I predicted it. It was an easy call.

Now let me tell you The Rest of the Story.

Link Fixed.

Posted by: Ace at 01:23 PM | Comments (406)
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Late Night Edition, my apologies for not getting this up earlier. For those living on the East Coast, our target this week is easy to spot, riding halfway between the Eastern horizon and zenith right about now.

As Spring yields to Summer, the sky continues to change in the evening. For those of you lucky enough to live in rural regions, the grandeur of our home galaxy comes into full view. For the rest of us, we can enjoy a richer field of objects with binoculars and backyard scopes. One of the more interesting this week can be "unseen" just by staring at it. We call it the "Blinking Planetary." more...

Posted by: CAC at 09:31 PM | Comments (10)
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I hate advertising something on NBC, but Leno is not shying away.

Every other day I read about some joke he's made about Obama.

Even lame jokes, like this one, successfully relay information about Obama that most of the media suppresses.

Here's the thing about not-very-funny-jokes: A comic tells them because he feels he needs to address the issue, to comment on it. A good comic will tell a great joke even if it's against his political interest. But comics won't tell so-so jokes, unless the joke is important in other ways.

Seth Meyer's hideous Weekend Update is a very long running example of this: Half the "comedy" consists of jokes that aren't funny, but exist there to "inform" the audience about things Seth Meyer thinks they need to be thinkin' about.

Leno has some good jokes, and some so-so jokes, jokes he thinks he should tell because it's important. Like this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

Or this one.

These are all from like a two week span. I could go on.

Jon Steward is wildly overpraised by liberals for, supposedly, being a truth-teller who speaks uncomfortable truths the media shies away from.

How about someone in the media acknowledge the supposedly boring, non-hip, non-edgy Jay Leno is doing that, and is actually exposing the truths the media reallyreallyreallyreally doesn't want to utter?

Meanwhile, this is funny: College Humor does a mock-up of what the media would look like if it were all run by Buzzfeed.

Posted by: Ace at 12:03 PM | Comments (140)
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Hmmm...

Noting that not only is Rice inept, but also has virtually no qualifications for the position to which she's now being appointed, the author speculates:

Or, maybe Obama is smarter than it looks on the surface.By appointing Rice to NSA job means she can invoke executive privilege and doesnÂ’t have to testify on Capitol Hill. And she will certainly be a loyal soldier if she is now sitting 40 yards from the Oval Office.

HmmmÂ….is Obama now taking Rice out of the running to be a key witness in the inevitable Benghazi hearings? Once she's on the White House staff, she can hide behind the veil of executive privilege.

Stay tuned. This story is far from over.

Yeah, I don't know about that, because while executive privilege may apply to advice given to the president, I don't think it's job-dependent, and I don't think it covers past communications not made to the president.

I expect there might be some debunking here. I'm putting it up because I don't know, and want to know, and I figure someone will Put Me Some F'n' Information.

Meanwhile, you'll be happy to know that Michael Eric Dyson, last seen announcing that Eric Holder was the "Moses of our age," pronounces the little-accomplished Rice to among the the most brilliant people walking the earth today.

Reading false talking points to the nation was quite within Rice's wheelhouse: she's long curried favor with dictators by ignoring their abuses.

Recently, during a meeting at the U.N. mission of France, after the French ambassador told Rice that the U.N. needed to do more to intervene in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rice was said to have replied: “It’s the eastern DRC. If it’s not M23, it’s going to be some other group,” according to an account given by a human-rights worker who spoke with several people in the room. (Rice’s spokesman said he was familiar with the meeting but did not know if she made the comment.)

If true, that rather jaded observation would appear to echo a Rice remark that Howard French, a long-timeNew York Times correspondent in Africa, related in an essay in the New York Review of Books in 2009, which was highly critical of Rice. In the article, headlined “Kagame’s Secret War in the Congo,” in which French calls the largely ignored conflict “one of the most destructive wars in modern history,” he suggests that Rice either naïvely or callously trusted new African leaders such as Kagame and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda to stop any future genocide, saying, “They know how to deal with that. The only thing we have to do is look the other way.”

She seems to view diplomacy as a con, or a conspiracy of the Decision Makers against the people.

Posted by: Ace at 11:34 AM | Comments (185)
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I've been seeing the charge that Obama's Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter attended Obamacare implementation meetings being made on some sites, and I think it's important to be accurate about it.

From Wikipedia:

She served as the Chief Spokesperson for the Obama-Biden Transition Project. She served in the Treasury Department as Timothy Geithner's counselor where "she protected GeithnerÂ’s fragile reputation and tried to spin unpopular policies like the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the A.I.G. bailout."

...

In 2010, Cutter was named Assistant to the President for Special Projects, charged with managing communications and outreach strategy for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In 2011, Cutter was named Deputy Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama.

