I can't believe we're talking about this but I guess, whatever. Slow news day.

In the Iowa caucuses, which has an almost perfect track record of predicting who Iowa GOP stalwarts think is the most authentic when eating corndogs and that famous Midwest barbecue, Ted Cruz seems to be an early favorite.

From all accounts, Santorum was a popular speaker; the social conservative crowd appreciated not only his positions but the enormous effort he has made to get to know the state of Iowa and its conservative residents.

But Santorum’s welcome could not compare to the wildly enthusiastic reception for Cruz. Joined by his pastor father, Rafael Cruz — he was a big hit, too — the Texas freshman senator wowed the crowd, and then wowed them again.

“The reception for Santorum was appreciative, consistent, and steady,” Bob Vander Plaats, head of the Family Leader and organizer of the event, told me via email. “The anticipation for and reception of Cruz was over the top. He was propelled by an amazing speech by his father, Rafael. All that said, Cruz delivered. Most walked away talking Cruz!”

I should say that Byron York begins this column by saying that there are absolutely zero polls showing Cruz ahead in Iowa, but this is his take from talking to a few intense partisans.

Which is basically what a caucus is so whatever.

Palin, meanwhile, says she's on "Team Rand" in the Paul-Christie dispute, and that Christie isn't really "rogue," but just does confrontational YouTube videos to seem like he is.

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (213)
Post contains 295 words, total size 2 kb.

When people on the cultural/aristocratic left, such as David Brooks, speak of the "Quality" of the media class and self-presumed intelligentsia, what they really mean is deranged incompetence such that only they are elevated enough to realize is worthy of praise.

Such as, for example, art created by "Outsiders," "Outsiders" referring to those well outside the traditional norms of craft or talent.

Imagine a crude, terrible piece of "art" such as this, but created by one of those Crazy Crude Rightwing Cretins the media likes to do stories about.

Any chance that would hang anywhere?

I cannot explain to you how crude, witless, stupid, and craftless this is. But the left champions so-called "Naive Art," art created by those who are naive of the basic tenets of the craft of art. Thus, not being sullied by such artifices as technique, practice, and talent, they are more "authentic."

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:10 PM | Comments (351)
Post contains 377 words, total size 3 kb.

If you missed the Washington Examiner's amazing exposé, and then Taranto's column, and then you missed Andy writing about it yesterday, here's your chance to finally make amends.

Newly uncovered Democratic anti-NRA talking points urge anti-gun advocates and politicians to hype high-profile gun incidents like the Florida slaying of Trayvon Martin to win support for new gun control laws.

In talking points likely followed by top Democratic leaders including President Obama after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in December, the anti-gun "guide" urged gun foes to speak out when a shooting "creates a unique climate" to shout down the National Rifle Association.

"The most powerful time to communicate is when concern and emotions are running at their peak," said the 80-page document titled "Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging," and produced by three Democratic firms led by the polling and research outfit Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.

The guide was produced in 2012, before the Sandy Hook shootings. According to a report posted on NRA News from Examiner.com, not connected to the Washington Examiner, it was developed to help anti-gun advocates in Washington State's effort to control gun purchases, though it clearly has national overtones and uses, especially as groups like Mayors Against Illegal Guns -- a Greenberg Quinlan Rosner client -- expand their fight for gun control.

The guide spells out how to talk about gun control and when to press the issue, the best time being in the wake of a publicized shooting. For example, it calls on gun control advocates to speak out, "don't wait" for the facts, after a shooting like Martin's heightens awareness of the issue.

"The debate over gun violence in America is periodically punctuated by high-profile gun violence incidents including Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tucson, the Trayvon Martin killing, Aurora, and Oak Creek. When an incident such as these attracts sustained media attention, it creates a unique climate for our communications efforts," said the guide.

