Quote of the Day

"If I had known when I was shot down that I would be there more than seven years, I would have died of despondency, of despair," he told Investor's Business Daily. "But I didn't. It was one minute at a time, one hour, one week, one year and so on. If you look at it like that, anybody can do anything."

-- Admiral Jeremiah Denton

OMG: The NSA's Been Spying on Every Single Call, Text, and Email in Iraq!!!!!!!

A couple weeks ago, we learned from leaked documents that the NSA has the capability to record an entire country's calls, texts, and email in real time. That's a hell of a capability, and those documents revealed that it was being used in one country. Now, thanks to a retired NSA leader, we know which country that is: Iraq.

...No matter what the reasoning was, it's still pretty insane that the NSA can monitor every single phone call, text, and email in a country. They're doing that with six countries now, according to the leaked documents. But it's even more insane that friends of the NSA think fessing up to it is going to make the agency look good.

Apparently we're supposed to be outraged by this at least according to the writer. But then this kind of information collecting is the whole raison d'être of the NSA in the first place. If they're not trying to capture any signal intelligence of potential interest in a country up until recently thousands of US troops were fighting in, then I want an accounting of all the goddamn money we gave them and where their time was spent.

And the fact that this shocks and infuriates Glenn Greenwald: Priceless

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:27 PM | Comments (732)
Post contains 994 words, total size 16 kb.

• Scott Walker Announces His Candidacy For The 2016 Presidential Elections
  
• Obama's Top And Bottom Coalition Shows Signs Of Strain
  
• Laboratories Of What? The Cliché's Of Obamacare
  
• Covered California Sends Deaf Callers To Hotline Offering Hot Ladies
  
• Bill De Blasio Booed By Mets Fans
  
• Can Anyone Tell How Obamacare Is Doing?
  
• OKCupid Boycotting Firefox
  
• MSNB-Fail
  
• Cleveland Clinic CEO: Three Quarters Of Americans Who Signed Up For Obamacare Now Have Higher Premiums
  
• What Happens When The Facts Don't Fit The Progressive Script
  
• Most States Flunk On Healthcare Price Transparency
  
• British Sniper Kills Six In Afghanistan With One Bullet
  
• Someone Needs To Find Out How Much Money Has Been Wasted On Global Warming
  
• Iran Names 1979 Hostage Takes To UN Post
  
• Private Massage Ends In Arrest
  

OKCupid kicked me off because my profile picture contained full frontal nudity, I thought it was tasteful what do you think?

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:12 AM | Comments (188)
Post contains 152 words, total size 3 kb.

Which would be good.

Democrats’ prospects for 2014 do not look rosy. There is little chance that they will retake the House, and a good chance they will lose seats. Even worse, there is a significant chance that they will lose control of the Senate. Our forecasting model said as many as two months ago. That forecast continues to square with the sense of many analysts — even those who mocked the forecast.

...

One key piece of information is whether candidates have held an elective office before and, if so, which one. Unsurprisingly, political science research has long shown that candidates who have held elective office and higher levels of office tend to do better on Election Day. They usually run better campaigns and make fewer mistakes, if only because theyÂ’ve done it before.

As we have begun to incorporate candidate experience into the model, our initial sense is this: Republicans may have a far better chance of winning control of the Senate than we or other analysts previously thought. Here is a preliminary estimate: The GOP could have as much as a 4 in 5 chance of controlling the chamber.

Numerous factors could upset this analysis, such as unexpected, weak candidates winning where the analysis assumes more experienced, stronger candidates.

Of course, none of that really matters anymore, because Chuck Todd has declared Obamacare "unrepealable."

ppearing on Monday's Today, NBC's chief White House correspondent and political director Chuck Todd seized on ObamaCare hitting the six million sign-up mark by the March 31 deadline, proclaiming: "So at a minimum, the importance of hitting the six million....it means the law is unrepealable....It means that it's here to stay." Todd made no mention of only 26% of Americans supporting ObamaCare in a new poll. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Co-host Matt Lauer accepted Todd's declaration and wondered about the political impact of the health care law: "You can't repeal it, but does that mean seven months down the road, as the midterm elections come around, that this will be any less of an issue in terms of close races in congressional districts?"

