She's speaking of Benghazi, and the media's flat-refusal to cover anything perceived as harmful to the left and Their Beloved Obama, but she has expressed similar sentiments regarding Gosnell, and surely the latter informs her statements about the former.

I can only say I agree, and welcome to the club.

Posted by: Ace at 11:59 AM | Comments (205)
Post contains 70 words, total size 1 kb.

Old Post/Previous Speculation: Obviously, and thankfully, my speculation/wargaming out the verdict was wrong.

It seems likely they had agreed on two counts of murder, and disagreed on the remaining two. And then split the difference.

...
I don't understand this.

The verdict is in, and is going to be read, and the media are in the courtroom, permitted there by the judge... but they have to turn off their cellphones (their method of instantly reporting the news out) during the reading of the verdict?

I don't understand the reasoning. Is it that the official protocol is that the jury reads the verdict, and then the verdict is read publicly on the courthouse steps?

No idea.

Anyway, cellphones off or not, they'll only be off for a bit, and then we'll have the verdict some minutes later.

As I wrote earlier, I'm pessimistic about the verdict. I wrote:

I think this way because if they were split 2-2 on guilty/not guilty for the baby murders, they would simply split the difference and present their verdict of 2 guilty, 2 not guilty. They would have still convicted him twice for capital murder; the third and fourth conviction are of less consequence after the first two.

So it's my guess what's going on is that the jury has agreed that on two deaths, there isn't enough evidence to say the baby was alive (and hence murdered), and then there are one or more jurors who are against imposing the verdict of guilty in these cases whatever the evidence.

So I think the fight is between those who want 2 guilty, 2 not guilty verdicts as to the baby murders, and those who want 4 not guilty verdicts for all of them.

With the verdict now in, it seems likely to me those pushing for the murder convictions have given in to the ideologically-opposed jury nullification person or persons.

Alternate Headline:

Verdict Reached in Local Crime Story

via @jimgeraghty.

Posted by: Ace at 10:27 AM | Comments (663)
Post contains 360 words, total size 3 kb.

One of the most bothersome things about a true political scandal is that the public tends to yawn about it.

So what, they tend to think. They're all corrupt anyway. Besides, this doesn't effect me or my family or my friends. We're all just Common-Sense Non-Political Independents.

This is how the low-information voter flatters himself for his ignorance.

Getting through to the low-information voter is very difficult. One might quote the liberal Washington Post on the issue (as quoted by Instapundit, at USAToday):

"A bedrock principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends. So it was appalling to learn Friday that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. It was almost as disturbing that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have not personally apologized to the American people and promised a full investigation."

But even that won't get through to the low-information voter, who considers such statements to be too abstract to get too worried about. He also hasn't read the statement in the first place, creating a large obstacle to his being concerned about it.

The low information voter barely understands what's happening now, let alone what may happen or the implications of what's happening. Even if it's a fairly dire threat to democracy-- people agree to peaceful, civil rule only when they believe the power of government is not being used to target them for their beliefs.

But the low-information voter doesn't appreciate this. He's too busy being Common-Sensical and Independently-Minded to fret any about serious threats undermining the rule of law and the civil order. And he considers people who think about such things as Why Democracy Endures and Why It So Often Fails to be crazy, hyperideological extremists.

Low-information voters assume that everything's okay and everything will continue being okay because they ignore all warnings about things going off the rails. Then, when the country is torn apart by a crisis, they go into Demanding Answers mode, angrily asking "Why weren't we warned?"

Which brings me to the point: Since this sort of voter will only take cognizance of a fact if he can see it directly, tangibly impacts him in the now -- not three years from now, hell, not even three weeks from now -- we need to always bring the scandal back to the tangible and the immediate and the personal for the low information voter.

Obama's government spends all of its time and political capital on political warfare. All of it. All of its power is directed towards ideological ends -- cover ups, punishing opponents, imposing partisan solutions the country does not want (such as ObamaCare), and then vindictively extending those partisan efforts beyond the pale (such as demanding that religious employers forsake their God and pay for workers' abortions).

Obama has a very limited capacity for useful work. Most of his day is eaten up by reading press reports praising him, and when he takes a break from doing that, he tries to get away for six hours of golf once a week and a vacation once every two months.

