You know when we used to claim that the Democrats were playing games with foreign policy and national security to advance their petty animal partisan interests?

We were all so wrong!

I have entitled the following graph "Nuance and Profound Intellectual Analysis."

Thanks to @boszo, @slublog, and @rdbrewer4.

Oh My: Thanks to RWC, from NRO.

Democratic National Committee chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz says there are “dozens” of nations supporting the United States’ intervention in Syria, but regrets she’s “not at liberty to say” which ones.

“There are dozens of countries who are going to stand with the United States, who will engage with us on military action and also that back us 100 percent,” Wasserman Schultz said on CNN last night. When pressed by host Wolf Blitzer as to which ones, the Florida congressman said some of that information was classified.

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Posted by: Ace at 08:45 AM | Comments (535)
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Well actually they just acquitted him but if the law permitted for Exciting Prizes they might have done that too.

The Texas Grand Jury relied upon an nineteenth century provision of common law, which states (and here I translate from the original Texan), He Got What He Got Because He Needed To Get It.

This wasn't a cold-blooded execution; the father walked in to find the molester raping his five year old daughter. So he had the right to use deadly force to protect his daughter, to remove the threat from her. The legal question concerns at what point he was required to stop beating on the guy. And apart from the legal question there's the practical question: Who the hell, in this kind of situation, is calculating precisely the level of force required to remove a threat?

No one does, and yet the law requires that.

Local Texans favor the grand jury's decision... just slightly.

Residents of the small Lavaca County town were largely in support of the father, saying the victim deserved it.

Sonny Jaehne, a Shiner native, told the Victoria Advocate: ‘He got what he deserved, big time.

Friend Mark Harabis reiterated this: ‘I agree with him totally. I would probably do worse.

America is 300 million strong lunatic asylum, but within the asylum grounds there are pockets of untreatable sanity, resistant to Lunatic Therapy and Maniac Medication.

Posted by: Ace at 07:34 AM | Comments (403)
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The buzz in the political media world this weekend is an 85 page paper written by CNN reporter Peter Hamby which examined the role of new media in the most recent campaign. Hamby contrasts the relatively sedate pace of campaigns prior to emergence of technologies like Twitter, small HD cameras, laptops and mobile devices that allow for the collection and dissemination of more information than ever before with the never-ending, frenetic pace of the 2012 race.

Much of the conversation has been around the Romney campaigns reaction to this never ending news gathering world and how their closed-off, top down control approach backfired.

“If I had to pick three words to characterize the embeds, it would be young, inexperienced and angry,” an unnamed Romney adviser told Mr. Hamby.

Maggie Haberman, senior political reporter for Politico, told me, echoing remarks she had made to Mr. Hamby, that “the Romney campaign had a natural mistrust of the press, in part because he had seen his father savaged in the press decades ago.” She continued, “Beyond the mistrust, there was an outright hostility. They simply did not deal with reporters, and sometimes it was nasty, and I think they paid a price.”

The most infamous instance of Romney paying "a price" for his approach to press relations is the well known "what about your gaffes?" question while in Europe.

Maybe Team Romney (more about them in a bit) was aloof from the media. Maybe they were even hostile but that isn't an excuse for the unprofessional nature of much of the media's coverage of Romney. More importantly, it simply ignores the main fact at play...reporters are overwhelmingly liberal and wanted to destroy Romney (or any Republican).

The idea that if the GOP picked a more media friendly candidate they would get better coverage is laughable.

One need look back no further than 2008 when John McCain was running. McCain was a longtime "good Republican" to the media elites because A-He spent a good deal of his career attacking other Republicans, especially conservatives and B-He would flatter and court them. Even Howie Kurtz admitted as much.

And how was McCain, the anti-Romney when it came to press relations rewarded? With Vicki Iseman hit jobs and overwhelmingly negative coverage.

Can you imagine if Romney did any of those things?

Let's just admit what we all know, the revolving door between the media and Democrats just keeps spinning.

And let's not forget that for all the fawning media coverage Obama recieved in 2008, he wasn't exactly slobbering all over the media himself. Remember "Why can't I just eat my waffles?", "'Guys, I mean come on. I just answered like eight questions.", calling a female reporter "sweetie" and cutting reporters off.

Obama's obvious disdain for the media didn't hurt him. In a sick way it seemed to make them love him even more.

Now, that's not to say the Romney campaign didn't suck. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 06:41 AM | Comments (243)
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$7B is a lotta scratch

Microsoft has agreed a deal to buy Nokia's mobile phone business for 5.4bn euros ($7.2bn; £4.6bn).
Nokia will also license its patents and mapping services to Microsoft. Nokia shares jumped 45% on news of the deal...

Is Microsoft's $7bn purchase of Nokia's mobile phone business a reshaping of the telecoms landscape, or two drunks propping themselves up at a party?

I've looked at the phone app development kits for MS Phone, Apple, and Android. From my software geeky POV, the MS Phone dev kit seems the easiest to use and most polished by far. The Droid app development environment is straight up painful, Apple's stuff somewhere in the middle. The old Nokia app dev tools from their prior generation tech was produced by Torquemada Labs.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 03:54 AM | Comments (157)
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Back to work!

