No, really. You lot.

I was at his book signing yesterday in DC, at ATR (Americans for Tax Relief), for his new book, Righteous Indignation.

I spoke to him a bit. Here is the actual exchange:

Breitbart: "You have the best commenters on the internet."

Me: "I know, I hear that all the time." (Subtext: Stop complimenting other people and tell me something good about me.)

Breitbart: "Seriously, they're hysterical."

Me: "Mind if I quote you on that?" (Subtext: I'm funny too, you know.)

Breitbart: "No, go ahead, quote me. Actually, I usually don't even read the articles, I just go to the comments to, uh, see...."

Me: "To get a sense of the room?"

Breitbart: "Yes, to see how things are playing, what people are thinking."

Me: "Well, even though that's kind of a put-down [strained smile] I'll quote you on that too."

So, there you go: Breitbart reads you guys to get a sense of where the movement is heading.

He also, at the end, seemed to suggest some kind of plan to get you guys over on his site, but I'm not sure why he would think I would conspire with him on that.

By the way, I just put my last post into draft because it's long and has more of a "lazy Saturday afternoon long thinky-post" feel to it. I'll cut it some and post it tomorrow.

I also wanted to report a little more on the little bits of rumor I heard yesterday, but I really want to get this up before 5 pm. So I'm posting this part now; I'll do the other stuff later.

Added to the Dialogue: Yes, I'm going from memory, but most of it is actually accurate to the word. I forgot he did say "hysterical." I added that in.

And actually, this was the second time I'd heard this this very night (in a two hour span). Another guy (not a celebrity type) said the same thing.

I honestly do always hear this. Always. Usually the second thing after "I love your blog" or "It's the one I refresh fifteen times a day" (same thing) is the "You have the best commenters" line.

Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (1060)
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America, Ameerica, Indonesia, Indahnesia: Let's call the whole thing off.

So when you ask Obama if America is "exceptional," well, he may not agree to that, but he can tell you honestly: America was always on my short list.

And if you ask him if America's the greatest country on earth, well, not so much, but you can take solace in the fact that America was his safety.

Kind of like a big, useful version of Dartmouth.

It turns out Barack Obama was dreaming big right from an early age - at just nine-years-old he announced he was going to be the prime minister of Indonesia.

The episode from a new biography of the president's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, reveals the roots of a hunger for power which has driven Mr Obama's heady rise from an eccentric upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia to the White House.

It will bring a wry smile to the faces of 'birthers', who are not satisfied he was born in the U.S.

...

His mother's ambition was clearly not lost on the future U.S. president. When his Indonesian stepfather asked him once what he wanted to be when he grew up, he was probably expecting him to say an airline pilot or an athlete.

'"Oh, prime minister', Barry answered,' wrote Ms Scott.

Incidentally, some Indonesian woman who knew him reported that Obama learned to laugh off mockery based on his mixed-race heritage:

Kay said: 'Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool. If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.'

I note that just because Obama's forgetting that of late. Or perhaps never really had to exercise that skill since he was quite young, as he's gotten a lot of ass-kissing these past 20 years. He's getting truculent and petulant and other SAT words that have a bad connotation and not so much laughing and taking it without any reaction.

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (179)
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If you've been watching the news lately, you may have noticed a narrative building. It looks a little something like this, and this. I understand the impulse behind such opinions - historically, incumbent presidents are very difficult to defeat, and none of the announced GOP candidates has thus far had a "wow" factor. Fair enough.

