I'll just leave this here without further comment.

Speaker John Boehner and other senior House Republicans are telling donors and industry groups that they aim to pass immigration legislation this year, despite the reluctance of many Republicans to tackle the divisive issue before the November elections.

Many lawmakers and activists have assumed the issue was off the table in an election year. But Mr. Boehner said at a Las Vegas fundraiser last month he was "hellbent on getting this done this year," according to two people in the room.

Added: Senator who partnered with Democrats to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill that Obama would sign in a heartbeat, fumbles and flips around on amnesty some more.

“I think this administration has probably reached the point of irreconcilable differences with regards to trust, particularly among Republicans,” Rubio explained during a conversation at a Texas Tribune event on Tuesday.

...

“There is a true distaste--and rightfully so--for comprehensive pieces of legislation,” he said.

Rubio explained that he believed that immigration would always have to be addressed in a sequential process.

“It doesn’t happen all at once, but I think it’s a lot better than continuing to go in circles here, and this all-or-nothing approach that for 14 years has led to nothing.”

So....we're just supposed to forget that less than a year ago he was the GOP poster-boy for what he's now saying is bad policy?

Rubio should stick to giving speeches about how much he loves America. He's very good at that. He's not quite as good at actual politics.

As Churchill once said about returning to the Conservative Party after abandoning it for the Liberal Party, "Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.". Rubio, who has gone from amnesty opponent to supporter and is now trying to get back to opponent, does not have Churchill's level of ingenuity.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:57 AM | Comments (407)
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National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg joins Ace, Drew, John and me for cocktails and banter and cocktails.

The yoga is hot, things are in hands, and no animals were harmed in the making of this podcast.

Intro/Outro: Van Halen-Panama / 38 Special-Teacher Teacher

Questions & comments here: Ask the Blog

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Browse (and even search!) the archives

Follow on Twitter:
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Andy (@TheH2 and @AndyM1911)

Open thread in the comments.

Profanity Note (Ace): After weeks of very little cursing, we curse a lot in this one.

I mean, I curse a lot. It wasn't planned or anything.

Posted by: andy at 01:03 PM | Comments (78)
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I guess Ben has forsaken you so allow me to step in.

1. Liberal Republicans like former W. Bush aid Michael Gerson, just can't stop beating up on Goldwater.

The problem comes in viewing Goldwater as an example rather than as a warning. Conservatives sometimes describe his defeat as a necessary, preliminary step — a clarifying and purifying struggle — in the Reagan revolution. In fact, it was an electoral catastrophe that awarded Lyndon Johnson a powerful legislative majority, increased the liberal ambitions of the Great Society and caused massive distrust of the GOP among poor and ethnic voters. The party has never quite recovered. Ronald Reagan was, in part, elected president by undoing Goldwater’s impression of radicalism. And all of Reagan’s domestic achievements involved cleaning up just a small portion of the excesses that Goldwater’s epic loss enabled.

The Republican Party needs internal debate and populist energy. But it is not helped by nostalgia for a disaster.

It's funny how the liberals in the GOP keep going back to Goldwater. Are there no more modern examples of the GOP picking bad candidates for President that we might learn something from?

I guess we're just to chalk up loses by George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney to...well nothing. Those get airbrushed out of history. No we must forever be vigilant against the repetition of a one time event like Goldwater (who in today's environment of fairly stable red/blue voting patterns would have done as well as McCain or Romney).

Remember that the alternative to Goldwater in 1964 was Nelson Rockefeller who just happened to support much, if not all, of Lyndon Johnson's "great society".

It's almost as if people like Gerson and Jennifer Rubin aren't trying to improve conservatism but push liberalism.

Speaking of which....

2. Mitt Romney can't or won't shut the hell up.

[Romney] may not direct a high-powered political-action committee or hold a formal position, but with the two living former Republican presidents — George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — shying away from campaign politics, Romney, 67, has begun to embrace the role of party elder, believing he can shape the national debate and help guide his fractured party to a governing majority.

Insisting he won’t seek the presidency again, the former GOP nominee has endorsed at least 16 candidates this cycle, many of them establishment favorites who backed his campaigns. One Romney friend said he wants to be the “anti-Jim DeMint,” a reference to the former South Carolina senator and current Heritage Foundation chairman who has been a conservative kingmaker in Republican primaries. Romney’s approach is to reward allies, boost rising stars and avoid conflict.

