Let's set the scene: The middle east is on fire; our representatives there have been murdered, and our interests in the region seem on the verge of being utterly swept aside again by an all-too well known wave of hard line Islamist politicization.

So, you're the ambassador to the UN: our face to the world. Besides disseminating the administration's lies about these events (already well-documented here and elsewhere), what else is your public face saying? What do you need to convey to Americans, and the world?

So proud to defend #humanrights and ensure #LGBT voices are heard at the #UN. @global_equality

Can we please replace this person with someone who is not a muppet-caricature of a clueless vapid liberal twit? Please?

Go to the link for more. Bring pills.

UPDATE FROM COMMENTS:

9 Our country is being run by liberal college students.

Posted by: Mr Pink at October 11, 2012 10:26 AM (fX+YS)

I knew one of you brilliant Morons could say it better with fewer words. Thanks.

Posted by: LauraW at 06:22 AM | Comments (277)
Post contains 180 words, total size 1 kb.

• NYT/CBS Poll Now Includes Wisconsin As A Swing State
  
• The Open Fields Of November
  
• Not Only Is Tonight's Debate Moderator Biased, It Appears She's Incompetent Too
  
• Obama Hemorrhaging Indies
  
• Time Publishes Unflattering Outtake Photos of Paul Ryan Working Out
  
• 92% Of Union Financial Documents Contain Errors
  
• James O'Keefe's Latest Video
  
• Obama Insults Liberal Bloggers
  
• It's Looking More And More Like Jack Welch Was Right
  
• Jon Stewart Ridicules Obama's Big Bird Ad
  
• Cuba Almost Became A Nuclear Power In 1962
  
• Politics And The Gallup Poll
  
• It Looks Like The Media Has Found Their Angle On The Benghazi Attack
  
• GOP Ground Game Working Well. Are You Helping?
  
• Easy Way To Get Fired From Your Job
  
• Internal Polls Show Latinos in Florida and Colorado Shifting To Romney

Bleg: Twenty six days until election. Twenty Six! What have you done to help the Republican party win? Do you have a yard sign in your yard? Have you contacted elderly or infirm Republicans and given them absentee ballot request forms? Have you made phone calls, knocked on doors, or volunteered to work the polls/phone banks on election day.

If you can take election day off work, or at least a half day, click the Romney election day volunteer link in the sidebar and give them your contact information.

This is it. If you really loathe the SCOAMF as much as you claim to, then you better be doing something about it. It doesn't matter if you live in the bluest of blue states or the reddest of red states. This victory needs to be total. Not only do we need to win the electoral college, but we need a decisive win in the popular vote as well.

Follow me on twitter

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:47 AM | Comments (185)
Post contains 294 words, total size 4 kb.

Happy Thursday.

A masked assassin killed a Yemeni security official during a drive-by at the U.S. embassy in Yemen. The official had been working for the U.S. Embassy for nearly 20 years. Yemeni officials said the killing bore the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda attack, though it was too soon to tell for sure.

The mother of the State Department computer-dude slain in Benghazi blasts President Obama for his "baloney" explanations of the attack. This, of course, comes on the heels of the mother of the slain Navy SEAL asking Romney not to politicize her son's death.

Dear Mom, if I should happen to die in such a way as to make the national news, do not talk to reporters. I mean, that's true all the time -- never talk to reporters -- but all the other kids in heaven are definitely going to make fun of me if my mom is defending me all the time. Oh, and if I happen to go to the other place, I'll send hellhounds after any reporter that bugs my mother. Yeah, hellhounds.

There are new polls out this morning, with some good news for Romney, but I'm not gonna get in Ace and CAC's little donnybrook over that. You'll just have to wait for one of them to get up.

In other news, the diversity officer at a D.C. college for the deaf was suspended yesterday for signing the Maryland marriage referendum petition earlier this year that sent the issue of marriage equality to voters. Lawsuits are likely to ensue.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:58 AM | Comments (376)
Post contains 266 words, total size 2 kb.

Brown Plastic Bowls and Potemkin Countries

In 1989 doctor Theodore Dalrymple through a confluence of events was one of 100 British guests allowed to tour North Korea. Here is his experience inside Pyongyang Department Store Number 1:

It didn't take long to discover that this was no ordinary department store. It was filled with thousands of people, going up and down the escalators, standing at the corners, going in and out of the front entrance in a constant stream both ways - yet nothing was being bought or sold. I checked this by standing at the entrance for half an hour. The people coming out were carrying no more than the people entering. Their shopping bags contained as much, or as little, when they left as when they entered. In some cases, I recognised people coming out as those who had gone in a few minutes before, only to see them re-entering the store almost immediately. And I watched a hardware counter for fifteen minutes. There were perhaps twenty people standing at it; there were two assistants behind the counter, but they paid no attention to the 'customers'. The latter and the assistants stared past each other in a straight line, neither moving nor speaking.