With his little remaining time, he uses the powers of government -- entrusted to the President to work for the public good, not the partisan good -- to promote leftism and attack anyone who objects to the imposition of an alien form of government, antithetical to the foundation of the Republic.

And what's he not doing with his microscopic amount of actual work-time?

Going to Jobs Councils meetings. Meeting with economists about how to get the economy producing jobs again.

In short: He's spending his very limited work-time working for NARAL and the extremist wings of the Democratic party and decidedly not on behalf of the Common-Sensical Practical-Minded Independent low-information voter.

He's spending all his time trying to put Republicans out of business and none of his time helping the common man keep his own business in business.

Although this is actually not the most important part of this scandal -- the threat to civil order and rule of law is the most important part -- this is the only part, I fear, that can get through to the low-information dunderheads, so, in the interest of saving the Republic, we should probably push this connection as often as possible.

<

Posted by: Ace at 09:56 AM | Comments (191)
Post contains 791 words, total size 5 kb.

Palette cleanser while I look for other news.

They have to worry about the Too Much of a Good Thing problem, no?

Sure, I like superhero movies... once a year or so.

Twenty two episodes a year, though, plus movies? This trailer teases that there might be some cameos in the show from Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the Hulk. I imagine these cameos will be extremely brief, but even so, doesn't this take the Event out of Event Movies?

I'm sure they've worried about this themselves.

Another concern they probably have: Marvel studios' primary strength has been quality control. Even if you don't like the films, and even if you find one or two of them to be disappointments (like Captain America), you have to admit they've done a pretty decent job of maintaining a certain good-to-very good level of quality in their productions. (In as much as a comic book romp can be a quality production, of course.)

But twenty-two hour long episodes a year is going to require an awful lot of writers and directors, some of indifferent ability, and TV scripts have a turnaround time (first draft to shooting script) measured in weeks or days, not years.

Ah well. I guess the answer to that is "Joss Whedon is the executive producer." Buffy was a superhero series, of course, and furthermore a Team Superhero series, with stuff like "character relationships" and other such Gay Shit; so this is in his wheelhouse. I suppose he could just dust off his old Buffy storylines and just replace "Vampire Coven" with "Serpent Society."

Marvel Studios famously linked all of its movies, something that made absolute perfect sense given its comic book origins (where team-ups happen frequently), and yet hadn't ever been done in films. Now they're going even further with this linkage notion and directly linking multiple interrelated movie franchises with an episodic action-adventure TV show.

Did I say "an" action-adventure TV show? I meant "possibly several," including the Hulk Show (still in development, possibly stalled in development hell) produced by Guillermo del Toro, and even, possibly, a TV show for the non-Avenger "The Punisher," though I think that one will never happen because they can't figure out the right approach to dark violence and vigilantism.

To be true to the character, they'd have to make it a darker show, inappropriate for kids; but doing so might make the show a poison pill for the rest of the Avengers franchise. You don't want to do a dark, violent, borderline-psychopathic Punisher show that will probably be cancelled in two months anyway and have that damage the Iron Man brand.

Proposed Solution: Ditch the Punisher and instead do a similarly street-level vigilante who doesn't necessarily murder everyone. For reasons I don't really get myself, every geek seems to dig Moon Knight, despite not really knowing much about him. I think he's sort of Marvel's Batman ripoff, except he dresses in white rather than gray or black, and he's Jewish instead of that vague, hybrid religion Bruce Wayne practices where he seems pretty Episcopal but he's constantly surrounded by Catholic imagery and themes.

Oh, and one more thing: I guess now superheroes are big, generally, what with the disguised-superhero show Person of Interest doing well, and the original superhero, Sherlock Holmes, also doing good ratings on American and British TV. And the movies, too.

So that means that... Must be time to gear up Jack Bauer for the Tenth Longest Day of His Life.

If I could suggest something: Call the show "CTU," ditch the "every hour is an hour of one day" gimmick, which is limiting and stupid, do six or seven multipart stories over the course of a season (so they're long-ish episodic stories, but not 22 episodes long!), and you can even then just hire Jack Bauer part-time as you frequently feature his fellow CTU agents tracking down their own terrorism plots.

