I see the word "injuries" in this short dispatch from The Blaze but that could mean anything from a scratch to a mortal would. I wouldn't assume that no one has been killed yet, not until they positively state that.

Pete Williams is reporting that the shooter is wounded and the incident is over:

If the shooter was shot by an armed citizen we'd have a new wrinkle in these eternal debates. I don't know that though -- he could have been shot by a cop, or, as is often the case, himself.

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (288)
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And they couldn't be more proud, especially about that last one.

Eagle Publishing owns RedState, Human Events and Regnery Publishing, a publisher of conservative books. With the acquisition, Salem Communications will operate a block of five major properties in the conservative media landscape.

...

The move marks an accelerating shift in the conservative media world, as a set of boisterous, sharp-elbowed independent digital outlets are brought under the same roof.

I see a lot of potential for cross-platform synergies and lateral integration and other things that don't exist.

But, well, Good, I guess?

Oh, I'll toss this one in: Media Matters now says its "War on FoxNews" is over, because Media Matters already won.

I don't actually understand this move. Nothing is forcing them to stop with their absurd FoxNews microblogging. I can only think that maybe people have grown bored with it.

Posted by: Ace at 11:23 AM | Comments (422)
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What's up morons? I'm back from my little haze, gray and underway vacation just in time for another Friday the 13th ONT. Oh and good luck to all you morons who have some skin in the $400 Mega Millions tonight (whose odds are even harder now).

This is just business as usual. Lawmakers who oversee government surveillance programs receive millions from intelligence companies.
image h/t more...

Posted by: CDR M at 05:57 PM | Comments (705)
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Or at least they're "eyeing" Ed Helms.

I like Ed Helms, but this is just Healthcare.gov: The Movie.

First of all, this movie is going to be awful. Obviously. I won't elaborate.

Second of all, Leslie Nielson wasn't a comic actor. He was a character actor known for playing straight-faced authority figures in melodramas. They cast Leslie Nielson in Airplane because they wanted him to deliver lines in his usual melodramatic serious way, but saying ridiculous things.

And then the cast cheeseball "dramatic" actors like George Kennedy and Ricardo Montalban around him. Then they cast people who couldn't act, like O.J. Simpson and Priscilla Presley. Because a movie like this, if it were played straight, would have that sort of a cast.

Casting Ed Helms -- a comic actor -- in the role is just wrong. Helms plays comedy like a comedy actor. They should be going for a melodramatic serious actor like Bruce Greenwood, or a comic actor that plays comedy deadpan, like Gary Cole.*

But this is part of the Stupid of Hollywood. People don't know offhand, who those actors are (though they know them and like them). People have heard of Ed Helms, and they remember he was in a big comedy trilogy, The Hangover.

So even though Ed Helms isn't a box office draw, we'll cast him in this movie, because then people will know it's supposed to be funny. If we cast Gary Cole, people won't know it's supposed to be funny.

I like Ed Helms -- but he's not Frank Drebin.

Hey why not just cast Jim Carrey? He's wild and crazy and people know he's supposed to be funny. Oh wait, it's because no one likes Jim Carrey anymore. Forget I mentioned it.

Third of all, this movie is going to be awful, seriously. Obviously. Although The Naked Gun itself was very funny, the sequel was very disappointing, and the third one flat-out stunk.

This Airplane-style humor is hard to do. It does get repetitive. It's hard to sustain for 90 minutes. Even the Airplane guys themselves have struggled to make funny movies using this sort of joke -- for every decent Airplane-style movie they made, they turned out two or three clunkers.

And so now a bunch of people who aren't terribly funny -- like the sort of people who write the Scary Movie movies -- are going to ripoff a lot of old Airplane and Naked Gun jokes and add their own Naked Gun style jokes. And they'll all be awful.**

But they're now determined to remake every single movie that earned at least $50 million in the past 30 years, so of course, they had to dig up the corpse of The Naked Gun and violate it.

* Actually, Ben Affleck would make a much better Frank Drebin than he would a Bruce Wayne.

** Actually, the article names the writers:

The studio has hired the team behind Night At The Museum and Reno 911, Thomas Lennon and R Ben Garant, to pen a screenplay for the new movie.

Yeah okay, they're not bad, but they don't do Airplane jokes. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:32 AM | Comments (303)
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Oh, dude. People will be talking about health insurance. Trust me on that.

Rich Lowry turns to my favorite topic in Politico Magazine: "The Left's Reality Problem."

The left continues to believe that Magic Words will change solid reality. All you need is to get people to Believe -- remember, the Right sabotaged Obamacare by not Believing hard enough -- and that Wish-Magic will change the world.

The “reality-based community” isn’t what it used to be. Progressives spent much of the George W. Bush years deriding the right for disdaining reality itself and waging an associated “war on science,” such was its purported hostility to evidence....

The left happily adopted the appellation “reality-based community.” (You can still find T-shirts and bumper stickers online.) It congratulated itself on its factual rigor and nominated for president a man whose initial appeal was based, in part, on his exquisite sense of nuance. Message: We’re more empirically grounded and intellectually supple than you.

