Sergeant of the must-read comedy site The Plum Line thinks the Hobby Lobby case represents the return of Excalibre to Arthur's hand:

Ah yes. That should do the trick.

That seems unlikely to me-- I don't think people are going to be super-psyched that they're getting their $9 birth control pills paid for by the state. I think they will notice that their premium increases of $1,000-$10,000 rather exceed the cost of the pills.

I don't share Sergeant's Unhinged Optimism about the debate on Obamacare being changed by a reminder that taxpayers are now on the hook to pay for Sandra Fluke's lifestyle purchases, but I am curious to see how this plays out. The GOP has been losing (or not winning enough of) white suburban voters lately, possibly because of their disagreement with the GOP on cultural issues.

I'm curious to see what wins out here -- economics or cultural gestures. I think Sergeant is wrong, but what I'd like to see is that he's really wrong: I'd like to see a large-scale migration of these swing voters to the conservative banner.

I can't help noticing that the left is avoiding the issue that the Big Thing -- Obamacare -- is very unpopular, and that they're counting on Small Things -- the shutdown, subsidized condoms -- to carry the day for them.

Wouldn't a rational person expect that the Big Things would matter greatly, and the Small Things hardly at all?

Byron York, meanwhile, writes that the slack that the public has given Obama is now gone for good.

In April, Real Clear Politics' average of polls showed that 47 percent of Americans opposed Obamacare, while 41 percent supported it — a 6-percentage-point edge for opponents of the president's health care law, which at the time was still months away from implementation.

The latest average of polls, less than two months into the law's rollout, shows 57 percent opposing Obamacare, with 38 percent supporting — an enormous 19-point gap between opponents and supporters.

The two numbers explain why Republicans made little progress when they tried to warn Americans about Obamacare. For years, GOP warnings about Obamacare were about something that had not yet arrived. People had not experienced Obamacare, did not have friends who had experienced it and didn't fully understand what it was. Many tuned out the Republican alarms.

Now that has changed. Millions of Americans are unhappy with what they have experienced under Obamacare — canceled policies, higher premiums and sky-high deductibles. They are also much more likely to believe predictions of future problems. They've seen what has already happened and now know it can get worse.

So how can it get worse? So far, Obamacare has upended the individual market for health insurance, which covers about 10 million people. The next step, according to the respected health care analyst Robert Laszewski, will likely come in the small-employer market, meaning businesses with anywhere between two and 50 employees. That covers about 45 million people.

"Obamacare is impacting the small-group insurance market in many of the same ways as the individual health insurance market," Laszewski writes.

Ah yes -- that small minority of 80 million people (or "trade-offs," as the Administration euphemizes the people they're directly harming with their law) who will be soon losing their insurance as well.

Almost 80 million people with employer health plans could find their coverage canceled because they are not compliant with ObamaCare, several experts predicted.

Their losses would be in addition to the millions who found their individual coverage cancelled for the same reason.

Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute said that in addition to the individual cancellations, "at least half the people on employer plans would by 2014 start losing plans as well." There are approximately 157 million employer health care policy holders.

...

And those cancellations, and the following days of sticker shock, are currently slated to begin before the midterms (though if I were a betting man, I'd bet everything that Obama will delay this).

"They're going to start doing that in the summer or early fall but certainly before the midterm elections," said Veuger.

More poll stuff at Hot Air.

Regarding that Iowa Senate poll that Freddoso commissioned, and that The Meatball just discussed-- I was struck that the Democrat led the race, when he was named. Apparently that guy has high name recognition.

But when the question was asked whether people would be voting for "the Democrat" or "the Republican," "the Republican" moved into the lead.

Ah well.

I'm sure a few tweets from Sandra Fluke on Reproductive Freedom will right this boat.

Posted by: Ace at 03:07 PM | Comments (153)
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Bumped since I only got this up late last night.

Oop. Pardon the late post. Busy, busy with family.

For the last few years, Patheos' Elizabeth Scalia and I have exchanged recipes just before Thanksgiving — it’s a fun little way of finding something new to bring to the table. See past posts here, here, and here.

This year, Elizabeth shared a recipe for Sal's cream puffs. Desserts are always a welcome idea and I agree with her about the chocolate sauce!

I'm having Thanksgiving dinner with my best buddy and his family before moving on to my folks' dinner. He's preparing Bourbon-berries in lieu of the traditional can-shaped cranberry sauce.

Here's what you'll need to do.

1 lb. of cranberries (about 4 cups).
2 cups sugar.
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon.
1/4 cup bourbon.

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Combine first 3 ingredients in 9x13-inch baking dish. Cover tightly with foil and bake until cranberries are tender and sugar is dissolved, stirring once, about 1 hour. Remove from oven and stir in bourbon. Refrigerate cranberry sauce until well chilled. Keeps for about a week. Transfer to bowl and serve.

