I just wrote to George Orwell and said, "You were right."

"No," he replied. "I always imagined they'd be more clever."

So, assault magazines. Coming to a Hardball with Chris Matthews near you.

Pictured: Mounts for attaching assault grenade launchers

Posted by: Ace at 08:44 AM | Comments (363)
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You morons stuck in the blizzard be safe. Hopefully you have ample amounts of medicinal booze on hand.

Over at the Laughing Squid, they've got some video and pics of The Blizzard of '78.

more...

Posted by: CDR M at 05:57 PM | Comments (834)
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Enjoy this from SooperMexican while we wait for the head honcho.

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:08 AM | Comments (354)
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• Killer Inspired By Piers Morgan Still At Large
  
• Piers Morgan Not Taking This Well
  
• Flashback: Piers Morgan Amazed Sarah Palin Hasn't Called To Apologize To Gabby Giffords
  
• Iranian Fighter Jet A Laughable Fake
  
• NYT Notices Obama Tax Hikes Are Crushing Americas But Fail To Mention Obama
  
• Gun Owner Shames Knife Wielding Robber
  
• Boomers Stick Next Generation With The Gas Bill
  
• Someone Hacks Bush Family E-mails And Photographs
  
• You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way Journalists Blow
  
• Obamacare To Increase The Cost Of Food
  
• Obamacare Fail: CBO Predicts Drop In Health Coverage
  
• British Hospital Carnage A Window Into Out Future
  
• Jesse Jackson Jr Plea Deal To Include Significant Jail Time
  
• The Latest Assault On The Second Amendment
  
• California School Districts To Steal Money From Poor Starving Children To Cover Other Expenses
  
• Get Your Own Obama Skeet Shooting Action Figure
  
• Ace's Favorite College Subject
  
• This Whole Foods CEO Seems Like A Decent Guy
  
• Boeing New Aircraft Orders Drop From 183 to 2.
  
• Breaking The Blue Model Monopoly On Education
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:06 AM | Comments (283)
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Happy Friday.

NTSB says FAA dropped the ball on the 787 Dreamliner batteries.

A year and four days later, D.C.'s McPherson Square is repaired and open to the public again after OcuppyDC's eviction. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (390)
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Red Letter Media's Review of Revenge of the Sith

Okay this is kinda old but I happened to watch it again last weekend while trying to explain to Mrs. Maetenloch just how awful the Star Wars prequels were and why. (Lucky for me she indulges my little rants and feigns interest remarkably well)

Actually of all the reviews this might be the most insightful and educational one - as well as the most poignant when Plinkett considers what might have been. Here he analyzes RotS and the entire story arc in the movies and points out where they went wrong (and right). He even gives Lucas credit for avoiding some of the more tempting mistakes.

Some of the more interesting points from the review for the ADD types: The huge fundamental logic gaps in the story that got worse as the series progressed, the fact that Anakin becoming Darth Vader just isn't all that interesting, how using blue screen in every scene ultimately makes it static and boring. Also the parallels of Anakin's story and Citizen Kane (and Lucas and Charles Foster Kane) were something new to me (must have taken a bathroom break during the original viewing.)

It's particularly telling when he shows similar scenes from the original Star Wars and the prequels - in nearly every aspect except for special effects the original is better. And even the new special effects aren't necessarily an improvement: At one point Plinkett replaces the movie with a scene from a Star Wars video game and the sad part is that you don't even notice for a while. It's all just one giant video game with the about same emotional impact as a gaming session.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:21 PM | Comments (542)
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It's not "hate" if the right people, the people in The Other tribe, get murdered.

Here's a rant I did on Twitter when I was trying to get unstuck from my choking anger earlier. (Ultimately I wrote that Piers Morgan post.)

I'm getting angry again. I need to chill.

Something Else the Media Won't Tell You... Chris Dorner has liberal fans -- and I don't mean for his politics.

I mean for his murders.

Dorner is a Fan of Anderson Cooper, Too: Sent him some kind of package, which I assume will turn out to be a justifying manifesto.

Apparently he thought his liberal hero Anderson Cooper would understand.

Posted by: Ace at 03:11 PM | Comments (572)
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I wrote a post over at the Conversation suggesting we can square the Assassination Power Circle by returning to the very ancient concept of "outlawry," in which a criminal is declared outside the protection of the law.

The chief benefit of this is that it's a transparent process. Strike that-- the chief benefit of this is that it is a process in the first place, and not just One Man deciding which citizens will get whacked this weekend.

Posted by: Ace at 02:21 PM | Comments (285)
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I think @benk84 linked this this morning. I need a post, so I'll link it again.

Fear not. As always in Washington when there is talk of cutting spending, most of the hysteria is baseless. The nearby table from the House Budget Committee shows that programs are hardly starved for money. In Mr. Obama's first two years, while private businesses and households were spending less and deleveraging, federal domestic discretionary spending soared by 84% with some agencies doubling and tripling their budgets.

Spending growth has slowed since Republicans took the House in 2011. Still, from 2008-2013 federal discretionary spending has climbed to $1.062 trillion from $933 billion—an increase of 13.9%. Domestic programs grew by 16.6%, much faster than the 11.6% for national security.

Transportation funding alone climbed to $69.5 billion in 2010 with the stimulus from $10.7 billion in 2008, and in 2013 the budget is still $17.9 billion, or about 67% higher. Education spending more than doubled in Mr. Obama's first two years and is up 18.6% to $68.1 billion from 2008-2013.

But wait—this doesn't include the recent Hurricane Sandy relief bill. Less than half of that $59 billion is going to storm victims while the rest is a spending end-run around the normal appropriations process. Add that money to the tab, and total discretionary domestic spending is up closer to 30% from 2008-2013. The sequester would claw that back by all of about 5%.

