And, more importantly, is this about Racism Straight-Up Hatin' on Black Man?

Is "has lost all credibility on accountability and transparency" the new, slightly-cumbersome N-word? I mean, it's a bit long and chewsome, isn't it?

I'd prefer sticking with the old racist standby, "IRS." So brutal in its brevity. But you haven't come here to read about my preferences in new racial slurs. So, on with the NYTimes' pretend one-day outrage:

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability. The administration has now lost all credibility. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it...

Mr. Obama clearly had no intention of revealing this eavesdropping, just as he would not have acknowledged the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, had it not been reported in the press. Even then, it took him more than a year and a half to acknowledge the killing, and he is still keeping secret the protocol by which he makes such decisions.

....

It is the very sort of thing against which Mr. Obama once railed, when he said in 2007 that the Bush administration’s surveillance policy “puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.”

Look, sometimes, when your lady is angry, she makes a show of anger. It doesn't mean she doesn't love you and it doesn't mean she's leaving you. It just means she's asking for some sweet, sweet soothing words, a warm kiss on the forehead and a lingering kiss on the lips, and then all is better again.

Don't mistake the NYTimes' outburst for anything but a spat between lovers, easily repaired and quickly forgotten, with just the slightest show of contrition and the most trivial offering of faithfulness by its paramour.

And don't forget that liberals have collectively decided that empty shows of emotional upset are a fine substitute for actual accountability and action.

Posted by: Ace at 01:52 PM | Comments (236)
Post contains 383 words, total size 3 kb.

This exchange happened on March 12. Watch the exchange. Clapper flat-out states that what we know now is going on was not going on.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (313)
Post contains 241 words, total size 2 kb.

Josh Earnest, White House Special Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy Press Secretary, read a prepared statement to the press aboard a flight regarding the Verizon/NSA news that broke last night.

There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act. That regime has been briefed to and approved by the court. And activities authorized under the Act are subject to strict controls and procedures under oversight of the Department of Justice, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the FISA Court to ensure that they comply with the Constitution and the laws of the United States, and appropriately protect privacy and civil liberties.

Just a slip of the tongue? Sean Davis asks if we could perhaps see a transcript of that statement just to make sure.

[Update]: It appears the New York Times does not have Obama's back this time. (h/t @RBPundit)

[Update 2]: Nope. Not a slip of the tongue. It's on the official White House transcript. (h/t Commenter "Baldy")

Posted by: JohnE. at 12:37 PM | Comments (245)
Post contains 201 words, total size 2 kb.

I had written that because I saw a lefty claiming that in a "GOP-Free America," death would no longer exist. That's right -- the GOP is in the pocket of Big Death. The Reaper plies us with campaign donations to keep Death alive.

Thanks, Citizens United!

A bit later, completely randomly, I noted an old joke of mine, which appeared on this site back in 2004 or 2005, but I felt like telling it again.

As if to prove my original statement, a Twitter user now came in to say:

@Wilbs999 4 Jun

@SissyWillis @MelissaTweets @AceofSpadesHQ <----That's an interesting comment. And incorrect. But then sexual illiteracy is rampant.

I can't embed the actual Tweets because the account is blocking me. I guess you'll see why.

At any rate, now begins a Great Scientific Debate over social media.

To be resolved: Are testicles the breasts of the groin?

In favor: Me

Against: A random Twitter Person I'll just call "Professor Science"

Response:

‏@Wilbs999 4 Jun

@AceofSpadesHQ Maybe you should attempt a defense of it, then. @SissyWillis @MelissaTweets

Again, I'm blocked from actually embedding the tweet.

@Wilbs999 4 Jun

@AceofSpadesHQ Defend it.
Retweeted by DepressiveBlogger69

I'm sorry once again for putting out anti-science misinformation about testicles being jock-knockers.

— DepressiveBlogger69 (@AceofSpadesHQ) June 4, 2013

If there's a cultural faultline in America, it's mons-pumpkins.

— DepressiveBlogger69 (@AceofSpadesHQ) June 4, 2013

But some inquiring minds were interested in my bold scientific thesis.

Now informed it's a joke that she didn't get, WillsBS insists that it sounds nothing like any so-called "joke" she's ever heard.

@willbs999 Doesn't sound like a joke... Try enhancing your wardrobe to expose your "cleavage" then.

Burn.

@Wilbs999 4 Jun

@Brunette_W @AceofSpadesHQ I see now that I've picked up some kind of Howard Stern clown. I don't find that sort of humor funny.

Apparently not.

At this point Professor Science wandered off, but there was still yet one question to be answered:

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (139)
Post contains 512 words, total size 6 kb.

Representative Louis Gohmert read a quote on the Congressional floor, I'm told.

So the Congressional Record now contains this (approximately):

"As the blogger Ace of Spades said, 'I guess we all have an Obamaphone now.'"