This Jake Tapper article makes it seem like her "special project" role was a lot like running PR for Obamacare. It was only in September of 2011 that she left her post as Senior Advisor to work on Obama's re-election campaign. Any meetings with Shulman before that can be fairly well explained (the frequency of Shulman's meetings is another issue entirely, however). Meetings after her move to the campaign, and pretty serious questions can be raised.

According to White House visitor logs, Cutter and Shulman were at the White House at the same time only once after September 2011: June 5, 2012.

Cutter's day:
14:30 - Meeting with FLOTUS in the residence. Total attending: 4
18:30 - Meeting with David Plouffe in the West Wing. Total attending: 1

Shulman's day:
16:00 - South Lawn event with POTUS (Shulman's wife joined him). Total attending: 3,692. That event appears to be this one.

Now, Cutter is unquestionably a partisan hack, but her presence at meetings before she left to join Obama's reelection campaign is not a smoking gun or even very strange. The whole purpose of this "gotcha" was to directly link Obama's reelection campaign with IRS meetings, and that does not appear to have happened with Cutter assuming the logs are accurate. Is it possible she learned something before she left? I suppose, but again, there's no evidence of that.

There's plenty about this IRS story to be outraged about. Let's not go inventing anything that could be easily refuted and allow Team Obama to spin this all away as some Republican witch hunt.

Posted by: JohnE. at 11:36 AM | Comments (107)
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Obvious observation that the media somehow fails to notice: People who make mistakes do not get promoted.

People who do exactly what you told them to do -- especially if it was a noxious thing -- get promoted.

The media apparently doesn't understand the basic principles of social interaction or the boss-employee relationship. At least when it suits them to not understand it.

Noah Rothman compares the media's treatment of the loyalty-based promotion of Dr. Rice to the loyalty-based promotion of Dr. Rice.

Reports have long suggested that Dr. Rice is highly regarded by the president and has enjoyed his confidence and support even before he occupied the Oval Office. In spite of her direct involvement in an debacle overseas, the president’s decision to promote her to a high-level position in the White House signals his disregard for the concerns of his critics. Rice’s promotion is as much a reward for her loyalty as it is an acknowledgement of her ability – probably more so, in fact. No, we’re not talking about Dr. Susan Rice who was tapped on Wednesday to become President Barack Obama’s next National Security Advisor. These are the themes that the press harped on when President George W. Bush promoted another Dr. Rice in his second term: Condoleezza Rice.

“Rice appears to have been picked to run the State Department as much for her fierce personal loyalty to Bush as for her own foreign-policy views,” opined Inter Press Service Washington Bureau Chief Jim Lobe in November, 2004. “Many State Department officials expressed serious concerns about Rice’s appointment.”

This is what I call one of them-there You Thought I Was Talking About This Thing But I Was Really Talking About This Thing things that people in the media like to do. I think this is a good use of it, though. The media are quite smitten with this new Dr. Rice.

Posted by: Ace at 11:09 AM | Comments (252)
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No doubt?

I know a little more than this report says from reading stuff in French papers; I'll just add my paraphrases. LeMonde is the paper that has the most on this story; in fact, one of their reporters claimed to have filmed a gas attack. I'll link that video below the jump; you can decide how convincing you find it.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told France 2 television: "We have no doubt that the gas is being used. The conclusion of the laboratory is clear: there is sarin gas."

Experts had analysed samples brought back from Syria, he said.

The samples are actually of urine of alleged sarin gas victims; when sarin metabolizes in the body, it creates two metabolites, which were reportedly found in the urine. Now, apparently, this test can be falsified. But they also claim to have blood samples of victims containing non-metabolized sarin (that is, actual sarin). They say these tests couldn't be falsified.

I think, but do not know, that the difference between these tests, as far as falsifiability, is that the metabolites are common-enough chemicals which you could just add to someone's urine sample, if you had a mind to, whereas to put the raw sarin into the blood, you'd obviously need actual sarin. (Though, of course, you could just add your own sarin to someone's blood, too, if you wanted to fake a test, and had your own sample of sarin-- which isn't some impossibility.)

...

Later, in his televised remarks, Mr Fabius went further, saying that in at least one case, there was "no doubt that it was the regime and its accomplices".

He'd been asked about the speculation that Sarin might have been accidentally released due to rebels targeting a gas depot; that is, accidentally blowing it up. He claims that's not possible. He says in one attack a regime helicopter was dropping submunitions at the time of the gas incident.

...

"A line has been indisputably breached," said Mr Fabius.

And yet... there is a peace conference scheduled for July, and we all know that will be a smashing success, so no one wants to make too much of this "indisputable breach."

...

"We must react, but at the same time we must not block an eventual peace conference."

