Ah, sweet, sweet maverickeyness.

There are a few typical cited reasons that GOP and political operatives are giving as for why there isn't a 527 operation set up yet, lack of enthusiasm, donor fatigue, fear of the race card getting thrown, but you know the biggest fear they have, one that most of them are citing?

But, in explaining the absence of any anti-Obama groups this time around, every individual interviewed for this story cited the same central reason: a fear that their partyÂ’s nominee will publicly denounce them and hold a grudge.

Posted by: Ace at 01:30 PM | Comments (40)
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Maybe this is more of a sidebar thing but I actually have something to add to it.

The New Yorker featured a ridiculous featurette called "Power Hour" in which, supposedly, an experiment was conducted on some of the world's most powerful feature. I say "supposedly" because it's clearly not an experiment -- an experiment requires you accept the data as they actually are, not massage them to get to the "result' you'd wanted from the get-go. We'll get to that later.

Here's the base assumption for the "experiment," and the "experiment" itself:

To academics, one of the best indicators of a person’s place in a hierarchy is his tendency toward “perspective taking”—“stepping outside of one’s own experience and imagining the emotions, perceptions, and motivations of another individual,” as it is defined in “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” a paper published, in 2006, in the journal Psychological Science. An assistant is perspective taking when he gets the boss’s coffee before he asks for it; when the boss forgets to pay the assistant back the $3.75, he is not.

...

With your dominant hand, as quickly as you can, draw a capital E on your forehead with the marker provided. DonÂ’t worry, the marker is nontoxic, and we will make sure it is removed before you leave today.

There are two ways to draw the “E”: with the prongs of the letter facing so that the person drawing can read it (“self-oriented”), or with the prongs pointing in the opposite direction (“other-oriented”). The researchers concluded that the high-power group was almost three times as likely as the low-power group to draw an “E” that would be illegible to anyone but themselves.

Now, you probably are already thinking this "experiment" is pure jackassery, but you'd be wrong; it's even worse that that. The New Yorker actually managed to get the "experiment" wrong by 180 degrees:

But is there any validity to it at all? No. and not just because it's ludicrous.

The authors cite Hass as the originator of the method, and as evidence for the validity of the method. Hass believed that people who were self-focused looked at themselves by occupying an external perspective, looking back. Read that again. In other words, a legible to the external observer E meant you were more self focused, not less. It doesn't measure the ability to adopt someone else's perspective: it measures your ability to see yourself.

So, the actual idea -- which was itself bullshitty and kinda-sort just made up entirely -- was that it was those who were more focused on themselves (more powerful, less interested in "taking perspective") who would draw the E to be legible to others, not the other way around.

Why all this flattery for the supposed virtues of those without power? The Last Psychiatrist has a simple answer:

An assistant is perspective taking when he gets the boss's coffee before he asks for it; when the boss forgets to pay the assistant back the $3.75, he is not.

The distinction may seem like the main point, but there's a subtext: the boss is a jerk in both examples. I'm willing to bet real money that if you had to guess who reads The New Yorker, it would be the assistant.

And I won't be the one to bet against him.

Now, where it really gets absurd is here: Paul Wolfowitz is asked to do this silly shit, and, actually, complies. He actually draws the "E" the "right way," showing that (according to the New Yorker's misreading of an already idiotic experiment) he's willing to "take perspectives" and is not, then, an asshole boss who won't give you $3.75 for the coffee you so nobly bought him.

But The New Yorker adds a super-special secret codicil to the experiment's protocols. In Part VIII of the Last Psychiatrist's deconstruction, he points out that even though Wolfowitz "passed the test," the New Yorker just goes ahead with its initial, pre-experiment conclusion and calls him a fucking jerkoff anyway.

In fact, nearly all of the powerful people at the gathering drew the e "the right way," leaving the reporter/moron to wonder what's become of her silly little story idea:

It seemed odd that, in a room full of powerful people, no one was acting the way powerful people are supposed to.

Well, there are two explanations: 1) the experiment is just fucking stupid, and 2) if you hadn't gotten the experiment completely wrong, you'd have realized that they all were actually drawing the e the way "high-power" people are supposed to.

The reporter is low-power as regards intelligence and reading comprehension.

I can only add one thing. Amy Poehler and Kristin Wiig, both of Saturday Night Live and both (rightly) praised as among the funniest women in the world, were also present and were also asked to do the experiment. They both have great power, of a sort -- they are beloved by millions, they're on TV (as last week's overboard coverage of Tim Russert's death proved, you only count on this Earth if you're on TV), and they're hip people working in a hip industry. They don't have to worry about PR -- they've got too much good PR to worry about some minor negative PR from The New Yorker, as if anyone reads that anyway -- and they, unlike Paul Wolfowitz, don't worry about social traps for the unhip. Wolfowitz may have worried that if he didn't agree to this silliness, he'd get bad press or be called an out-of-touch fuddy-duddy who didn't "get" what all the kids were into these days, like drawing letters on their foreheads.

