First 4 of 35 bowl games start today and continue up to Jan 6. It's on.

New Mexico Bowl: Washington State vs. Colorado State, 2pm EST

Las Vegas Bowl: (20) Fresno State vs. (25) USC, 3:30pm EST

Idaho Potato Bowl (hey New Mexico Bowl, checkit, we picked a food commodity for our bowl game): Buffalo vs. San Diego State, 5:30pm EST

New Orleans Bowl: Tulane vs. LA Lafayette, 9pm EST

I know some of you dear morons are traveling or about to travel to be with loved ones and friends. Be safe, come back a little fatter and enjoy the heck out of your Christmas.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 10:00 AM | Comments (154)
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Except for when they're setting up "reality TV" tension between Phil and a guy rivaled in his masculinity by Footie Pajama Boy, that is.

Because, *wink* *nod* more...

Posted by: andy at 06:58 AM | Comments (532)
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Not sure how I missed this obvious joke. Hopefully, someone else made it?

Posted by: andy at 04:18 AM | Comments (374)
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Ehhhh... I think this is linkbait-edly overstated but it worked. I'm linking it.

Her basic suggestion is that all of these "tweaks" Obama orders by his Kingly Right of Verbal Legislation have the tendency of undermining the actual viability of Obamacare. (Such as it may be.)

As Ezra Klein points out, this seriously undermines the political viability of the individual mandate: “But this puts the administration on some very difficult-to-defend ground. Normally, the individual mandate applies to anyone who can purchase qualifying insurance for less than 8 percent of their income. Either that threshold is right or it's wrong. But it's hard to argue that it's right for the currently uninsured but wrong for people whose plans were canceled … Put more simply, Republicans will immediately begin calling for the uninsured to get this same exemption. What will the Obama administration say in response? Why are people whose plans were canceled more deserving of help than people who couldn't afford a plan in the first place?”

Arnold Kling put it more pithily: “Obama Repeals Obamacare.”

IÂ’d ask this: What do you do for an encore? Will the administration force these folks to buy insurance next year? Or will they keep allowing special exceptions rather than take the political heat for changing health insurance that people liked?

IÂ’m not sure the administration is thinking that far ahead. The White House is focused on winning the news cycle, day by day, not the kind of detached technocratic policymaking that they, and the lawÂ’s other supporters, hoped this law would embody. Does your fix create problems later, cause costs to spiral or people to drop out of the insurance market, or lead to political pressure to expand the fixes in ways that critically undermine the law? Well, thatÂ’s preferable to sudden death right now.

However incoherent these fixes may seem, they send two messages, loud and clear. The first is that although liberal pundits may think that the law is a done deal, impossible to repeal, the administration does not believe that. The willingness to take large risks with the programÂ’s stability indicates that the administration thinks it has a huge amount to lose -- that the White House is in a battle for the programÂ’s very existence, not a few marginal House and Senate seats.

We keep talking about that in the podcast, the obvious observation that Obama is reacting day-by-day, thinking only of the Almighty Newscycle and the next 2-3 days, and not a couple of months or even a couple of weeks ahead.

We're in the very best of hands.

Posted by: Ace at 03:10 PM | Comments (292)
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Justine Sacco, a woman with 100 Twitter followers who no one ever heard of, is -- or perhaps was -- a communications director with IAC, a firm that owns a bunch of internet companies (like About.com).

She did something you're not allowed to do anymore: She made a joke.

Well, obviously she's telling a darkly ironic joke, of the kind you see on Saturday Night Live and the Family Guy every week. And sure, like the jokes on those shows, it's not terribly funny and it's a bit hacky.

But it's a joke. And not a joke at Africans' expense, either. It's black humor commentary about her soft, safe white life.

Obviously.

Well, you and I might understand that, but @BuzzfeedAndrew -- or, as I call him, "Scoop Kascynski" -- knows a smokin' hot story (and clickbait for a slow news day) when he sees it.

Well, a whole bunch of people joined in to say how awful this woman was, just because everyone secretly loves the game they played as children, when a group of kids would circle around and terrify and humiliate one kid who the group jointly decided was fair game for cruelty. Everyone loves joining in a group to destroy someone deemed "outsider."

And this ritual Pack Animal Frenzy Behavior bore fruit -- the woman's company has been apprised of her WordCrime, and they promise they'll take "appropriate action."

“This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC. Unfortunately, the employee in question is unreachable on an international flight, but this is a very serious matter and we are taking appropriate action.”

Isn't that wonderful?

By the way, Buzzfeed's article, headlined...

Internet Erupts After PR Woman For Media Firm Tweets A “Joke” About Getting AIDS In Africa

Justine Sacco is at the center of a massive Twitter storm after joking that white people canÂ’t get AIDS.

...fails to acknowledge that Buzzfeed Editor Andrew Kaczinsky was a major player in ginning up this "internet eruption" and in calling the "Twitter storm" to savage Sacco.

So Buzzfeed created a clickbait "let's get this random stranger fired just to prove we have power" story, and then they publish that story and get traffic off it, without acknowledging that they are, in fact, key actors in all of this.

So, Sacco's on her way to Africa and doesn't even know that Buzzfeed has worked so diligently to bring her unauthorized Humorousness to the attention of her bosses.

Won't it be a lovely Christmas for her.

