Pixy's cleaning out spam from the posts -- tens of thousands of spam messages, and lots and lots of IP's.

Because this process is automated, a lot of legit IP's will get banned.

Including, for example... my own. Yes, I've been banned.

However, he's aware of the problem (he mailed me about the possibility) and will unban IPs as they come in.

So let me know.

I wanted to comment in the other threads, but, damn. Banned.

What did I do to piss myself off this time?

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (346)
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Safe link to Hot Air (it's an NYT article).

“We need to get people organized and learn from what Obama did,” said Mike Duncan, a former national party chairman who now represents Kentucky on the committee. “We’ve got to reverse engineer what they did and leapfrog to the next cycle.”

By which they mean Obama's microtargeting of voters, making micropitches, data-mining for every available Democrat even in red districts -- the so-called project NARWHAL, which appeared to be a delusion (even to the people implementing it) until it actually swiped an election.

That last bit is crucial: Generally we target our own districts and try to churn out as many votes in those districts (whether with us or against us) as possible.

As @conartcritic pointed out numerous times, though: There are lots and lots of red voters in blue cities.

Now the cities as a whole of course will go overwhelmingly Democratic. But -- this is crucial -- in statewide campaigns you can microtarget the Republican flowers hidden by all the choking liberal weeds and get them to vote and thereby increase you statewide totals.

And thereby win state elections -- and electoral college delegates.

Obama used advanced data-mining techniques -- scanning FaceBook likes and purchasing history (I'm sure-- though I'm speculating on that) to find people who were likely Democratic voters, even if they almost never voted, and gin them up with narrowly-tailored political mail.

For example, if you find an unmarried woman, age 25, who follows the Anthropologie feed on FaceBook (the fashion shop, I mean, not the science), she's almost certainly liberal-leaning. Even if she lives in red territory, like Kansas.

So Obama sent that girl Alarming Abortion mailer after Alarming Abortion mailer.

We must absolutely copy this technique.

There is one problem that faces us that the Democrats don't face -- note that this technique involves a lot of saying one thing to one audience while saying something different to another. In their private mailers, Democrats ran as abortion and gay marriage enthusiasts... something they did not run on generally. (They pretended to not be outright liberal extremist generally.)

Now the media of course covered up for them, and would never report that while the Democrats talk about "common sense" guidelines about abortions, they advance a strong pro-abortion agenda in their micro-targeted mailers.

Republicans, naturally, will be hit with this relentlessly -- if a mailer uses stronger-than-usual language to defend gun rights in a mailer to a gun owner, we'll be hit about how "extreme" our message is "below the radar." Reporters will make every single one of our mailers famous, and not in a good way.

That said, that's the terrain we fight on, and there's little use complaining about it. This technique must be copied.

Posted by: Ace at 11:44 AM | Comments (330)
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I usually won't link Politico but it's a good piece.

There should have been something for everyone in President Barack ObamaÂ’s second inaugural address. For liberals, a full-throated call to arms. For conservatives, vindication.

Obama settled once and for all the debate over his place on the political spectrum and his political designs. He’s an unabashed liberal determined to shift our politics and our country irrevocably to the left. In other words, Obama’s foes — if you put aside the birthers and sundry other lunatics — always had him pegged correctly.
Continue Reading

If you listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, you got a better appreciation of ObamaÂ’s core than by reading the presidentÂ’s friends and sophisticated interpreters, for whom he was either a moderate or a puzzle yet to be fully worked out.

Rush, et al., doubted that Obama could have emerged from the left-wing milieu of Hyde Park, become in short order the most liberal U.S. senator, run to Hillary Clinton’s left in the 2008 primaries and yet have been a misunderstood centrist all along. They heeded his record and his boast in 2008 about “fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” and discounted the unifying tone of his rhetoric as transparent salesmanship.

