As you probably know, comments are down. I've contacted Pixy.

Update: But I think he's out or something. No response yet.

Here's Something: Brit Hume challenges Obama's narrative on the economy.

No, he didn't end the recession. The worst of the contraction was already over before he took office, and would stop contracting before his policies took effect.

But there hasn't been much growth since.

Hume notes that financial contractions usually lead to almost-as-sharp recoveries -- narrow V's, a deep drop down but an equally sharp bounce up.

But not under Obama's watch. Not this time.

And: Romney's straight-talk ad (the minute long one) is playing well with female swing voters.

Gotta be better than that China ad. I don't get that one. I understand it's designed to attract blue-collar voters. But even so, it seems weak to me. Very hypothetical, two many steps away from tangible proposals.

Posted by: Ace at 05:48 PM | Comments (9)
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Top Story. I'll post new things beneath this story, to make sure it remains on top for a while.
...

Due to Obama's failure to lead and craft a solution to the debt crisis, the Department of Defense is slated for massive cuts.

These cuts mean massive layoffs in both the DoD and affected industries.

200,000 or more layoffs.

The law requires that companies which know they're going to lay people off provide advance notice of this.

But Obama doesn't want those notices going out before the election.

So he's warned contractors to not comply with the law.

And if that weren't illegal enough, he's also promising to waive the fines the law says they must pay due to failure to notify.

Incredible.

The White House on Friday told government contractors worried about fiscal cliff spending cuts to hold off on warning employees about possible layoffs.

The government said it would cover legal costs if contractors are forced to slash their payrolls because of the looming $109 billion in automatic cuts next year and are alleged to have violated the WARN Act.

The federal WARN Act requires businesses with more than 100 employees to notify workers at least 60 days in advance of a mass layoff or plant closing. Some states require more notice.

More: Lockheed Martin agrees to break the law.

Lockheed Martin said Monday it will not issue employee layoff notices this year, ending an election-year showdown with the Obama administration.

The company said it based its decision on new guidance issued Friday by the Office of Management and Budget and the Pentagon.

The guidance said the Pentagon did not anticipate killing any contracts on Jan. 2, the day automatic spending cuts are set to begin hitting defense spending. The guidance also said the federal government would cover severance costs that are mandated under a federal layoff notices law.

The decision by Lockheed means tens of thousands won't get layoff notices days before Election Day, which might have cast a crucial blow against President Obama's reelection chances.

I'm quite certain you're not seeing this on your nightly Palace Guard Media "news."

Thanks to JackStraw.

More: Gabe weighs in at the NYDN.

Posted by: Ace at 04:49 PM | Comments (271)
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Measuring employment by the actual labor participation rate, the fraction of adult Americans actually working.

This is a recovery?

No. A recovery happens when the trajectory of the economy either catches and surpasses its previous level, or at least can be seen to be on the path to doing so.

This is not a recovery. This is bouncing along the bottom. There is no recovery.

Posted by: Ace at 03:43 PM | Comments (56)
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Will Elizabeth Warren's Unlicensed Practice of Law Make It Into Tonight's Debate?

The debate is now on CSPAN.

Here's the livestream

Posted by: Ace at 03:06 PM | Comments (171)
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A friend recommended this to me and I wanted to punch him in the nose. The premise seemed so contrived and so pandering, so eager to please. Like an annoying pop song where a hit is guaranteed because they've layered sugary-syrupy hook upon hook upon hook.

The premise is this: It is the year 2041, and the world has been over thirty years in the grips of the Great Recession (the one that began in 200 . Most people spend most of their free time in the greatest, most massively-multiplayer virtual world ever created, containing thousands of highly detailed worlds, including, explicitly, World of Warcraft's world. Pretty much all gaming and sci-fi and fantasy worlds have been ported into this massive virtual multiverse, and players can move from planet to planet (and fantasy to fantasy) via teleport pads or even X-Wing fighters.

That costs real money, though. Poor people mostly mill about on the few free worlds.

The creator of the game is a geek who was a teenager in the 1980s, fascinated with 80s pop culture and nerd culture of all kinds (sci-fi, fantasy, anime, Giant Robot Japanese shows, Duran Duran, videogames, and, yes, Dungeons & Dragons).

He dies. But in his video will -- televised to all the world -- he appears digitally inserted in the funeral scene from Heathers to announce that he has no heirs, and that his fortune -- two hundred and forty billion (with a b) dollars -- will be awarded to the first person who discovers the Easter Egg he has coded into the fantasy universe.

And oh, there are riddles and challenges, and they're going to involve esoteric trivia from the eighties (like maybe the dialogue in Ladyhawke or Ferris Buehler's Day Off) or skill at his favorite videogames (like, possibly, Berzerk or Defender).

So: It's a mash-up of the plots of Dream Park, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The DaVinci Code, except the riddles are not about early Gnostic thought or Dutch Masters but about Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot and Donkey Kong.

(Actually the riddles aren't about those things specifically -- I'm not giving spoilers. But they're about things like those things.)

