Watching "fiscal conservative" Chris Christie fail to say one word about those who demand that relief for his state be bought with unrelated spending for their own states, which weren't hit by catastrophe -- shouldn't it be noted that Lisa Murkowski and Don Young of Alaska won't vote for those left homeless by Sandy until some local businesses get their "cut"? -- it occurs to me that he is accommodating himself to reality.

The reality is vox populi, vox dei -- the voice of the people is the voice of God. And the voice of this particular shabby god has decreed that we shall be financially reckless and we should go through a national bankruptcy, and there's no sense trying to avoid it, so we'll just run up a huge tab buying multiple 65 inch 3D tvs before we crash.

Given that the people wish to spend money they do not have, and soon will not have (for all the same reasons that people with bad credit can't rent a car -- your ability to borrow is precisely related to your projected future ability to make good on your loans), and will not be diverted from this disastrous course, what can anyone do?

This Guy Makes the Same Analogy: Kids, we're going shopping! We will worry about the long-term consequences -- such as being without a home or college fund or creditworthiness to secure loans for same -- later.

But for now, let's go get a few of those sweet 3D TV's and watch Pirates of the Caribbean IV.

You'll think I'm a wonderful, well-providing father... for the next month or so.

After that, you may hold a different opinion of me. Major negative changes in circumstance tend to do that.

But for now-- 3D TVs. Have you ever seen such a clear, sort of three dimensional picture? Aren't I your hero? At this moment, I mean.

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (236)
Post contains 335 words, total size 2 kb.

He continues running against Republicans, which I suppose improves his chances for being reelected Governor, but does little to recommend him to me as a national spokesman for limited government.

"There is only one group to blame," Christie said. "The House Majority and John Boehner."

"Last night, the House Majority failed the basic test of leadership and they did so with callous disregard to the people of my state," he said. "It was disappointing and disgusting to watch."

"Shame on you, shame on Congress."

Following his remarks, Christie doubled down on his criticism in a lengthy — and incredibly candid — press conference in which he laid into House Republicans for putting "palace intrigue" ahead of their actual jobs.

...

Asked who he thought was responsible on the holdup over Sandy aid, Christie laid the blame entirely on Boehner.

"It was the Speaker's decision — his alone," Christie said, adding that he tried to reach Boehner four times, but that the Speaker did not take his calls until this morning."

Meanwhile Peter King tells people not to donate to the NRCC or Republicans, and of course half of the "Sandy Spending" is pork for entirely unrelated matters, like Alaskan fisheries. Which is what happens-- when you have an attractively-named spending bill, something people will only vote against with great trepidation, you lard it up with all the spending you couldn't possibly get otherwise.

At this point I've stopped worrying about the epochal financial crisis and simply accepted it, and have begun just looking for the silver lining: Well, they'll finally reap what they've long sown.

Notice it's always those who attempt to get pork stripped out who are charged with "holding things up," even by nominal Republicans. They never lay the blame with those who have stuck unrelated spending items in the bill for holding it up. Those people are "just doing what needs to be done."

Posted by: Ace at 11:28 AM | Comments (243)
Post contains 339 words, total size 2 kb.

So I've been waiting for Looper to be available on DVD. I finally saw it last night.

Very very meh. And it got such great reviews.

What I liked about the movie was that it tried to be a "real movie" science fiction movie. By "real movie," I mean it wasn't just a carnival attraction, a Universal Studios Theme Park ride without the actual ride part. 95% of movie science fiction is just that -- they dial up the comedy, action, and fantasy levels so high that the movie winds up being completely artificial. A funhouse attraction -- fun, maybe, if done well, but no one mistakes a funhouse for a genuine experience. Everything in it is designed to activate one of most primal and childlike responses -- laugh, cringe, say "Whoa."

Looper tries to be more like a real movie. I'm 99.9% sure Rian Johnson had in mind his own type of Philip K. Dick story. One thing Philip K. Dick does (I think) is casually introduce some crazy premise and just say: This is how it is. He doesn't defend it, he doesn't argue about it. It's just this way, okay? Accept it or don't.