They got him right, even as he duped the Obamacons, played the press and fooled his sympathizers. David Brooks, the brilliant and winsome New York Times columnist, has been promising the arrival of the true, pragmatic Obama for years now. In his column praising the second inaugural address, he appeared finally to give up. “Now he is liberated,” Brooks wrote. “Now he has picked a team and put his liberalism on full display.”

The whole column is good, and notes, of course, that those who got Obama wrong (or got him right, but publicly lied about, a much larger caucus) will continue to congratulate themselves for having gotten it wrong, and will continue attacking those who got it right.

The situation seems to me to fall under the rules of etiquette and tact. Now, if you're thinking I'm going to say Limbaugh is "tactless," and yell at me for that -- hold on. That's not what I'm saying at all. Let me get there.

In any Polite Dinner Conversation we will have the rules of Tact imposed upon us. The rules of Tact state that certain Truths must not be uttered. Furthermore, we should note that the rules of Tact are not innocent and are not organic -- they are created by people for their own purposes. Some of those purposes may be benign (we want to have light dinner chatter) and some exist to enforce an existing social order (we pretend we don't care about matters of money, and react with hostility to anyone who brings the matter up, because pretending to not care about money is an aristocratic conceit by which aristocrats differentiate themselves from the ruder lower classes and rich-but-unmannered parvenu class).

"Tact" is the enemy of truth. Sometimes it's useful to have the truth contained, a little, to the proper time and place-- we don't want an unhappily married couple openly demonstrating their hatred of each other at a light dinner party. Tact requires they put on pretenses about this.

But very often tact is simply used to suppress the truth because those who create the rules of tact dislike the truth.

And the important thing is that, by the usual operation of tact, the more true something is, the more upsetting it is for those who enforce tact, and the more aggressively they attempt to shut up the person they've deemed tactless.

Example: Your son walks up to your obese uncle and says, "You're fat like a moose!" Your son's transgression is speaking too much truth. (And try to explain this to him later, that there's such a thing as "too much truth.") The entire table hisses at him, "Reginald!" (Yes, you named your son Reginald.) Reginald feels the heat of social scorn upon him, or he would if he was sensitive to the power of social scorn. Luckily, he's too young to be conditioned to be hurt by that, and so instead just giggles.

But my point is that the remark is Socially Unwelcome not because it's false but rather precisely because it's true.

Truth is the most painful insult and truth is the most awkward embarrassment.

Statements which are untrue rarely elicit powerful responses. They get an emotion-free dismissal -- the eyeroll, the arched brow -- or, more commonly, are simply ignored.

Now, we may abide the rules of tact (and approve of them) in the correct situation -- sure, at a party, at a dinner, and at other such functions in which Truth is not a particularly important matter, we can accept that Tact restrains us from speaking truth.

But this rule should never be applied to important matters of politics, should it?

Well, no, of course not; a society that insists of repressing the most important truths about politics rapidly becomes a dysfunctional system in which people only speak in euphemism and lies, a system in which nothing can actually change because people aren't free to express their actual preferences.

What Limbaugh said about Obama -- and what Levin said, and Hannity, and so on -- was completely true.

It was completely true, but the enforcers of Tact at the Great National Conversation decided that the truth that Obama was a left-liberal stewed his entire life in fashionably radical politics (and keep in mind the radical years in which he came of age) Should Not Ever Be Spoken.

And then Sarah Palin, for example, committed the faux pas of stating the truth -- Obama did in fact "pal around with terrorists."

Sarah Palin was attacked on this point, with emotion and vehemence, not because she'd said something untrue but because she said something very true indeed, but that truth was categorized by the Masters of Tact as declasse. And they categorized it as such precisely because it was true, and it embarrassed them, and it compromised their ability to get what they wanted.

Now even liberals are saying Obama gave a liberal speech, and has outed himself as a liberal. But where, then, are the apologies for attacking Limbaugh?

They won't be forthcoming, of course, because in their minds, the liberals behaved properly throughout the miserably long five year dinner party -- they suppressed the truth when it was socially favored to suppress it (that is to say, when they themselves decided it was socially favored to suppress it) and then the giddily expressed the long-suppressed truth when it was socially acceptable to do so (that is to say, when they themselves agreed mutually that it was now socially acceptable to express it).