Let me remind you of a few things:

A-Romney was a terrible candidate

B-You can say, "but he was right about Obama". Yes and so was everyone on this blog. It's not a really impressive thing.

C-The whole idea of, "if the election were held today he'd win" is meaningless. It's not going to be held today for starters and just about any Republican would have as much of a shot in this hypothetical rematch as Romney.

D-He was untrustworthy on almost every issue.

That Romney would be better than Obama is a useless metric. So would just about any jackass off the street. Personally, I'd give the random jackass a better chance of winning simply because I know for a fact what a terrible candidate Romney is.

George W. Bush won two terms as President and he's been as quiet as a church mouse for going on 6 years. Mitt Romney got his ass kicked in one election and he can't keep his shut. Advantage: Bush.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:11 AM | Comments (239)
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Happy Friday, all.

Posted by: andy at 03:01 AM | Comments (405)
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10 Things 'Idiocracy' Predicted Would Happen, and Sadly Already Have

Garbage Avalanches

In the film, it is the "Great Garbage Avalanche of 2505" that frees our protagonists from their cryogenic sleep. This prediction that trash will eventually pile up to unmanageable amounts has started to come true in many parts of the world. Particularly, Guatemala is known for their regular landfill landslides, especially during rainy seasons. Sadly, this is the cause of many deaths per year there to those who make their living as trash miners.

Ads EVERYWHERE

This one was a fairly obvious dig on society as it already was when the movie came out, but it's gotten way worse since. You virtually can't go anywhere without being bombarded by advertisements, and it's only going to continue to get worse and more prevalent as technology advances. Think about it, when was the last time you watched a YouTube video, surfed the Internet in general, or even watched television for more than five minutes without some product being pushed in your face? Heck, even phone apps are loaded with them if you aren't specifically paying them not to.

Plus you have the ubiquitous cursing and general talking like a tard.

But the absolute proof that we're now in the late pre-Idiocracy era is the fact that this aired on America's Got Talent:

Ow My Balls Society!

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:44 PM | Comments (551)
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"This is the aging of the dawn of Aquarius."

I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian ‘human rights’ commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it’s a question of how you ‘strike the balance’, where you ‘draw the line’… which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that’s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn’t free at all. So screw that.

But I don’t really think that many people these days are genuinely interested in ‘striking the balance’; they’ve drawn the line and they’re increasingly unashamed about which side of it they stand. What all the above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: ‘“Shut up,” he explained.’

A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody’s asking you to defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But even that’s further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the media are prepared to go. As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: ‘What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.’ Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.

I actually noticed this story on Twitchy, because a left-leaning comic, Patton Oswald, approvingly retweeted the link, stating he agreed with the general thrust, and for that blasphemy, was then set upon by the zealous inquisitors of the Holy Universal Unification Church of Shut Up.

Posted by: Ace at 03:57 PM | Comments (379)
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Chelsea Clinton announced her pregnancy.

The 16-week-old fetus has been signed to a six-figure deal to host a new MSNBC show.

Chelsea has reported it kicking, for which the unborn child has received a Walter Cronkite Excellence in Journalism award.

I didn't care about the "Chelsea is pregnant" storyline -- who can keep up with our useless princelings? -- until I saw the Drudge headline, "Grandma Hillary."

Does this help her or hurt her?

Posted by: Ace at 01:55 PM | Comments (453)
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A lot of details claimed in this suit, and not just about the alleged drugging/sex.

But rather about a Hollywood culture that enables the abuse of children. I'll refer you to Variety for that.

X-Men: Days of Future Past” director Bryan Singer has been accused of sexually abusing a teenage boy in 1999 in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Hawaii federal court.

The plaintiff, Michael Egan, claims he was 15 years old when Singer forcibly sodomized him, among other allegations. EganÂ’s lawyers, led by Jeff Herman, allege that Singer provided him with drugs and alcohol and flew him to Hawaii on more than one occasion in 1999. His suit claims battery, assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy by unreasonable intrusion, and it seeks unspecified damages.

Singer’s attorney, Marty Singer, called the lawsuit “absurd and defamatory.”

...

