The cue, worked out in advance, I guess, was "To the queen," at which point "God Save the Queen" would play, and President Chalaque would just shut his yap-hole.

But President iPodSpeeches added some more of his blessed verbiage, I guess, and talks over the anthem as the Queen gives him a "shut up you dolt" type look.

This occurs late in the video, about 3/4ths of the way to the end.
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Posted by: Ace at 06:37 PM | Comments (118)
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Obama is on a state visit to Britain (only 2 US Presidents have had one). In honor of that visit, Nile Gardiner gives us the the top 10 insults Pres. Obama has done to Britain.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:14 PM | Comments (41)
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And it premiers in Iowa.

[T]the former Alaska governor pulled aside her close aide, Rebecca Mansour, to discuss a hush-hush assignment: Reach out to conservative filmmaker Stephen K. Bannon with a request. Ask him if he would make a series of videos extolling Palin's governorship and laying to rest lingering questions about her controversial decision to resign from office with a year-and-a-half left in her first term. It was this abdication, Palin knew, that had made her damaged goods in the eyes of some Republicans who once were eager to get behind her potential 2012 presidential campaign.

The response was more positive than Palin could have hoped for. He'd make a feature-length movie, Bannon told Mansour, and he insisted upon taking complete control and financing it himself -- to the tune of $1 million.

The fruits of that initial conversation are now complete. The result is a two-hour-long, sweeping epic, a rough cut of which Bannon screened privately for Sarah and Todd Palin last Wednesday in Arizona, where Alaska's most famous couple has been rumored to have purchased a new home. When it premieres in Iowa next month, the film is poised to serve as a galvanizing prelude to Palin's prospective presidential campaign -- an unconventional reintroduction to the nation that she and her political team have spent months eagerly anticipating, even as Beltway Republicans have largely concluded that she won't run.

Bannon, a former naval officer and ex-Goldman Sachs banker, sees his documentary as the first step in Palin's effort to rebuild her image in the eyes of voters who may have soured on her, yet might reconsider if old caricatures begin to fade. The film will also appeal to staunch Palin supporters who have long celebrated her biting rhetoric and conservative populism yet know little about her record in Alaska and have perhaps written her off as presidential material.

Kind of speechless. She's doing this extremely late, with as little support as she's ever had.

I honestly do not understand how she imagines she can win continuing to play only to the 15% of the country that actively seek out Palin-brand media.

ONT... is below, for now.

Posted by: Ace at 05:39 PM | Comments (448)
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Just came in the mail a day ago.
Really, really excited, because it tasted delicious, like a cross between chicken masala and bacon-inside-of-bacon. The chicken was a bit more chewy, but hey, it was free so I can't complain.

It also went great with a Coke: more...

Posted by: CAC at 05:20 PM | Comments (77)
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As you'd imagine, lots of interesting stuff. Below are some extensive excerpts and brief commentary. If you have any interest in defense issues and where we're going, the whole speech is well worth your time.

First, the reality...the defense budget is not going back to "the good old" days anytime soon.

But, as I am fond of saying, we live in the real world. Absent a catastrophic international conflict or new existential threat, we are not likely to return to Cold War levels of defense expenditures, at least as a share of national wealth anytime soon. Nor do I believe we need to.

First, the world is different. Our primary adversary then was a comparably armed super power, bristling with millions of troops, tens of thousands of tanks, and thousands of advanced combat aircraft – not to mention a vast arsenal of nuclear weapons – that was poised to overrun Western Europe and could directly threaten our allies and interests around the globe.

I know – as head analyst at CIA I signed off on the studies of Soviet military power. The threats and potential adversaries America faces today and down the road are dangerous and daunting – for their complexity, variety and unpredictability. But as a matter of national survival, they do not approach the scale of the Soviet military threat that provided the political and strategic rationale for defense expenditures that consumed a significant portion of our economy.

Second, we’re not going to see a return to Cold War-level defense budgets, at least as a share of GDP, because America is different: Our economy, our demographics, and our fiscal predicament – whether measured in the size of debt and deficits, ratios of retirees to workers, or the share of the federal budget consumed by entitlements. The money and political support simply aren’t there.