"A high-profile gun violence incident temporarily draws more people into the conversation about gun violence," added the talking points. "We should rely on emotionally powerful language, feelings and images to bring home the terrible impact of gun violence," said the guide, which also urged advocates use images of scary looking guns and shooting scenes to make their point.

This is an accidental disclosure of the truth every bit as arresting and important as Mitt Romney's "47%" remark (which itself was actually off-the-cuff, and not a thought-out, written strategy guide).

So why isn't the media talking about it?

For an obvious reason: They follow the guide themselves. How can they publicize a story that explains the manner in which they permit themselves to be used by gun-control advocates?

Indeed, by employing most of these tactics themselves first, they practically wrote the guide. The authors of the guide are really just collators of the fine work the media has already done.

By the way, be careful of this blog-- it's a Tactical Blog. Some of the posts are even Semi-Automatic.

Actually most of them are but, hey, so are David Brooks' columns.

Posted by: Ace at 12:30 PM | Comments (156)
Post contains 535 words, total size 4 kb.

Two stories, neither of which I'm sure will generate that much commentary, so maybe better to put them in one post.

James "Whitey" Bulger is of course the Boston mafia kingpin brother of William Bulger, who for a long time was capo of Boston's other Mafia, the Democratic state senate.

On June 19, 2003, he testified to a House of Representatives committee about an incident in which, while still President of the Massachusetts State Senate, he "went to an arranged location in 1995 to take a call from his fugitive brother, apparently to avoid electronic eavesdropping. He said that accepting the call from the gangster without bothering to inform the FBI was 'in no way inconsistent with my devotion to my own responsibilities, my public responsibilities.'"

During the hearing, when asked what he thought James (Whitey) did for a living, William Bulger said:

I had the feeling that he was in the business of gaming and... whatever. It was vague to me but I didn't think, for a long while he had some jobs but ultimately it was clear that he was not being, you know, he wasn't doing what I'd like him to do.

What's my brother's occupation? Oh... you know, "Whatever." Gaming or something. Maybe some Legitimate Construction Businesses that have a lot of employees and a lot of state contracts but don't seem to actually do much work.

Just mentioning what the media won't.

"It's "a complete victory for the government," said CNN legal analyst Sunny Hostin.

In one of the racketeering counts, Bulger was accused of involvement in killing 19 people, including two women.

The jury found Bulger played a role in 11 murders, and that the government failed to prove he was involved in seven other murders. The jury made no finding in one murder.

[Mid-post update - Andy]: Jeff Jacoby wrote a must-read column on the government's complicity in Bulger's crimes. (Globe link now safe to click again. Thanks, John Henry.)

The corruption of the federal government was a key element in BulgerÂ’s trial, as it was in so much of his sadistic career. Officials charged with defending the public from gangsters like Bulger used their considerable influence to defend the gangster instead.

In a matter I don't know that I have an opinion on, Eric Holder has decided to get around the mandatory-minimum law -- which prescribes mandatory lengthy prison sentences for those charged with certain drug crimes -- to not charge low level offenders with such crimes, thus avoiding the law's trigger for a mandatory sentence.

Although I think this fits into the general pattern of Eric Holder's (and Barack Obama's) lawless reign, I don't know if this itself is actually lawless -- I think he might actually legitimately have this power, and I don't necessarily think this represents some kind of betrayal of the Constitution or the like.

If you read the piece you'll see lots of talk of Social Justice and We Can't Stop Crime By Punishing It and such. Odd sentiments from an alleged Top Cop.

“We must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is, in too many ways, broken,” Holder said. “And with an outsized, unnecessarily large prison population, we need to ensure that incarceration is used to punish, to deter and to rehabilitate — not merely to warehouse and to forget.”

With all due lack of respect, prison is in fact a place to "warehouse and forget." One type of dungeon cell was an oubilette, a place of forgetting. We are in fact separating the lawless and violent from the rest of society so that the rest of us may live in peace.

We don't wish to have to remember violence, rape, and murder on a daily basis.