Herman is a sexual abuse attorney based in Boca Raton, Fla., who also represented the plaintiffs who accused Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash of sexual abuse. He and Egan are scheduled to appear at a press conference on Thursday in Beverly Hills.

“Hollywood has a problem with the sexual exploitation of children,” Herman said in a statement. “This is the first of many cases I will be filing to give these victims a voice and to expose the issue.”

Well.

Speaking of Rape-Rape... Has Whoopi Goldberg finally found something she's qualified to do?

More: The Daily Mail reports more on the "boy parties."

Posted by: Ace at 12:57 PM | Comments (308)
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Oblahblah's talking about... something or other.

Oh, he's doing a victory lap over the CBO's new estimated numbers that claim that Obamacare's unaffordable costs will be slightly lower.

Oh God, it's just a general defense of Oblahblahcare yet again, calling for us to "move on." Now he's talking about the "50 or so votes to repeal this law" (a debunked number, of course; see, he's lying) and how those votes could have been used to "create jobs" or something.

"The repeal debate is and should be over."

[Update - Andy]: A key takeaway from President TrollSoHard's prepared remarks lies:

Posted by: Ace at 11:42 AM | Comments (277)
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I quoted the story as it was written some hours ago.

But they've changed it, without acknowledging the change.

WAS: Pushilin acknowledged the flyers were distributed by his organization but he disavowed their content, according to the web site Jews of Kiev, Ynet reportedÂ…

NOW IS: Pushilin acknowledged that fliers were distributed under his organization's name in Donetsk but denied any connection to them, Ynet reported in Hebrew.

This is a major change in reporting -- from Pushilin admitting his men to handing them out, to a mere acknowledgement that he's aware of leaftlets purporting to come from his organization.

They have gone from reporting he publicly admitted that his men were dropping these leaflets, to him denying that.

This is not just a minor change in wording. This reverses, completely, their reporting on a key point.

We do not criticize the media for getting things wrong-- everyone gets things wrong, especially in fast-moving stories, and especially in cases of relying upon a translation.

But this is a major change to the original reporting and must be acknowledged as such -- otherwise people (like me) will go on thinking USAToday's original report was correct.

We don't get mad that they get things wrong. That is understandable.

We get mad that they can't bring themselves to admit they've gotten something wrong, and forthrightly correct the record.

And I have to think this is borne of incompetence. Competent people do not fear corrections, because they know they're getting things 90% right, and that's all you can hope for in this world.

It's the incompetents who are fearful that their next screw-up may mean their heads.

So I have to assume that USAToday considers itself incompetent, and on thin ice as far as the accuracy of its reporting.

Thanks to Anon Y. Mouse, who spotted this and was persistent in alerting me about it.

Unrelated, But: In Taranto's column discussing the politicization of the Census Bureau -- which, as DrewMTips notes, is a "crazy rightwing conspiracy theory" proven true -- he has a funny thing at the end.

Grandfather Clause

"This is not your grandfather's NATO anymore."--Thomas Friedman, New York Times, March 30, 2003

"Friends, we are in the midst of an energy crisis--but this is not your grandfather's energy crisis."--Friedman, New York Times, Jan. 20, 2006

"Well, my general view is that this isn't your father's recession; it's your grandfather's recession."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times website, Feb. 13, 2009

"To appreciate the problem, you need to know that this isn't your father's recession. It's your grandfather's, or maybe even (as I'll explain) your great-great-grandfather's."--Krugman, New York Times, Feb. 20, 2009

"I've been saying for almost a decade now that what we have these days aren't your father's recessions, they're your grandfather's recessions."--Krugman, New York Times website, Jan. 17, 2011

"And this is the relevant history we should be looking at: this isn't your father's slump, it's your grandfather's slump."--Krugman, New York Times website, Sept. 19, 2011

"If Israelis want to escape that fate, it is very important that they understand that we're not your grandfather's America anymore."--Friedman, New York Times, Nov. 11, 2012

"This is not your grandfather's battlefield."--Friedman, New York Times, Feb. 2, 2014

"We're not dealing anymore with your grandfather's Israel, and they're not dealing anymore with your grandmother's America either."--Friedman, New York Times, April 16, 2014

This is not your grandfather's cliched hackery.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (166)
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