I couldn't have done it without you guys. Well, I probably could have. But I wouldn't have wanted to.

Wrong Answer: Why this is nothing at all like Watergate!!!

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:15 AM | Comments (428)
Post contains 151 words, total size 1 kb.

You had to expect this to be the case, but here's your confirmation.

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

The Right Scoop... has just alerted everyone that he didn't check the date, and of course I didn't either. (Dates are for p*ssies.)

But the story is still true. Still, of course, it adds some political context -- this isn't all Obama, of course. Though Obama was the one who vowed this would not happen under his watch, and ran against Bush for believing he could "enhance our security" by "restricting our liberties."

Furthermore, it appears the point-- that it's not just Verizon, it's all phone companies -- is quite true.

Posted by: Ace at 09:55 AM | Comments (244)
Post contains 174 words, total size 1 kb.

You've all read about the National Tap Everyone's Phone program by now, but if you haven't:

Under the terms of the blanket order, the numbers of both parties on a call are handed over, as is location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls. The contents of the conversation itself are not covered.

That's per Glenn Greenwald, who was leaked the court order.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says this isn't even legal, and that the law the order is supposedly based upon still requires an individualized target, not the entire country:

But Cohn argues that the kind of dragnet surveillance suggested by the Verizon order exceeds even the authority granted by the Patriot Act. “Section 215 is written as if they’re going after individual people based on individual investigations,” she says. In contrast, the order leaked to the Guardian affects “millions and millions of innocent people. There’s no way all of our calling records are relevant to a terrorism investigation.”

“I don’t think Congress thought it was authorizing dragnet surveillance” when it passed the Patriot Act, Cohn says. “I don’t think Americans think that’s OK. I would be shocked if the majority of congressmen thought it’s okay.”

And what could be scarier than a blanket order to wiretap the country if not Eric Holder launching a leak investigation to find out who revealed the blanket order to wiretap the country?

Below, Eric Holder refuses to answer the Guardian's questions about this, and another video stolen from Hot Air: President Civil Liberties berating the Bush Administration for violating our civil liberties. It's a much watch, but not if you've recently eaten.

Update: Video of Holder vowing to not resign at Breitbart.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:10 AM | Comments (312)
Post contains 359 words, total size 4 kb.

An AR-15 to be specific. You see because while this is what most people think of when you talk about an AR-15 rifle -

to the BATF only the lower receiver (circled in red) is the actual firearm - everything else (barrel, upper, stock, etc.) are just accessories that are attached to it.

Now you could buy a AR-15 lower receiver separately and build a rifle out of it but you'd still have to go through an FFL, fill out a 4473, go through an NICS check, bla bla bla.

But you can also buy what is known as an '80% lower' which is almost an AR-15 receiver except that certain key sections haven't been milled out and some holes are missing. The BATF has declared these to be 'non-guns' so you can buy them like any other accessory and there are plenty for sale on the web, at gun shows and local gun shops. Once you have one all you need to do is finish the missing cuts and you'll have a working AR-15 lower that you can build into a full rifle.

And after reading this article and this one and this one (particularly the Mother Jones one because spite) I decided to do just that.

But wait - is it even legal to make your own gun? Yes - yes it is.

You can read the details here but basically as long you meet these conditions it's perfectly legal:

• You are allowed to own a gun (i.e. not a 'prohibited person')
• The gun you make is legal in your state/city
• It's not a machine gun (doesn't fall under NFA laws)
• It's built by you and intended for your personal use

A serial number isn't even required (unless you later decide to transfer it to someone else).

So I bought an '80% lower' for $120 cash at a local gun show. This particular lower is Cerakote-coated aluminum and it only needed the section where the trigger/hammer/safety fit to be milled out plus a few holes to be finished.

 

So let's make a firearm out of this hunk of aluminum.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 08:46 AM | Comments (135)
Post contains 851 words, total size 8 kb.

A little background.

People (including myself) have asked why the price of an ebook is so high, and and why it's gone up the past few years. When Kindle first came out, ebooks were super-cheap. Now they're not.

This trial is about that.

Apple proposed, and negotiated with the five biggest publishing houses, a different pricing model specifically intended to raise the price of e-books.

Previous to this agreement, e-books had been sold outright to retailers, as goods intended for resale usually are. That is, Manufacturer X sells a Widget to Retailer Y for $10. Retailer Y now owns the Widget outright, and may sell it for any price it likes, whether for $20, or for $10.50, or even for $6, if it wants to sell it at a loss (or must sell it at a loss, due to poor sales).

This is why Amazon usually offers such low prices (or had previously offered such low prices). They buy books from the publishers at the wholesale price. Usually a retailer would add, I don't know, a 50% markup. Instead, Amazon prices at a much smaller markup (maybe 5%), and sometimes even at cost and sometimes even at a loss. I suppose they do the latter with things like the last Harry Potter book, as a loss-leader to essentially buy new customers by offering them a price they can't refuse.