I have no idea how Chuck Todd would get to this "unrepealable" notion, apart from pure fanboism.

Posted by: Ace at 03:49 PM | Comments (370)
Post contains 391 words, total size 3 kb.

49-48.

ABCNews is determined to not ask about "Obamacare" -- I guess because people say they don't support the law when you call it "Obamacare" -- and so asks the question this way...

"Overall, do you support or oppose the federal law making changes to the health care system?"

What federal law making changes to the health care system? The various House efforts to repeal it, or end the individual mandate, or codify the "If you like your plan you can keep your plan" promise into law, or Obama's various extraconstitutional delays of mandates and enforcement efforts to ameliorate the pain, or...?

I'm not sure what people are thinking of when they're asked about "changes to the health care system." There's a new "change to the health care system" every week.

AllahPundit notes that ABCNews has asked the question this way before, and has found, previously, that people oppose Obamacare even when the question is worded so vaguely. So there is some movement in this poll, despite the shaky question.

But I don't know. Given all the "changes to the health care system" going on every week, I don't know if this question means what it previously might have been taken to mean.

Posted by: Ace at 02:02 PM | Comments (322)
Post contains 219 words, total size 2 kb.

Per a Rand Corporation study.

[O]f the people who have paid their first monthÂ’s premium on the Obamacare exchanges, and are thereby enrolled in coverage, 76 percent were previously insured, and 24 percent were previously uninsured.

...

WhatÂ’s important to remember is that this is not how Obamacare was supposed to work. The Congressional Budget Office, in its original estimates, predicted that the vast majority of the people eligible for subsidies on the exchanges would be previously uninsured individuals.

Guy Benson writes about all the chicanery in the Obamacare "sign-up" numbers, linking this piece by Marc Thiessen on the subject of the very small number of uninsured who have actually gotten insurance through Obamacare.

Recall that between 5 million and 6 million Americans lost their health plans because of Obamacare last fall. If the administration now succeeds in signing up 5 million to 6 million previously insured Americans, it will have achieved . . . nothing. Breaking even is no great accomplishment.

And let’s not forget: Many of those new Obamacare sign-ups are self-sufficient people who were previously paying their own way and now receive government subsidies for insurance. Creating government dependency is not progress — it’s a step backward.

The stated goal of Obamacare was not to move millions of privately insured Americans into taxpayer-subsidized health coverage. The goal was to cover the uninsured. That was the justification for all the chaos and disruption Americans have experienced — and that is the standard by which the administration should be judged.

...

Goldman Sachs is projecting that only 1 million Obamacare sign-ups will come from previously uninsured Americans. Indeed, it estimates that the number of total signups will be just 4 million — not 6 million, as the administration claims — because “HHS figures . . . count all persons who selected an ACA exchange plan regardless of whether or not they have actually completed the enrollment process by paying their premium.” Goldman Sachs also anticipates that fully 75 percent of all the Obamacare sign-ups will be from people who already had insurance.

All this, for one million sign-ups of the previously uninsured.

Posted by: Ace at 12:42 PM | Comments (419)
Post contains 385 words, total size 3 kb.

Many on the right are claiming this sketch "makes fun" of Obama.*

There's an odd thing on the right, where they repeatedly claim that what are objectively pro-Obama sketches and claim that they're goofing on Obama or "ripping" on him.

The below sketch, written in the patented recent SNL style (by which I mean it's not funny and relies almost entirely on minor references to minor celebrities for mere "oh I know who that is" recognition reactions than actual humor value), is pro-Obama and pro-Obamacare from start to finish.

