Sorry, another one of those days.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (882)
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The surrender addicts in the GOP need a hit but before they can surrender they need to pretend they are going to fight for something. With the debt ceiling hike coming up this month they have narrowed their phony demands down to two options.

Several House members told The Washington Post on Monday that Republican leaders have narrowed their list of possible debt-limit strategies to two options: trading a one-year extension for approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, or trading a one-year extension for repeal of a provision of the Affordable Care Act.

...

A clean debt-limit extension is not yet on the GOPÂ’s radar....

Oh it will be. It will be.

You know how I know the GOP will fold on all of these things? Boehner has already said he won't push this to default.

See, the key to playing chicken is to make the other guy you won't swerve first. Announcing before you start your engine that you will be turning away well before you come close to colliding sort of eliminates the other guy's incentive to give in.

Also, you may have noticed the GOP has a bit of history when it comes to this sort of thing. Remember Boehner's pledge to tie hikes in the debt ceiling to equal or greater spending cuts? Yeah, that died with the Ryan-Murray budget deal that busted the sequester to pieces.

Now if the GOP is going to try this, why are they even thinking of pushing the Keystone Pipeline? Isn't this the year of ObamaCare (and amnesty)? Why would you make this about anything other than OBAMACARE? Even if they cave on it, and they will, at least they'd be making people aware of something I best most people don't know...sure you'll be paying more but you'll also be bailing out the insurance companies for the privilege.

Oh and have you noticed the stock market has been tanking for a couple of weeks? Of course the media isn't really playing that up because it's not good for Obama but the second they can tie "Your retirement account is shrinking because the GOP is playing games with the debt ceiling!" you know they will. Is that a lie? Sure. Will it matter to Team Media/Democrat? Not a bit.

Personally, I think they should just pass the damn debt ceiling. They are going to do it anyway and they won't get anything for it. The list of GOP surrenders is long enough, there's nothing to gained by adding another one.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:11 AM | Comments (501)
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Say it with me ... UNEXPECTEDLY!

[CBO cited] new estimates that the Affordable Care Act will cause a larger than-expected reduction in working hours - eliminating the equivalent of about 2.3 million workers in 2021 versus a previous estimate of an 800,000 decline.

If only someone could've cut through this manure beforehand, but we had to pass the law to find out what was in it. Or so I'm told. more...

Posted by: andy at 06:43 AM | Comments (415)
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Happy Tuesday.

Surprise, surprise: the Arab Spring, relying as it did on radical Islam, expanded the persecution of Christians in the Middle East.

Glee: Democratic operatives are pissed at DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz for admitting that Dems aren't going to take back the House.

Silly: Rush Limbaugh added his voice to those who didn't like the Coca-Cola ad. "I said, 'Whoa, who got hold of this advertising campaign? The Republican leadershipÂ’s gotta be doing this.'"

Stupid: Obama says that Fox News is "absolutely" being unfair to him for asking about Obamacare failures, Benghazi, and the IRS scandal. Absolutely.

Neat: Endgadget, citing a Korean source, reports that South Korea is using Microsoft's Kinect sensor to help guard the DMZ.

Don't forget to grab last week's podcast with Townhall political editor and Fox News contributor Guy Benson. And send your Ask the Blog questions.

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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (253)
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UTA Flight 772: The Most Beautiful And Least Accessible Memorial On The Planet

UTA Flight 772 was a scheduled flight operating from Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo to Paris CDG airport in France.

On Tuesday, September 19th, 1989 the aircraft exploded over Niger in the Tenere region of the Sahara Desert. French investigators determined a suitcase bomb planted by Libyan terrorists to be the cause. All 170 people on board died.

And 18 years later in 2007 families of the victims gathered at the remote desert crash site in Niger and built a memorial by hand.

The site can be seen on Google Maps here.

And if you weren't already convinced that Gaddafi was a monster, you might want to read some of the details of his national system of rape dungeons.

Slate: In Atlanta Even the Snow is Racist

Because the city's voters rejected a light rail system, like to live in the suburbs, and vote Republican. Therefore racist snowpocalypse. QED

Oh and apparently there are Snow Truthers out there who believe the snowpocalypse was caused by fake snow. Made by the government of course.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:45 PM | Comments (603)
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Via john ëkdahl.

Posted by: Ace at 05:39 PM | Comments (69)
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• Part Of The Obamacare Software Was Written By Developers In Belarus
  
• Michelle Obama's 500 Million Anti-Obesity Effort Accomplishes Nothing
  
• Massachusetts Considers Denying Constitutional Rights To Innocent Arrestees
  
• Woman Who Can't Afford Her Own Birth Control Scrapes Up Money For Congressional Run
  
• Are Immigration Reformers Talking Down Chances So Opponents Will Drop Their Guard?
  
