• Benghazi Talking Points Underwent Twelve Revisions, Scrubbed Of Terror Reference
  
• So This Was A Terrible Idea
  
• Romney Scrapped Benghazi Ad In Final Weeks Of Campaign
  
• Boston Police Commissioner: We Never Received Intel On Tamerlan Until The Day He Was Killed
  
• Spntaneous Order Experiments Take Hold In Detroit
  
• Benghazi Victim's Mother: The Obama Administration Doesn't Care
  
• Another Reason To Home School Your Kids
  
• Why Lindsey Graham Isn't Afraid Of A Conservative Challenger
  
• Bad Faith An Benghazi
  
• Why Is Daily Kos So Afraid Of Some Speech Competition From The Koch Brothers?
  
• The Modern Court Jesters Have Reversed Rolls And Now Attack Anyone Opposed To The King
  
• Multiculti U.
  
• Illinois Swamped By Surge In Firearm Owner Applications
  
• Hillary Clinton: I Helped Start Media Matters
  
• Film Review Of Star Trek Into Darkness
  
• Tunisian Indicted In US In Connections With Canadian Railway Terror Plot
  
• Poll: 61% Of College Students Want Government Out Of Their Lives
  
• What Do US College Graduates Lack? Professionalism
  
• Malcom X's Grandson Was Slain In Mexico
  
• Know Where You Can And Can't Carry With This Concealed Carry App
  

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:09 AM | Comments (112)
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But not really.

The revolutionary concept of 3-D printed firearms has been building momentum for months now. Online observers, innovators, investors and the generally curious celebrated as the first completely 3-D printed handgun became a reality. Since the blueprint for “The Liberator” hit the web, the file was downloaded more than 100,000 times in a few days.

Today, the government shut it down.

And in this case "shut it down" means they maybe made the file slightly harder to find. Because if you're looking for it, you'd certainly never think of looking on Pirate Bay or somewhere like that.

This move by the government was pretty predictable, as was the fact that it would induce more people to hunt down and download the plans than would otherwise have done so, what with the Streisand Effect and all.

But if you've been paying attention to Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed's founder, at all, this whole project has never been about guns anyway. It's about something more fundamental than that.

According to Wilson, the organization’s ideal goal is to test constitutional rights. “This is the conversation I want,” he says. “Is this a workable regulatory regime? Can there be defense trade control in the era of the Internet and 3D printing? I think this isn’t a project about firearms, it’s a project about political equality.”

This core problem with the left's predictable BAN ALL THE THINGS! response to events like Newtown is that it's wildly unrealistic as a solution to the problem they purport to address. I know this may come as a shock to regular readers of the HQ, but it would seem that the left is much more interested in using these events to justify their long march towards top-down, authoritarian control than it is in any of the particulars.

Guns have been around for centuries now, and the basic technology isn't going away. The 3D-printed gun isn't even all that revolutionary (it shares the name and basic idea of the FP-45 Liberator that we planned to flood Axis-occupied Europe with during World War II) and zip guns and other crude firearms are no big trick to make.

If you follow the left's anti-gun fetish to it's ultimate goal, a complete gun ban, then two groups wind up with guns: the government and criminals. In such a regime, it'd be awfully hard for anyone who values civil liberties to tell the difference between the two.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a file to share.

Posted by: andy at 07:30 AM | Comments (215)
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Happy Friday.

Rasmussen's most recent polling on Sen. Rubio -- and his first polling about Sen. Cruz -- came as a bit of a surprise. Cruz's favorable/unfavorable with Republican voters is 42/12.
Rubio's, by contrast, is 68/10.

Sen. Warren has a stupid idea about student loans -- and she probably knows it's a stupid idea, which hasn't stopped her from proposing it to garner support from stupid people.

Sen. McCain has once again introduced legislation to forbid cable providers from bundling channels; he also wants to end sports broadcast blackouts.

I'm not sure why it's all Senate news this morning.

Ah, here's something. Folks with implanted defibrillators, don't set things with magnets -- like iPads -- on your chests, m'kay?

Gawker's mole at Fox News pleaded guilty yesterday to a pair of computer crimes.

There's a rumor that Fox tv wants to bring back '24' now that Kiefer Sutherland's current show followed tradition in the Friday death slot.

Programming Note: I will be heading to FreedomWorks' Blogcon conference in Dallas tomorrow, where I'll be doing a panel discussion with Larry O'Connor, Dana Loesch, and Guy Benson about media accuracy. I won't be back until Wednesday, so one of the cobs will be covering the morning posts. Be good.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (474)
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Take the Pew Research Science and Technology Quiz

Other than a trick question or two it's easy - so if you score 11 or less you must wear the Cone of Shame during the entire ONT.

Wait - There's a New #1 Beauty!

And according to Maxim it's this:

Guess The Party: The Cleveland Kidnapper

Ariel Castro's party affiliation wasn't mentioned in any MSM article and you know what that means.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:48 PM | Comments (918)
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Wait, what? Sarcastically, right?

No seriously. I have to break embargo here because his piece is very good and there is no fair way to excerpt it without a link.

