"In case you couldn't tell from Woody Harrelson saying it five thousand million times at the beginning, this is the trailer for HBO's Game Change which stars Ed Harris John McCain [and] Julianne Moore as Tina Fey as Sarah Palin[.]" -- dlisted

HBO, you know, makes "important" movies.

Don't blame me. I hate HBO productions and don't ever subscribe to them precisely because they clutter their channels with infinite replayings of their in-house pretendertaintment dreck.

Yes, I know, Deadwood was good. (For two seasons.) That don't justify.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:26 PM | Comments (249)
Post contains 98 words, total size 1 kb.

Via Michael Graham, the Gingrich soundbite of the day.

As a resident of the Bay State, I wholeheartedly agree.

Video below the fold. more...

Posted by: andy at 03:48 PM | Comments (108)
Post contains 37 words, total size 1 kb.

Transcript at the link, video below.

“It’s legitimate, it’s legitimate. These things are pretty incendiary,” Borger pressed.

“Because of people like you,” Paul riffed.

Is that his actual, considered position? That the newsletters are incendiary only due to a Liberal Media making them so?

He actually has made that claim before. When these first came to light, he did not disclaim authorship. He simply said you had to read them all "in context" and not seize upon any particular sentence, but read everything he's said "in context."

So he has in fact attempted to claim that these newsletters, like the Ron Paul Survival Report (!!!), were not actually a problem at all as far as substance.

Just this darned liberal media (and only this darned liberal media) making a stink about it.

More: Ron Paul endorsed Cynthia McKinney in 2008 (did you know that?) and yes, Ron Paul gives sneaky little-shout-outs to Truthers.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 02:05 PM | Comments (272)
Post contains 175 words, total size 2 kb.

Apparently there's a tradition of having a raffle, and whichever sailor wins gets the honor of being the first off the boat and first to kiss his/her awaiting sweetheart.

Now you know I get the shrieking vapors when someone even utters the word "conspiracy" but I ask you: do most lesbians in the Navy look like this?

One girl is pretty. The other girl, in the Navy uniform, is a freakin' hottie, and by the way, congratulations on the female dress uniforms, Navy. They're adorable. (Clarification: Apparently they're both in the Navy, just not on the same ship (which I assume would be against the rules), so only one's in uniform for this.)

Explanation: Mallamutt explains this wasn't a conspiracy -- except of the most common sort, the conspiracy of shared interest.

Conspiracy, no. Every other raffle participant putting the winner name on the raffle slip to get to watch that.....I am not ruling that out yet.

Is there a 2nd base raffle and if not how do we get the ball rolling on that?
more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:06 PM | Comments (316)
Post contains 197 words, total size 1 kb.

Bad behavior, of course.

I know we're not there or anything, and maybe I'm going Godwin, but I always think of the Communists and Nazis fighting in the streets when I see this crap.

Grow up, pigs. No matter how much noise you make, Mommy will never really love you.

By the way, Newt promises a more aggressive campaign to combat his rivals' negative ads against him.

This might be an example of that, in which he characterizes Mitt Romney as essentially claiming the right to lie.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:04 PM | Comments (194)
Post contains 97 words, total size 1 kb.

It's even better. This company isn't even American. It's German, or at least the parent company is.

$2.1 billion spent on this particular company, Solar Millennium. You're welcome.

Bell also tells Newsmax that untold billions of stimulus funds actually went to benefit foreign companies. A new solar plant in Blythe, Calif., received a $2.1 billion stimulus grant, despite the fact that the project was awarded to a German firm, Solar Millennium and its U.S. subsidiary, Solar rust of America.

The company might want to consider changing its name from Solar Millennium to Solar Six or Seven Years, Tops.

Solar Millennium said today it has begun insolvency proceedings, the second German solar manufacturer to do so this month.

The company has been trying to sell its pipeline of large-scale concentrating solar projects in the U.S. But because Solar Millennium was not able to negotiate desired terms, it had to enter into insolvency to "save existing assets," the company said in a statement.