Looper does that with both its time-travel premise (which is rickety and crazy enough-- in the future, they send people back in time to be executed? Really?) and the early introduction of a completely unrelated sci-fantasy premise, that in the future, about 10% of the population is telekinetic, but only comically so, able to levitate light coins and perform other useless tricks.

Well, as in Philip K. Dick, whether or not you buy these wacky premises determines whether you can enjoy the story. I didn't buy into either.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:34 AM | Comments (325)
Post contains 1180 words, total size 7 kb.

Another post swiped from @benk84. No one wishes ill for Mrs. Clinton, but this is Tina Brown at her most insipid.

The idea of losing Hillary has seemed especially unbearable at this political moment. It’s as if she has become, literally, the ship of state. She stands for maturity, tenacity, and self-discipline at a time when everyone else in Washington seems to be, in more senses than one, going off a cliff—a parade of bickering, blustering, small-balled hacks bollixing up the nation’s business. She’s a caring executive too, and that takes its own emotional toll. What a disgrace that John Bolton and his goaty Republican ilk accused Her Magnificence of inventing a concussion to get out of testifying at the Benghazi hearings. Bolton is not fit to wipe her floor with his mustache.

Her determination to defy fatigue and keep going beggars belief....

ItÂ’s not just WashingtonÂ’s antics that make us value Hillary the Stoic more than ever. These are scary times. Everyone feels terrified of economic and societal volatility. The pace of change from destructive innovation and cutthroat global competition and demographic shifts and media proliferation is making us a nervous, increasingly medicated nation....

In an era of quicksand, everyone is looking for a rock, and youÂ’re one we depend on...

I should note that that final elipsis (...) is in the original. That's how she ends her article, dot dot dot. Like, portentously. Like, the question mark at the end of a suspense film.

Like, she's trying to hard and we can see the flop sweat.

This squeaking fart of a piece reminded me of this pre-Christmas article about Newsweek publishing its last print edition, and Tina Brown's desperate attempts to find "the zeitgeist." It's a key word for her-- she seems to think her metier is to sense the zeitgeist, or at least fake up an argument about what the zeitgeist is that will be discussed by other people.

She's been failing at this a great deal. I guess many would say she always failed, but earlier in her career she had least had the cachet to get her burblings talked about by other idiots. Now the other idiots seem to have caught on.

Betrayed by the Zeitgeist she once channeled, Tina Brown invokes it one last time

By Matt Haber

...

In an interview with Michael Kinsley in the Nov. 26 issue of New York magazine, Newsweek editor in chief and magazine legend Tina Brown gave a big-picture reason for the magazine's failure: "[E]very piece of the Zeitgeist was against Newsweek," Brown told Kinsley, a quote so telling, New York's editors even saw fit to tease it on the magazine's cover, the word Zeitgeist framed by inverted commas.

...

Back to Brown. Here she was arguing that the spirit of the current times is against these kinds of large, macro interpretations of daily life, the very things Newsweek tried to do every week, and that Tina Brown has been doing for her entire career: that is, pronouncing the Zeitgeist.

It's a conundrum. Tina Brown's pronouncement of the Zeitgeist here was that the death of Newsweek is an emblem of the Zeitgeist's rejection of magazine editors' pronouncements. It's therefore got to be her final pronouncement of the Zeitgeist, if it wasn't, by her own pronouncement, one too many.

...

The Zeitgeist, it would seem, betrayed Tina Brown after she spent the last three decades, as editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Talk, The Daily Beast and then Newsweek, invoking it weekly or monthly. She packed the word itself in headlines, display copy, and in the bodies of her writers' work constantly. At The New Yorker, Brown found the Zeitgeist in many places as well, in everything from the tales of Bill Clinton to the tale of Joey Buttafuoco. For Brown, the Zeitgeist could be summoned anywhere, from anything that caught her eye during a given week.

But with Newsweek, her eye finally faltered. Or the Zeitgeist wasn't where she was used to finding it anymore.

The author suggests that with the flood of opinion and context and viral videos, "finding the zeitgeist" is a game open to millions, and, confronted with competition, (this is my gloss) Tina Brown turned out to be not particularly good at it.