Unless you posit that the newly legalized immigrants will dramatically outperform the existing immigrant population, you will reach a result very like that of the Heritage Foundation: that the taxes paid by the newly legalized will not begin to equal the costs of their Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other benefits.

(The Wall Street Journal is trumpeting a letter from the Social Security Administration declaring that the Senate bill will have positive effects on the solvency of the retirement program. But in a really shabby piece of misleading reporting, the Journal's lead paragraph refers to the program's "long-term solvency" and waits until paragraph four to note that this "long term" extends only to the program's next ten years - long before the vast majority of the newly legalized will become eligible for benefits! The SSA promises in its letter to provide a 75-year accounting somewhat later. I can well imagine Senator Rubio urging them, "take your time, take your time.")

Let me put this in boldface: Heritage's cost estimates are driven not primarily by welfare, but by healthcare. Every newly legalized immigrant, no matter how ambitious and hard-working, will get old. When he or she gets old, he or she will qualify for Medicare. Medicare is very, very expensive, and getting more expensive all the time. Fewer and fewer Americans - whatever their ethnic origin - pay enough in taxes to cover their predicted future health care costs. Inevitably, Medicare is becoming a more redistributionist program. People on the left get this point when they scoff at the imputed Tea Party slogan, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." Why do they forget the point when they speak of immigration?

He then gets into the objections lodged by the pro-low-skilled-labor-pool right -- those who say but you haven't measured the effects on the economy.

No. This analysis measures fiscal effects, budget-related effects. The government's budget is not the economy -- not yet, anyway, though we are getting close to that. And this amnesty would bring us closer to that.

Those who claim that bringing in a lot of low-skilled, low-income workers into our social safety net will actually pour money into the safety net have to answer one question: In what country, anywhere, are the poorest citizens net-payers into the government's fisc?

It's ludicrous. It is no knock on poor people -- no slight to their humanity -- to note the obvious fact that the poorer a person is, the less he pays into the government (lower taxes, if any at all) and the more he takes out of it (needing more frequent use of welfare, foodstamps, unemployment insurance, and, of course, Medicare and ObamaCare).

You are either stupid or lying if you claim that adding 20 million fairly poor people into our social safety net is actually a net fiscal winner for the US taxpayer and treasury.

As DrewM. has noted, it's not as if the country wants for poor people. If poor people are the Gateway to National Prosperity, why bother training people to have more in-demand skills at all? After all, since poor folks are the key to a government fisc overflowing like a cornucopia filled with cash and stock options, we shouldn't "invest" any resources in skill-training or education. We should just endeavor to produce as many poor folks as possible, and, as DrewM. says, "let the good times roll."

Larry Kudrow demands that the Heritage report add "dynamic scoring," a demand Frum himself rubbishes. I'll direct you to his article; I don't want to restate what he wrote.

But I'd add this thought. "Dynamic scoring" is the notion that as policy changes, so too does economic performance. That is, you can't change policy and expect the country will be precisely the same. Changes in policy create changes in life as actually lived. Thus, Kudrow argues, we must take into account the effects of this policy on our economy.

Okay. But I've got another idea about dynamic scoring myself. If the idea is that we want to properly forecast the effects on the economy due to a change in policy, let's talk about all of it.

Because illegal immigrants are in fact illegal and not entitled to welfare, ObamaCare, etc. -- all the free gifts to the poor of government -- they have to work. And, everyone says that illegal immigrants do in fact work rather hard. Most people praise them for that.

Okay.

What happens when they don't have to work anymore? What happens when Daddy Government tells them he's gonna provide for them working or not?

Are they still going to be working quite so hard at hard manual labor and unpleasant jobs like working in a slaughterhouse?

As Larry Kudrow is keen to account for changes in behavior attributable to a change in policy -- as he insists on the "Magic Asterisk" of dynamic scoring (Frum's term; a fudge factor, a guess) -- let's factor the dynamic change to work ethic effected by now having the overflowing cabinet of the American dole opened to one.

Posted by: Ace at 03:44 PM | Comments (121)
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Via the AP, Stan Lehman reporting.

In Rio De Janeiro, a man shot a harpoon gun through his wife's mouth, critically injuring her and hitting her "cervical spine."

This turns out to be not even close to what I thought it was, but rather a series of spinal bones at the base of the head.

He says it's an accident. The cops say it looks like it is indeed an accident. That said, the woman is still unconscious...

"[O]nce she fully recovers we will be able to question her and get a clearer picture of what happened."

Here's the part that's very surprising: Doctors say they expect a full recovery.

There's a picture to go with this -- not a picture, actually, but some kind of medical imaging technology image, showing her skull, spine, and the harpoon that pierced her.

I'm giving you a content warning even though it's actually not gory-- because it's actually not a picture. The image looks artificial because it is artificial -- it's a body scan made into an image.

Still, it's not exactly nice. But click here if you want to know what this might look like.

Via @iowhawkblog, who reads Large Northeastern Obama-Supporting Institutions so you don't have to.

Early Weekend For Me/Open Thread: I'm taking tomorrow off to travel. And I'm tuckered out.