The steep drop in the cost of photovoltaic cells doomed Solar Millennium, as it previously doomed Solyndra. So apparently for all of Obama's and Biden's squawking about "beating China," we will not beat China in this field, and all the money spent on subsidizing companies to "beat China" will be lost.

This also is a case of the state attempting to pick winners and losers and failing, as usual. Obama tried to pump up companies promising flashy new technology. These technologies have failed, or, at the very least, are not commercially viable at the moment.

It is claimed -- and I think it's actually been proven true, but correct me if I'm wrong -- that picking stocks by random throws at a dart board produces results in line with lots of research and serious thinking.

But Obama, of course, can predict the market, and millions of happenstance events that shape the market, because he's smart, you see, and he has smart people working for him.

So they will make this planned-economy/socialism thing work, because, God knows, no "smart people" have ever had their hands in such a venture in the past.

The beginning of wisdom is the realization that you're just as smart as you think you are.

Dumbass.

Thanks to Ogre Gunner.

Posted by: Ace at 10:54 AM | Comments (244)
Post contains 408 words, total size 3 kb.

I've suggested that I would be okay with nominating Romney. Because he's generally conservative (ish) and probably a good enough manager.

The problem is just that Romney is unacceptable to around half of the party. And he is unable to make himself acceptable. And in fact he keeps making it worse.

Requiring people to have health insurance is "conservative," GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney told MSNBC on Wednesday, but only if states do it.

...

"Personal responsibility," Romney said, "is more conservative in my view than something being given out for free by government."

"There were two options in my state," he said. "One was to continue to allow people without insurance to go to the hospital and get free care, paid for by the government, paid for by taxpayers."

"The best idea is to let each state craft their own solution because that's, after all, the heart of conservatism: to follow the Constitution," he said.

The guy is throwing away the presidency because he can't say "I erred."

Romney has the makings of an argument here, but I've never heard him make it.

He can claim (and I think this is true, or true enough for politics, leastaways) that Massachusetts already had a heavily subsidized/socialist-leaning health care system, with lots of taxpayer money diverted to pay for the indigent's health care.

He can attempt to distinguish himself from Obama by claiming that in Massachusetts, where socialized medicine already existed, prior to his governorship, that his plan pushed the state's health care to the right from its initial left position.

And he can go on to say that given that America, the nation, does not have a socialized health care model as an, ahem, pre-existing condition (oooh, you can use that, Mitt, gratis), Obama's effort pushed health care in the wrong direction, to the left, away from personal responsibility, away from personal ownership and private contract, towards government takeover.

A doctor must treat his patient as he finds him, after all. He cannot tell a man dying of lung cancer to go back in time and stop smoking 30 years ago.

He can make the case that RomneyCare was an attempt to push the heavily-socialized and therefore dysfunctional health care system of Massachusetts to a slightly more responsible, "conservative" place, whereas imposing such a system on a nation that still had voluntary health care insurance was anti-conservative.

This isn't a very strong argument, but it's the only one he can make. And I suppose he is sort of implying some of this; he should say it directly.

Because he's not going to win if he keeps insisting that the individual mandate -- which is our best hope of defeating ObamaCare, both in the courts and legislatively -- is a good, proper, "conservative" measure.

To some extent we conservatives have seized on the Individual Mandate opportunistically -- we don't like it, of course, but we don't like much about ObamaCare; this just seems like our bet hope of undoing it all.

Romney is essentially telling us, then, "Give up on fighting ObamaCare, and you can then have me as President."

That's an exchange few of us are willing to make. If the choice is between defeating ObamaCare and getting President Romney... uh, that's not really a choice requiring much thought. You lose.

But he's continuing on and on like this.

Which actually makes me doubt he's really as smart as he's cracked up to be, or as electable as claimed.

If he can't figure this much out -- we want to repeal ObamaCare far, far more than we want President Romney -- then his political instincts are not merely poor, but outright atrocious.