The thing is, it all works. It's fun from start to finish. The Massively Multiverse Online Game isn't really so far off. At this point, only the lawyers and licensing stands in the way.

The high school zero hero, Wade Watts, is instantly appealing simply because he's such a pitiable underdog; he's awkward, fat, riddled with acne, and living in the future version of a trailer park (in which RVs are stacked upon each other 20 or more trailers high to preserve ground space). He doesn't have any money to teleport to all those myriad world where the Easter Egg can be found, but he does have time on his hands, so he can at least study the billion-dollar clues which might be hidden in Family Ties and Man From Atlantis.

But since this contest is for Real Money -- as Real as it gets, 240 billion dollar's worth -- there is, naturally, an Evil Corporation which has long sought to take over the virtual reality world, and they have their own hunters trying to find the Egg. And they are, of course, not above cheating.

Or murder.

I really liked this book. After reading a series of depressing books, and finding our own crapsack world pretty depressing lately, I really wanted a bright and light bit of escapism.

The book delivered. It's a first novel, and reads like that at times (it's always sort of awkward to read adults try to capture the essence of teenager's speech -- here, it seems to be a lot of "Dude" and "Suck" and "SUXXOR.") The Evil Corporation does not really appear to be all that Evil, except to a teenage Conforming Noncomfomist liberal's mind (wow, they want to take over the multiverse to impose a monthly fee, and put up additional advertising, and reduce cursing and trolling -- not exactly the Third Reich, here.)

But then, they do have a habit of murdering people, and that does make them pretty evil.

And towards the end, some very difficult schemes are pulled off with, to my mind, too little difficulty, too little set-up, too few complications along the way.

But still: If you have an interest in any of the things this writer does, and wouldn't mind to check out of the crapsack world for 8 or 10 hours in this virtual (literary) world, I'd buy the book.

Three quarters of the way through I started calling people to recommend it, so I'm definitely a fan.

By the way: Apart from the Evil Corporation That's Evil Chiefly Because It's a Corporation, there is one throwaway line to the crapsack world having had its environment altered because we screwed it all up, but that's never mentioned again. So you'll get those two minor nods to liberal sensibilities.

Otherwise, it's just a great big pure-escapism treasure hunt, with Fan Service laid on so thick you know it's going straight to your thighs, where people drop lines from The Breakfast Club and occasionally someone uses the line "No one ever gets what they want in the world and that is beautiful" for their computer's passphrase, and you'll scratch your head wondering "Where is that from?," until you look it up.

Highly recommended, if you're in the mood for a very, very sugar-filled dessert which is then topped with more sprinkled sugar. With a side of Count Chocula.

Posted by: Ace at 02:05 PM | Comments (98)
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Expectations.

Obama likes them low. Obama needs them low. Because Obama's talents and achievements and character are very, very low.

n its latest effort to slap Mitt Romney's "47 percent" comment, the Obama campaign on Monday tapped a young woman with Down syndrome to pull at the heartstrings of undecided voters.

The Obama-Biden campaign's web page featured a "letter of the week" from a 25-year-old woman who wrote that "I am one of the 47% of Americans who fall under Mitt Romney's definition of 'entitled' and 'unable to take responsibility for my life.' I have Down syndrome."

...

And, she added, "I have also included my picture, not just because I'm cute, but because I wanted to give you a face of one of the 47% to share with Mr. Romney."

The pushback from the right is that 92% of babies diagnosed with Downs are aborted, an outcome Obama presumably supports. I'm not sure how that actually gets turned into an effective rejoinder, though.

Posted by: Ace at 01:36 PM | Comments (168)
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Among Likely Voters, using CNN's super-duper likely voter screen, it's 50-47.

Among Registered Voters -- no screen -- it's 50... 46?

That's it? The likely voter screen subtracted a point from Romney? Correction: It added a single point to Romney. Math. How does that work?

But is Obama really going to enjoy another 2008, with a +8 turnout advantage?

Oh: The WaPo/ABCNews had it close nationally, but then claimed Obama enjoyed an eleven point lead in just the swing states.

Problem? Only 161 swing state voters were polled. That's a tiny sample -- with a margin of error of + or - eight points.

They're not defending their decision to push that, but it's nonsense.

They know the bigger sample is the better sample, and they know that actual state voting closely mirrors national voting.

Posted by: Ace at 12:47 PM | Comments (242)
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I don't know about this -- I can't say it's a bad idea. I also can't say it's a good one. It will depend on actual execution. As I don't know the zingers, I just can't say much of anything.

But I will anyway, after the quote.

Mr. ObamaÂ’s team records his practices to sharpen his responses so that they connect on a more visceral level with the television audience. One of Mr. RomneyÂ’s aides calculated his words-per-minute rate in the primary campaign debates to break him of the habit of feeling that he needs to rattle off the most statistics.

Mr. RomneyÂ’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August. His strategy includes luring the president into appearing smug or evasive about his responsibility for the economy.

So here's what I think happened. I think Romney imposed his own idea of what a Convention should be about on the RNC. I think his team gave the order that speeches were to be substantive and serious, but also seeking a human connection by telling stories about life history and grandparent coal miners.