Meanwhile, Professor Gutsy Call says...

Washington has said it needs more evidence before concluding that sarin has been used.

Meanwhile, a reporter embedded with some of the rebels claims to have filmed a gas attack, as I said. The article is here; Bing automated translation here.

The video is below. It's narrated in French but there are English subtitles.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:54 AM | Comments (247)
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Oh, by the way, Obama's trying out the spin that we have to stop distracting him with these made up scandals so he can focus on the economy.

He didn't focus on it before. He wanted to focus on everything but the economy during the campaign.

And yet now... now. Now he's gotta focus.

I guess his theme will be, "Let me have a pass on the scandals so I can keep this good thing goin'."

Real GDP growth — the value of goods and services produced after adjusting for inflation — is 15.4% below the 3% growth trend of past recoveries, wrote Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast. More robust growth will be necessary to bring this recovery in line with previous ones.

“It’s not a recovery,” he wrote. “It’s not even normal growth. It’s bad.”

Posted by: Ace at 08:19 AM | Comments (250)
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Wow, that sort of sounds like they did with the IRS IG report.

It also makes the administration sound absurd when it claims it's "just trying to protect national security" when it spies on James Rosen and AP. They don't mind politically-helpful disclosures of classified material.

The release of the findings in the draft report also raises questions about why the findings have been under wraps for so long, and which of the documentÂ’s conclusions were known to White House officials prior to last NovemberÂ’s election.

Panetta disclosed this information during a CIA awards ceremony held outside under a tent. Mark Boal, a reporter, was in the group. There were 1300 total persons there.

Politico's report -- and I guess the IG report -- says they're unsure if Panetta knew Mark Boal was at the ceremony. I guess the claim is that maybe Boal snuck in so Panetta didn't know he was disclosing top secret information to a reporter.

Which strikes me as absurd. This is a CIA awards ceremony.

Mark Boal was almost certainly cleared to attend. What is the contrary speculation? That he found the location of a secret CIA awards ceremony and then he just bluffed his way in?

No. This did not happen.

Consider the security on hand for a CIA Awards Ceremony. All the agents who did the most that year, including those who participated in the execution of Bin Laden. This would be a fantastic target for terrorists. And Mark Boal is a well-known intelligence-beat reporter whose face is known to Panetta and half of the CIA.

Mark Boal did not just bluff his way past the maître d', like Ferris Beuhler pretending to be the Sausage King of Chicago. He was invited.

Corrected: 1300 people were at the presentation, not 130, and that wasn't just a typo; I misread the number.

Posted by: Ace at 07:32 AM | Comments (238)
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There are amnesty supporters who want to paint people who disagree with them as “anti-immigration” or even more scurrilously “anti-immigrant”. While there is a faction in the anti-amnesty camp that supports either scaling back legal immigration numbers or even taking a “pause” in admitting new immigrates to the US, nothing I’ve seen shows them in anything like the majority of amnesty opponents.

Most of us want an orderly system of immigration that lets us decide who comes and stays here and on our terms.

What would a system like that look like? Surprisingly, it would include a lot of whatÂ’s in the current bill under debate in the Senate, though with some major differences in emphasis.

HereÂ’s my outline of what a reasonable immigration reform would look like:

1-Reform and Rationalize The Legal Immigration System

Clear the backlog of 4 million people waiting to come to this country legally. Yes, we should be welcoming of immigrants and that means dealing with the people who respect our laws in a timely and efficient manner.

Reforming the legal immigration process by rationalizing our system for selecting immigrants. Right now most immigrants come here because they are sponsored by a family member, someone who is often a naturalized US citizen. This “chain-migration” system makes family relation a key decider in who comes to this country. For the most part it doesn’t take into account the needs of the country or what skills the perspective immigrant brings to the table. We need to adopt a system along the lines of Canada or Australia that takes into account the needs of the country and matches the type of people they admit into the country. Obviously if you bring in someone like a doctor you will also need to let them bring their spouse and children but you don’t have to give priority to their 3rd cousin’s husband just because they are all related.

The H1-B Visa system needs to be completely replaced. Currently high-skilled workers compete for a relatively few visas that are tied to the immigrant's ability to find a company to sponsor their application. The worker then essentially becomes tied to that company in a form of expensive indentured servitude. Yes, these workers compete with Americans for high paying jobs but they are also the people who bring the highest skills that are likely to create the greatest spin off value to the wider economy. A system that enables creative people freedom to utilize their skills and create more opportunity for others is one we need to embrace to grow our economy and compete in the global market. These types of workers are in demand around the world; itÂ’s silly not to be competitive for them. They are going to go somewhere and crate value; it might as well be here.

more...

Posted by: DrewM at 06:36 AM | Comments (251)
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