Say what you will about Perry, but this belief of Romney's -- that the party will give up its best weapon against ObamaCare just for the dubious benefit of electing Mitt Romney as President -- is far stupider than anything that's come out of Perry's mouth.

"Heartless"? Perry was desperately appealing to emotion when confronted with a tough attack, on the spot. But Romney's had years to see this problem coming and years to formulate a response.

And what he's come up with, thus far, is that "the individual mandate is actually quite conservative."

Posted by: Ace at 10:05 AM | Comments (366)
Post contains 734 words, total size 5 kb.

Why post this before Christmas?

Ah yes, because the typical Obama voter will not see her family except on Christmas.

Remember the Reason for the Season: organizing for Obama.

There is a persistent theme running through the various liberal emotional support aids like this. We also saw Planned Parenthood offering advice on how to argue for partial birth abortion at Thanksgiving (pass the gravy, and by the way, did you know that most babies' lives are going to suck anyway?).

The theme is that the various members of this coalition actually do not have an existing group of familial supporters, and thus Obama, or Planned Parenthood, must step up in loco parentis as they say in law, to provide the motherly uplift and fatherly guidance otherwise missing from lives in search of structure and meaning.

That's not terribly surprising, of course. That is the appeal of the liberal brand of government -- paternalism for those lacking a genuine pater themselves.

A market survey group determined that the OWS demographic consisted largely of those seeking ersatz families and substitute religions:

First, that many of the rank-and-file occupiers feel isolated in their lives, and appear to lack basic community ties such as are provided by participation in clubs, churches, and strong families.... They thus attach to their political causes with something like a religious fervor. For many, a commitment to “social justice” is “not the end, but rather a means to an inflated sense of self and purpose in their own lives.” Crucially, involvement with others who agree with them provides an “overwhelming feeling of being part of a family.”

This actually brings up one of my main disputes with evangelical atheists. Many speak as if religion is the only non-rational belief system that people seize upon. (I'm using non-rational even though it's not a word to avoid negative words like "irrational.")

Whereas I see it as one of many. The atheists speak as if the only non-rational belief system is religion, if they stamp out religion, they stamp out unreason.

Not true. Throughout history religion has been displaced almost entirely by other religions, though those other religions were often unconventional, such as cults, Madame Blatvasky's insipid neopagan Atlantis-and-psionics mysticism, Hitlerian and Klanner race-lore, Marxism, cultish Gaiaism/"green" fetishism, Obamaism, Trutherism, Bircherite The World Is A Conspiracy paranoia, etc.

Many people have a strong metaphysical drive to know something about the universe and their place in it.* They ask questions which really cannot be answered, by anyone, and certainly not a scientist restricted to strict empirical inquiry, without a leap of faith.

I would be far less annoyed by the evangelical atheists if they were a little less irrational themselves, and did not fixate singlemindedly on their bugaboo of organized religion.

That fixation seems pretty irrational to me. It seems like it springs from an early-development intellectual trauma they can't get over -- at some point, in their formative years, they believed in God, then had a shattering realization that there was no God, and have been haunted by that ever since.

Which is understandable. As people's petty irrationalities are usually understandable.

But if the crusade is against unreason, then let's some more emotional and intellectual firepower directed against all the other non-rational belief systems.

Particularly those which have actually killed, enslaved, or impoverished millions in the last 50 years.

* By the way, this is another point upon which I disagree with atheists. They make it pretty plain that they think rather highly of themselves for not buying into religion.

On this point I can only generalize from my own experience. I don't consider my own lack of faith to be something I can brag on, because I know the chief reason for it is my lack of interest in the metaphysical.

That is to say, the major reason I do not seek a religion to answer big questions is that the big questions actually do not interest me.

That's not some kind of discipline I've imposed upon my mind. It's nothing I "did," like learning a foreign language. It's just a general disinterest in metaphysics.

This seems less of a determined, active intellectual stance -- at least to me, in my own experience -- than simply being born as a certain innate psychological type.