Hell, you can even have them going after non-terrorist villains, for a change of pace. I don't suggest this to be PC; I suggest this because after 8 seasons of 24 they've done an awful lot of the same darned thing. Might be nice to just do a straight counter-espionage or anti-contraband episode.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:29 PM | Comments (278)
Post contains 743 words, total size 5 kb.

President Obama delivered a defiant defense Monday of his administration's response to the Benghazi terror attack, calling the revived controversy over the matter a "sideshow."

...

"There's no there there," Obama said.

The president, with his comments, echoed remarks made by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who asked during testimony in January "what difference" did the controversy over the talking points make.

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 AM | Comments (275)
Post contains 84 words, total size 1 kb.

And says Jay Carney's usefulness to this Administration is "diminishing rapidly," due to his hapless deceit on issues.

Dennis Kucinich, meanwhile, seems to be on the "liberal" side of the "liberal/leftist" line. A true liberal does not bless dishonesty and corruption simply because it may aid his politics; the leftist does. Kucinich declares that "of course" the Benghazi Talking Points were "scrubbed" for political reasons, and then speaks a very simple truth about the IRS scandal:

“We can not have a condition in America where peoples politics are the basis for IRS attacks.” …

Wallace countered, asking if Kucinich thought the IRSÂ’s missteps were straight up political targeting:

“How can it not be?” Kucinich concluded.

Mickey Kaus, meanwhile, reminds everyone that Democratic bureaucrats did this under Clinton, too, and do not need to be instructed to do this -- apparently they all want to do it.

Thus, it seems to me, a law-abiding liberal President should send the word down from on high that such behavior is illegal and unethical and unamerican -- indeed, it's Soviet-- and will therefore be prosecuted to the maximum effect the law allows.

And if he doesn't do that, he's blessing the Soviet-style assault on citizens.

Posted by: Ace at 08:33 AM | Comments (222)
Post contains 237 words, total size 2 kb.

Out of 261.

This doesn't mean Gosnell has been found guilty on all other counts, only that they've agreed to verdicts -- including the possibility of "not guilty."

It's possible, for example, the jury has found that there wasn't enough evidence to convict on murder in two of the baby-slayings (say, if they evidence wasn't beyond a reasonable doubt regarding whether they were born alive). There could be one or more jurors resisting any murder charges for the "aborted" babies, even if the evidence is strong they were born alive; it might just be that the rest of the jury agreed with them on two counts, for insufficient evidence.

The judge will now holler at them some and remind them of their duty and tell them to work it out.

Why I Think This Is the Case: I think this way because if they were split 2-2 on guilty/not guilty for the baby murders, they would simply split the difference and present their verdict of 2 guilty, 2 not guilty. They would have still convicted him twice for capital murder; the third and fourth conviction are of less consequence after the first two.

So it's my guess what's going on is that the jury has agreed that on two deaths, there isn't enough evidence to say the baby was alive (and hence murdered), and then there are one or more jurors who are against imposing the verdict of guilty in these cases whatever the evidence.

So I think the fight is between those who want 2 guilty, 2 not guilty verdicts as to the baby murders, and those who want 4 not guilty verdicts for all of them.

Posted by: Ace at 07:46 AM | Comments (220)
Post contains 292 words, total size 2 kb.

Irritating auto-play video warning:

THE PLOT THICKENS: ABC News has obtained a draft of a soon-to-be-released investigative reporting (sic) showing that the Internal Revenue Service began targeting conservative groups as far back as 2010 and that senior IRS officials in Washington have known about it for almost two years.

... which makes this Jonathan Alter piece from October 2011 about Obama's miraculous scandal-free administration even more ridiculous.

There are plenty of scandals, if the press would just bother to look. Operation Fast & Furious and this IRS mess, to name just two, were ripe for the picking before the 2012 elections.

But it's almost like the Obama administration engages in these activities with the knowledge that the fifth-column media will bend over backwards to protect its boyfriend. Almost.

Posted by: andy at 07:13 AM | Comments (195)
Post contains 142 words, total size 1 kb.

Sorry, Moveable Type ate my entire morning news dump right after I finished it.

So you'll have to settle for this. more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:25 AM | Comments (398)
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

Methodists Clash with Renegade Lutherans

Unions Poaching other Unions!

Posted by: Open Blogger at 03:32 AM | Comments (373)
Post contains 17 words, total size 1 kb.