Poehler and Wiig didn't have to worry about that, and they know damn well that participating in this silly shit isn't hip at all, but rather stupid and pointless and offering little benefit apart from the chance to be ridiculed by a nobody reporter.

So Amy Poehler and Kristin Wiig demonstrated real power: They outright refused to play the game at all. Why would I want to do that?” Poehler asked.

They were the only people who refused to play, and thus, in context, the only truly powerful people at the soiree. Reporters are more powerful than Paul Wolfowitz, in the sense they can say awful things about him and make his life a bit less pleasant. But beloved TV personalities are more powerful than shitty little reporters -- Poehler and Wiig know The New Yorker doesn't even have the balls to say something nasty about them. They'd get too much hate mail from their fans.

If you're still interested in this after this long summary, I recommend The Last Psychiatrist's full take, which has a couple of good things left in it I haven't stolen -- including a rather, um, colorful "scientific explanation" as to why the "experiment" failed so completely. If you thought the experiment itself had the distinct whiff off stale 4 AM pot-smoke, wait 'till you hear the sweet, sweet science explaining its abject failure.

Via Petite Dov.

Posted by: Ace at 12:50 PM | Comments (30)
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Barack Obama has been praised for merely talking. Why shouldn't he now be praised for simply acting like any other politician?

This isn't racism, mind you. It's just praising a black guy for managing to do what everyone else does. It's good racism.

Barack Obama abandoned his promise to limit his fundraising by accepting federal matching funds. As Allah and Dean Barnett both readily admit, it's hard to really castigate him much for doing what anyone in his situation would have done. He's raising more money than anyone else in the American -- and world -- political history; that's simply too much of an advantage to toss aside for "principle."

I put "principle" in quotes because I've never really understood why raising lots of money from lots of different people is itself such a horrible thing. It didn't bother me when Bush raised a lot of money, mostly from small donors, though of course the MSM attempted to portray this as something nefarious, equating Bush's quite legal fundraising with Al Gore's blatantly illegal fundraising from Chinese nuns in 1996.

And I put "principle" in quotes, too, because this was never actually Barack Obama's principle in the first place. His pledge, from the beginning, was an empty political gesture intended to benefit himself-- he thought he'd be at a big money disadvantage to Hillary Clinton, so he made a big promise about accepting federal matching funds because accepting matching funds would give him the most money possible, and he could claim it was some sort of virtue that he was taking in less money than Hillary.

He was attempting to cast hard reality -- a massive fundraising disadvantage -- as some sort of show of integrity. I could raise just as much money as Hillary, but I nobly choose not to.

Of course, as it turned out, he was taking in a lot more money than Hillary, so he quickly abandoned that promise. The very moment his initial assumption -- I'll raise less than Hillary, so let me position myself by claiming that raising more money is bad -- proved false, he abandoned that claim, and began talking up the virtues of raising lots of money from lots of donors.

And now, of course, knowing he can absolutely swamp John McCain with money-power, he abandons his pledge of taking matching funds in the general campaign, too, as expected.

In fact, he even managed to lie about that, quite gratuitously and clumsily, first claiming he'd tried to meet with McCain's people to negotiate how each would remain within the federal matching-funds limit, and only later conceding he'd completely made that up and refused to even entertain such a meeting from the get-go.

Barack Obama's decisions may be understandable. People acting in their own self-interest is always an understandable phenomenon. So, he lied and made promises and broke them, and feigned an interest in higher principle when all along he was merely interested in securing the maximum possible political advantage for himself. Par for the course in politics.

But if it's understandable that he lied, broke promises, and proclaimed false adherence to higher principles, surely it's not virtuous or praiseworthy that he did so.

Telling a useful lie in politics is usually understandable. We usually, however, do not praise a useful lie as a positive.

But that is, predictably, how Obama's various cultists are reacting to the lie.

They are actually praising Obama for making the amazing discovery that it is often helpful to lie, break promises, and act according to ruthlessly unprincipled self-interest. Surely no white politician would be "cunning" enough to realize this.

Scratch that -- surely no human being without divine parentage could possibly have the "cunning" to lie for personal gain.

It's truly extraordinary.