I dated a girl a long, long time ago who was consumed by the Big Questions. Not just about religion, but about art and culture and intellectual traditions. All of it.

I honestly did not understand her-- I didn't understand why she was so focused on such questions. I suppose the answers that satisfied me -- "Just because" and "There is no reason" and "It is fundamentally unknowable" -- did not satisfy her.

But I can't say she was less intellectual that myself. Pretty much the opposite. She was a dedicated intellectual type, the sort of conscious-intellectual-by-self-definition.

She was just different than I was. Not lesser, but different. At root we just had a different starting assumption about the limits of human understanding and inquiry. Her position was that these things could be known, hence it was constructive to try to know them; my position is/was they can't be known, hence it is futile to bother. Neither assumption is provable.

Which brings up another ersatz religion -- egotism, and those who insist that what works for them should work for everyone, and what interests them should interest everyone, and what animates them should animate everyone.

I think that is a more troublesome religion than many of the others.

Posted by: Ace at 08:56 AM | Comments (242)
Post contains 951 words, total size 6 kb.

Greg Pollowitz over at NRO's Planet Gore blog has a few interesting observations on Keystone XL. First,

One thing lost in the entire Keystone XL debate is that we’re really not talking about an entirely new project. The “XL” portion is the proposed expansion of the original Keystone pipeline that is, much to the amazement of some I would gather, currently operating safely while transporting oil from Canada to the United States.

The left's arguments about potential damage to the Ogallala aquifer, etc., seem pretty muted when you consider this point. But don't get too excited quite yet because,

But jobs really arenÂ’t the important issue. ThereÂ’s an issue brewing that could derail the pipeline, and itÂ’s an issue conservatives really should be taking a hard look at: eminent domain. (emphasis added)

Read the whole piece, as Greg has pulled together some good information on TransCanada's use of eminent domain to clear the way for its pipeline routes.

These seem to be the exact same kind of takings that Justice Thomas warned about in his Kelo dissent:

If such “economic development” takings are for a “public use,” any taking is, and the Court has erased the Public Use Clause from our Constitution ...

Pollowitz's piece points out the national security arguments in support of the pipeline that countervail fifth amendment concerns to some extent, but this seems too cute by half.

Is the theoretical national security benefit of Keystone XL a "public use" under the fifth amendment, or does this veer into Thomas' "public purpose" danger zone?

I come down where Greg does at the end of the day: If TransCanada wants to build the pipeline, they should do it without eminent domain.

Posted by: andy at 08:17 AM | Comments (187)
Post contains 297 words, total size 2 kb.

Thou shalt not doubt the yellow metal. This is the goldbug's creed. (I wish I had a Scrooge McDuck-style mountain of gold coins in my vault. Not so much because of the "rich bastard" aspect, but because then I could slide down it while laughing in childlike glee.)

China is not our problem. We are our problem. I inveigh against the China-boosters not because I’m afraid the Chinese will “replace” us in some way (they won’t and they couldn’t even if they wanted to) but because it distracts us from the real root of the problem: ourselves, our behaviors, our culture, our society. Salvation cannot come from outside; it must start within. This is as true of a nation as it is of an individual.

Note from the Greek government: “Dear Taxpayer: You know that tax refund you’ve been waiting on? Don’t hold your breath. You’ve been dodging your taxes for years, you bastard, and turnabout is fair play.”

North KoreaÂ’s per-capita GDP is the same as AmericaÂ’s! Well, the same as AmericaÂ’s was in 1826.

Speaking of North Korea...noted philosopher and economist Ms. Whoopi Goldberg points out this stunning revelation about Communism: “On paper, it makes perfect sense.” In real-world terms it didn’t work out so well, but what’s a hundred million murdered innocents more or less?

MSNBC’s headline: “Unemployment fell in 43 states in November”. My headline: “Millions of discouraged workers left the labor force in November.”

In praise of housewife economics.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 05:09 AM | Comments (293)
Post contains 1362 words, total size 12 kb.