Asterisk?

The longer Belichick goes without winning a Super Bowl after the Jets and the NFL put an end to his intricate spying operation of opponentsÂ’ defensive signals, the more a case can be made that his championships deserve an asterisk.

The mystique and aura of Belichick has taken major hits.

He is supposed to be so much smarter than everybody else, so until now he has escaped criticism for his bizarre deployment of personnel in blowout games because it hasnÂ’t resulted in a major injury.

What sense does it make leaving Tom Brady in at the end of games with leads so big even the PatriotsÂ’ putrid defense can hold them? Fortunately for Brady, nobody has taken a cheap shot at him as Belichick keeps dialing up touchdowns.

But how sick must Belichick feel now that he will be Gronk-less for the Thanksgiving Night game against the Jets at MetLife because he kept All-Pro tight end Rob Gronkowski on the extra point protection team after New England scored its eighth touchdown Sunday to take a 59-24 lead against the Colts with 3:55 remaining. Gronk broke his forearm and had surgery Monday.

He'll be out at least 4-6 weeks. Bellichick had pulled him from the offensive squad but not the special teams squads.

Bellichick snapped about this, "Tell me who's going to get hurt and I'll take him out of the game," and there's some truth to that.

And it is true that if you start pulling the first-string guys who protect the first-string kicker (a very important position, obviously; always a team's highest scorer), the odds that your first-string kicker will be injured with a leg injury due to a guy coming in hot on a block go up dramatically.

Still, there is a time when the second and third string should get some experience in live-ball situations, and that time is certainly less than four minutes left when you're up 58-24 and have scored eight touchdowns in a row. (It was 58-24 before the extra point made it 59-24.)

Bellichick has always tended to leave his first-string in late in games. He did this a lot in the season they lost to the Giants, the 18-1 season, when the Patriots just ran up massively padded point-counts against teams which had been beaten by the middle of the third quarter. I suppose you dance with the girl that brung ya, but the fact is this is a dangerous game, and a game that grinds strong men down, and if you can spare your best players four minutes, five minutes per game here and there that's gotta have benefits for the late season (not to mention their later careers). And not just in terms of major injuries that put players out for blocks of the season, but just in terms of the niggling, nagging injuries, the ones that dog players the whole season and keep them no better than 90%, the wear and tear, the exhaustion.

Sure, you should play 60 minutes of football, but when you're up 58-24 you already did play 60 minutes of football. You just did it in 55 minutes.

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (259)
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The state is benevolent.

The state is wise.

The state loves you.

The state would never hurt you.

The state only wishes to help you.

Will you help the state to help you?

A Senate proposal touted as protecting Americans' e-mail privacy has been quietly rewritten, giving government agencies more surveillance power than they possess under current law.

CNET has learned that Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Revised bill highlights

✭ Grants warrantless access to Americans' electronic correspondence to over 22 federal agencies. Only a subpoena is required, not a search warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause.

✭ Permits state and local law enforcement to warrantlessly access Americans' correspondence stored on systems not offered "to the public," including university networks.

✭ Authorizes any law enforcement agency to access accounts without a warrant -- or subsequent court review -- if they claim "emergency" situations exist.

✭ Says providers "shall notify" law enforcement in advance of any plans to tell their customers that they've been the target of a warrant, order, or subpoena.

✭ Delays notification of customers whose accounts have been accessed from 3 days to "10 business days." This notification can be postponed by up to 360 days.

Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant. It also would give the FBI and Homeland Security more authority, in some circumstances, to gain full access to Internet accounts without notifying either the owner or a judge. (CNET obtained the revised draft from a source involved in the negotiations with Leahy.)

It's an abrupt departure from Leahy's earlier approach, which required police to obtain a search warrant backed by probable cause before they could read the contents of e-mail or other communications.

So he immediately flipped from "must seek a warrant" to a new position of "doesn't have to seek a warrant and in fact can do even more without a warrant."

Yes, any limitation you place on law enforcement makes their jobs harder. We cannot sacrifice whatever small bits of privacy we have, though, simply to make their jobs even easier.

At some point you can make it so easy for law enforcement to investigate citizens than they can get around to investigating non-criminal activity. Like political speech the federal government doesn't like.