Obama is depicted as a reluctant pitchman for Obamacare. He doesn't want to embarrass himself by doing these social media stunts to advertise for Obamacare. He has more dignity (and less ego) than that.

He's only drawn into these schemes by third parties, who, in this sketch, are the butt of the joke. Here, that third party is the WH's social media outreach guru, depicted as a nerdy freak.

Whenever Obama objects to her schemes, his advisor reminds him of all the people who desperately need health insurance, whom Obama has sworn to help. And then Obama goes through with the advert.

Almost all of SNL's Obama sketches are like this now -- and by "like this" I mean "not funny." And they're specifically unfunny because they're written as relentless pieces of boosterism and apologism for Obama.

* Maybe this is semantic. When I read "makes fun of Obama," I take it to mean that Obama is the target of the jokes, that he's being attacked.

All the SNL Obama sketches do (for the past several years) is put Obama into a situation in which funny things are happening around him (well, in theory, funny things are happening around him). But this isn't "making fun of" him. At most, this is... I don't know what you'd call it. Dealing with him "irreverently," I suppose, as Life of Brian handled the Jesus story without actually making Jesus the target of jokes.

It's a standard comedy trope that when you have silly crap happening, you need someone playing "The Only Sane Man in the Room" to react to it. The audience sees its own reaction in The Only Sane Man, and winds up identifying with The Only Sane Man.

These sorts of sketches -- making Obama the put-upon Only Sane Man -- are not making fun of him. At worst for Obama, they're merely goofing on the things that a thoughtful, dignified, brilliant man must do to Get Poor People Insured.

I don't know if this frequent mischaracterization of SNL's many pro-Obama sketches as somehow "anti-Obama" is a play for viral links (in hopes that the right will link the posts celebrating the alleged sketch that "rips on" Obama), or if people on the right are so desperate to have SNL's validation that they're seeing things that just aren't present in the sketches.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:30 AM | Comments (412)
Post contains 496 words, total size 3 kb.

That's a paraphrase. They claim they never cover state senators.

Which is a great defense, were it true. Which, of course, it's not.

Posted by: Ace at 10:03 AM | Comments (370)
Post contains 47 words, total size 1 kb.

Update: France's PM has resigned. MereMortal posts this tweet:

French Prime Minister Ayrault's office says he has resigned as prime minister - @Reuters

Note this is not the President (Hollande), who will remain in office even longer than Obama (the next presidential election is sometime in 2017, probably March).

...

"Nightmarish," says LeMonde.

"Without precedent," says Le Figaro.

France just held its municipal elections -- held every two years to vote in mayors, town councilors, etc. -- and the Socialists (PS, Parti Socialist) lost badly.

At least 155 towns with 9,000 inhabitants or more switched from leftist rule (PS or associated leftist parties) to rightist (usually Sarkozy's party, l'UMP). Some towns, which have had socialist rule for 37 or 43 years, have now dumped the socialist party in favor of the UMP.

Limoges has been ruled by socialists since 1912 -- except during the Vichy years (when the Nazis ruled it) and except for 1946-47, when it was ruled by... Communists. That town has now flipped to a UMP mayor.

The "far right" party, the Front National (FN), picked up something like 15 mayorships as well.

The Prime Minister (himself PS) confessed the defeat.

Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault acknowledged the vote was "a defeat for the government and the [Socialist] majority".

"This message is clear... The president will draw conclusions, and he will do so in the interest of France,'' he added, in an apparent reference to a likely cabinet reshuffle.

These elections don't directly affect the national government. The elections for the French Senate will be held this September (I believe this is exactly the midway point in a President's five-year term). But this is the public's first chance to weigh in on Hollande's socialist rule, and they're not happy about it.

I doubt this has much to do with American politics, except in this minor way. When Democrats are in trouble, the media frequently portrays the public as "in an anti-incumbent" mood, as if they're just against incumbents, period, without parsing out between which incumbents they're most displeased by.