On the other hand, Palin, Limbaugh, Levin and the rest just behaved abomidably, what with their rude statements of obvious truths which all good-mannered people were furiously attempting to ignore or hide.

No class, no class. Classy people know when it's okay to lie -- because "classy people" are privileged with the power of making up the rules as to when it's okay to lie.

As they set the rules -- to benefit themselves and to protect and extend their own socially-privileged positions -- they can never be disadvantaged by their rules. If they sense a personal disadvantage flowing from the rules they've made up, they just change the rules to grant themselves an advantage again.

And who are you to complain? They're your betters, you know.

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (555)
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Great piece. It's partly about guns, partly about everything.

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.

‘In announcing his gun control proposals, President Obama said that he was not restricting Second Amendment rights, but allowing other constitutional rights to flourish.’

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”

All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. They are paid to follow orders.

Rule by bureaucrats and functionaries is an example of the first part of the Marxist equation: that the Government shall determine the individualÂ’s abilities.

As rules by the Government are one-size-fits-all, any governmental determination of an individualÂ’s abilities must be based on a bureaucratic assessment of the lowest possible denominator. The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

President Obama, in his reelection campaign, referred frequently to the “needs” of himself and his opponent, alleging that each has more money than he “needs.”

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”? And note that the president did not say “I have more money than I need,” but “You and I have more than we need.” Who elected him to speak for another citizen?

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.

He gets into guns on the back nine.

Posted by: Ace at 09:33 AM | Comments (184)
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The Chicago Tribune read an info-formative graphic which explained to its almost-as-ignorant readers that a buckle for affixing a carrying strap to a gun was in fact a mount for a bayonet, or, indeed, a "grenade launcher."

Taranto likes the error to Todd Akin's, and notes that, in an area where someone is ignorant, ideology has a way of filling in all the gaps of knowledge in a way that's ideologically helpful to the ignoramus.

Knowles's assertion that "this was a careless mistake" and not "an intentional deception" is surely true. But his denial of bias is not credible.

The episode reminds us of Todd Akin, the failed Missouri Senate candidate. Asked a question last summer about his position on abortion, Akin made some claims about the workings of the female reproductive system that were about as accurate as the gun graphic that occasioned the Trib's crow consumption.

Was Akin engaged in "an intentional deception"? That seems highly implausible, as it implies both that he knew that what he was saying was false and that he expected others to believe it was true. It's much likelier that, like Knowles and his staff at the Tribune, Akin was misinformed and made "a careless mistake."

It would be preposterous, however, to deny that Akin was biased. Indeed it seems obvious that he believed the falsehood in question because that falsehood made it easier to justify his ideological position to himself (and, he mistakenly believed, to others).

I think the same thing goes on with 9/11 Trutherism. It's usually easier to believe an Unbelievable Thing if you don't know much about it -- every bit of reading you do just might disprove that Unbelievable Thing you believe.

So, better to keep oneself virginal of any penetration by information.

The gun-sissies of the press find it easier to imagine that any gun which looks ugly is capable of automatic fire and so don't bother digging in any more deeply; they've heard enough from 2nd-amendment supporters to know that maybe that's false, but if they keep their brains hygienic, uncontaminated by dirty data, then they can assert that the AR-15 is an "automatic rifle" without having full knowledge of the falsity of this claim.

Posted by: Ace at 09:02 AM | Comments (154)
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By the time you read this, 'Rons & 'Ettes, I'll be knee-deep in drunkards and barflies down at the ol' salt mine. It's currently just before the ungodly hour of 10:00 AM -- a time not generally recognized in AoS culture and lifestyle. But, being the selfless team player/consummate brown-noser that I am, I thought I'd go ahead and throw something together for you people to look at before I start my workweek.