In fact, under Gates the services have already done quite a bit of cutting. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 04:51 PM | Comments (45)
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Boo hoo hoo, it's so rude, so unprecedented, so offensive...

Awesome.

Posted by: Ace at 04:23 PM | Comments (218)
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Update -Joplin, part 2: Oh shit...I spoke too soon. The storm strengthened and Joplin is now under a tornado warning. Sirens going off now.

Update -Joplin: The t-storm about to hit Joplin appears to have weakened somewhat and hopefully will continue to do so. But it doesn't appear to be tornadic (as if those poor people haven't suffered enough). Still, it's bringing strong wind and a lot of rain with it so it's only gonna' add to the misery there.

Tulsa Nexrad radar (which covers Joplin as well) from Weather Underground

Update: Tornadoes now in the Dallas/Fort Worth metro.

KTVT livestream here

WFAA livestream here

UPDATE [Gabe]: Outbreak is over for Oklahoma west of I-35. Unfortunately, there have been several reported fatalities and some more tornadoes popping up in south and central Oklahoma, east of I-35.

BFF checked in; he and his family are okay. I'm still waiting to hear from my folks, but Stillwater wasn't hit that hard, so I'm hoping its just telephone disruption.

Lefties, ignorant or immune to the human suffering going on right now, are already blah-blah-blahing about global warming causing these tornado outbreaks. This is, of course, utter nonsense, even according to scientists that believe in global warming. Like, for example the NOAA, which reports:

One question on many minds concerns the role of anthropogenic climate change. Two recent national and international assessment reports have summarized the existing state of knowledge on climate change and tornadoes. According to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) :

"There is insufficient evidence to determine whether trends exist in.....small-scale phenomena such as tornadoes, hail, lightning and dust-storms."

The US Climate Change Synthesis Report SAP 3.3 concludes that:

"The data used to examine changes in the frequency and severity of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms are inadequate to make definitive statements about actual changes."

The report also concludes that:

"There were no significant changes in the high-intensity end of these distributions from the 1950s through the 1990s, although the distribution from 2000 and later may differ."

One of the issues with Leftist claims about more numerous tornadoes recently is that tornado-detection equipment is substantially more accurate now than before about 1990. So merely counting the number of reported tornadoes and comparing doesn't actually give you a meaningful comparison. That's why the report above notes that there is no change in "high-intensity" tornadic events.

Original Post with links to live coverage is below the fold:

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Posted by: Genghis at 04:00 PM | Comments (371)
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There's a story about cops looking for a discarded murder weapon, a gun, in a notorious crime-dump of a lot in Baltimore.

One cop finds a gun, and his sergeant tells him, "No, that's the wrong caliber. Let's just focus on the one we're looking for or we'll be out here all night."*

With Dominique Strauss-Kahn: Let's ignore the attempted rapes or we'll be at this all year.

But now Tristane Banon, the 31-year-old god-daughter of Strauss-KahnÂ’s second wife Brigitte Guillemette, said he attacked her almost a decade ago.

Ms Banon will now tell French detectives about the alleged attempted rape, which took place in an anonymous studio flat in Paris in 2002.

Strauss-Kahn lured the then 21-year-old trainee journalist to the property under the promise of an interview, and then started to rip her clothes off, it is claimed.
‘I kicked him, I called him a rapist, he didn’t seem to care,’ said Ms Banon in earlier interviews, in which she also described Strauss-Kahn as acting like a ‘rutting chimpanzee’.

Ms BanonÂ’s mother, Anne Mansouret, said the only reason she did not press charges at the time was because 'she was just starting out in journalism' and was afraid of being 'defined by the story' of being attacked by a senior politician.
Mrs Mansouret has now confirmed that her daughter is making a report to Paris police, and may hold a press conference about an ordeal which left her 'traumatised'.

Via Hot Air, which goes with the other headline (so many to choose from) of Strauss-Kahn's friends and family members offering "seven figures" to the family of the rape victim to shut her trap.

“They already talked with her family,” a French businesswoman with close ties to Strauss-Kahn and his family told The Post. “For sure, it’s going to end up on a quiet note.”…

“He’ll get out of it and will fly back to France. He won’t spend time in jail. The woman will get a lot of money,” said the source, adding that a seven-figure sum has been bandied about.

