Of course she did nothing wrong.

That's why she's retiring.

What a terrible thing You Guys did to this woman.

Update: Apparently the IRS is clearing the decks of Old Bad Business. They've offered True the Vote the tax-exempt status they've sought for years.

In order to keep True the Vote's lawsuit against them from going forward.

“We are pleased and relieved that the IRS and the DOJ are finally doing what should have been done three years ago, which is to recognize TTV as a charitable and educational organization, which we have always been and will continue to be,” True The Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht said in a statement provided exclusively to Breitbart News.

...

The IRS granted the tax-exempt status on Friday night and then filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit all in the same document. True The Vote is accepting the tax-exempt status, but will file a counter motion to continue fighting the other counts of the lawsuit against the IRS.

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (238)
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Of course.

You can say whatever you like if a friendly media will just transmit your nonsense without bothering to check on a single thing.

Gartland also turns his attention to the superhero mayorÂ’s actions in the wake of the 2010 blizzard that blanketed the northeast. Time chonicled how Booker and his staff personally shoveled streets and delivered diapers to a woman who was snowed in and couldnÂ’t leave her home to purchase them. Gartland tracked her down:

Barbara Byers confirmed to The Post that Booker, in one of the more colorful accounts of his heroic, hands-on approach to governing, delivered Pampers to her home. But the press never questioned how she felt about it.

“I always found it weird that no one asked me about what happened,” she said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t have diapers because I didn’t go shopping. It was two days later and nobody cleared our street.

“He’s a very nice man, but he isn’t a good mayor,” she added. “If he would have done his job, I would have been able to do for myself and gone out. It took three days for someone to come by with a plow the first time.”

Why would they ask? When it comes to Democrats, the rule is that caught between a fact and a legend, Print the Legend.

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (269)
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Are you kidding me?

Imagine any other circumstance in which a boss intruded into the marriage of her employees like this, threatening a consequential firing (and this has consequences beyond loss of a job -- the Clintons are the gateway to influence, jobs, and liberal money) if she did not leave the father of her child.

Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has been given an ultimatum: dump serial-sexting hubby Anthony Weiner, or get out of Clintontown.

“Huma has a choice to make,” a close associate tells New York magazine. “Does she go with Anthony, or does she go with Hillary?”

Abedin’s decision over whether to leave the “Clinton bubble,” where she’s seen as Hillary’s most trusted aide, has emerged as “the biggest question among Hillary’s circle” as the former Secretary of State mulls a 2016 run for the White House, the magazine reports.

But I'm sure the media, to the extent it notes this at all, will call it a Smart, Tough play.

Because any time a Democrat behaves selfishly and ruthlessly, it's just a Smart, Tough play.

Their virtues are sacred, of course. But their sins are also sacred.

Posted by: Ace at 10:08 AM | Comments (234)
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Cruz and Lee's strategy today is to filibuster the bill passed by the House, which defunds ObamaCare.

They want to filibuster it because if it passes, Reid can very easily clip out the defunding provision on a majority vote.

They wish to filibuster it so that they can force Reid to agree to new rules: That the defund provision will not be taken out, or that any stripping must be done with 60 votes (that is, that the move to strip can be filibustered).

Posted by: Ace at 09:33 AM | Comments (232)
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At Instapundit.

This isn't a politics, it's a pathology. It's a socially-approved outlet for neurosis, hysteria, and inadequacy issues.

A UCSF fundraiser (not a professor) thinks that "nonbelievers" -- nonbelievers, that is, of ObamaCare -- should be refused medical treatment.

That's Nick Searcy, Art Mullen of Justified, calling her out.

It's interesting to me that she links 18 ounce sodas to this. The message is clear and unmistakable: If you refuse to obey our orders about what we currently believe is healthy, we need you to die.

And so it came to pass that once again an angry, primitive tribe dreamed of converting other tribes to its beliefs by the sword, or being Smited by the Health Gods.

And check the Instapundit link for the Michigan professor, supposedly a creative writing teacher, who decided to use the time that students were paying quite a lot of money for to deliver a rant unworthy of Ed Schultz.

William Penn -- a professor in the university's creative writing program -- was featured in a YouTube video (see above) in which he told students "if you go to the Republican convention in Florida, you see all of the old Republicans with the dead skin cells washing off them."

"They are cheap. They don't want to pay taxes because they have already raped this country and gotten everything out of it they possibly could," Penn continued. "They don't want to pay for your tuition because who are you? Well to me, you are somebody."

Interesting here is is how he hides his motives from himself. Because Hate is, supposedly, a forbidden thing in the Cult of the Left, everyone on the left has to pretend they're not giving vent their hatreds even as they vomit up their hatreds. And so, in a rant full of hatred and actual threats (not physical threats, but threats to "come after you" rhetorically) against his caricature of what a Republicans might look like, he adds:

"I absolutely don't mean to offend you," Penn said. "Even if you are a Republican, I don't mean to offend you in this class."

