Maybe youse Morons want to arrange local mini-meetups that night, or some other night soon while it's still playing?

Here's where it's showing.

Coordinate your hookup plans on this thread if you like.

Thanks to AndrewsDad for the whole idea.

Posted by: LauraW at 10:35 AM | Comments (95)
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Good Lord.

I have a feeling there's a lot of Giuliani Effect going on here.

Before Giuliani made it clear in a debate that he was pro-choice, Giuliani led all the GOP polls and not even by just a little. He always was pro-choice; this fact just wasn't widely known.

Name recognition + lack of widespread appreciation for a candidate's positions and history = ephemeral front runner status.

Trump has some advantages. But he also seems to have a stack of drawbacks, like frequent business bankruptcies, two divorces, donating to Harry Reid as far back as last frickin' year, previous strong embrace of liberal social positions before he suddenly realized he was strongly conservative, a general tendency to bluster and shoot from the lip, etc.

Posted by: Ace at 10:08 AM | Comments (187)
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He got stung by one of those To Catch a Pedophile type stings (but it wasn't To Catch a Pedophile, or damnit, someone's hiding the video).

He engaged in a graphic sex chat with a person claiming to be a 15 year old girl, and then polished his pickle on webcam for good measure.

He says he of course thought his sex partner was 56 years old and just lying about being a 15 year old, and also, he was set up due to his opposition to the War in Iraq.

Attorney Gary Kohlman said Ritter thought the woman was acting through a fantasy when he was arrested by Barrett police in 2009.

In opening arguments, Attorney Gary Coleman called Ritter a dedicated veteran and suggested he could be a victim of a conspiracy theory because he's been so outspoken about the war.

This is another underage-sex charge -- in 2001 he was charged with child endangerment for trying to meet with a 16-year-old girl. (I think at a Burger King -- class all the way.) That was also and undercover sting operative, and you gotta think if he's blundered into two fake-kids he must be attempting to pick up on kids all the time. (Actually, Wikipedia says this is his third charge for soliciting a minor.)

His attorney said today that Ritter was depressed during that time in 2001 because threats had been made against him because he was so outspoken about the Iraq War. The attorney said the depression led him to the incident in New York.

I was depressed most of last year and my doctor prescribed statutory rape, so I know the feeling.

This is sort of alarming:

Ritter's daughters are in the courtroom for the jury trial.

His daughters? Who I assume are tweens or teens, or as Scott Ritter calls them, "fair game"? Yeah, they won't have any problems.

There was an old meme on the internet that pedophiles all tend to smile alike. With a small smile, as if keeping a secret, but also sort of laughing on the inside that you don't know it. A "pedosmile," the meme went. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (110)
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Monty sends me this tip with the subject line "Romney is doomed! DOOMED!"

RomneyCare is unpopular, and not viewed as "helping," even in Taxachusetts.

In 2008 — when Obama was running for president and Ted Kennedy was towering over the Senate — nearly 70 percent of Massachusetts voters supported the plan. A mere 22 percent of right-wing holdouts opposed it.

...

But after five years of actually experiencing this new universe, even the Kennedy Democrats have had enough. A new Suffolk University poll showed that nearly half of Massachusetts voters say the law isnÂ’t helping, while just 38 percent say it is. As Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute pointed out, Romneycare is almost as unpopular here as Obama- care is across America.

...

Taxpayers now spend $2.5 billion more on our state’s health care budget. The direct cost of Romneycare has gone from less than $100 million a year to at least $400 million — and even that number is suspect. But we do know we’ve spent more than $35 million in a single year on health services for illegal immigrants, and tens of millions more on illegal, unallowable or outright bogus claims.

If you want to know why RomneycareÂ’s costs keep rising, check out this simple statistic from the Patrick administration: In 2006, 85 percent of the insured in Massachusetts got their coverage through private group coverage at work. Today thatÂ’s down to 79 percent.