Now, last night's ONT had its high and low points. By nearly all accounts, the video of the chick in the bikini riding in a Lamborghini was well received. However, the goat balls didn't go over quite as well. I don't know why. I've never tried them, but some folks say they're delicious. I suppose I may have trod upon the delicate sensibilities of a few goat-fanciers among the horde. So, to that end, here's something to make up for it.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with goats aside from watching videos of the ones that "faint" when you startle them. Though, I understand even run-of-the-mill domesticated goats can be entertaining. But, when it comes to animal-related entertainment, the high drama of African wildlife documentaries is tough to beat. The raw, gut-level emotion pulls me in every time.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:50 PM | Comments (670)
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He is famous for the worst video resume ever created. (Embedded below the fold.) UBS Financial Services leaked it on the internet. There were many parodies, and he was relentlessly mocked. He deserved it, I guess, but I feel guilty for having mocked him myself. People like that are trying to compensate for terribly low self-esteem. Apparently it was a heart attack from a drug overdose.

Even before he arrived as a freshman at Yale, Vayner had become known for exaggerating his own feats.

At a 2002 event in New Haven for high-school seniors who have been admitted to Yale, Vayner told current students all about his abilities and specialised skills.

He told Jordan Bassm a freshman student at the Ivy League college that he had taught tennis to Jerry Seinfeld and Harrison Ford and that the Dalai Lama had apparently written his college recommendation.

'He talked for, like, six hours straight the first night,' said Bass to the New Yorker magazine after they investigated Vayner in 2006 following his notorious video job application.

'He had a lot of affiliations with élite institutions. He was an action star, an espionage expert, and a professional athlete. He would be on the C.I.A. firing range one day and, the next, at a martial-arts competition that took place in this secret system of tunnels underneath Woodstock, New York.

'Then he was at a skiing competition in Switzerland. He told us the Russian Mafia had him forging passports.'

. . .

Attending Yale despite the attention of the article, Vayner arrived with a CV that now boasted he had begun modelling for the price of $200 an hour, written a book about the Holocaust and founded a charity for troubled children.

He also claimed to have won two tennis matches against Pete Sampras, retired from professional martial arts and mastered the art of 'bone setting'.

According to the article, a friend on Facebook was concerned about his health the night before he died, "Do not, anyone, sell this idiot ANY pills!"
more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 08:08 AM | Comments (222)
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You can read the entire decision here. The decision was unanimous.

"[T]he President made his three appointments to the Board on January 4, 2012, after Congress began a new session on January 3 and while that new session continued," the court wrote in its decision. "Considering the text, history, and structure of the Constitution, these appointments were invalid from their inception."

Gabe's analysis:

Short version: individuals, companies, and (unlikely, but possible) unions who don't like any of the NLRB actions after the "recess" appointments can win lawsuits if the NLRB tries to enforce its decrees.

Also, Cordray is likely to face a similar challenge.

More analysis from the AP:

The Obama administration is expected to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, but if it stands, it means hundreds of decisions issued by the board over more than a year are invalid. It also would leave the five-member labor board with just one validly appointed member, effectively shutting it down. The board is allowed to issue decisions only when it has at least three sitting members.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:36 AM | Comments (178)
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Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:23 AM | Comments (428)
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... I wish. I guess now the Sandy Hook truthers will just say this guy's in on the plot.

Lt. J. Paul Vance, the face of an ongoing Connecticut State Police investigation into worst grade-school shooting in U.S. history, Thursday debunked media and Internet reports that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza killed his victims with handguns and not the Bushmaster XM-15 E2S rifle that is now the focus of a proposed federal assault-weapons ban.

All 26 of Lanza's victims were shot with the .223-caliber semi-automatic rifle, said Vance, who bristled at claims to the contrary during an interview with Hearst Connecticut Newspapers.

Via @SooperMexican on the Twitters.

Update: A good point in the comments - we must apply the Clinton Doctrine in cases like these, so ...

What Difference Does It Make?

Posted by: andy at 04:20 AM | Comments (220)
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