Obviously, perfect for Thanksgiving. But it also goes great on English muffins with cream cheese and ham the morning after.

What new recipe are you and yours having this year? Share in the comments. Check out what Elizabeth's commenters are sharing with her.

Y'know, I wonder how it'd go if you put the bourbonberries on the cream puffs?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:15 AM | Comments (261)
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No. Lie? There's no way Obama would misrepresent a bargain in order to trick the American public into acquiescing to it and thinking he achieved a political breakthrough.

That just doesn't make any damn sense at all.

Iranian officials say that the White House is misleading the public about the details of an interim nuclear agreement reached over the weekend in Geneva.

...

The White House released a multi-page fact sheet containing details of the draft agreement shortly after the deal was announced.

However, Iranian foreign ministry official on Tuesday rejected the White House’s version of the deal as “invalid” and accused Washington of releasing a factually inaccurate primer that misleads the American public.

...

Afkham and officials said that the White House has “modified” key details of the deal and released their own version of the agreement.

The White House "modifying" the details of an agreement and then lying about those terms?

That doesn't sound like the White House I know.

IranÂ’s right to enrich uranium, the key component in a nuclear weapon, is fully recognized under the draft released by Tehran.

...

The White House confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon on Monday that the final details of the plan have yet to be worked out, meaning that Iran is not yet beholden to a six month freeze its nuclear activities.

Obama has managed his most important goal, though: Cornering Israel.

U.S. President Barack Obama has had two overarching goals in the Iran crisis. The first was to stop the Iranian regime from gaining possession of a nuclear weapon. The second was to prevent Israel from attacking IranÂ’s nuclear facilities.
This weekend, the president achieved one of these goals. He boxed-in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so comprehensively that it's unimaginable Israel will strike Iran in the foreseeable future. Netanyahu had his best chance to attack in 2010 and 2011, and he missed it. He came close but was swayed by ObamaÂ’s demand that he keep his planes parked. It would be a foolhardy act -- one that could turn Israel into a true pariah state, and bring about the collapse of sanctions and possible war in the Middle East -- if Israel were to attack Iran now, in the middle of negotiations.

Except that it's not wise to corner a country in existential fear for its continued existence.

Israel might not feel as boxed-in as Obama hopes they will feel.

A Foreign Policy writer suggests that Israel might resort to a pre-emptive nuclear strike of its own, to forestall Iran from getting the bomb.

They do seem to contemplate that possibility, and hint at it:

n August, Yuval Steinitz, Israel's minister for international affairs, strategy, and intelligence, claimed that Iran's uranium-enrichment facilities can be "destroyed with brute force," which he described as "a few hours of airstrikes, no more." Yaakov Amidror, who recently stepped down as national security advisor, asserted this month that Israel can "stop the Iranians for a very long time." Asked whether this includes Iran's deeply buried nuclear installations, he responded, "including everything."

Only a nuclear weapon could destroy deeply-buried facilities.

Thanks to Dave at Garfield Ridge for that last link.

Posted by: Ace at 01:15 PM | Comments (281)
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Dick Durbin (D) 51%
Jim Oberweis (R) 36%

Per far-right-wing pollster Public Policy Polling.

Now, PPP writes it off casually as the Republican's ceiling, "unless the political climate gets even more toxic for Democrats nationally." I would disagree to a degree: with polling showing no bottom in sight, millions yet to have their policies cancelled, and the latest word about Healthcare.gov missing it's end-of-week deadline, do the Democrats really think the ten point collapse in generic ballot preference from the shutdown to now has suddenly stopped?

Senator Dick Durbin has nothing to really fear next year. He will win, by at least 10 points, because he is Dick Durbin, and this is Illinois. But the sampled electorate already shows a considerable shift to the right: the state voted for Obama by more than 17 points, but the electorate polls claimed they did so by 9. The President's approval rating is barely above water here- 50-46- and this is Illinois.

If the numbers have gotten that sour in the Land of Lincoln, how about elsewhere?

Conservative Intel and Harper Polling teamed up to check up on neighboring Iowa, and, well, I'll let David Freddoso run down the results:

The survey of 985 likely Iowa voters, conducted on November 23 and 24 by Harper Polling, finds the likely Democratic nominee, U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley, with a slim lead against all comers. But despite a near-total lack of name recognition among the Republicans in this race, each of them holds Braley in the low 40s, and some trail within the margin of error in head-to-head matchups.
The poll also finds a slight Republican lead on the generic Senate ballot, 42 to 38 percent...The poll finds that likely Iowa voters disapprove of Obamacare, 54 to 34 percent, and that 52 percent say they are more likely to vote for an Obamacare opponent, versus 39 percent who say they are more likely to vote for an Obamacare supporter.
President Obama himself suffers a 21-point approval deficit in Iowa, with 55 percent disapproving of his performance and only 34 percent approving.