Aren't human beings just the most wonderful types of people?

Update: I forgot to mention this. Buzzfeed did a little more journalistic digging to find out what other Naughty Things this allegedly Free Citizen might have said in her past.

It's quite scandalous what they uncovered.

This is not the first time that Sacco has tweeted something that was professionally questionableÂ…

I can't be fired for things I say while intoxicated right?

— Justine Sacco (@JustineSacco) January 30, 2013

I'm so glad we Told On Her.

Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (362)
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Wow.

I can't be completely outragey about this because Phil Robertson did, after all, talk about this stuff in fairly crude, blunt terms. That invites a reply in the same spirit.

However, I would point out that Robertson didn't say what he said on a television show adhering to community standards of taste. He said it for a magazine interview, and print is always allowed more latitude that filmed or televised material.

This is now basically just MSNBC's go-to subject: Poopie Sex.

Chris Hayes has never heard anything so wicked. Look at her giggle.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:13 PM | Comments (544)
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As Pelosi said, embrace the suck my friends. Looks like fracking is the only thing that enabled some positive increase in household income. more...

Posted by: CDR M at 05:49 PM | Comments (851)
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They're being paid a little bit more than 3/5ths of a white staffer.

“African American staffers on Democratic federal-level campaigns are paid 70 cents on the dollar compared to their white counterparts; Hispanics are paid 68 cents on the dollar,” writes Ethan Roeder, executive director of NOI.

The study finds that although Republican campaign staffs hire a disproportionately high number of white men, the income disparities between racial groups are not nearly as pronounced as on Democratic campaigns.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (171)
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Wonderful.

Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman with the Department of Health and Human Services, said the system was deliberately taken down Friday morning due to an error that needed to be fixed. She said it should be up by early afternoon.
"Right now HealthCare.gov is queuing consumers," Peters said. "This system is in place while the tech team works on fixing an error that happened during routine maintenance last night. This work started at 10 a.m. and we anticipate this could take two to three hours and that the site will be up and running again soon."

It's so totally fixed.

Before the launch of the site, the head IT guy, Tony Trenkle, refused to sign off on the system's security. So his boss signed it instead, despite the site not being secure. Trenkle then either resigned, or was fired, or some combination of the two.

That happened again with this relaunch. Sharyl Attkisson reports:

Teresa Fryer, the chief information security officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), revealed the findings when she was interviewed Tuesday behind closed doors by House Oversight Committee officials. The security risks were not previously disclosed to members of Congress or the public. Obama administration officials have firmly insisted thereÂ’s no reason for any concern regarding the websiteÂ’s security.

...

According to federal standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the potential impact of a high finding is “the loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect on organizational operations, organizational assets, or individuals.”

Details are not being made public for security reasons but Fryer testified that one vulnerability in the system was discovered during testing last week related to an incident reported in November. She says that as a result, the government has shut down functionality in the vulnerable part of the system. Fryer said the other high-risk finding was discovered Monday.

In another security bombshell, Fryer told congressional interviewers that she explicitly recommended denial of the website’s Authority to Operate (ATO), but was overruled by her superiors. The website was rolled out amid warnings Fryer said she gave both verbally and in a briefing that disclosed “high risks” and possible exposure to “attacks”.

Fryer also said that she refused to put her name on a letter recommending a temporary ATO be granted for six months while the issues were sorted out.

"My recommendation was a denial of ATO," Fryer told Democrats and Republicans who sat in on the day-long interview. According to Fryer, she first recommended denying the ATO to CMS chief information officer Tony Trenkle based on the many outstanding security concerns after pre-launch testing.

Speculation: @drewmtips thinks this guess sounds plausible in explaining the current system failure:

I'm not sure about that. This New Illegal Law was just previewed last night. Have insurers even had time to crunch the actuarial numbers to assign a price for such policies?

Drew also expressed doubts about the "planned" nature of the system failure:

Hah. What a dope Drew is. He still thinks there's a thing called a "deadline" which is real.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 AM | Comments (554)
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I don't watch the show, and I know nothing about A&E's corporate culture, but this sure sounds plausible to me.

Duck Dynasty is not the show that they wanted, it is the show that got away from them.

It seems what the producers intended and what A&E envisioned with the show is much different than the show that they ended up with, but they didn't do anything about it because it was so wildly popular and so wildly profitable. But even with all the money, they have never really been comfortable with what happened.

This is what happened. The whole idea of the show was to parade these nouveau riche Christian hillbillies around so that we could laugh at them. "Look at them," we were supposed to say. "Look how backward they are! Look what they believe! Can you believe they really live this way and believe this stuff? See how they don't fit in? HAHAHA"

When the producers saw the way the show was shaping up, different than they envisioned it, they tried to change course. They tried to get the Robertson's to tone down their Christianity, but to their eternal credit they refused. They tried to add fake cussin' to the show by inserting bleeps where no cussword was uttered. At best, they wanted to make the Robertson's look like crass buffoons. At worst they wanted them to look like hypocrites.

They desperately wanted us to laugh at the Robertsons. Instead, we loved them.
A&E wanted us to point fingers at them and laugh at them. But something else happened entirely. Millions upon millions of people tuned in, not to laugh at them, but to laugh with them.

They didn't know their places.

Posted by: Ace at 08:13 AM | Comments (330)
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