This was supposedly some kind of "red line" or something, wasn't it?

Yes, the article notes, it had been a red line.

Obama's got so much respect from world leaders.

He whacked OBL, you might have heard.

The cable, signed by the U.S. consul general in Istanbul, Scott Frederic Kilner, and sent to State Department headquarters in Washington last week, outlined the results of the consulate's investigation into reports from inside Syria that chemical weapons had been used in the city of Homs on Dec. 23.

The consul general's report followed a series of interviews with activists, doctors, and defectors, in what the administration official said was one of the most comprehensive efforts the U.S. government has made to investigate claims by internal Syrian sources. The investigation included a meeting between the consulate staff and Mustafa al-Sheikh, a high-level defector who once was a major general in Assad's army and key official in the Syrian military's WMD program.

An Obama administration official who reviewed the document, which was classified at the "secret" level, detailed its contents to The Cable. "We can't definitely say 100 percent, but Syrian contacts made a compelling case that Agent 15 was used in Homs on Dec. 23," the official said.

The use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime would cross the "red line" President Barack Obama first established in an Aug. 20 statement.

...

Many believe that Assad is testing U.S. red lines.

Has tested, present perfect. Don't they teach people grammar any more?

Likely Secretary of Defense and Chuck Schumer protege Chuck Hagel announced he would make it his top priority to "find out which Jews were behind this." He then apologized to Chuck Schumer and said he didn't mean all Jews, just the ones who control the world.

Posted by: Ace at 02:30 PM | Comments (155)
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Chuck Schumer is seen as one of the Democrats top supporters of Israel (certainly in the Senate) so his thumbs up on Schumer will give cover to Democrats to vote for Hagel.

Ben Smith seems to think this means "The Pro-Israel Lobby" won.

The bad news for Hagel's allies among "realist" foreign policy thinkers and on the foreign policy left is that the nominee appears to have gotten Schumer's support by repudiating virtually everything they liked about him.

Schumer cites "several key assurances." I count about 12 points, most of them related to Israel and Iran, on which Hagel has reversed past positions or his perceived stances, points that now come across in Schumer's voice, but which he will have to presumably reiterate in his own words in televised hearings. This was always a likely endpoint of the battle over Hagel, which has been a proxy war over Israel and over a broader foreign policy philosophy, but it has come with remarkable speed and comprehensiveness.

Are these "key assurances" enforceable in any way? Of course not. Hagel is engaging in one of the oldest tricks in the book, confirmation conversion. The key is simply getting passed the Senate, once you have the job you can go back to doing what it is you really believe. Remember when Sonia Sotomayor and Elana Kagan sounded like Scalia on fidelity to the Constitution during their confirmation hearings? How's that working out?

Obama didn't pick Hagel because he was going to be the second coming of Donald Rumsfeld but because he'd give him the veneer of "bi-partisan" support for his new found "flexibility" when it comes to dealing with nations like Russia, Iran and of course, Israel.

Schumer simply needed cover to do what he, as a partisan hack and number 3 Democrat in the Senate was always going to do....vote for Obama's guy.

It's going to be a long, long 4 years.

Reminder: The problem with Hagel isn't just his views on Israel, it's that he's not in any way qualified for the job.

Posted by: DrewM at 01:58 PM | Comments (113)
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Remember those commies who killed dozens of millions of their own citizens, the Rooskies? Now you can cheer for them when their spies try to destroy our way of life in 1980s DC.
You know they're the good guys because Reagan is on the other side! This is a real network TV show. [ArthurK]

Posted by: Open Blogger at 01:55 PM | Add Comment
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But I thought maybe this would lead to jokes: Hints a woman might drop when she wants you (or wants to steal your man).

I can't even think of anything for this lame post. This one, though, is usually a "strong signal:" "My chooch is dirty, come wash it."

Posted by: Ace at 01:33 PM | Comments (175)
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Human shields.

Carney said that the president will be joined by Vice President Joe Biden as well as children who wrote to the president after the Newtown shootings.

It's at times like these I remember all the times I've been told that Republicans only think with their limbic systems, their primitive, reptilian R-complexes.

Posted by: Ace at 12:48 PM | Comments (300)
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And if they outlaw boobies, only outlaws will have boobies.

A 50-year-old Everett woman is accused of smothering her boyfriend by lying on his face.

Witnesses said the woman had her chest on the victimÂ’s face, a Snohomish County SheriffÂ’s Office document said.

Death by smothering by breast. Old hat.

But there are going to be three shocks in this story. I want you to prepare yourselves. Please, take a seat, or, if you must stand, steady yourself by firmly grasping a solid upright surface.

If you are eating, please finish chewing and swallowing any food in your mouth to reduce the risk of choking due to sudden surprise.

Shock Number One:

Deputies said they were called to the Airport Inn trailer park at 12:45 a.m. Saturday...

Shock Number Two:

Police said that in addition to the victim, a man and three women were at the scene, all who were heavily intoxicated.

And Shock Number Three:

Documents indicated the victim was 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed about 175 pounds, and [the perpetrator] is 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 192 pounds, documents said.

Police are recommending a charge of 2nd-base manslaughter.

