Evening Moron Nation! Maet couldn't make it tonight so I'm filling in at the last minute.

I saw this mini-documentary the other day and it's a tremendous look into the life of a strange creature that many of us have known in our lives. Perhaps, some of us have been this creature. Some still are. This creature? Why, it's The Douche. Be afraid, very afraid. (video after the break).
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Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:00 PM | Comments (577)
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And, more than likely, this is coming from the White House, or at least AG Holder, because it's the political appointees signing the orders to decline to prosecute.

a number of leaders of Islamic organizations... were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorneyÂ’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade.

But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

Included in those indictments was at least one of the co-founders of CAIR, based on “Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad,” a March 31 DOJ legal memo from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. A second DOJ official familiar with the investigation independently confirmed these details. Omar Ahmad is one of CAIR’s co-founders and its chairman emeritus. He was personally named, along with CAIR itself, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. During the trial FBI Agent Lara Burns testified that both Omar Ahmad and current CAIR executive director Nihad Awad were caught on FBI wiretaps attending a 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders in Philadelphia.

A source at DoJ says it's completely political.

from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

The source adds that because we're just giving up on these cases, the evidence we've collected, implicating many of this Islamic groups in terror fundraising, will simply be locked away forever -- which is the outcome sought.

Chilling stuff.

More from the same source in a follow-up.

Are these organizations ratting out the terrorists? At all? Here's an interesting claim: They only drop dime on someone as a "terrorist" when that person is actually working for the government as an informant gathering information about terrorists. By branding that informant a "terrorist," it suddenly makes his testimony weak and almost unusable.

That's what this guy says is the extent of CAIR's "cooperation" -- deliberately tanking terrorism cases.

In all my years working counterterrorism I canÂ’t recall a single case where we prosecuted someone based on a tip from MPAC or CAIR or any of these groups. The only time we hear from them is when they think that someone is a government informant. ThatÂ’s how MPAC blew a big al-Qaeda case in California. When they thought they had somebody spying inside the mosque, they called the FBI and said he was a potential terrorist and the whole case ended up falling apart. So what do we do in response? Did we cut them off? No, DHS has them train thousands of TSA employees in cultural sensitivity. I almost fell out of my chair when I heard about that. Oh, and they still call us when they want to bitch about us arresting one of their friends or employees or board members. But under Obama and Holder that doesnÂ’t happen so much anymore. Just ask Omar Ahmad.

2012 can't come soon enough.

Posted by: Ace at 02:26 PM | Comments (460)
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I didn't even know about this until now (I didn't watch TV all day yesterday and only was on the internet for a half hour; no tv yet today either). My hopes are with all the stricken.

45 dead, mostly in North Carolina, and particularly in Bertie County.

"Everybody's been coming together," said Dave Western, pastor of Kendale Acres Free Will Baptist Church in Sanford, North Carolina. Along with the adjacent parsonage, the church escaped largely unscathed from the massive tornado Saturday that reduced several surrounding homes to sticks.

"That's the wonderful thing about this. We had people we didn't even know coming by wanting to help," said Western, whose church has served as a meal center for many neighbors and a base for delivering food and water to other neighbors by golf cart.

At least 97 tornadoes struck between Thursday and Saturday, according to National Weather Service records. Yet more tornadoes will probably be confirmed on top of the 249 reports received during the three-day period, CNN meteorologist Sean Morris said.

A tornado was videotaped at harrowing range by a guy who remained calm the whole time; he says he didn't fear because he's a Marine and he loves Jesus.

Posted by: Ace at 01:39 PM | Comments (93)
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Speaking of good ideas for commercials...

Standard & Poor's lowered its outlook for the nation's long-term debt Monday, saying the political grousing over the deficit could put more pressure on the still shaky economic recovery.

"The outlook reflects our view of the increased risk that the political negotiations over when and how to address both the medium- and long-term fiscal challenges will persist until at least after national elections in 2012," said S&P credit analyst Nikola Swann.

Our credit rating was not actually lowered, but the outlook -- the prognostication -- was reduced from "stable" (will continue) to "negative" (will fall). The window they're forecasting is 2-3 years away.

Maybe I'm just loving my own stink today but I think that's another good one.

Identity theft. Shady imposter with access to your credit cards running up a huge tab on luxury goods. Film it!

Posted by: Ace at 11:47 AM | Comments (263)
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The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today about what happens when unions feel their special privileged status slipping away. The article, aptly titled: When Unions Get Desperate, contained a humorous tidbit. One of the union's strategies is to appeal to Ben & Jerry's to create a "labor-union flavored ice cream."

One wonders just what exactly "labor-union flavored ice cream" would taste like and what ingredients it would contain. Certainly it would contain nuts, grease, and wine. In the comments below, please make your suggestions. H/t weaselzippers.us

Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:38 AM | Comments (139)
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As I suspected on both counts: The 12 year window is chosen to hide the fact that he's really talking about much smaller amounts of deficit reduction, but wanted it to at least look like it was in the same class as Ryan's plan.