Meanwhile the percentage on the MassHealth dole has doubled, and more than 150,000 people are now subsidized through Commonwealth Care.

Although he can do a little blaming of Democrats and suggest that his preferred plan would have been better, there are two problems with that take: He was always on board with mandate, a rational but unpopular element of the law (and likely unconstitutional at the federal level) and whatever his preferred plan may have been, he signed this plan into law. (And, in an ancient, distant, mist-shrouded age, actually made that a central argument for his qualifications as president.)

I don't see how he can win without disowning this completely. Even if he does disown it, I'm not sure how he can win. But continuing to defend this? Seems disqualifying.

Ouch: Romney says he doesn't know if America is ready to tackle entitlements. "Soft rhetoric," a source who heard his pitch to donors and supporters said.

This is classic Romney -- cautious, calculating. I agree with his assessment that I don't know if America is ready for this -- it's probably not, and will chose ruin over action.

But leaders are supposed to lead, aren't they? Even Obama, in 2008, was willing to pay lip service to entitlement reform.

Posted by: Ace at 08:20 AM | Comments (249)
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That's what this means. He says if he doesn't win the Republican nomination, he'll gladly divide the anti-Obama vote into two losing minorities and hand the election to the man he says is ruining the country.

“I am very conservative,” said Mr. Trump. “The concern is if I don’t win [the GOP primary] will I run as an independent, and I think the answer is probably yes.” Mr. Trump said he thought he “could possibly win as an independent,” adding, “I’m not doing it for any other reason. I like winning.”

Oh, usually presidential candidates at least pretend to be running for reasons other than ego and checking off a box on the Life's Achievement Scorecard.

Thanks for being candid, I guess.

So, apparently it's not as critical that Barack H. Obama be replaced as President as trash-talking Trump has previously claimed. Turns out it's rather incidental to the bigger picture (and by bigger picture I mean Trump).

This is a really horrible threat. With all of the natural advantages of incumbency, the last gift anyone should want to give Barack Hussein Obama is a divided anti-Obama vote.

Posted by: Ace at 07:26 AM | Comments (328)
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(This is the first in a series of posts about the basics of economics. Feedback and corrections cheerfully ignored accepted. If you have specific questions and/or requests for clarifications, post them in the comments.)

DISCLAIMER: I am not a Nobel Prize-winning economist who works at the New York Times. I don't even play that guy on TV. If you prefer your Economics backgrounders from actual smart people with degrees, Thomas Sowell is your go-to guy.

What is an “economy”?

It is a state of Nature that exists when scarce goods that have alternate uses are allocated in a competitive environment. Note the “state of nature” part of the description. An “economy” is not a human-devised system imposed on Nature; it is a state of Nature imposed on humans (and everything else that crawls, walks, swims, or flies). It is scarcity that drives the supply/demand dynamic, with competition among both producers and consumers being the defining characteristic. “Economy” is simply a descriptive term for how the supply/demand dynamic plays out.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 05:53 AM | Comments (202)
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Alternate Title: Pie Charts Are Hard

Leftists and Doug Mataconis stumbled on this graph yesterday and immediately jumped to the wrong conclusions.

Here's Doug (and I don't mean to pick on him specifically, but he summarizes the overall leftist response to this chart):

Now I think we can draw a few conclusions from this information:

1. There is no nation on the planet that poses a real threat to the United States in the way that the USSR during the Cold War. RussiaÂ’s share of worldwide military spending is less than the United KingdomÂ’s and equal to that France. Our military spending is six times larger than that of China. ThatÂ’s not to say that there arenÂ’t threats out there, but the idea of any nation posing existential threat to the United States is, I think, off the table
2. Our allies (the U.K., France, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Japan, and the vast number of nations that make up “Other”) can afford to pay more toward their own defense than they are now.
3. We could afford to make serious cuts in our defense budget without threatening our own security.