In other words, there's no need for a Newsweek to explain What It All Means (serious capital letters included), when so many of us are doing so constantly and fluidly online.

And what is the Zeitgeist, after all? It's just a faux-elevated version of the desperate magazine writer's go-to fake story, the Trend Story, in which two incidents of the same thing happening Define an Era (for this week; two more incidents will Define the Era next week, as deadline approaches).

But then, Newsweek was always this way:

[I]t's worth remembering that as far back as 1969, Esquire's Chris Welles compared the magazine to its closest competitor, Time, and concluded that "Newsweek is much more anxious to make broad pronouncements about the significance of the week's events, to practice the art of the 'hype,' by which the routine is blown up into the incredible and the sensational. It is filled with 'crises,' turning points' and 'watersheds,' especially in the 'Violin,' Newsweek's slang for the lead story in the magazine."

Ah, there's the word: Hype. Audaciously drawing grand (and almost completely unsupportable) conclusions from small things. Carnival barking in print form. Everything's the Most Important, the Latest, the Best. News You Can Use; Is Your Hair-Dryer Giving You Brain Cancer? Tune in next paragraph to find out.

There's a lot of that on the internet (and look, there's a lot of that here). I guess it turned out that Tina Brown didn't have a skill so much as she had an inclination, and it turned out many thousands of other people had the same inclination, and the same level of skill. Her One Great Big Trick -- making splashy but daffy claims about What It All Means -- turned out to be a pretty small trick, easily duplicated.

I suppose glibness -- making superficial connections and writing about them, superficially -- is a type of skill, but it's not a particularly difficult skill, and it's not particularly useful.

Maureen Dowd does this too, of course. She was once the Reigning Queen of Soft, Superficial Zeitgeist pieces. People stopped reading her a dozen years ago, though. If Tina Brown's main gig were as a writer, rather than as an editor/executive, people would have stopped reading her 12 years ago, too. Maybe we all kind of hated Tina Brown, but no one ever asked us about it.

Who's Editing Tina Brown -- Meghan McCain? A commenter underlines this, which I completely missed:

ItÂ’s as if she has become, literally, the ship of state.

She's got the ballast for it, I guess.

Posted by: Ace at 09:32 AM | Comments (313)
Post contains 1149 words, total size 7 kb.

Previously, Hobby Lobby lost its own bid for an injunction. Now Domino's wins, creating a split that will have to be resolved by higher courts at some point.

A federal judge has ordered a temporary halt on the Obama administrationÂ’s birth-control coverage policy for Tom Monaghan, the Catholic billionaire who founded DominoÂ’s Pizza.

Federal District Court Judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff issued the decision Sunday, less than two days before the policy would have taken effect and exposed Monaghan to fines for non-compliance.

“Plaintiff has shown that abiding by the mandate will substantially burden his exercise of religion,” Zatkoff wrote.

“The government has failed to satisfy its burden of showing that its actions were narrowly tailored to serve a compelling interest. … This factor weighs in favor of granting Plaintiffs’ motion.”

How did we come to the point that religious liberty was worth violating in order to satisfy some people's demand to be subsidized $3-6 per month for birth control?

The feminists have an odd theory that religious strictures about sex and birth control are specifically about controlling women's reproduction, taking decisions from women and giving them to "the patriarchy." They insist that such strictures exist specifically to subtract rights from women to deliver them to men (or male-dominated institutions), rather than serving as directives that apply to both genders.

So they've ginned up $3-6 per month as a serious civil rights issue. If men needed birth control, it would already be paid for, they insist, overlooking the fact that men do need (or, at least, often want) birth control, and men's birth control expenses are also not covered.

As is true with so much of our politics -- and I think this is detestable -- the bottom-line consequences of what they seek are minor in the extreme. What is really sought is an encoded-into-law declaration of the legal supremacy of one culture over another, to the extent that the culture which has lost this political debate is actually now illegal and cannot exist as it previously had.