Eventually, they grew uncomfortably aware that they were under my observation. They began to shuffle their feet and wriggle, as if my regard pinned them like live insects to a board. The assistants too became restless and began to wonder what to do in these unforeseen circumstances. They decided that there was nothing for it but to distribute something under the eyes of this inquisitive foreigner. And so, all of a sudden, they started to hand out plastic wash bowls to the twenty 'customers', who took them (without any pretence of payment). Was it their good luck, then? Had they received something for nothing? No, their problems had just begun. What were they to do with their plastic wash bowls? (All of them were brown incidentally, for the assistants did not have sufficient initiative to distribute a variety of goods to give verisimilitude to the performance, not even to the extent of giving out differently coloured bowls.)

They milled around the counter in a bewildered fashion, clutching their bowls in one hand as if they were hats they had just doffed in the presence of a master. Some took them to the counter opposite to hand them in; some just waited until I had gone away. I would have taken a photograph, but I remembered just in time that these people were not participating in this charade from choice, that they were victims, and that - despite their expressionless faces and lack of animation - they were men with chajusong, that is to say creativity and consciousness, and to have photographed them would only have added to their degradation. I left the hardware counter, but returned briefly a little later: the same people were standing at it, sans brown plastic bowls, which were neatly re-piled on the shelf.

Read the rest here and find out what happens when Dalrymple attempted to buy a pen.

Communism always leads to Potemkin countries where the citizens lead sad Potemkin lives as cogs in the machinery of national deceit:

But the most sombre reflection occasioned by Department Store Number 1 is that concerning the nature of the power that can command thousands of citizens to take part in a huge and deceitful performance, not once but day after day, without any of the performers ever indicating by even the faintest sign that he is aware of its deceitfulness, though it is impossible that he should not be aware of it. ...But this is no joke, and the humiliation it visits upon the people who take part in it, far from being a drawback, is an essential benefit to the power; for slaves who must participate in their own enslavement by signalling to others the happiness of their condition are so humiliated that they are unlikely to rebel.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:10 PM | Comments (772)
Post contains 998 words, total size 10 kb.

Oh, someone wrote on the internet that Romney wanted to ban tampons?

Hm, that sounds plausible. Let me post that around to six hundred places before asking if that's actually true or not.

Because that's what smart, on-the-ball people do!

Posted by: Ace at 05:55 PM | Comments (159)
Post contains 70 words, total size 1 kb.

From The Meatball, who is now scared to post, as well he should be.

Pulse Opinion Survey, Obama 47 Romney 45.

Smith is really nipping at Casey's heels to- trails him 41-44.
Sleeper Senate race, perhaps.

So in four days:
Sienna O+3
Rasmussen O+5
Susquehanna O+2
P.O.S O+2

Very tempting, especially this late in the game and after it seemed to
have swum away...

The Meatball also sends this quote:

"At the end of the day, polls don't matter." -- campaign director of opinion research (i.e., Head Pollster) David Simas

Politico calls him "campaign director of opinion research," I imagine, to avoid the drama and news value of Obama's chief pollster saying polls don't matter.

Posted by: Ace at 05:25 PM | Comments (145)
Post contains 143 words, total size 1 kb.

Just awful.

And remember, this is all to the Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella "strategy" -- the "normalization" strategy that postulates that if you disarm yourself, no armed attacker will kill you -- which sounds suspiciously like a notion that came directly from Obama.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:03 PM | Comments (149)
Post contains 71 words, total size 1 kb.

And when we say weapons, we mean chemical weapons and other nasties.

Correction: The plane was flying from Russia to Syria and is not suspected of ferrying weapons out of Syria, but into Syria.

Apologies. I completely misheard this story on Fox and conflated it with the troop movements to Jordan. When I looked up the story in print, I thought I understood it from the misheard TV report.

...

Now I know what you're thinking, with regard to Iraq. And I'm thinking that too. There's an article by a guy whose name I forget -- I believe he was a Greek, and I believe he was formerly a Communist agent, and I believe he wrote on National Review for a time.

And I can't quite remember what he said, but he asserted that Russia had plans with all of its satrapies to evacuate the Nasty Stuff out upon collapse of the regime they'd been helping.