The erstwhile reality-based community is having a tough time of it lately, though. Most infamously, Obamacare is foundering on the flagrant deceptions used to sell it, exposed every day by the workings of the law in reality.

Many liberals still don’t want to acknowledge the rather straightforward fact that if you mandate more insurance benefits in the so-called Affordable Care Act, insurance will cost more. QED. You might be able to cushion the cost increase for some people with subsidies, but not for everyone, and the underlying insurance is still more—not less—expensive.

...

The deceptions around Obamacare are central—both to the law and to the left’s advocacy generally. So much of liberal policy is based on Affordable Care Act-style thinking, which involves hiding and never acknowledging the costs of a given policy; giving legislation a warm and fuzzy name on the assumption that its results will live up to that appellation; and moralistic attacks on people who resist as fools and ogres.

You don't need a god to be religious hysteric; you only need dogma and a devil. And the left is proving that more and more each day.

thanks to @tmi3rd and @charlescwcooke.

Posted by: Ace at 09:55 AM | Comments (245)
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Tom Friedman has long been an admirer of China's version of democracy, which is to not have a democracy.

Yesterday David Brooks moved outside his comfort zone of evaluating the crispness of trouser creases to opine it's time to Yield more authority to the President.

No link for David Brooks' #SlatePitch Nonsense-trolling, but you can find it at the New York Times if you like.

Strengthen the Presidency

By DAVID BROOKS
December 12, 2013

....

WeÂ’re in a period of reform stagnation. ItÂ’s possible that years will go by without the passage of a major piece of legislation. Meanwhile, Washington nearly strangles on a gnat, like this weekÂ’s teeny budget compromise.

He quotes an article by Francis Fukuyama (the premature The End of History author), apparently upset that there's a lot of history still going on.

Fukuyama ultimately throws up his hands. Things would be better, he observes, if we had a more unified parliamentary system, with more administrative discretion. But we don’t. “So we have a problem.”

But there is a way out: Make the executive branch more powerful.

I can't wait to hear him explain why we should give more power to Obama, who's assuming a lot of legislative power already, and screwing up everything while doing so.

This should be a doozy.

This is a good moment to advocate greater executive branch power because weÂ’ve just seen a monumental example of executive branch incompetence: the botched Obamacare rollout.

Doozy status: High. We must cede more power to the executive precisely because it's so massively incompetent.

But don't worry-- See, Obama has learned how incompetent he is, and therefore he can be trusted not to abuse this new power Brooks would yield to him.

ItÂ’s important to advocate greater executive branch power in a chastened mood.

He's so chastened he's assuming more power to rewrite the law as he likes, and to vow to Americans that he intends to rule contrary to their preferences.

He's so chastened he's giving speeches saying "Fuck you America, Obamacare stays."

ItÂ’s not that the executive branch is trustworthy; itÂ’s just that weÂ’re better off when the presidency is strong than we are when the rentier groups are strong, or when Congress, which is now completely captured by the rentier groups, is strong.

"Rentier" means those seeking rents or other goods from government. He previously identified lobbyists as being rentiers.

But he doesn't identify Obama as being beholden to rentiers.

Obama himself hasn't been captured by rentiers so much as he is their apotheosis.
He is a walking favor-bank, the spirit redistributive justice made flesh, taking from those outside his political power bloc and delivering it to those within it.

But Brooks doesn't acknowledge this -- the past five years don't exist for David Brooks. For Brooks, Obama remains the same reasonable, idealistic, pragmatic, ethical post-partisan progressive whose pants he was once so smitten with at their first meeting.

Now Brooks will explain why we must make the executive more powerful. You will not be surprised to discover that the first reason is to pass a bill that Brooks favors-- the Comprehensive Immigration bill.

Here are the advantages. First, it is possible to mobilize the executive branch to come to policy conclusion on something like immigration reform. ItÂ’s nearly impossible for Congress to lead us to a conclusion about anything.

We must permanently change our system of government in order to achieve a few short-term political wins for David Fucking Brooks.

We donÂ’t need bigger government. We need more unified authority. Take power away from the rentier groups who dominate the process. Allow people in those authorities to exercise discretion.

That is, give the president further power to ignore the law as he pleases.

Incredible.

Update: David Brooks... from June of this year. Like six months ago.

"We should never trust concentrated power."
-- David Brooks

They're all jokes.

Thanks to @DrewMtips.

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (356)
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Particularly with respect to Obamacare, but it also cites Obama's executive lawmaking in the case of nonenforcement of immigration laws.

"President Obama has adopted a practice of picking and choosing which laws he wants to enforce. In most cases, his laws of choice conveniently coincide with his AdministrationÂ’s political agenda. Our Founding Fathers created the Executive Branch to implement and enforce the laws written by Congress and vested this power in the President. However, President Obama has chosen to ignore some of the laws written by Congress and implemented by preceding Presidents," [South Carolina Congressman Tom] Rice wrote in a letter to fellow House members to ask them to co-sponsor this resolution.

"This resolution allows the House of Representatives to bring legal action against the Executive Branch and challenge recent actions, inactions, and policies."

Given Boehner's moves lately, I have a feeling that the leadership will squelch this much-needed effort. After all, there's an election coming up. We mustn't do anything that any progressive anywhere can criticize.