Posted by: Ace at 11:02 AM | Comments (321)
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As they say about horses doing arithmetic, this isn't remarkable for what it says but for who's saying it.

Within days of winning the election, President Obama announced that his victory gave him a mandate to raise taxes on the “rich.”

Come again? This was a two-and-a-half-point election. It reflected a painfully divided electorate. The only mandate I saw was to unite a divided country. . . . I did not vote for Obama because I think I am paying too little in taxes.

Obama needs to be very careful. Yes, he was re-elected. But so were all those folks who blocked the extension of the Bush tax cuts if they excluded individuals and small businesses who make enough money to qualify as rich — but not enough to send their kids to college, or help their aging parents, or buy a home in a decent neighborhood.

We need to avoid going over the fiscal cliff. But Obama must also avoid the political cliff.

I've long had a theory that people like Ben Affleck talk up raising taxes on the rich because they know the Republicans will spare them from actually having to pay higher taxes. Thus, it's a no-cost position with social-approval upside: You can agitate for policies that would actually hurt you, and thus seem magnanimous and unconcerned with self, while not actually ever having to do anything beyond speaking a few words.

Partial proof of this is the fact that liberals, as a group, are far less generous in their charitable donations. For people who talk about the poor and needy so darned much, they seem to forget the words "poor and needy" whenever their checkbooks are handy.

So now wealthy Susan Estrich tells us she didn't vote for Obama to be taxed at a higher rate.

My theory is looking better by the minute.

Posted by: Ace at 10:09 AM | Comments (323)
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I don't get much of this hassle -- but then I'm not an attractive young girl.

For some reason -- Dana Loesch seems to get this problem a lot -- the TSA is pretty sure that most terrorists are attractive young women, and they're probably hiding their bombs in their vaginas and breasts.

So, now a 17 year old girl, daughter grand-niece of a Congressman, on a trip with her Christian youth group, has her breasts publicly exposed by the TSA.

What the government and the civil libertarians are quite certain of is that we must not racially profile people actually fitting the terrorist profile -- Muslim men between 18 and 40. So we let the TSA workers pick and choose. And what ends up happening is we get racial profiling of young women, aged 16 to 35, usually white and usually a C cup or better. They are not being selected for their likelihood of terrorist intent, but rather according to how much the TSA screener wants to touch them.

This is racial profiling too -- or sexual profiling, at least, and unlike the racial kind, it has no rational link to the sort of crime being profiled. This is just about personal sexual jollies.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (318)
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We've suspected this for months. Now people are saying it was indeed Clapper. Actually they're saying it was his office -- the Director of National Intelligence -- and any of several people might have made the changes.

But I will stick with Clapper. He's proven himself to be a perfect Obama appointee, by which I mean incompetent and eminently malleable in his claims according to Obama's political needs. Furthermore, we are speaking here of the deaths of four Americans, including an ambassador. We are talking about talking points prepared by the CIA to be given to the US Ambassador for wide dissemination on television. And the US Ambassador was appearing on TV at the order of the White House (which I imagine means the President).

As very senior people are involved on all ends of this, I doubt very much the edit job was done by a convenient subordinate. I would imagine another principal-- Clapper himself -- made the edits. Either way, Clapper is confirmed to have reviewed the edits, at the very least.

As I've been saying, these talking points are negotiated. It is not the case that the CIA just hands out talking points and the Administration accepts them without challenge. Everything Bush wanted to say about Iraq or Al Qaeda was subject to a discussion between his people and the CIA about what the CIA would be willing to disclose and also what they would be willing to sign their names to, as the official intelligence finding of the United States.

The White House wanted the terrorism angle all but written out of the report, and Clapper was the man who did the editing, and then the CIA, to its great dishonor, signed off on this lie.

CBS News has learned that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) cut specific references to "al Qaeda" and "terrorism" from the unclassified talking points given to Ambassador Susan Rice on the Benghazi consulate attack - with the agreement of the CIA and FBI. The White House or State Department did not make those changes.

There has been considerable discussion about who made the changes to the talking points that Rice stuck to in her television appearances on Sept. 16 (video), five days after the attack that killed American Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, and three other U.S. nationals.