I've also invited the cobs to not sweat it and also take the day off. They may post, but it might be sparse content.

I'll see you guys again first thing Monday morning, or as you call it, "Monday at 1:38 PM."

Speaking of: I can't have people attacking the coblogs personally anymore. I can't. They do an awful lot of work here... including covering for me when I'm off.

They are important to the site. The site could not exist without them.

Official banhammer warning on personal attacks on them.

In simple economic terms, they're more valuable to me than any single reader. They keep the site alive.

Just keep that in mind, please.

And just stop trolling, period. I really am tired to death of trolls. And yes, just because you're on the right doesn't mean you're not a troll -- a troll is a state of mind. A troll is just a nasty little thing filled with hate who just can't wait to spoil someone's day on the anonymous forum of the internet.

That's my job. Back off.

Posted by: Ace at 04:12 PM | Comments (373)
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What backlash?

The GOP has moved out ahead of the Democrats on the economy and immigration, as well.

Well, we've had five years of horrific failures from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi. It's nice that the slow boats have begun joining us on the right side of the river.

Posted by: Ace at 03:02 PM | Comments (140)
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The funniest thing to ever come out of Roseanne Barr's mouth was Tom Arnold's nut.*

And how sad is that. How sad is that.

* This isn't my joke. I got it from a Dane Cook movie, My Best Friend's Girl.

Posted by: Ace at 01:31 PM | Comments (252)
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Don't look for the large news network -- this is all they have. Clicking on them will just tell you what I just did, plus some background you already know.

This is almost certainly because of the "fetal demise" aspect, as I'm pretty sure you can't be executed for kidnapping. (The Supreme Court has limited the death penalty to murder. I may be slightly wrong about that, but not much wrong. If they left wiggle room it's only a little wiggle room. I'm not wrong-- not only can you only get it for anything but murder, you also can't get it for "ordinary murder." Some sort of aggravation of murder is required. So you need a murder, plus.

This actually means the Ohio case, if the death penalty were imposed, would be taken to the Supreme Court. The Ohio statute makes intentional fetal demise itself an aggravated murder. I'm not sure the Supreme Court would bless that. It might okay it as being classified as murder, but not murder, plus. (Then again, the kidnapping and rapes may aggravate it!)

Either way, I think it would go up the system a ways.)

Posted by: Ace at 12:24 PM | Comments (242)
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I just read two pieces by two liberals on #Benghazi, one by Michael Hirsh and one by Marc Ambinder. There will be no links. I'll explain that in a moment.

Both pieces denied the possibility of a cover-up. Ambinder seemed very confused about why the administration would possibly lie about the matter, despite the fact that an email from Hillary's spokeswoman Victoria Nuland specifies the why: The email says that her "superiors" are concerned that the CIA's talking points suggest that Hillary overlooked warning signs in Benghazi.

And hence the talking points were rewritten to claim the massacre happened "spontaneously." Spontaneously = no possible overlooked warning signs.

This is difficult to parse? They really need hand-holding with this?

It's as if OJ wrote an email saying "Niccole Brown fills me with an intense, murderous sexual jealousy which I fear is consuming all my reason and restraint," and Ambinder and Hirsh then say, "I don't get it. I don't see a motive for OJ to murder her."

Sure. Except for his own words.

In addition, while these two hacks deny any cover-up, they refuse to mention the smoking gun evidence of a cover-up: The demotion of a whistleblower, retaliation against Gregory Hicks, for telling the truth about the talking points.

Because this point is all but unspinnable -- except to essentially say that Hillary Clinton enjoys the queenly right to dismiss the courtiers who displease her -- they choose the media's all-too-common tactic of late: Silence.

They simply do not mention it, and therefore they have nothing at all to spin away.

If no one knows, then no one will notice the omission.

This ends it for me. This is the end of things.

It is time to put Voltaire's observation into action: It is good in this country to hang a admiral [who fails] from time to time, to encourage the others.

You don't have to hang every admiral to make your point to all admirals. You just have to hang one.

We have to hang Admiral NBC. We have to get Levin, Limbaugh, everyone on this.

I don't mean NBC News. No one watches that and it's a rounding error in their operation.

I mean NBC itself-- Entertainment Division.

I mean Comcast.

And I mean, as a secondary matter, an end to the practice of linking the media.

We can attribute quotes. We can rewrite stories-- all fair use. We can note from where this information comes from.

But we can do that without a link.

They have declared war on the truth.

It's time we all understood we in a war and stopped giving aid, comfort, and traffic to the enemy.

All media is losing money, pretty much. And this is happening naturally. It is now well past time to add concerted, deliberate action to their woes.

NBC is now finishing behind Spanish-language Univision in the ratings. It is time to take NBC's pitiable, money-losing position and turn it into a financial disaster that they can no longer ignore.

It's time to stop talking about the weather and start doing something about it.

Actually it was time four years ago.

It's well overdue now.

Just for the humor of it: Paul Anka understood what must be done when the band is misbehaving.

It's time to slice. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:17 AM | Comments (544)
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