Is this old? New to me. Pretty amazing to watch, you can also hear the ATC communications and see the conversations in the cockpit between Capt. Sullenberger and First Officer Skiles in the lower right panels. Video starts with the take-off roll from La Guardia, audio starts at 1:19.

via mesablue over at H2

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 01:33 PM | Comments (50)
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Don't bother clicking; everything the stub says in in the headline.

Posted by: Ace at 01:18 PM | Comments (95)
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I don't know if I can mention the soft commitments I have, specifically, but I'll just say I have one expression of interest from a big draw, an expression of very strong interest (including help in getting this off the ground, and pulling in other draws) from another big draw, and a third expression interest from another draw.

I'm also in touch with someone in DC who can, I hope, help out on that side of things -- sponsors or co-organizers (whatever you call that -- a partner organization) as well as establishment DC guests, and people outside the establishment to get non-establishment type guests.

I would say that the odds of this happening are now much higher than it not happening. The things that would have stopped it early -- people saying "Nah, sounds dumb, not interested" -- didn't happen. So that first hurdle is crossed.

Although, of course, there is still a lot to do. (Everything to do, actually; but with people on board, that stuff gets easier.) It can all fall through but there seems to be enough interest from name-type draws that other name-draws can be gotten, and that in turn should help with a sponsorship, and that in turn should lead to this all happening.

Regarding the city: It's going to depend on the deals offered but since I'm shooting for spring I'm thinking "warmer city." Vegas is still at the top of the list, but based on suggestions and my basic idea that it's a very cool city which also might be hurting and be willing to offer deals, New Orleans is pretty much tied.

The idea is that this would be somewhat countercultural or at least not fully establishment, so a city like Vegas or New Orleans sells that idea in a way that, say, Dallas would not.

A draw suggested Colorado Springs or Denver, which sound too cold to me for spring.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:27 AM | Comments (711)
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Kinda funny... but Beck has been satirized so often by now the only thing different here is that Cartman's doing it. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:27 AM | Comments (86)
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Seen on Hot Air, Infidels are Cool has this exchange:

Stone: Do you think itÂ’s fair to send people to jail who donÂ’t buy health insurance?

Pelosi: Â… The legislation is very fair in this respect.

The left continues pounding the table, insisting that right-wingers are "paranoid" and "extremist" to call Obama a socialist, or to use totalitarian imagery in posters to protest his agenda. Why, it's just so not true! they bleat. You'd have to be a maniac like Sarah Palin to make these delusional claims! Why, it's like bad science-fiction!

Really?

Socialism never attends a party without an escort of coercive state behavior. It is a historic fact -- indeed, an economic fact -- that as the state seeks to regulate and control more and more economic activity, they must, of course, control more and more human activity.

Economic activity is human activity, after all. Economics is not somehow divorced from humanity. Economic choices are not made of their own volition, passive-voice, without an actor. People make economic choices -- and socialism demands an ever-increasing control over those choices, and therefore the people who make those choices. (Or, more accurately: formerly made those choices.)

Furthermore, apart from the basic definitional aspect of socialism that requires a loss of freedom in exchange, supposedly, for economic security: Socialism has almost never worked as intended, but rather creates new problems and new poverties and new ways to exploit the system (black markets, for one); socialism therefore always requires even additional laws against once-unobjectionable and perfectly-legal behavior. In other words, not only does socialism require a small buy-in, in the form of loss of freedom, but it is always accompanied by unplanned-for (?) additional losses of freedom to "correct" for all the systematic irrationalities and distortions it creates.

And then it gets even worse after that, because it always fails, whenever it's been attempted, and the newly-empowered state will fight to survive, as any organism does, and any organism is willing to do an awful lot of violence when its very existence is threatened.

Note that the third part of that is the scariest step in the socialist takeover of the human condition, but even if that is avoided, the first and second stages are plenty objectionable in their own right. Although socialism has had a pronounced tendency to lead to full fascism and totalitarian control over the increasingly miserable citizenry it supposedly "serves," and that is the point of all those Nazi posters, it cannot be emphasized firmly enough that even if Stage Three of socialism is avoided, Stages One and Two are anti-freedom and frankly anti-human as well.

Just less so.

On a personal level, I go 'round and 'round with myself as to whether Nazi imagery is "civil" or helpful, politically: On one side I know for a fact that socialism tends in this direction. Every. Single. Time. Even in socialist states where fascism is avoided -- Britain, say -- it is nevertheless the case that the citizenry there exists under a much-diminished concept of "freedom" than your average American would find tolerable, or even imaginable.

On the other hand, I doubt the effectiveness of such imagery, for the simple fact that few can imagine such things, they seem too speculative and too impossible to contemplate, and so I usually make the case that rather than talk up the farther-off (yet still quite possible, and not quite so far off as some would like to imagine) possibility of Stage Three socialism, we should talk up instead the quite-objectionable-enough and much more immediate and imaginable defects of Stages One and Two.