Oh, and there's a quote included from Bernard Henri-Levy, no, the real one, not the other one, where he contends against the presumption of truth by a poor black woman, and the presumption of guilt on the part of a rich white man.

There is much to that. That's an important point. We saw that exact dynamic play out in the Duke Not A Rape Case.

However, countervailing that consideration, is this one:

Guilty.

* I read this in Homicide, that book the TV show was based on. It was presented as a real story, but it does seem like a story that cops just tell each other.

From Paris With Love: Although quite a few Frenchmen repudiate DSK and the dandy BHL's defense of him, I thought this angry spin by a French idiot was worth reading more.

To the American people,
Please be advised that you are no longer welcome to France as the ambassadors of a violent, decadent culture.
You have taken in hostage a wonderfully competent man who represented real hope for millions of French people (over 60% declared they wanted him for President).
You have humiliated him and together with him, you have humiliated France.
This is for us a very serious offence.
You have broken this man, his family and his career, without even giving him a chance to express himself.
This was all done in a spirit of revenge for Mr Polansky, even though his "victim" wanted the case to be closed.
This is really sick.

When I see the thousands of horrible, bloody crimes that are committed every days in the US, the number of innocent people who have been wrongly executed in your system, I feen there is something definitely hatable about your culture.

We thought we were brothers in the Western universe.
But you hate foreigners, like you hated Black people before.

We mage a mistake about you, people.
You are just a bunch of arrogant bastards.

That's from "Jean Aymar."

Posted by: Ace at 03:29 PM | Comments (155)
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Bait and switch.

During the health care debate Obama and the Democrats went on and on about how great screenings and preventative medicine would be to keep costs down. Now, it was pretty clear to everyone not trying to shove health care "reform" down Americas throat that was not going to pan out.

Now liberal wunderkind Ezra Klein has decided that all these screenings are going to cost way too much and not provide enough benefit. What's a good liberal to do when their talking points run into cold, hard reality? Admit that maybe they aren't that smart and perhaps should be a bit more humble about their ability to control the health care decisions of hundreds of millions of Americans? Of course not. Obviously the solution is to have doctors stop talking to patients about available options.

So if youÂ’re anything like me, take a moment to think about how much you donÂ’t want to believe that lung-cancer screenings or breast-cancer screenings may not actually work. And then think about trying to convince yourself they donÂ’t work when your doctor is strongly urging you to get screened.

ThatÂ’s why, if you want to control health-care costs, you somehow need to convince, incentivize or otherwise conscript doctors into doing it for you. Robin Hanson can write as many blog posts as he wants, but as long as doctors are telling scared and uncertain patients that they need to get screened, theyÂ’re getting screened. The moment they stop telling patients to get screened, screenings will plummet. In health care, doctors are really the relevant decision-makers. And right now, they donÂ’t have the evidence to make good decisions nor the incentives to make cost-effective decisions.

Remember this line from Obama's big health care "reform" speech to Congress?

And insurance companies will be required to cover, with no extra charge, routine checkups and preventive care, like mammograms and colonoscopies -- (applause) -- because there's no reason we shouldn't be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse. That makes sense, it saves money, and it saves lives.

Now, having gotten their law passed, the technocrats want to "convince, incentivize or otherwise conscript doctors" into shutting up about the very things they were talking up as part of their sales pitch.

It's like liberals have no clue what they are doing but are ready to boldly and persistently experiment with your health. And if some people don't get the right treatment while the experts tweak and refine their formulas...well you know, eggs and omelets.

Posted by: DrewM at 03:01 PM | Comments (78)
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All under the fold. I can't believe I got this guy to guest-post.

The most important intellectual in France (which is longhand for "still not important"), Bernard Henri-Levy, has taken to defending his very good friend, the indicted rapist Dominque Strauss-Khan, in a series of essays at the Daily Beast, protesting the assault on his friend's dignity.

This was a "I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter" situation, but I got better than that: I got him to write for me.

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Posted by: Ace at 01:52 PM | Comments (317)
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