Good nominee for dumbest comment ever, though seriously there's so much competition it's really pretty absurd to try to pick a winner.

Posted by: Ace at 10:54 AM | Comments (127)
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The ad is working, too.

Happiness is a warm gun, after all. (John Lennon's take-off on the Peanuts' line "Happiness is a warm puppy.")

Important Update: Commenters have brought it to my attention that the reporterette here, Brittney Hopper, is hot and has a sweater full of mischief. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (176)
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Good God Almighty.

The Rodeo Clown really wants Obama to stay in office, huh?

This, of course, will encourage Ron Paul to do what he probably is already inclined to do.

Wonderful.

Apparently some among us talk a good game about the crucial need of removing Obama from office, but sort of have a kind of Battered Wife Syndrome, and just can't quit the big lug.

Some of us are apparently going to work our very hearts out to make sure the batterer who gives our lives meaning remains president.

Posted by: Ace at 09:47 AM | Comments (341)
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Honestly, I think she's just recusing herself so she can not recuse herself on ObamaCare, and then say "But I recused myself before!"

Anyway, she won't be deciding this one:

In its notice, the court said Justice Elena Kagan had recused herself from the decision to take the case.

Justice Kagan has come under fire for not recusing herself from the decision to hear challenges to the new health care law.

Posted by: Ace at 09:09 AM | Comments (120)
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From ArthurK., this guy is a definitely not on Team Tebow, and yet his analysis seems persuasive.

Michael Irvin, I think, is on Team Tebow, generally, and he said similar things: It's not what Tebow does during those first ineffectual three quarters, it's what he doesn't do, which is throw a lot of interceptions. Because he doesn't throw a lot of interceptions, Denver's defense (which is really a lot more responsible for Tebow's success than his arm or his legs or his faith) is never far out of the game. They're not exhausted and demoralized. They're not giving up a bunch of short-field touchdowns and then hating themselves.

As this guy says:

Passer efficiency ratings and context-neutral stats simply don't capture what Tebow does well. He isn't an NFL-level passer on a consistent basis, and yet he also isn't novel or completely unconventional. In fact, he does what every non-elite quarterback blessed with a great defense is told to do in the NFL: protect the ball and keep the game close. In general, Tebow has done a wonderful job over the last seven games at limiting his turnovers and giving his team a chance to win by keeping them within striking distance. He's just another "game manager" quarterback that actually adheres to the requirements of the job description, taking very few risks with the ball early in games and often making a single, lock-on read before pulling the ball down and running with it. In even the most extreme cases, Tebow is tasked with a half-field read featuring a single route combination and a dump-off option to go with his default scramble impulse.

If a quarterback doesn't have the skill and anticipation to make meaningful NFL-caliber throws, everyone in their right mind usually calls for that guy to become a "game manager" focused on not losing the team the game with costly turnovers and errors. Early game situations marked by grossly inaccurate passes and an inability to diagnose coverages and pressure schemes aren't necessarily a death blow to Tebow's reputation or his legitimacy. Countless quarterbacks have been asked to become game managers but have chosen to perilously overstep their bounds just to escape the label, even at the expense of team wins. Meanwhile, Tebow is not scared to prioritize ball security over his stat line or his reputation as an NFL quarterback. If he has to use his legs to get first downs and avoid turnovers, it beats the potentially disastrous alternative. To deny the value of that dedication would be to ignore a key aspect of Tebow's impact: he allows his defense to do their job and keep the game close. Tebow Time is real in large part because he is committed to his role as a game manager.

But he's also missing something. Young starting quarterbacks tend to throw a lot of those interceptions. They also tend to get sacked a lot. They also tend to lose a lot.

Tebow isn't losing. That may not be primarily due to his skills, but he's got an advantage that a lot of debut quarterbacks don't: He's learning to win while he also learns the game.

There was a quarterback for the Texans a few years back who I thought got a raw deal. David Carr (thanks, commenters!) The guy got sacked constantly. Constantly. For some reason I always thought he could/should be a top quarterback... but he wasn't allowed to be. His apprenticeship consisted largely of being blindsided by defensive ends.

His offensive line just couldn't protect him.

But I had to wonder what actual lessons he'd learned from that. I figure the lesson he'd have to learn-- which any human being would learn -- is "Passing is awful and results in pain and having my spine twisted by a 300 pound man running very fast at me."

In other words, no matter what he learned on paper or from films, the real lesson he was learning -- the lesson his body and his experience taught him -- is that if he holds the ball for more than one and a half seconds he's going to be hit by a small car.