Back to this leftist insistence that we're all paranoid to even think this way, to even define "freedom" in an antique, right-wing fashion, meaning "stuff you are permitted to do or not do without penalty and coercion from the state:" It is especially risible to me, in gallows-humor way, that the left continues to call us lunatics for fretting about increasing state control and increasing state coercion and increasing state outlawing of previously-legal behavior and freedoms even as, in their very first bill out of the socialist box, they propose jailing Americans for engaging in unobjectionable behavior which no one ever before dreamt of being a crime.

Think about this.

The left says: You are crazy to claim your so-called freedoms are being taken away, and you are a lunatic to scream about an overly powerful state which will use violent coercion (no one goes to jail without the threat of violence if he doesn't, after all) to enforce its notions of the "economic good."

And with the next breath the left says: By the way, you shall either buy health care insurance or we will throw you in prison for two or three years.

I'm paranoid? Really? I am not fretting here about some remote and unlikely possibility. We are not speaking here of "slippery slopes" or in terms of "what comes next?"

We are instead objecting to a black-letter law spelled out for all to see in the very first piece of legislation you're proposing.

Right out of the box. The state here -- Pelosi, Reid, Obama -- are claiming that they can imprison people for behavior that has never before even been hinted as being a crime, on the theory that such behavior constitutes unpatriotic economic behavior which is detrimental to the state's balance sheets.

Think about what a broad, all-encompassing term "economics" is. 80% of our waking hours are spent in economic activity of one sort or another. The state here is asserting the right to imprison people for behavior they consider not actually morally reprehensible or harmful as other crimes are, but instead merely detrimental to the Great Push Forward, the state's master plan of economic health and well-being.

Right out of the box they propose sending people to jail for acting as economic subversives and economic traitors and yet I am, somehow, paranoid if I point out that the first step here is to reduce human freedom and increase state power.

And this is just a down-payment, remember. This is merely the first of many freedoms you previously believed sacrosanct to be lost. This is merely the first freedom they've realized, in advance, will have to be taken away. When their Rube Goldberg system of cross-subsidizations and stealth-rationing produces a slew of irrationalities and evasions they did not anticipate, we will have a welter of new crimes to correct all that human behavior they now find constitutes bad economic hygiene and must be outlawed.

But we're paranoid. We're lunatics. We're "extreme."

Used to be in this county when we proposed making an entire category of human behavior a crime, that was cause for debate. Civil libertarians on the left would join those on the right in wondering what has so changed in the past several years to require an entire new category of criminality, an entire sphere of human activity now removed from the column of "freedom" and moved to the column of "forbiddance."

But not this time. Fascism, as they say, tends to come with a smiling face, and there's hardly a face more surgically stretched into smiles than Nancy Pelosi's, quite chipper and blithe as she proposes that she will begin filling America's prisons with a whole new category of criminal, the economic saboteur.

And there is no argument about it, and no debate. We are creating an entirely new type of "crime" that could end up imprisoning millions (or -- very nearly as bad -- compelling behavior and restricting freedom due to threat of incarceration) and the entire left and the entire media (but I repeat myself) blows it off as no big deal.

It's just What Must Be Done. Omlette, eggs, some breaking required.

But I'm a paranoid and extremist to take notice of the fact that what was once my freedom in 2009 shall become a cause for imprisonment in 2010.

Posted by: Ace at 10:08 AM | Comments (359)
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More signs that the "strategery" going on around the Afghan war is a soup sandwich being eaten in a chicken wire canoe while it is paddled up Shit Creek by a guy swinging a football bat wearing bowling cleats. Yeah I'm done tap dancing around this. Today's clusterf**k.

No one was happy to read in The Washington Postthat Eikenberry, who commanded the war himself from 2005 to 2007, thinks that the Karzai government needs to demonstrate its commitment to anti-corruption measures before the administration can responsibly authorize another troop increase. The prevailing theory is that “he leaked his own cables” because “he has a beef with McChrystal,” the staffer said. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Eikenberry’s successor as NATO commander in Afghanistan, has requested an increase in troops to support a counterinsurgency strategy with a substantial counterterrorism component.

But Eikenberry — who also briefed the White House by teleconference yesterday — reiterated his concerns. The ambassador told the NSC not to send additional troops to Afghanistan “without an exit strategy” and urged that the president to adopt a “purely civilian approach” with the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the lead, not the military. According to the NSC staffer, Eikenberry “wants a realignment” of USAID, the Afghanistan inspector general’s office and the State Department’s stabilization and reconstruction office. Eikenberry said President Obama “wants that” — although Obama was not in the meeting — and he hailed the arrival of the new USAID administrator-nominee, Rajiv Shah, “because he will not wage war when the org charts start changing.”

I am not an expert on ret. LTG Eikenberry, but his ideas seem to be complete fantasy. His last tour in country was as Commander of Combined Forces Command- Afghanistan from 2005-2007. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that when things there went completely into the shitter? 