At the outset, Doug's first "conclusion" casually dismisses the possibility of an "existential threat" to the United States. Unmentioned are threats to national security of a lesser nature, as if to say that since lesser threats are survivable for some of Americans that some losses are acceptable to Doug.

Consider also that the U.S. responds to even lesser threats by altering, sometimes drastically, national policy. I'm not sure how Doug feels about "enhanced interrogations", but for the liberals he's lining up with such interrogations themselves represent an existential threat to the America they believe in.

Finally, I want you to note the assumption that is made in the first conclusion, because we're going to come back to it later: he assumes that defense spending is correlated to national security. High defense spending relative to other countries means existential security. Remember that, because it's going to come back in a minute.

Doug's second "conclusion", that our allies can afford to spend more on their own defense, is probably true, but not evident from the chart. And it's not evident from the chart for the same reason that his third "conclusion" isn't: the chart doesn't have a thing to say about national security.

As far as our allies, the question of how much they can afford to pay for more defense depends first of all on whether they have the money to spare or divert from other spending. But it also depends on how much desire they have to exert force abroad. The United States takes a very pro-active stance when it comes to securing national interests in places other than mainland America. Most other countries don't because they can't.

As for the third conclusion, that we can cut defense spending without harming national security, this is nothing more than a preexisting delusion that Doug and the other liberals who passed that chart around yesterday possess. It may be true, but as I said, the chart says nothing about national security.

More importantly, the third conclusion directly contradicts Doug's first conclusion. Remember, he just got through saying that high defense spending means that there is no existential threat to the United States and implying that defense spending is correlated with national security. All that goes out the window in the third conclusion. Now, rather than correlated, Doug wants you to believe that we can "make serious cuts in our defense budget without threatening our own security."

The Left's conclusions about this chart aren't really conclusions at all. They're just a list of ever-present beliefs about defense spending in the United States. They would have reacted to a chart of random values the same way.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:43 AM | Comments (201)
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Do you know why we never see Jack Bauer go to the bathroom? Because nothing escapes Jack Bauer!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:52 AM | Comments (96)
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"Show me on the doll where the TSA screener touched you."

Number of 6 year-olds who have hijacked or bombed planes thus far: 0

But this is just the sort of thing that will radicalize them.

Better Watch Your Cornhole Roth IRA
The government beast is hungry and your Roth IRA has what it wants - money. So pro-spending leftists are already laying the rhetorical groundwork for why having one is just the same as stealing from the public:

All of which makes Roths a perfect "fiscal Frankenstein." In return for little more than ordinary upfront taxes, Congress waived untold billions in future Treasury receipts. Then, too, Roths could be a drag on the U.S. economy. Since no withdrawals are required, assets can lie idle indefinitely.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:45 PM | Comments (752)
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Welcome to the party, pal.

Though Mr. Koster has been slow to weigh in, he did not mince words, arguing in the brief that Congress had overstepped its authority by mandating that individuals purchase health insurance, which he called “a substantial blow to federalism and personal freedom.”

“If Congress can force activity under the Commerce Clause, then it could force individuals to receive vaccinations or annual check-ups, undergo mammogram or prostate exams, or maintain a specific-body mass,” he wrote.

Ahem. He then goes on to argue that while the mandate should be repealed, the rest of the monstrosity should remain on the books.

He also didn't even join the lawsuit as a party -- but only wrote a brief as a friend of the court.

Oh, well. I wasn't really thinking he was an ally. But...

...

For Mr. Koster, who was elected in 2008, the decision to oppose his party on such a high-profile issue reflects the political challenges for Missouri Democrats in the coming election cycle.

Yes, indeedie.

This particular guy is just pretending to be on board with this because Missouri's voters voted 3-to-1 to repeal the law, so he offers up this shuck and jive.

Not to actually repeal ObamaCare. Just to save his own ass.

Remember, pal:

There is no "I" in Repeal.

I don't know what that means either but you damn well better remember it.

Posted by: Ace at 03:01 PM | Comments (296)
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