While such matters were previously left to each individual conscience -- each person herself or himself decided whether to use birth control, and paid using his own private money -- a law is now on the books stating that everyone must pay for birth control, no matter what one's religious beliefs may say about it.

This isn't about $3-6 per month, of course. It's specifically about using the law to win a cultural argument through coercive force. If you can't persuade them, criminalize them.

Posted by: Ace at 08:24 AM | Comments (248)
Post contains 443 words, total size 3 kb.

Kathy Griffin, who is to comedy what Cher is to music, that is to say, irrelevant and old and weird-looking from plastic surgery, continues scrabbling at her last possible handhold of cultural relevance.

Again swiped from @benk84:

[C]ompletely out of the blue, Griffin said, “I'm going to tickle your sack. You can say sack. That's not bad.”

An obviously nervous Cooper responded, “I don't know what you're talking about. I have no sack of gifts here.”

Griffin then suggested the camera pan lower so the audience can see her “naughty gestures.”

...

National correspondent Gary Tuchman reported live that thereÂ’s a custom in the town to kiss a statue of an eight-foot sardine that they drop from the museum at the stroke of midnight. People were then shown kissing the sardine.

As Tuchman finished his report, Griffin in the left split-screen bent down and kissed Cooper's crotch.

As she continued to try to kiss it, Cooper asked her, “Did you drop something?”

“No, I was kissing your sardine,” Griffin replied.

“Thank you. I got it,” giggled Cooper.

“I can do it again,” Griffin said kneeling. “I can do this all night long."

“No, sweetie,” said Cooper lifting her back on her feet.

“I'm going on Letterman in two nights, and he wants a moment,” argued Griffin as she went down again.

“I'm going down,” she said. “You know you want to.”

I see a a great deal of cultural and political bias here. Almost all of the media continues chasing the same minority cohort -- liberal, urban, sexually loose. There is an awful lot of money to be made by chasing the majority cohort, which isn't those things.

But all networks (entertainment too) continue chasing smaller and smaller pieces of this minority pie instead of making an uncontested play for the fat majority of the pie. You have to be very hateful of group of people to essentially make the decision, "No, we're not interested in making a great deal of easy money if it means cottoning to your ilk."

Posted by: Ace at 08:09 AM | Comments (185)
Post contains 354 words, total size 2 kb.

Autocratic for the people.

From @benk84's linkdump:

In his remarks Tuesday, Obama issued a stern forewarning on the upcoming debates, and reiterated that he will not negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling.

"As I've demonstrated throughout the past several weeks, I am very open to compromise," he said. "But we cannot simply cut our way to prosperity."

"While I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills they have already racked up," Obama said. "We can not not pay bills that we have already incurred."

He's very open to compromise, but will not consider things he refuses to consider.

And:

Immediately following the remarks, Obama left the White House to return to Hawaii, where his family is still on vacation.

Well he's certainly earned it.

Posted by: Ace at 07:55 AM | Comments (210)
Post contains 161 words, total size 1 kb.

• New York's Putnam County Denies Gannett's Request For Gun Permit Database
  
• Famed Environmentalist Flying From Party Event To Party Event
  
• Boehner To Harry Reid: "Go F**k Yourself"
  
• After Heroically Saving Bulk Of Bush Tax Cuts, Obama Spends Millions To Fly Back To Hawaii
  
• Obama Won't Debate Debt Ceiling Deal
  
• VDH: Welcome To Very, Very Scary Times
  
• An Optimistic Take On The Fiscal Cliff Deal
  
• 2% SS Payroll Tax Cut Not Part Of Fiscal Cliff Deal. *
  
• Lawyer Suing For 100 Million On Behalf Of Sandy Hook 6 Year Old Withdraws Claim For Now
  
• INTEL To Challenge Cable By Offering People The Ability To Subscribe To Individual Channels
  
• Showing Pictures Of Starving People In Africa Has Stopped Working For Charities
  
• Russia Won't Renew Kyoto Protocol
  
• Let's Put America's Tax Hike In Perspective
  
• Fiscal Cliff Deal Adds 3.9 Trillion To The Deficit
  
• Hugo Chavez On His Last Legs
  
• Death Spiral For The Egyptian Pound?
  