Rehabilitation is a joke and always has been, a nice idea pushed by Victorian reformers and then American progressives which itself has always been intended as a way of forgetting what evil actually lurks in the hearts of men.

“A vicious cycle of poverty, criminality and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities,” Holder said Monday. (Excerpts of his ­prepared remarks were provided Sunday to The Washington Post.) He added that “many aspects of our criminal justice system may actually exacerbate these problems rather than alleviate them.”

Criminality "traps" criminals in prison? Why my stars and garters, I just never.

It is clear that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no truly good law enforcement reason,” Holder said. “We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation,” he added later in the speech.

Take that, plunging-violent-crime-rates-since-1990.

As far as long drug sentences for low-level offenders, though: I don't really need to see a man in jail for ten years (or whatever) for smuggling 20 pounds of pot.

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 AM | Comments (237)
Post contains 839 words, total size 6 kb.

Over the weekend, John Sexton praised his former partner-in-crime MorgenR. for more or less singlehandledly stopping the so-called "Public Option" -- by discovering and poplularizing a series of videos in which high-ranking Democratic officials and policy wonks flat-out sold the Public Option as being a "Trojan Horse" to destroy private insurance and get us to Single Payer.

They sold it that way-- they didn't just accidentally mention this. It was a selling point that the Public Option would destroy private insurance. It was the whole point of it.

Now, it was okay to say this in front of liberal audiences, at liberal town hall events and in liberal discussion panels that the participants thought would never get wider exposure, but of course it was politically disastrous to tell the truth about this to the general public.

Well, MorgenR. did the media's job for them. He found the videos, he collected the Public Option proponents all selling it as a step that would lead, inevitably, to single payer.

He did the media's supposed job of informing the public about the actual facts and the actual plan so that they could give, or refuse, informed consent about the laws their supposedly democratic government would execute.

And not only did the media not do its job as far as this, but after MorgenR. exposed it, they either refused to report it entirely or simply lied about it.

But the word did get out anyway -- at least Joe Lieberman heard about it-- and the Public Option was stripped from the monstrosity we now know as ObamaCare.

I'll take one MorgenR. over fifty David Brookses.

Although, having met Morgen, he does dress fairly well. I didn't check his trouser crease, but who knows? Maybe it's well-creased. Maybe he even creases his pants by laying them beneath a heavy stack of Edmund Burke books.

Maybe David Brooks would say that his one-man quest to inform the public about the real point of the Public Option demonstrated some Quality and Authority.

Stopped? Or Delayed? Lauren writes that Heritage warns that the Public Option virus is still present in the body of ObamaCare.

Posted by: Ace at 10:53 AM | Comments (225)
Post contains 392 words, total size 3 kb.

Boy this is going to put a major dent in my whole ongoing New Class/New Aristocracy theory.

Via Hot Air, with video at RCP, David Brooks is more or less explicit about matters of Rank and Class and Persons of Quality.

In many ways I actually agree with him. There has been a general lessening of standards as so many (including myself) have succumbed to the song of the Drudge Siren. There is too much Buzz and not enough Feed.

One sees this in the alleged Elite Media as well.

But that said, that's a tendency, an impulse, a tic not actually central to a person; a person may choose to do that sort of thing, or he can choose not to.

David Brooks speaks, in his dreary wannabe nobleman way, of inborn "quality" and "authority," that is, attributes which are not defined by one's actions but by one's status and position.

And here to tell him he's not all that good, and neither are the bien pensants he believes constitutes the lesser lights in the constellations of the elite. Somewhat long ago he wrote, I'm told, one wry book about his own social cadre (the Bourgeois Bohemian), which apparently resonated with other bobos. And why wouldn't it? People love reading about themselves.

And since then, from his sinecure at the New York Times, he's written a weak soup of columns which tend to influence or enlighten no one at all, except to reinforce the strong belief among the vaunted elite that they alone, well, they, and other politically-credentialed members of the New Class, are talented and wise enough to speak upon American affairs, and that they are all quite right to ignore contrary voices and of the 88% minority.