There is a major difference between boring and weak. Charles Krauthammer suggests in today's column that a lack of baggage and flash may be just what we need. He then lists the major candidates and in looking over them, there emerges a trend: political experience. Business success. Briefly:

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House
Tim Pawlenty, former Governor
Mitt Romney, former Governor
Rick Santorum, former Senator
Herman Cain, successful businessman
Michelle Bachmann, former state senator and member of Congress
Haley Barbour, former current Governor
Gary Johnson, former Governor

There's a considerable amount of political and business experience there. Again, not exciting, but weak? It's an assertion without evidence that's only being made to further the "no one can beat The One" narrative. In other words, utter nonsense. If I were consulting one of the candidates, I'd take this head-on in a stump speech. Something along the lines of this:

Pundits in the media and the political class in Washington are pointing to my GOP opponents and I and they're calling us a weak field of candidates...they claim that none of us have what it takes to defeat President Obama. They are trying to make this election about us, but we can't allow them to do that. This election is about a simple set of questions, ones that have been asked before: are you better off now than you were four years ago? Have you had to tighten your budget? How much does it take to fill your car with gas?

These are simple questions, and I suspect for most Americans the answers are no, yes and way more than I can afford.

This election is not about who is the flashiest candidate, or who can attract the biggest crowds or make the prettiest speeches. Are my opponents and I the most exciting people to grace the political stage? Depends on who you ask. But are we weak? No.

You know what's weak? The dollar. The housing market. The job market. Wages. Our foreign policy.

Those are weak, and the policies of the current administration is what has weakened them.

If the administration wants to have a conversation about weakness, I'm all for it because the things that are weak right now matter more to the American people than what the media and pundits are focused on. What do you think Americans care more about? A candidate who 'wows' crowds with his words, or a candidate who wants to move past words and take action that will improve the economy? As we've seen, pretty words and charisma don't create jobs, they don't make the world instantly love us and they don't lower gas prices.

Don't let the media set the narrative. We don't have a weak field. We have a weak president.

Ed. Note: changed two paragraphs, included the word "Business."

Posted by: Slublog at 10:47 AM | Comments (254)
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Pretty nice effort, but futile. This will not change any minds.

There are in fact real conspiracies. We have, and have had since legal codes began, a criminal charge of conspiracy (defined as an agreement between two or more people that at least one of them will undertake a crime).

People do in fact conspire towards non-criminal activities too. These activities are often shady and at least borderline illegal, but people can conspire to do nice things too.

What makes a "conspiracy theory" different from an actual theory of a conspiracy isn't the conspiracy part. It's the inversion of the relationship between premise and conclusion.

When we say something is rational, we usually mean that there are one or more well-founded premises which, taken together, fairly imply a conclusion.

That conclusion need not always be logically inevitable -- outside of mathematics and computer programming, it rarely is inevitable, or definite. Usually it's a fuzzier thing -- the premises tend to support the conclusion. A probabilistic thing more than a mathematical, binary necessity.

But the conclusion must at least be fairly derived from the premises. It must at least be likely or at least plausible.

We say conspiracy theories are irrational because they do not observe the rules of rational, reasonable, fair deduction and inference. In some cases, the premises are simply false and easily provable as such, and yet the conspiracy theorist insists on a different set of non-existent "facts" which, if true in the hypothetical, would support his conclusion.

And/or: The conspiracy theorist makes unfounded, implausible leaps from premise to conclusion.

But both of these irrationalities are caused by the same irrationality: For the conspiracy theorist, premises to not lead to conclusions.

Irrationally, conclusions now lead back to premises, invented on the fly or discovered by wishcasting.

Premises don't give birth to conclusions; conclusions now give birth to premises.

This is why it is of course absolutely futile to challenge the premises of a conspiracy theorist. This is why it is so frustrating. Because rational people are attempting to argue with the irrational, using the rules of rational discussion, which simply do not apply in a conspiracy theory.

The rational mind thinks that if it can demonstrate that the premises a conclusion supposedly rests upon are false, then the conclusion must, logically, fall as well.

But it won't. In a conspiracy theory, with its irrational inversion of the relationship of premise and conclusion, premises do not grant evidentiary support to a conclusion; the conclusion, instead, grants evidentiary support to the conclusion.

If the premise is consistent with the conclusion, it is asserted as true; if the premise is inconsistent with the conclusion, it is asserted that it must be false.

It must be. It must be. We know the conclusion is absolutely true, therefore any and all premises which tend to undermine it must either be false, faked, or forged.