Next up, Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks will praise Obama for having the "moral courage" to work Chicago's corrupt political levers with gusto and take his dirty payoffs from Tony Rezko. Only He Who Was Prophesized could possibly take money from the Chosen Bagman. And then the Three Magi of the Chicago Machine descended upon The Savior's Rezko-subsidized estate, bearing him Gifts of Donations, Patronage, and Votes of Dead Men.

I feel like I'm watching Ghostbusters. "Surely no human being could stack books like this."

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (31)
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This is Miss Israel:

This is an artist's depiction of Miss Iran:

I really don't think the choice could be any clearer. Also? You're welcome.

Posted by: Jack M. at 11:31 AM | Comments (69)
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The new game Spore ambitiously seeks to simulate the evolution of life-forms from single-celled organisms, to advanced animals, to entire star-faring civilizations that compete against others. By making thousands of choices along the various stages of evolution (both physical and social) you develop your own species, from cell to stellar empire.

So, of course, everyone is using the game to create cock monsters (NSFW). Either bizarre alien beings with outsized penises (the multiple-penis look is popular), or simply free-standing penises. That dance. And throb.

150 videos on YouTube, and the game just came out. Correction: The game hasn't come out, but the creature-creating software was pre-released as a teaser.

Right now the phenomenon is sort of funny. When they start creating vagina monsters, of course, it will become truly disturbing.

Although, seriously, I don't know how you can really make an alien vagina creature that's scarier than the real thing.

Thanks, I guess, to Josh.

Posted by: Ace at 11:18 AM | Comments (21)
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Both cable clowns are pitching themselves for the Meet the Press show, both deny it, and both are deemed by an "insider" to be delusional to think the network would even consider either of them.

The insider said, "They're cable. They're far too partisan. They have no gravitas. If gravitas is eight letters, they're about seven letters short."

Keith Olbermann, the scuttlebutt goes, is threatening to quit if he doesn't get the gig.

I do wonder what NBC's other options are, though. David Gregory? David Schuster? (Giggle to both.)

Who are their other higher-profile options?

I don't know. Seems to me they'd have to go outside the organization for a suitable replacement.

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (56)
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The full quote is obviously intended to show how much he loves America: "I didn't really love America until I was deprived of her company," that is, until he was held as a captive by the North Vietnamese in solitary confinement for five and a half years. (Link Fixed.)

The left is attempting to claim this is the equivalent of Michelle Obama's remark. McCain's statement? I didn't really (that is, wholly and completely) love America until it was taken away from me and I could reflect on all its greatness.

Michelle Obama's? I was never proud (not "really" proud, but proud at all) of my country until I had the chance to be one of the most politically powerful leaders in the country.

They seem kind of different to me. McCain's statement is about appreciating America for what it is; Michelle Obama's is about appreciating America for what it will give to her and her husband (oh yes-- and Michelle Obama's children; how could I forget them?) and no one else at all.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (30)
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I wanted to post this last night but was screwed by my own determination not to link AP.

Hot Air has the details. It's not good.

Although there is some doubt about exactly what he said, a Spanish-language account seems to say he claimed he'd ask Congress to reconsider CPOS (Comprehensive Piece of Shit) on the first day of his administration:

[TRANSLATION OF SPANISH-LANGUAGE REPORT:] “This reform will be a priority in my administration because it is a convincing federal responsibility”, added the contender of the Republican Party. “We will undertake immigration reform and on the day after my inauguration, I will ask Congress to reconsider it, although I believe that first we have to secure our borders, set in motion a plan for guest workers that works and to focus on the issue of the undocumented in a humane and compassionate way.”

I don't know how much doubt I have about his actual words. He keeps saying this, over and over. After questioned about it, he'll say he's committed to "securing the border first," but that's obviously a lie, given the fact he wants to grant amnesty on the very first day of his administration.

I don't know how the fuck we wound up with this guy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (78)
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Jockeying for advantage, first the batter switches his hand, then the pitcher switches his, then the batter switches back, then the pitcher switches back... until the umpire has had enough and demands both use their right hand.

The full at-bat, with all the ambidextrous dueling, is here in the second video.

Thanks to DavidR.

Posted by: Ace at 09:36 AM | Comments (29)
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An "imperfect way to rid politics of the excesses of special-interest money."

(Until McCain/Feingold refined it.)

Obama's latest flip is a humdinger, and his cheering squad in the MSM is soft-soaping it as he can't bother with the "broken, imperfect system".

I expect McCain to suggest changing the 1040 $3 check box to $9.19.

I won't check it then either.

Broken. Imperfect. System.

I hate those. But if he manages to kill it, that's change I can hope in.

I firmly believe in campaign funding. That's my position and I'm sticking to it.

shop courtesy someone who isn't working any more than I am today.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:42 AM | Comments (30)
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