He also learned to lose, because (not really due to his own failings) he just did it so much. He was damaged goods, and his career stunted, because in his formative years, he basically just learned how to get his ribs cracked.

This writer goes on to knock Tebow for having poor pattern-recognition skills and not developing the ability to "see the whole field" quickly and make sound decisions not via the intellect but via feel and muscle memory. But that's ludicrous -- no debut quarterback can do that. Not even Peyton Manning did that.

I think Tom Brady was pretty solid at that out the gate, but I also think he had one more year of experience as a back-up, and also, he is freakishly good at playing the game with his eyes.

That's something every quarterback (with the qualified and also trivial exception of Brady) has to learn, and they learn that as they play.

I think the odds are still against Tebow ever being a truly elite quarterback. But when you consider that he's passed a bunch of gates already -- a bunch of gates where he could have failed -- he's at least in the hunt. It's a mistake to claim he's something other than what he is -- a young, inexperienced quarterback who is constantly re-setting his feet and who throws a lot of inaccurate passes and who still sees the field in "fast motion," as opposed to the slowed-down motion that the true elite quarterbacks see it in -- but he's getting a chance to learn in real games, which only a smattering of quarterbacks ever get, and he's learning about winning while doing so.

One potential problem is that he's learning the wrong things, and maybe will keep sticking with his bad mechanics because those bad mechanics are, somehow, winding up producing wins, but no one seems to be whispering he's uncoachable or arrogant or unwilling to learn.

If Tebow were a third-year starting quarterback, I'd say this stuff -- staring down the one receiver he intends to throw to, constantly re-shuffling his footing, not seeing the whole field -- was a big problem, and he should be benched to become a backup.

But he's not. He's a first-year starter. (I know he was drafted last year, but I really don't think you can learn the quarterback position (or most other positions) by any other method besides playing in real games.) And there's a metric ton of things he doesn't know, and doesn't do well.

And yet, during this apprenticeship, he's 7-1. He's doing something right, then, isn't he?

Oh, and while Denver's defense deserves the bulk of the credit here, Michael Irvin also pointed out that Denver had the same defense when they opened the season 1 and 4.

Posted by: Ace at 08:35 AM | Comments (222)
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Newt Gingrich's climb to the top of the GOP heap was fueled in part by his "New Newt" persona. He was the guy who refused to attack the other candidates but focused on Obama and debate moderators. Other candidates failed to attack him because he was pulling up the rear most of the year.

That all ended Saturday night when Gingrich was at a debate for the first time as the front runner. Mitt went after him as insider and Gingrich shot back that the only reason Mitt wasn't a long time politician is he keeps losing races.

The sniping continued after the debate with Romney calling on Gingrich to return the money Gingrich made from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That was enough to get Newt to revert to his old self.

"If Governor Romney would like to give back all the money he's earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain, then I would be glad to then listen to him. And I will bet you $10, not $10,000, that he won't take the offer."

Personally I think both attacks are pretty lame. The money Newt was paid by Fannie and Freddie was for work done. If you want to say he shouldn't have taken them on as a client, fine but he met his contractual obligations, so he got paid.

As for Mitt's work at Bain Capital, I was unaware that conservatives and Republicans were against management maximizing profits for shareholders. Leave it to liberals to argue that companies exist to give people jobs. Conservatives shouldn't feed into that nonsense. Mitt made money for the people he worked with, that was his job. End of story.

If Mitt and Newt spend the next 3 weeks before the Iowa Caucuses beating the hell out of each other it could turn voters off both of them. Is there enough time for someone, say Rick Perry, to push through the two squabbling candidate by keeping their focus on Obama and the economy?

If it had started a few weeks ago, I'd say yes. Perry had a very good debate performance (I don't mean very good on some Perry Curve but objectively very good) but I don't think there's enough time.

Related(ish): Rasmussen poll says 49% of GOP voters think Gingrich is strongest candidate to go up against Obama to 24% who say Romney.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:54 AM | Comments (257)
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If the payroll tax cut keeps getting extended, it may finally do the job of killing off Social Security. I tend to doubt it personally: I think this is simply a ploy by the Democrats to drive the program into crisis, and then use this manufactured crisis as an excuse to jack up taxes. (This is after all their modus operandi during the reign of His Majesty Barack Obama.) To the extent that the Democrat Party is "about" anything, it is "about" government and the welfare state, and it will fight to the bitter end to keep the welfare-state plates spinning.