There is a four letter word that rhymes with rave I dare not speak for fear of jinxing it.

But with South Dakota, West Virginia and Montana clearly polling as Republican pickups; Arkansas, Louisiana, Alaska, Colorado, North Carolina, Iowa and Michigan also polling as battlegrounds; and Merkley, Shaheen, and Franken now open to "fixing" Obamacare, it's hard not to read into the future and smile, just a bit.

I'm tempted.

Maybe I'll even make a map. more...

Posted by: CAC at 02:20 PM | Comments (193)
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A lesbian waitress claimed she hadn't been tipped by a couple after she served them dinner. She claimed they wrote on the receipt "WE HATE YOUR LIFESTYLE!!11!" or something.

Her story went viral.

First of all, wait -- this went viral? This was big news? Really? Some alleged bad behavior and rudeness is now a national news story?

Anyway, somehow she was able to start receiving donations, and she got 10,000 dollars' worth of them. One woman sent her $3,000.

For her travails.

Well, guess what: The couple accused of the Sexuality Crime (or whatever) realized she was talking about them, and objected-- noting they'd actually tipped her 20%, and, more importantly than that, they could prove it. Their Visa statement shows a payment including a tip.

And the handwriting doesn't match theirs, either.

Do watch the video to the point where the local news reporter asks the "victim" about these discrepancies, and she all but folds, offering nothing but stutters and shrugs.

Honest people, accused of lying and perpetrating a hoax, do not fold up all demurely like that. They get rather angry and hot about it. They don't just go, "Well, like, I just know, whatever."

Remember some time ago, when another Hate Crime Receipt became a big story? In that case, it was claimed that a couple had written on the receipt that they don't tip n***ers.

Yeah, that was fake too (Item 4).

How many times is the media going to fall for this?

Posted by: Ace at 12:30 PM | Comments (314)
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Just some funny and cute stuff.

Okay, that last one isn't cute and funny. But I like it

Posted by: Ace at 04:04 PM | Comments (246)
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Remember when the media's main story on Benghazi, before all the bodies had yet been recovered from the burning wreckage of the annex, was not that Obama had failed to anticipate a terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11, but that Mitt Romney attempted to politicize the attack?

The media doesn't mind carrying Democratic water. They don't mind at all when Democrats push a cooked-up #WaronWomen narrative. They media will gladly join the Democrats in pushing such stories.

But they do object to Republicans, specifically, attempting politically profit from their reportage.

And so they offer this excuse for their failure to cover legitimately big stories: Republicans tried to talk about it too, so of course we cannot talk about it ourselves.

This is yet another example of the media attempting to claim some rule that looks politically neutral upon first glance -- "We will not publicize stories if a party is attempting to capitalize politically upon our reportage" -- is exposed as a complete lie upon second glance. For, of course, they don't really mean that they won't dig into a story if any political party is capitalizing on them.

They mean only "Republicans." They may attempt to cast the "rule" so that it doesn't say, straight-up, "We'll be damned if we'll be helping the g**-****ed Republicans on this," but in fact that is precisely how it is applied.

No one in the media seemed to mind very much that Democrats turned the Jack Abramoff scandal into their 2006 meta-narrative (despite Jack Abramoff being a huge donor to the corrupt Harry Reid, of course-- but that part didn't "fit the narrative" of a specifically Republican "culture of corruption").

But the moment a story seems to help Republicans, they're now claiming that some rule of ethics bars them from covering it in anything more than desultory "and then these liars said this bullshit" fashion.

It's interesting that Halperin, especially, is pushing this meme, because he's also claimed that the media should be excused from not investigating the actual law and regulations of Obamacare because Mitt Romney didn't make enough of a deal out of it. He continues to refuse to say why Mitt Romney was required to say anything at all about Obamacare in 2010, and why the press would take its cues from a former governor of Massachusetts as to setting the national investigative-media agenda.

But note that he's now offering two rules to explain away the media's refusal to pursue any story that hurts Obama or the Democrats:

1. If the Republicans talk about it too much, the media should be forgiven for refraining to cover it themselves, as they wouldn't want to be seen as taking their talking points from the Republican Attack Machine.

2. If the Republicans talk about it too little, as Halperin says Romney did in 2012, then the media should be once again excused from covering stories that hurt Obama and the Democrats, because they only take their talking points from the Republican Attack Machine.

Nifty little pair of rules, huh? I'd like to know what Halperin has in mind as the "Goldilocks Scenario" where Republicans don't talk about the issue too much, but also not too little, thus enabling the press to actually do its alleged job.

As Mary Katharine Ham asks:

WHAT IS THE POINT OF YOU, MARK HALPERIN?

Posted by: Ace at 11:25 AM | Comments (290)
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