Posted by: Uncle Jimbo at 09:21 AM | Comments (68)
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Is it better to be a bully? Or a pussy?

I know one thing for sure: the worst is to come off as pussy-bully, as the US does under Obama. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:59 AM | Comments (121)
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A Premature Concession?

Very unlikely. Extremely unlikely. It's virtually impossible...but, uh, yeah, it technically seems like he could.

Conservative Doug Hoffman conceded the race in the 23rd Congressional District last week after receiving two pieces of grim news for his campaign: He was down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night, and he had barely won his stronghold in Oswego County.

As it turns out, neither was true.

But HoffmanÂ’s concession -- based on snafus in Oswego County and elsewhere that left his vote undercounted -- set off a chain of events that echoed all the way to Washington, D.C., and helped secure passage of a historic health care reform bill.

...Now a recanvassing in the 11-county district shows that OwensÂ’ lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes over Hoffman, 66,698 to 63,672, according to the latest unofficial results from the state Board of Elections.

In Oswego County, where Hoffman was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, inspectors found Hoffman actually won by 1,748 votes -- 12,748 to 11,000.

Read the whole story to see how mistakes on election night have upped Hoffman's totals.

There were about 10,000 absentee ballots requested but the story only notes that 1,303 were returned to the county that is home to the 10th Mountain Division at Ft. Drum. There's also still time for military ballots to be returned and counting won't begin until next week.

Even if all the 10,000 ballots were sent back (and it won't be anywhere near that number) they'd have to break overwhelmingly for Hoffman to have a chance of overcoming the current deficit. The one upside is that most of those ballots were presumably cast before Scozzafava quit the race and endorsed Owens.

It would be interesting as hell to see what would happen if Hoffman is able to pull this off. Owens has already been seated in the House. Presumably he'd have to be removed by a vote of the full House. Would the Democrats delay that long enough under the pretense of 'investigating' what happened? Would they order a new election? The Constitution grants each house of Congress exclusive power over who they will and won't sit as well as they will remove them, so their options are almost limitless and nearly unchallengeable.

Mostly this is just a curiosity because there's really no way Hoffman can pull this off.

Thanks to IreneFingIrene for the heads up.

More: Politico says about 5,400 absentee ballots have been returned, so no way he gets near enough.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:17 AM | Comments (236)
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It's a year away from election day and a lot can happen so don't get cocky but do take a moment to enjoy this.

Former Connecticut Congressman Rob Simmons has an early lead in the Republican primary race for the 2010 U.S. Senate contest and runs better than any other challenger against Sen. Christopher Dodd, topping the Democratic incumbent 49 - 38 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Former World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon gets 43 percent to Sen. Dodd's 41 percent, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds.

..."After inching up in the polls for months, Sen. Christopher Dodd is sliding back down again on job approval. He continues to struggle with independent voters as 60 percent disapprove of the way he is handling his job. President Barack Obama is still popular with independents, but voters say that his support of Dodd won't affect their Senate vote," said Quinnipiac University Poll Director Douglas Schwartz, PhD.

"Healthcare is an issue that should work for Sen. Dodd. Voters who tell us it's the most important issue side with him. But voters who care most about the economy say the Republican candidate will be better able to deal with it. If the economy worsens, this will hurt Dodd."

Please don't tell me how Simmons is a RINO, I get it, I really do. Here's the thing...it's Connecticut. It's one of the bluest of the blue states. Having anyone from there with an R after their name is flat out thievery. If the only thing he does that I like is help to make Mitch McConnell Majority Leader, I'm happy.

Connecticut voters are, wait for it, liberals. They haven't accidentally been voting for the Chris Dodd, Joe Liebermann (yeah, he's a liberal 90% of the time) and Lowell Wickers of the world by accident. It's what they want. If we can give them a slightly less liberal Republican who will make Tom Coburn and Jeff Sessions committee chairs, sign me up.

Keep this in mind...it's Chris Dodd. I don't so much care who wins that seat as I do that this pompous, Friend of Angelo, fool is tossed out on his ass. I'd even be happy if he got booted in a primary.

The big question in this race is...Will LauraW hold her nose and endorse Simmons? The Nutmeg state holds its collective breath in anticipation!

And now that I've pissed a lot of you off, allow me to offer this as a second gift.

Another Quinnipiac poll shows Obama and Democrats dropping like stones in...Ohio.

For the first time, Republican Rob Portman is inching ahead of the two Democrats in the 2010 race for Ohio’s U.S. Senate seat, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Also for the first time, Ohio voters disapprove 50 – 45 percent of the job President Barack Obama is doing, down from his 53 – 42 percent approval September 16 and 49 – 44 percent approval July 7.

Ohio is more or less the prototypical bellwether state.

If these trends hold (and that's a Gigantic if), next year is going to be very, very interesting.

The Connecticut poll story was via Major Garrett's Twitter feed.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:16 AM | Comments (187)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:57 AM | Comments (102)
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