Now the publishing houses don't like this. Why, I'm not sure, as they're still getting the price that they themselves set for their wares. But for some reason, especially with e-books, they felt the low prices were threatening in some way. Perhaps they felt the low prices of e-books would threaten their main business of selling physical books.

Apple proposed a different pricing scheme: The publishing houses would not sell the book to Amazon, but rather permit Amazon to act as the agents of sale. Now, in this "Agency model," the publisher sets the price of the book, and then gives Amazon an "agent's fee" of 30% for each sale.

Now Amazon can no longer set the price, as the publisher still owns the book until the moment of sale to the customer, at which point 70% of the publisher's price goes to the publisher and 30% goes to Amazon.

So, Old Model: We sell a book to Amazon for $8, expecting them to charge something like $14. But they don't charge $14; they only charge $9. Amazon decides to make less money per sale in an effort to expand its business, and for some reason the publishers don't like this.

Thus the New Model: The publisher sets the price at $14, period. Amazon cannot raise or lower the price because it doesn't own the book; it merely has an agent's right to sell it at that quoted price. Now the book sells for $14, as it must. 70% to the publisher, 30% to Amazon.

This is why Amazon has been so insistent about saying "This price has been set by the publisher" regarding all those books with inflated prices.

Now, the trial against Apple isn't about a new pricing model, per se; it's about the Bigs of the Industry getting together to mutually agree to set prices, using the Agency Model as the vehicle for doing so -- that is, it's about price-fixing by major players in the industry.

The five publishing houses implicated in this scheme have all settled independently with the government. For some reason, no article gives me a straight answer as to whether this means the agency model is retired, or what.

I think the agency model is not retired, as I just looked up Dan Brown's lame new book and it costs $13 and carries the advisory, "This price was set by the publisher." I think then all they agreed to do is not insist on actual price fixing (they had wanted to escalate the retail price of books between $13 and $15).

So the US government is suing people and extracting agreements and yet not undoing the Agency Model scheme that raised prices.

Apple insists it's done nothing wrong. Furthermore, their big trial strategy is to put Amazon on trial, claiming Amazon illegally sought to fix prices itself (albeit at a low level). This claim seems to concern Amazon negotiating for best-offered prices (a Most Favored Nation clause, that is, whatever the lowest price is that you offer to any other seller, you offer to Amazon). I'm not sure why this fairly-common clause constitutes price fixing or illegal behavior; I suppose it might be that when a company has near-monopoly position, things they had been permitted to do as non-monopolists become, by law, illegal. Whatever the theory, that's Apple's story and they're sticking to it.

Apple also insists that they're going to embarrass Amazon by having evidence introduced that Amazon itself thinks that its Kindle format is inferior to Apple's format. The supposed legal consequence of this is to prove that Apple needs to have higher prices to support its supposedly-superior format, but that seems absurd; this is rote, mostly automated coding. How many times does a human hand enter the process of turning a computer file of a manuscript into an ebook? A tweak here and there, a read-through; but it's not like there's a lot of work going into this process.

Yes, the iPad has a neat "turning the virtual page" animation when you turn the virtual page. But this is the product of software coded into the iPad -- it's not something that's coded into each and every new book. There's no justification for charging more per book for a cute bit of code you bought once with the iPad.

The real point of this, it seems to me, is for Apple to crow that "Even Amazon thinks the Kindle sucks!"

Which it doesn't, by the way. If I wanted an iPad I'd've bought an iPad. But Apple seems to think it can win some PR by trash-talking the Kindle at a trial about its own behavior.

Sorry to be so biased here. All I know is that one company wants to sell me a book for $8.67 and another company has arranged it so that it is impossible for anyone to sell me the same book for less than $12.99. And no, the iPad's page-turning animation isn't worth $4.32 per book to me.

The trial will last about three weeks, it's expected.

Posted by: Ace at 11:00 AM | Comments (166)
Post contains 1084 words, total size 6 kb.

WSJ is subscription-blocked, but WSJ India lets you see the story.

"Following instructions," they say. Higher-level officials "had a lot of input," they say.

Hot Air has excerpted the print story.

Transcripts of the interviews, viewed Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal, appear to contradict earlier statements by top IRS officials, who have blamed lower-level workers in Cincinnati.

Elizabeth Hofacre said her office in Cincinnati sought help from IRS officials in the Washington unit that oversees tax-exempt organizations after she started getting the tea-party cases in April 2010. Ms. Hofacre said Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington, closely oversaw her work and suggested some of the questions asked applicants.

“I was essentially a front person, because I had no autonomy or no authority to act on [applications] without Carter Hull’s influence or input,” she said, according to the transcripts.

Posted by: Ace at 08:00 AM | Comments (271)
Post contains 163 words, total size 1 kb.