• To Revive Economy, Cut Spending Now
  
• No Real Cuts In Fiscal Cliff Spending Cuts
  
• This Is CNN
  
• Democracy At Work In Israel
  
• More From Philadelphia's Asset Forfeiture Racket
  
• Tina Brown's Latest Piece Of Garbage
  
• Why The House Couldn't Amend The Bill
  
• America's Forgotten War
  

*Updated. Normally you pay 6.2% in withholding for Social Security. It had been cut to 4.2% some time ago. Now it is going back up to 6.2%. I should note that your employer never got a cut. They had to pay the 6.2% rate in full the entire time.

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:56 AM | Comments (431)
Post contains 256 words, total size 4 kb.

Happy Wednesday.

Rep. Paul Ryan on why he voted for the fiscal cliff deal: "I came to Congress to make tough decisions - not to run away from them." Alright, then. Two months from now he'll have another tough decision to make when the sequester cuts come due again. We're also due to run into the debt ceiling sometime between now and then.

The House has put off a vote on the Senate's bloated Sandy relief bill. House leadership had planned to confront it in two stages, with a scaled-back $21 billion bill just including things like actual Sandy relief, which was expected to have broad GOP support, and a $33 billion amendment including the Senate's pork, like money for fisheries in Alaska, which most of the GOP congressmen would vote against. I've heard it said that "emergency" legislation like this should be considered "must-pass," since it looks so bad not to, but that sounds like so much RINO bullshit to me.

A hacker group is claiming that it has stolen the entire subscriber list to the Lower Hudson Journal News, the paper that published the names and addresses of gun owners, and then posted the subscribers names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses online. William Jacobson has the details.

Back to the fiscal cliff, there's a lot of moaning about Republicans "paying the price" for yesterday's fiscal cliff drama, by which I mean not just the vote, but also the all-day Three Stooges routine put on by the House GOP. I don't think that's true. Most GOP members get to go back to their districts and say they voted against the plan, which will no doubt please their majority-GOP constituents. The ones that voted for the plan were already on solid ground in their more purple districts. They get to go back and say they averted tax hikes for their constituents.

Each of these two categories of Republican congressmen are going to count their actions as qualified victories when they seek reelection. So, of course, neither group has much incentive to change anything about the way they acted the next time around. Did I mention the sequester and debt ceiling debates are just around the corner?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:54 AM | Comments (281)
Post contains 375 words, total size 3 kb.

257-167, 172 Dems and 85 Republicans voting yes, 151 Republicians and 16 Democrats voting no.

Here's the roll call of votes.

Big votes: Boehner vote yes as a sign of solidarity with the team. Cantor and GOP Whip McCarthy voted no but only after the bill had enough yes votes.

Voting yes....Paul Ryan. He'll undoubtedly say he was voting to keep 98% of the tax cuts but Rubio was a no in the Senate. If the GOP can't deliver big on spending cuts, a yes vote is going to look pretty bad in a few years.

Tomorrow lots of GOP apologists will tell you how great and/or necessary this vote was. Keep in mind two Republicans spoke in favor of the bill during debate...Dave Camp, Chair of Ways and Means and Ed Royce.

No Boehner, Cantor or McCarthy.

The GOP turned control of the House over to Nancy Pelosi tonight and hid.

Disgraceful.

Swell....

Ran into Pelosi, asked her about deal. “I’m very pleased,” she said. “It’s a victory for Democrats, and the president and the middle class.”

— Rebecca Berg (@rebeccagberg) January 2, 2013

Obama now speaking. Says we need more spending and taxes. He won't negotiate over debt ceiling. Balance, blah, blah, blah.

When the Team Happy GOP starts telling you how great this is, remember Obama got $600 billion in taxes for free but they want you to believe in two months the GOP will get a trillion plus in cuts for no additional taxes. This is a fairy tale.

And while not getting a tax hike is good personally for a lot of people, shielding 98% of Americans from the fiscal reality of their big government votes is going to kill the country.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:09 PM | Comments (378)
Post contains 297 words, total size 2 kb.