Almost the entire convention was like that. Only the major speakers got to pop off any kind of fireworks -- and the guy most expected to be a Human Fireworks Show, Chris Christie, instead turned in a sober call for personal responsibility in a time of national crisis. (Mike Huckabee got a bunch in, and Condi Rice a couple, and Paul Ryan got in not quite zingers but deadly criticisms.)

I noted at the time the convention was lacking zingers. Now, zingers may be dumb, they may be cheap, but you miss them when they're not there. Although we'd all like to pretend we are nothing but Patriots Seeking Substance, we have to admit that there is a real entertainment aspect to these things -- or there should be, at least.

Now, I think the time for the most zingers is the Convention, but that's water under the bridge now.

Can Romney gain some appeal, and reduce Obama's, by some funny, but cutting, lines?

I will say that it is the zingers that most people remember, isn't it?

Romney, though, is not a natural-seeming public speaker. If this were Christie or Ryan, I'd say zing away. My problem is that I'm not sure Romney can manage to be funny and cutting and likable and serious all at once. I do not knock the guy for not being a great, naturally charismatic presence -- that's a gift from God, and no one can fault a man too much for not being blessed by God.

But I do worry that anything outside Romney's comfort zone of being a diligent, homework-doing, test-acing technocratic wonk will come off false and cloying. Trying too hard.

I noted much earlier in the primaries that "Romney can't get away with anything." Some politicians are teflon coated; gaffes and even falsehoods won't stick to them. They have some kind of charisma or charming self-deprecation that makes it hard to stick them with something.

Well, Romney doesn't have that. Romney can't get away with anything. Everything seems to stick to him.

The media makes sure of this, of course, but I think even without the media, people judge Romney more harshly, because he just seems to be trying to hard. All politicians are trying to convince you to give them something. But Romney seems like he's doing that, whereas other politicians -- who are doing the same damn thing -- do not.

So I'm not against the zingers per se. But I do think this is outside Romney's metier, and I'm worried he even struggles to be authentic when he's authentically being himself.

I guess I'm saying: I sure hope his aides are not bullshitting him and telling him "You nailed that, sounded perfectly natural and charming" if his zingers aren't actually working.

Oh: I do love when Romney uses sort of old-fashioned country type sarcasm like "Bless his heart" and "Isn't that remarkable?" The last one deployed like so: "This is a president who came into office claiming he would cut the deficit in half, fix the economy in three years, and even lower the oceans. And now, as his second term approaches, he tells us he can't change Washington from the inside. Isn't that remarkable?"

I love when he does that.

That seems (from what I've seen so far) his best sort of zinger.

Posted by: Ace at 12:03 PM | Comments (307)
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On the President's failures...

Since World War II, America has been the leader of the Free World. We're unique in having earned that role not through conquest but through promoting human rights, free markets and the rule of law. We ally ourselves with like-minded countries, expand prosperity through trade and keep the peace by maintaining a military second to none.

But in recent years, President Obama has allowed our leadership to atrophy. Our economy is stuck in a "recovery" that barely deserves the name. Our national debt has risen to record levels. Our military, tested by a decade of war, is facing devastating cuts thanks to the budgetary games played by the White House. Finally, our values have been misapplied—and misunderstood—by a president who thinks that weakness will win favor with our adversaries.

By failing to maintain the elements of our influence and by stepping away from our allies, President Obama has heightened the prospect of conflict and instability. He does not understand that an American policy that lacks resolve can provoke aggression and encourage disorder.

Crossroads GPS did this very good ad, below. My one reservation is that it appears to be an add intended to simply be emailed (the 1:22 running time is very nonstandard for TV, or even forced-play on YouTube).

I sure hope they adapt this for television airing, or at the very least, YouTube placement before other videos.

Otherwise it's just wank material. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (185)
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The Blaze has clips and a report. Including this excerpt from ABCNews (following up on the Univision Report):

2. Fast and Furious Guns Used in Two Grisly Massacres

ABC News reports, citing Mexican Army documents obtained exclusively by Univision News:

On January 30, 2010, a commando [team] of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez. Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.

Indirectly, the United States government played a role in the massacre by supplying some of the firearms used by the cartel murderers. Three of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), according to a Mexican army document obtained exclusively by Univision News.

Yes, that is literally blood in the streets. So much it didn't all drain away.

The other bloody attack linked to Fast and Furious guns occurred in September 2009 when members of a Mexican drug cartel murdered 18 young men at Salvarcar and El Aliviane, a rehab center in Ciudad Juarez, according to the report.

I don't know what to say. I've said it all a hundred times. It's not that they couldn't get this story; it's that they didn't want to.

They suspected the news would be bad so they devoted few, if any, reporters to it, and downplayed it as much as they could.

Can you imagine if Bush had a Mexican (and American) bodycount from a failed, still unexplained, covert operation to send guns to narcoterrorists.

Can you imagine if 60 teenagers had been gunned down with "Bush's Illegal Guns."

Can you imagine.

Can you imagine.

No question marks, because they're not really questions.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (218)
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