And also as I suspected: The majority of savings will start taking place in the conveniently-distant years 11 and 12. Plenty o' time before his bigger cuts begin kicking in. And plenty of time to undo those changes, even if they were done in the first place.

Any serious plan starts with cutting now, not in what science fiction refers to as "the near future." "The near future" is an illusion, a fiction. It's all hypothetical.

Dishonest.

Pair this with his risible "spending reductions in the tax code" and his lies about transparency and signing statements and you can start to paint Obama as dishonest, devious, and, maybe most importantly of all, ridiculous.

Via Instapundit.

Posted by: Ace at 11:27 AM | Comments (40)
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Even though I said in the last post that it's time to take the kid gloves off, I realized, even as I was writing that, that that wasn't true.

The public tends to steeply discount naked personal attacks.

This subject, in and of itself, will gain little purchase, as I am convinced that the persuadable non-committed public doesn't care about 1) procedure or 2) abstract spats over constitutional powers. This is both.

So the idea is to package this with a series of other Obama lies -- about transparency, about debating health care with television cameras present, and so on -- and tie them all together with the message "What else isn't he telling you?," putting his similar promises about taxing the middle class into question.

That they definitely care about. So if you do it this way, you tie something they probably don't care about with something they do care about, and you also attack Obama's character.

And here's the clever part: You're making an important argument here, in which the attack on his character is incidental rather than central.

I think the public tends to tune out direct attacks on character with a shrug. 'Oh, they all say that about each other," they think, "and besides, they're all liars."

Okay, fine. Well make it an incidental part of a larger point about middle class taxes. That way, they see it as directly relevant, and what might be an otherwise ignored personal attack is now remembered. It's now part of the basket of risks of Obama's reelection.

It'll stick with them better this way. It will seem that the personal attack isn't being made as such, but as part of a policy point. The public loves believing that they don't care about personal attacks, only policy. They're wrong about that -- they care about personal attacks more than they admit and about policy much less than they'd ever admit to themselves -- but playing it this way feeds into that self-illusion they have about themselves.

Sorry to be so cynical. But as the Dan Akroyd character in Tommy Boy said, slightly modified: What the American public doesn't know about itself is what makes it the American public.

The mushy middle will claim, every time you poll them, that by overwhelming margins of 95% to 5% they want to hear about "the issues" and not "personal" or "political" attacks.

But the fact of the matter is that that mushy middle doesn't trouble itself to discover what the issues are or evaluate methods of addressing them in any sort of rigorous, wonky kind of way. They say all they care about was substance, but if they bothered to do their homework and bone up about the substance, we wouldn't even be having these arguments anymore -- they would have decided most crucial broad-stroke issues one way or another, and the most pertinent question would be now how to implement that basic ideological agenda, not which ideological agenda we should pursue.

The mushy, careless middle which doesn't think too hard about these things loves to believe all it cares about is "substance" but in fact they can't be troubled.

The tactic I suggest would, I think, make Obama's lies politically relevant and also let this less-than-rigorous mush vote continue believing their self-illusions about caring greatly about wonkish policy points.

Posted by: Ace at 11:05 AM | Comments (75)
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Wow, AllahPundit noted on Friday: The candidate who promised to never use presidential signing statements to effect constitutionally-dubious glosses on Congressional legislation -- interpreting them this way or that -- is now actually using them to directly contradict and illegally veto congressional legislation.

Congressional languages said no more monies could be used to fund four "czar" positions. Obama signed that law, but added a statement: I'll spend your money they way I like.

Now his taxpayer-paid shill comes out and claims that Obama didn't promise not to use signing statements -- he only said he wouldn't "abuse" them.

Well, for one thing, directly contradicting clear congressional language is an abuse -- it's straight-up illegal. There's no gray area here.

For another thing: Jay Carney's a liar in service of an even greater liar.

These abuses and lies must be noted and pushed hard. The public still has a higher-than-50% regard for Obama personally, even as they disapprove of his job performance. If there is no clear favorite on policy in the 2012 election, the candidate with a higher personal regard will probably win.

Usually I don't suggest pushing too hard on the character issue when it comes to Obama, but only because 1, it's harder case to make as the public is apparently determined to think well of their Idiot King, and 2, it's hard to sound statesmanlike when hitting someone's personal defects, even if they're plainly relevant to the office sought. And 3, there are opportunity-cost considerations -- if you're hitting him on a harder issue, that means you're not spending time on an easier case to make, like the fact that he's going to bankrupt the country.

That said, where there is an unambiguous, straight-up factual case to be made that Obama is a liar and a charlatan, it must be made.

This is an easy one. This is a lay-up.

Obama has already tipped his hand that he's going to launch a billion-dollar scorched earth negative campaign for the centuries. It's about time we stopped treating this lying socialist pink with kid gloves.

If you're not a racist, it's time to stop being racially condescending and start treating Obama as you would any other dishonest failure.

(This, of course, is the main appeal of Trump at the moment.)