Hopefully you'll remember.

As mentioned earlier, US troops are now in Jordan, patrolling the border, looking for cross-border movement of chemical weapons stocks.

Posted by: Ace at 02:47 PM | Comments (612)
Post contains 209 words, total size 1 kb.

Since you guys are giving me grief about my Lifemanship Studies, here's a poll.

Mitt Romney now holds a narrow advantage over Barack Obama in the race for the White House -- 46 percent to 45 percent, if the election were held today, according to a Fox News national poll of likely voters released Wednesday.

That’s a six-point turnaround and a three-point “debate bounce” for Romney.

Before the first presidential debate in Denver last Wednesday, Romney had 43 percent to ObamaÂ’s 48 percent (September 24-26, 2012).

...

The poll shows independents side with Romney by 44-32 percent. ThatÂ’s a reversal from before the debate when it was 43-39 in ObamaÂ’s favor. One independent in four is undecided or will vote for another candidate.

Romney's favorability jumped by four points. Obama's was unchanged. This is the first time Romney's favorability has been higher than Obama's, and the first time, in fact, it's been over 50% (which seems a critical threshold -- I've been told and told again by a pollster to "watch the favorability," as it represents the height of potential support).

One more thing: Obama leads with young people (under 30), but only attracts 50% support. That doesn't mean Romney gets the rest; some are undecided. But many undecideds will, of course, either break for Romney or just not vote.

That's down from 58% in the last poll.

And one more thing: I lied before. One more thing. If you noticed --and even if you didn't -- the right-wing FoxNews poll has actually been very tough on Romney, and Republicans, all year.

It's been one of the worst polls for us.

Posted by: Ace at 02:08 PM | Comments (188)
Post contains 301 words, total size 2 kb.

As I mentioned previously, I have become a devotee of Stephen Potter's "Gamesmanship" theory of games and social interactions -- a theory that says, in short, why should the game go to the skilled? Or the admiration to the virtuous? Or the respect to the expert?

What about the rest of us? Why shouldn't we have that social credit, just because we lack skill, virtue, or experitise?

I don't play many games, so the principles of gamemsanship, while providing a solid foundation, are not directly useful in my life. But the principles of Gamesmanship -- winning without technically cheating -- can be applied profitably to social situations of all sorts. This is the sub-field of "Lifemanship."

I have little social interaction with humanity because I'm frankly not a fan. But I was compelled recently to enter a social setting, and I decided that I would use the principles of Lifemanship to undermine social rivals and steal social credit for myself.

One of the central principles of Lifemanship is to rely upon -- or "abuse," if you like -- the natural tendency of people to be polite and consider that in any case of offense, they might be the ones primarily to blame. To, as Dr. Potter so eloquently put it, "convince one's rivals that something, however slightly, has gone wrong, and it's likely their fault."

Theory is all well and good, but practice -- deployment in the field of play, as it were -- is something else again. And thus I sallied forth to put what I have learned into good use.

The scenario: A casual introduction leads to a brief, collegial conversation.

The mark: Someone who is more successful than I am. Which is most people, frankly, but I don't talk to people very often, so usually I am spared the pangs of inadequacy.

The strategem: The simplest of ploys, really. At this point in my education I don't feel comfortable using more advanced gambits and tactics. In this case, I simply went with the crude, brute-force method of suggesting my mark had committed an offensive faux pas.

ME: Well I'm surprised to be meeting you here. How did you get into [your field of expertise] in the first place?

THE MARK: Well I never really planned on it, I just sort of--

ME (deadpan, with bite): No, no, do keep talking about yourself.

The result: A complete flummoxing, as Dr. Potter predicted. Accusing him of monopolizing the conversation, not ten words into an answer to a question I had in fact asked of him, left him speechless, and wondering what he might have done to warrant such an aggressively rude response.

The aftermath: Given that this was merely a Test Run -- I am not yet a Lifeman and certified to attempt these ploys in actual social combat -- I explained to The Mark I had run a ploy on him, as part of a Laboratory of Lifemanship experiment. He seemed reassured to know that he was not, in fact, guilty of any faux pas, and I was not, at least not demonstrably, a lunatic.

I have forwarded this data to the Lifemanship Institute in England for further analysis. It is entirely possible that these ploys, having been left to fallow for so long, are now effectively novel again, and may be of usefulness to the practicing modern Lifeman. Perhaps a Renaissance in the Art of Being a Dick may yet come.

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (174)
Post contains 590 words, total size 4 kb.