Similar crap was/is going on in France, with much made of the very poor turnout rate -- the elections featured an all-time high of people choosing not to vote in a municipal election.

Thus the public was in an "anti-incumbent" mood.

But they didn't vote out all incumbents. Only three towns moved from having a rightist (UMP) mayor to having a leftwing one. Meanwhile, at least 155 moved the other way, in what is being called the droitisation (rightward movement) of the electorate.

Hollande is not directly affected by this. Even if he looses the September elections, he still won't be booted out of power, because the Prime Minister is selected by the Senate, but the President (like the President in America) serves his full term no matter who holds the Senate.

But this is obviously a major blow to the left. So much so that Hollande will address the nation at 8 PM (their local time) to say something or other about what is variously being called a "rout," "debacle," and "penalty" for the left.

Interestingly, it's also frequently said that a "vague bleu" swept France -- a Blue Wave. The French have retained the historical use of red for the left, so the right is blue.

Oh it's also being called the left's Berezina. The French don't speak of "meeting one's Waterloo," for some reason. Usually they refer to another of Napoleon's major setbacks, that at the Battle of Berezina (a river in Russia in 1812). Like our own Waterloo expression, it means "disaster" or "catastrophe).

BTW: There's some lame spin in the world press that the left's "consolation" is that Paris elected its first female mayor.

That is not consolation. Hildago's opponent, NKM (I forget her full name) was also a woman.

It has been known that Paris would have a female mayor, whether the PS candidate Hildago or the UMP candidate NKM, for a full year.

Meanwhile, some "anti-fascism" groups are protesting the FN's wins in some towns by... threatening political violence.

I'm not sure if they understand what "anti-fascism" means.

Posted by: Ace at 08:43 AM | Comments (378)
Post contains 714 words, total size 5 kb.

It's hard to stand out for low ratings on network that no one watches like MSNBC but full credit to Ronan Farrow, he manages to pull it off.

“He sort of stinks on TV,” an MSNBC source told Confidenti@l. “He hasn’t turned out to be the superstar they were hoping for.”

...

Last Wednesday, Farrow drew an average of about 312,000 total viewers, which might be stellar for Twitter but “is rather measly for someone who is supposed to be a major national personality,” another source said.

Even worse: Wednesday’s show was 708th among all programming ranked by Nielsen, in both total viewers and the 18-to-49 age group advertisers covet. The midnight airing of “Baggage” on the Game Show Network came in ahead of it, at No. 707, and the 8 a.m. “Golden Girls” on the Hallmark Channel (No. 700) crushed it.

Somewhere in the great beyond, Frank Sinatra is telling everyone there's no chance this no-talent loser is his kid and if he were he'd smack the smirk off the kid's face.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:09 AM | Comments (237)
Post contains 215 words, total size 1 kb.

Obama likes to talk about how he's using his "discretion" in enforcing immigration laws to focus on deporting illegals who have committed crimes (in addition to being here illegally). As in so many other cases, Obama's talk is unrelated to his actions.

“ICE released 68,000 criminal aliens in 2013, or 35 percent of the criminal aliens encountered by officers. The vast majority of these releases occurred because of the Obama administration’s prosecutorial discretion policies,” Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, wrote in a memo summarizing the DHS document.
ICE classifies illegal immigrants as criminal if they have been convicted of a crime, not including traffic offense, Vaughn noted.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Budget Committee, blasted the administrationÂ’s record.

“The preponderance of the evidence demonstrates that immigration enforcement in America has collapsed. Even those with criminal convictions are being released. DHS is a department in crisis,” he said in a statement Sunday.

But you know, we can do amnesty because...background checks! What's the matter? Don't you trust Obama?

Well maybe you'll trust...John McCain who once again vowed to work for amnesty because that's what Ted Kennedy would have wanted.

Related(ish)...The GOP establishment has a fever and the only cure is more Jeb "Amnesty" Bush.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:28 AM | Comments (363)
Post contains 242 words, total size 2 kb.