Why of course you didn't! Perish the thought!

Of course you could never intend to offend or insult someone. Your motives are pure -- definitionally. As a sub-acolyte in the Cult of the Left, your are cleansed of all sins, all hatreds, all selfishnesses, all irrationalities.

Therefore it must be the case that even as you deliver a hateful monologue to your students, vaguely threatening the closet "racists" (by which he means "Republicans") among them, that you mean no offense at all, and are in fact simply doing your Strange God's work.

I've mentioned this before, but it is a common characteristic of religion to hold certain things as taboo -- sex, for example -- but where a human urge is taboo, there is usually some sort of approved outlet for it. In conventional religion, sex is taboo, but sex within a marriage is approved. (And I'm not saying that's unreasonable or irrational -- just noting that there is an "out" on sex, as there must be.)

On the left the taboo is Hate, and the Approved Outlet for it is... well, just about everything. So long as your Hate advances the Cult, it is not only not taboo, but actually Righteous and Sacred.

Incidentally, CNN just looked at online hate once again (focusing on Twitter), and once again they focused only on the H8 they associate with the right, the Forbidden Hatreds.

They never examine all this very palpable hatred emanating from the left -- because, of course, that's not not Forbidden Hatred, but Sacred Hatred.

Posted by: Ace at 08:54 AM | Comments (268)
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The sex will not be shown (but I bet you'll hear some of it) and then will be rated by a panel of celebrity Sex Judges, including buffoon Dan Savage.

Now, at this point in the story, it is required that the show is being mounted for Serious You Guys highly moral reasons. This show's creators are claiming this is a high-minded pushback against... porn.

Frostrup said she approached the show with "great trepidation and a degree of skepticism, particularly about why we need a box, but ultimately I think it was a really really mature – surprisingly for television – look at a subject we've allowed to proliferate in its worst manifestations and refuse to confront."

Ah. So this "real sex" look at sex will something-something the fantasy unrealistic sex of pornography and something-something produce a favorable social outcome.

Or, just maybe, you're competing with pornography and trying to grab a few porn dollars yourselves. Either/or.

Posted by: Ace at 07:35 AM | Comments (401)
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You know why the GOP loses a lot? Because it deserves to.

Yesterday a bunch of Republican Senators went around to the various Sunday shows and instead of talking about why it's imperative ObamaCare be repealed because of the damage it's doing, they decided to make it about how much they hate Ted Cruz. Some Republicans went as far as to offer Fox News Sunday Host Chris Wallace what he termed, "opposition research" on Cruz.

The anti-Defund talking point went for criticizing Cruz for surrendering without a filibuster on Wednesday to criticizing him on Sunday for promising to mount a filibuster.

I like however one is supposed to pretend that Cruz and Lee thought Reid would just give up on Day 1 and agree to the House's CR. No one did. Everyone knew the idea was to put the GOP in the position of keeping the government open while killing or at least wounding it (Here's what supporters of the plan say defunding will do. It's a pdf).

Filibustering the bill while the ObamaCare defund language is still in it is actually a bad idea. Let Reid strip it out with 50 votes. That would force some Democrats to vote for a very unpopular program or a few Democrats would vote to defund it, thus making the opposition to it bi-partisan.

But Cruz can't drop the filibuster now because the go along, get along GOP would kill him for dropping it. Now they get to kill him for keeping it. Nice game they've got going on.

One thing we shouldn't kid ourselves about is that if the House passed a clean CR and then included the delay plan in their budget ceiling bill it still wouldn't have the votes in the Senate and we'd still be in the position of having to find them by having the House play chicken not with a government shutdown but with what would be called "defaulting" on the full faith and credit of the United States.

Given the level disingenuousness in the delay camp's hits not on Obama or ObamaCare but the Devil known as Ted Cruz I'm seriously doubt they would do what they claimed. Right now it seems like one big shell game to avoid actually fighting against something they all claim to be against.

You know why Cruz is so popular? Because he's actually fighting. Maybe it's a losing fight, maybe it's a fight to raise money (though let's not pretend he's the only one doing that) or to raise his popularity (the sight of professional politicians accusing anyone of self-aggrandizement is too precious) but at least he's fighting.

Something I think we should all remember is that when the GOP had the House and the Senate before we never saw this kind of fight from the GOP. We saw a slightly less robust rush to bigger government than we did under the Democrats but we saw Denny Hastret, Tom "There's No Fat Left To Cut In The Federal Budget" Delay, Trent Lott and Bill Frist just muddle along without any energy or drive to bring the federal government under control. The professional Republican class wants to say, "hey we need more votes to do anything", well a lot of us remember when you had more votes and not only did you not do anything, you made it worse. Remember "Pork Busters"? Yeah, we didn't love you then and we don't trust you now to do the right thing.