More troublesome are the cuts in defense, but for security not economic reasons. The sequester cuts the Pentagon budget by 7%. This fits Mr. Obama's evident plan to raid the military to pay for social programs like ObamaCare.

...

The most disingenuous White House claim is that the sequester will hurt the economy. Reality check: The cuts amount to about 0.5% of GDP. The theory that any and all government spending is "stimulus" has been put to the test over the last five years, and the result has been the weakest recovery in 75 years and trillion-dollar annual deficits.

I don't care, Obama's my dad. Chris Rock says so.

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (193)
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It is said that this manifesto was more than a theory, that it was an incitement. Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief, and, if believed, it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us, it had no chance of starting a present conflagration.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, joined by Louis Brandeis, dissenting in Gitlow v. People

The case involved a communist manifesto which urged, as they do, the violent overthrow of government. The opinion blessed jailing the man for the manifesto, claiming it was an "incitement."

Which provoked Holmes to reply: Every idea is an incitement. That's the whole point of them.

I bring this up because of the repulsive dishonesty in media reporting concerning the intersection of violence and politics.

If a conservative commits violence -- and, actually, you'll have to remind me when the last time that happened was, exactly; but if he does -- the media begins calling for the right to "tone down its rhetoric."

After all, this might "incite" people to commit violence. Eloquence might, as Holmes said, "set fire to reason."

And as Holmes might say: That's the whole bloody point of eloquence.

Now, the media claims the right must "tone down its rhetoric" -- make its rhetoric less inciting -- in order to Protect the Public Safety. Any pungent, tough-worded bit of rhetoric could spur a nutter to do something violent.

True enough. I can't argue with that. History is filled with nutters who read something and then shot someone. For God's sake, John Lennon was killed by someone who got really, really incited by Catcher in the Rye.

But what you can't help but notice is that the media never makes a similar demand of those on the left to "tone down their rhetoric." Like, for example, the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Hate Map," which, it turns out, quickly became a leftist's Kill Map.

There was some incitement going on there, it turns out. Based on the incitement contained on the SPLC's website -- branding millions of citizens as "haters" and oppressors, for the mentally unstable to obsess over -- Floyd Corkins got himself a gun and set out to shoot innocent men and women at the Family Research Council.

He also brought Chick-fil-A sandwiches with him -- his intent was to smear the faces of the dead with Hate Chicken.

Incitement, yes? Eloquence -- well, let's not dignify it as eloquence; let's call it what it was, crude fundraising hair-on-fire fear-peddling -- did in fact "set fire to reason."

So where are the calls for SPLC to take down its Kill Map?

There hasn't been a single call from the media. The Kill Map remains up.

The calculation on the part of the media is simple: the SPLC's speech contains value and hence we'll just have to accept that the occasional hateful lunatic might be incensed by it and kill someone.

That -- those murders, those losses of human life -- are just a cost we'll have to pay. Free speech is too important to be restricted due to such concerns.

Yes, in this case, free speech outweighs the value of human life.

Now, consider conservative political messaging. Suddenly, in the media's eyes, the costs which could flow from incitement are not worth it.

Why? Simple: Conservative speech is valueless, or, at least, of relatively low value compare to liberal speech. While the potential of inspiring murder is not sufficient to suggest that liberal speech be controlled and moderated, that same concern is plenty sufficient to require that conservative speech be controlled and moderated.

This is the underlying assumption that they simply will not confess, for if they did confess it, it would be game over for them. All of their conclusions -- all of their bias, all of their double-standards -- flow from this premise, which they will not admit, but will only dance around.

The premise is simply that liberal speech is much more valuable than conservative speech and this is of course because liberal politics are much more valuable than conservative ones.

Once you accept this premise -- liberal speech is high value, conservative speech is very low value -- then you can see that all the conclusions make logical sense (although the syllogism remains invalid, as it's based on a false premise).

Of course there is distinction between how we treat liberal and conservative speech -- just as there is distinction between how we treat jewels and how we treat human waste! One is precious and one is refuse; of course the two are treated differently!

Of course, having vastly different levels of value, one might be worth a certain toll in human lives, and of course the other one would not be!

They won't say this.

But this is our fault -- because we don't ask them.

This weekend, a dozen Republicans and conservatives will sit face to face with David Gregory, George Stephanolopolous, and the rest of the progressive clownshow.

And not a single Republican or conservative will put the question I have outlined to their faces.

That's the only way to compel an answer to a question someone doesn't even want to acknowledge -- you embarrass him into answering it. You put him on the spot. You make him squirm. You either make him answer, or let the world see his babbling evasions.

You get an answer or your expose him as a liar or a fool.

But we won't do that. Our Polite Company Conservatives will continue appearing on these shows only to answer David's and George's questions, never to ask questions themselves.

And David and George should be asked questions. They are more important political actors than 90% of their clock-watching guests are.

Political actors should be asked, early and often, about their politics, and their too-shameful-to-be-confessed unstated assumptions and secret agendas, and their hypocrisies, their lies, and their evasions.

Is that our job? To be interrogated as if we were suspects? To assume, and to confirm, the media's self-vaunted status as the Judges of Truth and the Priests of Righteousness?

Why would we ever concede that to them? Just because a lunatic believes he's Napoleon does not mean we should dress in kepis to indulge him.

You think we're lying? Get this: We're certain you're lying.

You don't trust our motives? Let's talk about your motives -- motives demonstrably corrupt and dishonest.

You think we're religious zealots who adapt our perception of the world to agree with the word of our so-called God? Yeah, some of us do.

But none of us are so irrational and stupid to worship a profoundly mediocre dilettante named Barack Hussein Obama, as you do.

Do we ever swing the hot light around and begin Watching the Watchmen?

Posted by: Ace at 12:18 PM | Comments (469)
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