(No but seriously they're recommending 2nd-degree manslaughter; I'm not sure why they're backing off murder, as it appears intentional. Perhaps it would just be hard to prove the Boobies had the intent to kill.)

Thanks to Jenjhis.

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 AM | Comments (302)
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How many f'n' times are voters going to fall for this trick?

And more to the point, I guess: At what point is the RNC going to be running ads featuring previous supposed "conservative Democrats" showing how each in turn flipped to the liberal side on ObamaCare (and the abortion mandates), guns, etc.?

Sen. Joe Manchin, who once shot a copy of the cap-and-trade bill through with a rifle in a campaign ad to prove his down-home bona fides, is apparently looking to change that. In the month since Newtown, Manchin has been pro-gun control, then back to pro-gun, then at a No Labels event, presumably because his opportunistic flip-flopping defies ideological classification.

On Andrea TantarosÂ’ radio show Monday, he was back to more aggressive talk on gun control:

“Do you think there should be more gun control laws?” Tantaros asked Manchin directly.

Manchin responded, “I believe that you have to have an approach, to where everything is on the table. Now, when you say ‘gun control,’ I just don’t think it’s a one-issue problem. That’s why people keep talking about that, and people keep wanting to say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ ‘are you for this or against it?’ We’re in an environment in Washington where your guilty by conversation.”

Red-State "Conservative" Democrats

Caution: Objects in Your Mouth may be closer to completion than they appear.

Posted by: Ace at 11:25 AM | Comments (196)
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As Instapundit says, when even the NY Times notices (about 15-18 months after most others did), it's safe to say everyone has now noticed.

Billions in federal spending, largely a result of two foreign wars, were pouring into the local economy by the early 2000s. Then came the housing bubble. But after it burst, a remarkable inversion occurred: as the country withered, Washington bloomed. Since 2007, the regional economy has expanded about three times as much as the overall countryÂ’s. By some measures, the Washington area has become the richest region in the country. It is now home to the three highest-income counties in the United States, and seven out of the Top 10.

he growth has arrived in something like concentric circles. Increased government spending has bumped up the region’s human capital, drawing other businesses, from technology to medicine to hospitality. Restaurants and bars and yoga studios have cropped up to feed and clothe and stretch all those workers, and people like Jim Abdo have been there to provide the population — which grew by 650,000 between 2000 and 2010 — with two-bedrooms with Wolf ranges.

...

How Washington managed this transformation, however, is not a story that the rest of the country might want to hear, because we largely financed it. As the size of the federal budget has ballooned over the past decade, more and more of that money has remained in the District. “We get about 15 cents of every procurement dollar spent by the federal government,” says Stephen Fuller, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an expert on the region. “There’s great dependence there.” And with dependence comes fragility. About 40 percent of the regional economy, Fuller says, relies on federal spending.

And then there's the classism and racism -- something to keep in mind the next time a young liberal DC politico pops off about such matters. The city is divided into "good" (white, rich) neighborhoods and "bad" (poor, black) neighborhoods, and all those young liberal DC politicos definitely live in the former and not the latter, and that's not some kind of gigantic coincidence, either.

Washington, though, has become an increasingly two-class town. About a third of households make less than $60,000 a year, while around 45 percent make more than $100,000 a year. Relatively few are what might be traditionally considered middle class.

Perhaps that, more than anything, explains the appearance of the new gilded-age Washington, which is less about wealth than it is about the growth of one of the most ascendant petite bourgeoisies that the United States has known.

...

And these days, many lower-income families have moved from the District altogether, often to the suburbs of Maryland, like Prince GeorgeÂ’s County, or even farther out. Newsome stressed that the change has been economically driven, but there are some racial overtones too.

“People will tell you it’s not about race, but it is,” said George Pelecanos, a Washington native, novelist and screenwriter who worked on “The Wire.” “It’s no longer a black city, and a lot is going to be lost because of that. But the flip side of that is, I try not to get too nostalgic about what Washington was.”

The article, being a NYT piece, explains that all this boomtime in the capital is due to... Reagan and Bush's push for contractors over federal workers and the War on Terror.

One strains to find a single sentence in the piece noting that Obama's trillion-plus-per-year deficits -- trillions of dollars not just extracted from the people in the hinterlands but from the children and grandchildren of the people in the hinterlands -- might have something to do with the boom.

Which is, incidentally, happening now, and not in 1987 under Reagan.

And yet this is all due to Reagan. And Bush.

I read it in the Times. It must be true!

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 AM | Comments (209)
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The whining.

It should be noted that Toure only treated the activists with respect because he thought they were liberals, and he felt the need to plaintively explain his hypocrisy to them. After all, they were members of the Moral Elite, like himself.

There would have been no "respect" had they declared themselves political opponents.

Also, Toure is very dumb. That's just something to keep in mind. His brain is dumb, and he thinks dumb things.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (130)
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New audio of Obama announcing that an $8 trillion ("trillion with a 't,' he specifies) national debt represents a "sad state of affairs."

$16 Trillion, on the other hand, is... well, funsolvency, I guess.

Posted by: Ace at 10:09 AM | Comments (105)
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