Will public-sector pension plans run out of money? Yes, in many -- perhaps even most -- cases. Investments in a slow-growth economy will not solve the problem, and taxpayers will not stand for the kind of tax hikes that would be necessary to make these programs solvent. Money that can't be paid out, won't be.

You know what the real problem with the “too big to fail” philosophy is? It’s not true. (In fact, more often than not it turns into "too big to succeed". See: our own federal government.) We’ve convinced ourselves that this fallacy is true, though, and in the process we’ve basically only managed to enlarge the issue to such an extent that we’ve turned a “problem” into a “catastrophe”.

The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP)...without stability or growth.

Reforms slowing in China and India? Well, the truth is that a lot of the “reforms” were never real to begin with: the West has a habit of seeing the East the way it wants to see it rather than the way it really is. The western-exceptionalist argument has never been a racist argument (never mind the nattering of the Left) but rather a cultural one -- if an economy is just people doing what people do, then it matters how and why people do those things. Rule of law, civic involvement, respect for authority, and the primacy of the individual over the collective: these are the strengths of the West, not weaknesses.

You want some depressing chart-fu? HereÂ’s some depressing chart-fu.

One more reason among the multitudes as to why Chicago (and Illinois) is boned. You think Chicago can't look like Detroit? Just give it time.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:55 AM | Comments (221)
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I wrote yesterday that Governor Perry has proposed eight constitutional amendments so far. This is not unusual.

Even when you include the Equal Rights Amendment, conservatives have been much, much more likely than liberals to propose amendments to the Constitution for the past thirty or forty years. For example, some version of a human life amendment has been batted around for almost forty years. A flag desecration amendment has had attention off and on since Reagan's presidency. A federal marriage amendment has been on the GOP's radar since at least 2002, when the first one was formally introduced in the House. The Tea Party-inspired resurgence of a balanced budget amendment is only the latest revision to get widespread attention.

Also, we are presently in the middle of the third-longest period between constitutional amendments in the history of the country. The last amendment to be ratified, the Twenty-Seventh, was ratified by the states in 1992. But, in fact, modern amendments are even more remote than that seems. The Twenty-Seventh Amendment was submitted to the states for ratification in 1789. It just took 203 years to get it done. The most recent amendment that was actually proposed and ratified shortly thereafter was the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which gave 18 year-olds the right to vote in 1971.

So there is quite a bit of built-up interest in making some changes. Liberals like to cluck about conservatives, "constitutionalists," "originalists," or whatnot who want to amend the Constitution, as if the amendment process wasn't a part of the initial plan for our country. They're also conveniently ignorant, apparently, of the Eleventh and Twelfth Amendments, which were proposed and ratified within the lifetimes of the Founders and with their participation.

Many of Perry's amendments aren't outside the mainstream at all. The balanced budget amendment, the human life amendment, the federal marriage amendment, repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, and repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment are all long-standing conservative goals. Perry's remaining ideas---abolishing lifetime tenure for federal judges, giving Congress a veto over Supreme Court decisions, and allowing organized prayer back into public schools---are a bit out-of-the-ordinary, but not so much that they should be dismissed without considering the problems that have impelled Perry to propose them.

While we're thinking about constitutional amendments, how about a second look at a Federalism Amendment?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:33 AM | Comments (66)
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Happy Monday.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:56 AM | Comments (91)
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The Red Cross and Video Games - Or Why You Might Already Be a War Criminal

So the International Red Cross seems to have run out of things to worry about despite the multiple on-going human rights abuses in Syria and pretty much all of Africa and so they've turned their eye towards ...video games:

Delegates at the 31st International Conference of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Red Crescent raised the concerns over the potential “International Humanitarian Law” violations – which can constitute war crimes – during a workshop in Geneva.
“Exactly how video games influence individuals is a hotly debated topic, but for the first time, Movement partners discussed our role and responsibility to take action against violations of IHL in video games,” the Red Cross wrote in its daily bulletin.

“The aim for the ICRC is that they send the right signals to their hundreds of millions of players by rewarding respect for IHL and penalising violations,” the spokesperson said.

The Red Cross said if it finds the conventions have been violated, they may ask game developers to conform to international laws or encourage governments to create laws that regulate the gaming industry, Kotaku reported.

So the good news is that it's not a war crime to play Call of Duty. On the other hand the 32nd ICRC conference is less than a year away so be wary of what the delegates will come up with next.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:13 PM | Comments (770)
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