Posted by: andy at 02:51 AM | Comments (129)
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He says repercussions to interests of France, because he's being interviewed by a French paper. I assume if he were addressing an American paper he would mention repercussions to American interests as well.

Le Figaro had a reporter interview Bassar al-Assad. They have a translation* but it's behind a subscriber wall; so below is my translation. It should be accurate.

Their headline:

Assad's Warning to France

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Posted by: Ace at 10:51 PM | Comments (97)
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"Kafkatrapping"

A perfect description of the proof-of-guilt via denial gambit so popular on the left.

In White-liberal white-baiting link-baiting gone wild you mentioned this:

Make an outlandish statement about White people.

Watch White people react in denial.

Use denial reaction as proof you were right all along.

There's a word for this logical Fallacy. It's called Kafkatrapping.

In short it takes the form of using denial of guilt as proof of guilt. Here's the blog that explains it very well.

I think the term should be used more widely.

The Benevolent Ruling Class I: Nudging You at the Grocery

Because you don't eat enough fruits and veggies.

Then he looked down at his grocery cart and felt quite a different tug. Inside the front of the buggy, hooked onto its red steel frame, was a mirror.

...The mirror is part of an effort to get Americans to change their eating habits, by two social scientists outmaneuvering the processed-food giants on their own turf, using their own tricks: the distracting little nudges and cues that confront a supermarket shopper at every turn. The researchers, like many government agencies and healthy-food advocates these days, are out to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables.

The Benevolent Ruling Class II: EU Proposes To Fit All Cars With Speed Limiters

Because you go too fast sometimes and have a boo-boo.

"Under the proposals new cars would be fitted with cameras that could read road speed limit signs and automatically apply the brakes when this is exceeded. Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary, is said to be opposed to the plans, which could also mean existing cars are sent to garages to be fitted with the speed limiters, preventing them from going over 70mph. The new measures have been announced by the European Commission's Mobility and Transport Department as a measure to reduce the 30,000 people who die on the roads in Europe every year.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:09 PM | Comments (629)
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• Our Relationship With Pakistan Continues To Deteriorate
  
• Rangel On Obama's Red Line: "It's Embarassing"
  
• Sowell: The Left's Unintended Consequences
  
• VDH: Miley Cyrus And Ugly Sex
  
• Egypt Building A Buffer Zone Between Them And Gaza
  
• US General Claims Intervention Could Be More Substantial That Obama Is Letting On
  
• Pot Grower Killed By His Own Booby Trap
  
• Another Journalist Joins The Obama Administration
  
• Red Monday: Down With Labor Day
  
• A Nation Of Working Class Drop-Outs
  
• Barack Obama's Staggering Incompetence
  
• Obama Enlists Sleazy Bob Menendez To Push For Syrian War
  
• The Year Of Seeing Red Lines
  
• Ronald Coase, RIP
  
• EPA To Regulate Water Vapor Emissions
  
• When All Else Failed, Obama Went To Congress
  
• Drunk Girl Blows A .341
  
• The Prescience Of The Duranty Prize
  
• That's No Place To Stash 5,000 Dollars
  
• Syria Hacks Marines.com
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:30 AM | Comments (195)
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Wearable tech.

Pro: It's just like a phone you can wear on your wrist

Con: On the other hand it's just a phone on your wrist

Pro: It's slightly smaller and more useless than a phone but they glued a wristband to it

Con: People will despise you and spit into your face as you try to use it

This is supposedly a leaked picture of the thing but I doubt it. No one's going to buy this.

I think Apple has to do the heavy lifting on this. Apple has a bunch of.... let's call them fans, who think that whatever Apple says is cool really actually is cool.

I don't think that Samsung has the power to deceive so many people. It has to be Apple conning people into wearing a phone on their wrist.

Coming soon: The Computer Hat

Posted by: Ace at 04:02 PM | Comments (343)
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We have to pass it to find out what's in it and who's left alive to read it.

Turns out, shock of shocks, that the unions' so-called "Cadillac" insurance plans (which are simply good coverage) will be taxed quite a bit, just like critics said they would, and just like Obama said they wouldn't.

The Longshoreman leader said, "President Obama ran on a platform that he would not tax medical plans and at the 2009 AFL-CIO Convention, you stated that labor would not stand for a tax on our benefits." But, regardless of that promise, the President has pushed for just such a tax and Trumka and the AFL-CIO bowed to political pressure lining up behind Obama's tax on those plans.

Caution: Annoying autoplay. Turn sound down for that.

Yeah, look: The key to ObamaCare was always redistribution of Medical Coverage wealth. Anyone who thought there was a big pile of Free Money sitting in a pile to be tapped was an idiot. No, money for subsidies for the poor would come from where it always comes from, the Middle Class.

Meanwhile, the White House is touting the awesome fact that taxpayer-paid subsidies will bring insurance prices down 21%... that is, after a 22% base cost increase.

I don't know what to say. You make up your own jokes.

Posted by: Ace at 03:06 PM | Comments (152)
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