Posted by: Ace at 10:18 AM | Comments (125)
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The Wall Street Journal is hitting the most important fact of budget debate -- Obama's vision of a leviathan Super-European-sized government can only exist with the middle class paying federal tax rates approaching 50% -- and that's good.

The thing is, though, this has to be pushed out of the realm of "wonkish discussion" and into the realm of "common knowledge." Only a relentless -- almost robotic -- repetition of this basic fact by anyone appearing on television will make this happen.

In 2005 [the most recent favorable year for Obama's tax-the-rich proposal; the "rich" have been much less rich of late] the top 5% earned over $145,000. If you took all the income of people over $200,000, it would yield about $1.89 trillion, enough revenue to cover the 2012 bill for Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—but not the same bill in 2016, as the costs of those entitlements are expected to grow rapidly. The rich, in short, aren't nearly rich enough to finance Mr. Obama's entitlement state ambitions—even before his health-care plan kicks in.

Emphasis added; I want to make sure everyone knows we are talking about 100% taxation levels.

So who else is there to tax? Well, in 2008, there was about $5.65 trillion in total taxable income from all individual taxpayers, and most of that came from middle income earners. The nearby chart shows the distribution, and the big hump in the center is where Democrats are inevitably headed for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks.

Hey, I keep saying that. In case you don't know the line, Willie Sutton was a notorious bank robber, and when a reporter asked him, "Why do you rob banks?" he answered, simply, "Because that's where the money is." I think the reporter meant to ask why do you rob at all, whereas Sutton took the question to mean why do you rob banks. Sutton just assumed the "robbing" part and focused on the choice of target.

The Democrats have a similar mentality. If you put them under truth serum and ask "Why are you creating the circumstances under which we will have no choice but to heavily tax the middle class?" they'll answer "Because that's where the money is." Like Willie Sutton, they assume the "rob" part is obvious; they're just focusing on the target for the heist.

The following chart is not of taxes paid by different income level cohorts -- it's a chart of the total income available to be taxed within each grouping.

It's like a big middle finger to Obama's claims of pain-free deficit reduction via only "the rich."

No matter how you slice it, the rich do not have enough money, even if we seize their incomes at 100% levels (which is both impossible and unconstitutional), to make up for Obama's deficits.

But look at all those ripe trillions ready for the plucking in the $50,000 to $200,0000 range. Delicious.

This is politically risky, however, so Mr. Obama's game has always been to pretend not to increase taxes for middle class voters while looking for sneaky ways to do it. His first budget in 2009 included a "climate revenues" section from the indirect carbon tax of cap and trade, which of course would be passed down to all consumers....

I forgot about that -- the tax and cap system was sold as a some kind of "Green" policy, but in fact what it really was was a direct tax on the middle class which, it was hoped, would be disguised enough that the middle class wouldn't realize they were having the government seize big chunks of their income, because the huge bills would come via a third party (energy companies).

That was Obama's not-so-secret plan to fund his behemoth state. As did Pelosi's floating of the idea of a national sales tax or VAT.

But now those have been stopped (for now). So what next?

Now that those two ideas have failed politically, Mr. Obama is turning as he did last week to limiting tax deductions and other "loopholes," such as for mortgage interest payments. We support doing away with these distortions too, and so does Mr. Ryan, but in return for lower tax rates. Mr. Obama just wants the extra money, which he says will reduce the deficit but in practice will merely enable more spending.

Keep in mind that the most expensive tax deductions, in terms of lost tax revenue, go mainly to the middle class. These include the deductions for state and local tax payments (especially property taxes), mortgage interest, employer-sponsored health insurance, 401(k) contributions and charitable donations. The irony is that even as Mr. Obama says he merely wants the rich to pay a little bit more, his proposals would make the tax code less progressive than it is today.

Spending reductions in the tax code -- Catch the Fever!

Posted by: Ace at 09:08 AM | Comments (167)
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Here's a positive review from the Daily Caller. The critics of course don't like it.

Gee, wonder why.

Yesterday, I caught an early viewing of Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, the film adaptation of Ayn RandÂ’s famous novel. I went in with deep reservations, but I came away impressed.

...

While the acting is at times melodramatic (I heard a giggle or two from the audience), and the plot is a bit wonky, the movie comes together very well. The directing and dialogue (screenplay by Brian Patrick O’Toole) take a difficult subject with no action and turn out a fast, sleek and handsome movie that pulled this reviewer — no fan of Ayn Rand or epic book-to-movie conversions — right in.

It's in 300 theaters now, but not making very much money yet. It'll probably turn out to be financially successful with PPV and DVD money included, but why leave that up to chance?

By the way, apparently Part II was already shot so you'll definitely get to see that. But Part III remains unshot, so there is a chance that if the film doesn't find support, the ending will go unfilmed.

Oh, My Review: Yes, I'll see it, maybe tomorrow, and get the review up as quick as I can.

I meant to this weekend but felt awful for most of it.

Fancy Becomes Fact: I linked this Friday, but still cool. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:32 AM | Comments (153)
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