This is a man, we should never forget, who presumed to induce the Quality and Authority of one Barack Hussein Obama from the crease of his trousers.

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Let me propose something obvious: We value most what we ourselves are good at. That is to say, a mathematician tends to champion mathematical logic and look a bit down on those whose math is limited to arithmetic; a writer tends, naturally, to hold those who are adept with phrasing in high regard; a religious man esteems reverence, a laborer praises those who work until they sweat, and so on, and so on.

None of this is a bad thing; it's human nature. And it probably has some positive effects. I imagine this sort of People Like Me Are Good and Wise thinking is a useful boost to the ego (and the ego, ultimately, is the captain of the spirit, and charged with keeping the ship afloat). I think that perhaps those who don't particularly value the things they're good at might at risk for depression.

But while this impulse is understandable, it is, of course, self-justifying and narcissistic. And the inverse of People Like Me are Good and Wise is the terrible and unavoidable corollary, People Not Like Me are Wicked and Stupid, which is essentially a sort of race-neutral Social Racism.

And I rather think the media has indulged its twin ego-boosting premises, both the one that elevates the self and the one that denigrates The Other, for far too long and with far too much enthusiasm and with far too little self-reflection.

A thinking man may not be able to avoid such narcissisms and bigotries but neither should he construct a worldview which explicitly justifies them and, by so doing, gives further license to his already-promiscuous indulgences.

David Brooks took a shine to Obama because, as he himself stated explicitly, "he talks like us," that is, talks like the New Class of which Brooks is a very proud and high ranking member.

A sharply-creased trouser leg is important to faux aristocrats like David Brooks. He perceived then in Barack Obama -- another man to whom Quality Drycleaning is apparently a sort of lesser sacrament -- a kindred spirit. A person like him, and thus Good and Wise.

But Obama's presidency has lurched from failure to disaster, and David Brooks sees, it seems, no reason to reflect upon the sort of thinking that caused him to insist that a state senator from Illinois run for the highest political office in America.

And so, it seems, David Brooks feels that to never reexamine one's premises nor scrutinize one's errors is a way in which a man demonstrates his Quality and Authority.

As President Trouser-Crease might say: I reject that premise.

David Brooks' New Class is fond of nattering forever on about diversity, and yet they're quite insistent that the only participants in the national debate should be people exactly similar to themselves, drawn from the same three fields, always, living in the same three cities, always, and coming from the same three schools.

Not always on that one. A lot of them actually didn't go to particularly prestigious schools.

But, they would each and all like to be mistaken for people who all came from the same three schools, always.

Ideas are like people, and if there are not enough newcomers in the idea gene pool then ideas will become inbred, stupid, and sometimes monstrous.

Posted by: Ace at 09:53 AM | Comments (338)
Post contains 1088 words, total size 7 kb.

Phony scandals keep rolling along.

E-mail correspondence unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee reveals that Lois Lerner, the figure at the center of the scandal, may have committed a felony by divulging information about a conservative group to the Federal Election Commission, in an incident that dates back at least to 2008, before President Obama took office. Though some conservatives have eagerly sought evidence that Obama’s White House instigated the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups, the latest evidence suggests that an anti-conservative bias may instead be an endemic feature of the federal bureaucracy. And now, an FEC official is raising the specter of systemic bias at that agency, too, calling the techniques its lawyers employ a “much more sophisticated way” of discriminating against conservative groups than those used by the IRS.

“When we spoke last July, you had told us that the American Future Fund had not received an exemption letter from the IRS,” an FEC attorney wrote in a February 2009 e-mail to Lerner.

But Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code provides that both “return information” and “taxpayer return information” are strictly confidential. An IRS source tells National Review Online that, within the agency, disclosing the information that Lerner appears to have provided is considered “a violation of Section 6103.”