• America Headed Back To The Moon
  
• ABC Plants Guns Among Toys And Candy, Shocked That Kids Touch Them
  
• The GOP's Immigration Delusion
  
• Ukrainian President Returns From Sick Leave
  
• Is Heroin Use Soaring?
  
• Will Piers Morgan Apologize For Spreading A Racist Hoax
  
• Billionaires Start Lining Up Behind Hillary Clinton
  
• Moron AmishDude Named Checked By Rush Limbaugh
  
• Mitch McConnell Could Lose His Primary
  
• Salon Defends Communism
  

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:08 AM | Comments (307)
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This relates in a way to the post Ace put up just below.

A fellow co-blogger wondered why the GOP House doesn't have someone like the UKIP's Nigel Farage in its ranks, a fearless firebrand who'll denounce the Democrat agenda in ringing tones.

You can thank the two-party system for some of that. Farage can be a firebreather because he's operating in a parliamentary system and only has to represent the UKIP, which has a fairly narrow and well-defined platform. The GOP and the Democratic party don't have that luxury -- they have to represent broad swathes of voters, many of whose points of view not only differ but are in fact sometimes in direct opposition. Even in "conservative" districts, a Representative is bound to some extent by his Party. The Tea Party is about as fractious as the GOP gets, and we've all seen how the rest of the GOP likes those people.

The Democrats benefit more from this kind of situation than the GOP does, for the simple reason that the Democrat platform has always depended on buying votes with broad-brush populism (the "party of the poor", the "party of the common man", all that rot). Democrats are perfectly comfortable using coalition-building to govern because they really have no core, animating philosophy. The latter-20th century Democrat party was explicitly tied to Marxism (whether they admit it or not), but when the USSR imploded Marxism took on a bad odor and the Democrats had to cast about for something else, and that something else turned out to be "gender/class/race" and "social justice". It's the same old wine in a new bottle, really, but it helps that most Democrats don't even believe their own bullshit for the most part. They are a coalition of interest groups, and always have been. Their power lies in giving each interest group a big-enough slice of the pie to keep them from bolting: women, minorities, unions, eco-nuts, "intellectuals", etc.

Republicans have always had a tougher sell. The party was born simply as an oppositional force: the Not-Democrats. The GOP was created because the Whigs failed, and the two-party system needed two parties. The GOP's "animating philosophy", to the extent that it even has one, has changed several times over the decades. During the Cvil War, it was maintaining the Union and preventing the secession of the South (The GOP was born as a big-central-government, anti-Federalist party. How's that for irony?) Then it became the party of plutocrats and robber barons during the Gilded Age. Then Calvin Coolidge made the GOP what it still is in some respects: a pro-defense, pro-business, low-tax, minimal-federal-bureaucracy party (at least in theory). But the GOP has never really learned how to govern by coalition, not even during the Reagan years. The Tea Party focus on federalism, small government, and government restraint is actually a fairly new development in GOP thinking. Ronald Reagan shared this vision to some extent, but it's never been widely held by the Party as a whole.

Then there's the fact that "collegiality" trumps principle in Washington, D.C. Most Congresscritters dream of being Senators or Governors some day, and you don't move up the ladder (or raise campaign funds) by pissing people off.

Posted by: Monty at 04:05 PM | Comments (174)
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Via @rdbrewer4, an interesting post by Jonah Goldberg, using a review of a history of liberalism as a jumping off point for various thoughts.

A new book claims that liberalism was born out of the wreckage of progressivism. Progressivism championed the ever-growing power of the state, to do Mighty Things in Many Ways. However, the book argues, progressives themselves became disillusioned with their former advocacy of the Super State due to World War I -- and the truly authoritarian measures beloved progressive Woodrow Wilson used to jail dissidents. Some of whom were truly dangerous and ought to have been jailed, but others of whom were just dissidents.

And so, the book claims, liberalism adopted a strain of "radical libertarianism" as regards personal rights, especially those involving speech and sex, as a tonic, or talisman, to prevent the resurgence of Woodrow Wilson World War I progressivism.

Goldberg calls the alternate historical reading "interesting," but he's not convinced. He's especially not convinced that liberalism contained any strain of libertarianism at all -- he argues it was really a non-libertarian (that is, authoritarian) urge to impose a competing set of values, not to protect all possible values.

As I said: Interesting.

Another interesting thing is that the left tends to shy away the label "liberal" now, but has embraced the label "progressive" -- even though progressivism was previously discredited due to its authoritarianism and grandiosity and incompetency and innate disrespect for the individual human being outside of his corporate capacity as a cell of the state.

Posted by: Ace at 03:05 PM | Comments (138)
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This was a real ad -- real! -- that ran during the Super Bowl, in the local Savannah market.

He used to be a criminal defense attorney. But as Jamie Casino is going to tell you, after the death of his brother, he is now out for justice.

And he defines "justice" as "personal injury litigation."

You will literally not believe.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (265)
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