Posted by: Ace at 07:59 AM | Comments (200)
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Our behumped coblogger Laura W. joins Ace, Gabe, Drew, John and me to discuss POTUS and FLOTUS' Excellent Adventure to South Africa and the latest on Obamacare.

This week's PodFight segment, which I'll just refer to as Gabe vs. Everyone (final score: Everyone 56, Gabe 2) is unsurprisingly over the budget bill.

We wrap up the episode with quick hits and Q&A from the Moron Mailbag. Speaking of which, I have a new Ask the Blog form running over on the server that hosts the podcast, and you can now use that to send in your questions and comments.

Oh, and be sure to stay through the outtake.

Referenced in this episode:

• Santa Claus Should Not Be a White Man Anymore


• Connecticut Health Exchange Buys Three Murals for $24,980 Each


• National Park Service Stonewalls FOIA Request on Mount Vernon Barricades, Cites Potential ‘Chilling Effect on the AgencyÂ’s Deliberative ProcessÂ’

[MP3 Download] | Subscribe: [RSS] | [iTunes]

Follow on Twitter:
AoSHQ Podcast (@AoSHQPodcast)
Ace (@AceofSpadesHQ)
Drew M. (@DrewMTips)
Gabriel Malor (@GabrielMalor)
John E. (@JohnEkdahl)
Andy (@TheH2 and @AndyM1911)

Open thread in the comments.

Posted by: andy at 07:23 AM | Comments (87)
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So yesterday the House GOP overwhelmingly decided to renounce fiscal conservatism.

One excuse given by the party of Not Quite As Big, But Still Pretty Damn Big Government is that they had to bust the sequester or else there would be another disastrous shutdown.

HereÂ’s the problem with that excuseÂ…itÂ’s bull.

The idea is that Obama, Reid and the rest of the Democrats would love another shutdown so that they could get the focus away from ObamaCare and back on the dysfunction of the GOP. This would supposedly be the answer to all their problems.

Now if that’s true, why would the Democrats allow themselves to be bought off for a few billion dollars in spending? Do you really think Obama and Reid are thinking, “We’re facing annihilation in 2014 and the only way we might survive is a shutdown but gosh, we’re getting $30 billion more non-defense spending. I guess we’ll just give up our one chance to hold the Senate because that extra $30 Billion is just too sweet to pass up on!”

In what world does that make any sense?

If the Democrats wanted a shutdown they could have had it in a heartbeat, even with the extra spending the GOP just coughed up.

All they’d have had to do was insist that extending unemployment payments be part of the deal. If the GOP held firm on that, the Democrats, along with their allies in the media, would have said, “These Republicans are at it again. Now they are shutting down the government because they want 1.3 million Americans to lose their unemployment payments. At Christmas time! We didn’t think the GOP could get more extreme or cruel but now they are holding these vulnerable Americans hostage because fringe conservatives like Ted Cruz only care about their extremist donors.”

But no. WeÂ’re to believe Obama and Reid passed up on that (they cut the deal without the extension, much to the consternation of their liberal members) even though they really, really want and need a shutdown.

Why don’t Democrats want another shutdown? Likely because they recognize the country is angry with them at the moment and they aren’t sure the blame will be placed on the Republicans this time. Americans now realize that Obama lied to them about ObamaCare and the GOP told the truth. This time around voters might be inclined to think he’s lying to them again when he says, “I’m Mr. Reasonable but those crazy Republicans! You can’t even talk to them.”

So did Democrats simply bluff the GOP into thinking they really wanted a shutdown and at least got something out of it? No.

This is the truly sad part. The GOP didnÂ’t have to be bullied or bluffed into breaking the sequester, they wanted to do it.

more...

Posted by: DrewM at 06:28 AM | Comments (320)
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In case you haven't heard, China recently expanded its air defense zone to include the disputed Senkaku Islands. China senses weakness in the West(rightfully so) and is testing the limits of American power.

Since the announcement the US has flown B-52's through the newly declared Chinese air defense zone, the South Koreans have extended their own air defense zone to include the disputed Islands, and the Japanese instructed their private airlines to continue to fly through the Chinese air defense zone.

This is a recipe for disaster, just last week a Chinese naval vessel tried to force a US warship to stop in international waters.

The guided missile cruiser USS Cowpens, which recently took part in disaster relief operations in the Philippines, was confronted by Chinese warships in the South China Sea near BeijingÂ’s new aircraft carrier Liaoning, according to officials familiar with the incident.

“On December 5th, while lawfully operating in international waters in the South China Sea, USS Cowpens and a PLA Navy vessel had an encounter that required maneuvering to avoid a collision,” a Navy official said.

“This incident underscores the need to ensure the highest standards of professional seamanship, including communications between vessels, to mitigate the risk of an unintended incident or mishap.”

Keep an eye towards Asia in the early 21st century. The current circumstances there resemble that of late 18th and early 19th century Europe. Land and sea grabs, rising and declining great powers, irredentist feelings, historical rivalries, increased military spending, a thirst for power, domestic need for resources, and poor communication. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:47 AM | Comments (246)
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