Added note: Keep something in mind...the four Senators fighting this the most Cruz, Lee, Paul and even Rubio all had to beat go along, get along establishment picks to get there. Do you really think that if the GOP had the Senate majority the old guard would suddenly adopt the new blood's tactics and issues or go back to (big) business as usual?

Dan McLaughlin made the political case for the GOP to fight not Ted Cruz but Obama.

You motivate the base by showing them you fought & lost b/c you needed reinforcements-not by telling them the party's not worth reinforcing.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) September 22, 2013

So what happens next? We'll since focusing on ObamaCare seems to be off the table I think we can move on to the next best thing...the destruction of the GOP. How could that happen? Cruz mounts his filibuster and Reid manages to break it. If he can keep all the Democrats in line he'll need 6 Republicans to join him to get to 60. Lisa Murkowski, Bob Corker and Susan Collins are always up for screwing the GOP just fun fun so that leaves 3 more. Imagine if Reid says he'll turn off the sequester as it applies to the Defense Department. I bet that would get you John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Ayotte. Just for fun Reid might also be able to get McCain's protege Jeff Flake and even Tom Coburn seems annoyed at the whole thing.

If Reid could get 60 votes then the House would fold in 30 seconds.

There are only a couple of ways the GOP can possibly lose the House next year. A shutdown isn't one of them but completely demoralizing conservatives certainly could.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:00 AM | Comments (364)
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According to the L.A. Times, climate scientists are now exploring new theories to sell to the public to explain why their climate models -- which called for measurable and serious warming to be occurring -- totally failed to predict that no global warming has occurred for more than a decade.

Since just before the start of the 21st century, the Earth's average global surface temperature has failed to rise despite soaring levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and years of dire warnings from environmental advocates.

Now, as scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gather in Sweden this week to approve portions of the IPCC's fifth assessment report, they are finding themselves pressured to explain this glaring discrepancy.

Imagine that. Scientists being asked to explain why their science doesn't seem to be working out. The nerve.

Though scientists don't have any firm answers, they do have multiple theories.

I bet.

Ben tells me no news dump this morning and Monty says DOOM is out too. You may consider this another open thread.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:22 AM | Comments (165)
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Happy Monday.

The hostage crisis continues at the Nairobi Westgate mall. At least 68 people are dead so far. Al Shebab says the attack is "retributive justice" for Kenya's part in trying to help Somalia fend off the Islamist butchers.

The FAA is getting ready to publish a rule allowing the use of electronic devices during takeoff and landing. It sounds like implementation will come next year.

As I mentioned back in one podcast, the Clinton camp would have wanted to salvage all the time spent grooming Huma Abedin by separating her from her deviant, unpopular husband. The NY Post says that's exactly what the Clinton people want. Includes this hilarious attribution: "The candidateÂ’s bird-flipping parting shot to reporters after his humiliating defeat this month made a bad situation even worse, according to New York."

AP reports that the review panel Obama appointed to scrutinize NSA surveillance is actually working out of offices borrowed from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Participants and privacy advocates say this isn't the "independent group" the president promised. Heh.

NYTimes' front page finally notices something Republicans have been saying for years: under Obamacare, if you like your doctor, you may NOT get to keep your doctor. "Consumers should be prepared for 'much tighter, narrower networks' of doctors and hospitals..."

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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:49 AM | Comments (246)
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Living the Politicized Life

Because being liberal means that every aspect of life - no matter how mundane, human and apolitical - must be about politics, judging and feeling superior. And yet remaining oblivious to this very aspect of themselves.

Here Jonathon Last calls out a a particularly egregious example of this:

When you live in Washington, one of the things that's supposed to happen is that, by bumping around casually with folks from the other side you learn to empathize with them and come to understand that they put their pants on one leg at a time, too.

So here's a Tweet from a guy who just met Don Rumsfeld:

"Evil"? I'm sorry. Are you fucking kidding?

...You know who's evil? Mohammad Atta was evil. And I wouldn't make such a big deal over Geer not being able to make moral distinctions between Donald Rumsfeld and Mohammad Atta, except that he tweeted this on, you know, the fucking anniversary of September 11.

Twelve years before Donald Rumsfeld had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Geer, he spent his morning helping to carry wounded colleagues out of the burning Pentagon.

Quote of the Day

"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe.

"They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the Enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish.

"They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the Enemy. And that, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the Enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn't done enough for - yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part - something that we could correct. And this means that that our first task is that we must try to grasp what the concept of the Enemy really means.

"The Enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the Enemy always hates us for a reason - it is his reason, and not ours."

   -- Lee Harris in Civilization and Its Enemies

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:00 PM | Comments (925)
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