So there's really no point whatsoever in debating these premises, in undermining them (as Salon does), because in a conspiracy theory, the conclusion doesn't rest upon this series of premises. It never did. The conclusion stands independently of evidence, above it, beyond it, immune to the laws of logical gravity, like an anvil floating in mid-air.

The floating anvil of the conclusion does not need the support of planks of evidence to hold it aloft. The conspiracy theorist will suggest various planks to hold its weight up, to make it "look good," so that it's not so obviously a heavier-than-air anvil defying the laws of gravity, but if those planks are knocked away, it just doesn't matter, the anvil can float without them. They're window dressing.
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Posted by: Ace at 08:38 AM | Comments (326)
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As Charles Gibson might say, 'Freedom? Never heard of it."

The US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) says it will seek an order to require Boeing to place the second 787 production line in Washington state, in response to charges filed by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) 17 months after Boeing selected North Charleston, South Carolina to host the site.

Acting general counsel Lafe Solomon says the NLRB "found reasonable cause to believe that Boeing had violated two sections of the National Labor Relations Act because its statements were coercive to employees and its actions were motivated by a desire to retaliate for past strikes and chill future strike activity."

Because the right to strike should never had any negative repercussions for the poor workers. Hell, if they give up their jobs voluntarily, liberals think you should pay more to subsidize their strike. In liberal fantasy land, union members should be able to ruin the business that provides them with work at absolutely no cost or risk to themselves. Only rich, greedy, capitalists should have to assume risk. And hey, should those risks actually lead to some rewards, well, hand them over 'for the common good'.

And what about people who want to work in South Carolina? To hell with them because they aren't really 'workers'. How could they be if they aren't in a union? And every dollar of wages not confiscated in the form of union dues is money that won't ever be funneled to Democrats like Obama.

Government picking economic winners and losers based on nothing more than political power. What could go possibly go wrong?

Added: Slu points to this Instapundit entry which notes that two of the Democratic members of the NLRB were recessed appointed and never subjected to Senate confirmation.

Wherever did Rep. West get the idea that Obama is as arrogant as a third world dictator?

BTW- The House tried but failed to defund the NLRB. Yeah, they wouldn't have gotten it by the Senate or Obama but we need to lay down some more out there markers. We'll eventually win one or two. This would be a good chance to try again, no?

Posted by: DrewM at 08:18 AM | Comments (119)
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I'm pretty sure someone gave a nod to this earlier in the sidebar or on the main page, but the U.N.'s defective crystal ball has resurfaced just in time for the High Holy Day of the pagan religion of Global Warming Climate Change Climate Instability.

This time it seems that there's a little problem with their scare story of 50 million climate refugees by 2010. A very small problem, really. The prediction still holds, other than the fact that neither the origin nor destination of any actual climate refugees can be located.

50 million predicted. Zero found. That's about par for what passes as climate science these days. Another hallmark: "hiding the decline", in this case by deleting the inconvenient truth of their asshattery from the Internet.

In 2005, the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) published a color-coded map under the headline "Fifty million climate refugees by 2010."

...

Six years later, this flood of refugees is nowhere to be found, global average temperatures are about where they were when the prediction was made—and the U.N. has done a vanishing act of its own, wiping the inconvenient map from its servers.

And don't worry about all that noise you hear emanating from Turtle Bay. It's just the sound of the goalposts being shifted.

The program's spokesman tells us the map vanished because "it's not a UNEP prediction. . . . that graphic did not represent UNEP views and was an oversimplification of UNEP views." He added that the program would like to publish a clarification, now that journalists are "making hay of it," except that the staffers able to do so are "all on holiday for Easter."

Yeah. Right. The U.N. map on the U.N. servers didn't represent the U.N.'s views. You just can't make this stuff up.

I'm sure when they get back from "holiday" they'll correct the inconvenient typo by telling us we're all doomed. DOOMED. Just in 2020 now. In the meantime, we'll get to make fun of our favorite enviro-idiot, as Rush's AlGore Doomsday Clock stands at about 4 years and ticking.