That’s a felony punishable by up to $5,000 in fines or five years in prison. If found guilty of such a violation, Lerner, who has been on paid administrative leave since May, would also lose her job: “If such offense is committed by any officer or employee of the United States,” the law reads, he shall “be dismissed from office or discharged from employment upon conviction for such offense.”

Tax-law experts, however, disagree about whether Lerner’s apparent disclosure was a violation of Section 6103. Steven Willis, a professor of tax law at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, argues that it was. The law “does not allow for disclosure of pending applications,” Willis says, and though he acknowledges that the law is a “technicality,” he maintains that Lerner’s violation is something more serious. “In her position as director of Exempt Organizations, Ms. Lerner would surely have been aware of section 6103,” Willis tells me. “She would have had responsibility to ensure that employees who reported to her not violate the sections.” Further, her role as a senior IRS official “adds to the seriousness.”

However, itÂ’s not clear that Lerner disclosed anything that could not have been inferred from information otherwise available to the FEC. Attorneys at that agency knew, based on information provided by the American Future Fund, that the group had applied for tax exemption.

Posted by: Ace at 08:32 AM | Comments (258)
Post contains 470 words, total size 3 kb.

• Know Thine Enemy
  
• Spain Builds 47 Story Skyscraper, Forgets Elevator
  
• Milton Friedman And Restraint
  
• NPR Admits It Slandered South Dakota
  
• The Sequester Success
  
• Barbarians At The Campus Gates
  
• Not Everyone Wants To Be A CEO
  
• One Dead, Three Missing In Colorado Mudslides
  
• Weiner Documentary In The Works?
  
• Gay Couple Seeks Spousal Privilege In Kentucky Murder Trial
  
• Britain Considers Legal Action Against Spain Over Gibraltar
  
• The Washington Post And Future Of Journalism
  
• Dems Using Obamacare As A Path To Single Payer
  
• Naval Buildup In Asia
  
• Obama Airlifts Bo To His Vacation Spot
  
• Deep Sea Crab Attacks Methane Bubbles (video)
  
• Laszlo Csastari Dies At Age 98
  
• My Life As A Cellphone Holdout
  
• The $425 Pencil
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:13 AM | Comments (490)
Post contains 125 words, total size 3 kb.

Times were so hard in England during the Great Famine of 1315 that no bread could be found even for the King himself. So, you know, perspective.

20 things 20-year-olds don't get. It's a good list, with some caveats. But I can boil the list down to only three basic items: 1. Be on time; 2. Hustle; 3. Listen more and talk less. Just showing up is half the battle. If you just arrive on time, dressed in the proper clothes for the job, and be ready to work, you'd be amazed at how far you'll go.

Incentives matter. Generous disability benefits combined with lax oversight and partisan liberal resistance to reform means that SSDI is a reliable and low-risk way for dishonest people to live off the public dole indefinitely. (The UK is suffering from almost exactly the same problem.) Check this out (emphasis mine):

We find that among the estimated 23 percent of applicants on the margin of program entry, employment would have been 28 percentage points higher had they not received benefits. The effect is heterogeneous, ranging from no effect for those with more severe impairments to 50 percentage points for entrants with relatively less severe impairments.

Posted by: Monty at 04:00 AM | Comments (123)
Post contains 649 words, total size 5 kb.

Happy Monday.

Donald Trump was on ABC's "This Week" yesterday, where he flirted with birtherism again, suggesting that maybe President Obama's birth certificate was fake and, oh, that Sen. Cruz is ineligible for the presidency because he was born in Canada. Trump was in Iowa over the weekend at the invitation of the Family Leadership Summit, along with Cruz and Rick Santorum. Trump gave the keynote.

The Obama Administration is ordering prosecutors to omit listing quantities of illegal substances in indictments for drug cases so as to avoid mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:51 AM | Comments (204)
Post contains 100 words, total size 1 kb.