On a related note, for all you gearhead morons (and anyone who likes production of massive amounts of CO2, really) Iowahawk's annual celebration of our favorite MILF is not to be missed.

Crap! As I was writing this, I noticed that Tim Blair had found some climate refugees. I'm still standing by my post, though, as I'm pretty sure the U.N. wasn't talking about fish. Maybe.

Posted by: andy at 07:50 AM | Comments (51)
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Good riddance to the Build America Bonds (BABs). I concur. BABs were mainly a badly-hidden bailout of the states (one of many to come, I'm afraid.)

I've often thought that many people (and not just liberals by any means) think of money as magical tickets that can simply be fabricated and spent at will. The modern age of fiat currency has convinced everyone that we have indeed found the magical hole in the sky that creates cash ex nihilo, no questions asked. Our President certainly thinks this way. So does the erstwhile head of the Federal Reserve and his counterpart over at the US Treasury. These people are not alarmed about the mind-boggling debt-load we are carrying because to them, it's not actually real. It's just some made-up number that has no impact on the world of real things. (The fact that most Americans are functionally innumerate doesn't help.)

The next time someone tells you that inflation is low, show them this story and tell them they're full of it. There's a reason that the Fed is careful to ignore commodity prices when they calculate the rate of inflation.

The dread beast of default draws ever closer to Greece, Ireland, and Portugal.

You know that "temporary" weakness in the USD? Well, that weakness might not be so "temporary". (In what I am sure is completely unrelated news, Gold hit a new high of $1512/oz yesterday.)

Somehow, this feels like economic DOOM! news for Old Blighty: some fun-loving youths of carefully-unmentioned ethnic extraction engage in a minor altercation with British cops. Nothing much to it really, hardly worth mentioning. It's not as if this is an unprecedented development, after all. Get a load of the fabled British reserve:

Rod Hansen, Avon and Somerset Constabulary: "This was unacceptable behaviour."

In poor boned L.A., the beating heart of poor boned California, there is a growing understanding that the world has changed but that habits and attitudes have not. The problem in California, as in the nation more generally, is of the most vexing kind: the only solutions that have a prayer of working (drastic cuts, austerity, aggressive pro-growth economic and tax policies) go completely against the prevailing political grain. So the trend is to incrementalism, which won't work but at least slows the DOOM! train down some and gives the illusion of addressing the problem.
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Posted by: Monty at 05:22 AM | Comments (212)
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In the heat of composition I find that I have inadvertently assumed the form of a large centipede. I am accordingly dictating the rest to my secretary.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:57 AM | Comments (218)
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From the News-You-Can-Use Dept: How To Tell Which Side of Your Rental Car The Gas Cap is on

For most cars the answer is to look for the arrow next to the gas tank icon. Sure it's a little thing but then life is the accumulation of lots of little things so why not remove a little angst when you can.

Now don't you already feel a tiny bit better?

Also here are the Five Best Daily Deals Sites which according to a poll by Lifehacker are:

1. Woot!
2. 1 Sale A Day
3. Groupon
4. LivingSocial
5. TeeFury

I've used Woot! before and gotten some pretty good deals - their occasional Woot! Offs where they clear out their warehouse can be particularly good. Other good deal sites I frequent are Fat Wallet, Slickdeals, Wow! Coupons, and Dealcoupon.

So now you can't go complaining to the Internet Authorities that you never got anything useful from the HQ. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:45 PM | Comments (704)
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I have a problem. Actually, I have many problems, some of which require ointment, but I'm not here to talk about those because I left my rash album at the in-law's place.

No, my problem as it pertains to politics is this--despite years of following politics, I still don't get how leftists think.

Oh, sure I know WHAT they think. But as far as what goes on those looney heads of theirs ... how they get from A-B, so to speak ... I got nothing.

And that's because I've never been a leftist.

Here's a story. You guys like stories, right? Those of you who can read?
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Posted by: Code Red at 03:50 PM | Comments (663)
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