...

However, an intelligence source tells CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan the links to al Qaeda were deemed too "tenuous" to make public, because there was not strong confidence in the person providing the intelligence. CIA Director David Petraeus, however, told Congress he agreed to release the information -- the reference to al Qaeda -- in an early draft of the talking points, which were also distributed to select lawmakers.

...

An intelligence source says the talking points were passed from the CIA to the DNI, where the substantive edits were made, and then to FBI, which made more edits as part of "standard procedure."

The head of the DNI is James Clapper, an Obama appointee. He ultimately did review the points, before they were given to Ambassador Rice and members of the House intelligence committee on Sept. 14. They were compiled the day before.

Brennan says her source wouldn't confirm who in the agency suggested the final edits which were signed off on by all intelligence agencies.

If you can follow this: The DNI says it struck the references to Al Qaeda from the talking points because that connection was "too tenuous," but then stuffed it full of references to the YouTube video and a spontaneous protest, for which there was no evidence at all and in fact for which there was strongly debunking evidence. Such as the fact that no one at the consulate reported a protest all day long before the attack. What the reported was cops/security agents snapping pictures of the place, like they were casing it, and then a large coordinated attack, out of nowhere.

Posted by: Ace at 07:26 AM | Comments (315)
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Well you can't buy them. The American government can, though.

Just some filler while I wake up, before I start poaching all of Ben's links.

Weapon X, the Laser Avenger, is a vehicle-based laser that can take out an aircraft. Well, a drone, at least. The 1 kilowatt beam is weak. But a 100 kilowatt beam is coming, supposedly soon.

Not mentioned here are the various sniper/gunfire detection and location systems, which use either accoustics or optics (the latter by beaming laser light around, looking for reflections from the sniper's scope's lens) to pinpoint the location of a hidden shooter.

Posted by: Ace at 08:14 AM | Comments (92)
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• So, About The Idiot Who Waves In Group Photos
  
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• Turbo Tim Geitner: Let's Do Away With The Debt Limit Entirely
  
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• It Looks Like Elmo May Have Sexually Abused That Kid After All
  
• Do People Like This Still Think They're Edgy And Avant Garde? This Schtick Is Old And Tired.
  
• Four Ways 2013 Looks A Lot Like 1937
  
• Too Few Oppressors, Too Many Victims
  
• Marco Rubio And The Age Of The Earth
  
• Scarborough Finally Scolds Candy Crowley For Making Up History On Benghazi
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:09 AM | Comments (321)
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Happy Tuesday.

An update on the low turnout myth: Yesterday, I wrote that Romney only lagged McCain by about 250K votes (as compared to Obama 2012, who came 6 million votes short of his 2008 total). Well, Romney's numbers are now larger than McCain's -- by about 10,000 votes. And some California votes are still being counted.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:45 AM | Comments (347)
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So how about a palate cleanser of....

Some Juicy Liberal Schadenfreude: Peace Corp Guilt

Esther Katcoff is a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay and apparently a well-meaning, compassionate person who just wants to help people. And I think you're all aware of the magnitude of harm this kind of person can inflict on those whose lives they decide to improve. But this isn't about them - it's about Esther and her guilt problem.

Because being a bien pensant liberal means feeling guilty about everything - even guilt itself. And it turns out that helping others is really all about you and your feelings....of guilt.

Read and savor the sweet, sweet tears of indulgent, narcissistic liberal self-flagellation here.

People all over the world are dying. They are suffering and we are watching. It is immoral, says Peter Singer, not to do everything in our power to help them. iPods, spankin' new cars, vacations to Disney World... we spend money on these things instead of paying for life-saving surgeries, feeding hungry children or investing in third world economies. According to Singer, the fact that we don´t need to watch the poor suffer doesn't change the fact that they are drowning and we know it. And we let them.

...But what to do about all that? Well, I started by not buying a new iPod after my old-school Nano broke. But would that help the hungry children of Africa? I couldn't just donate the money saved. I was an Urban Studies major. I knew about the complications of development work, the band-aid solutions, the causes that just sound good, the charity that unmotivates the beneficiaries, the money that doesn't always reach the ground. The only way, I told myself, the only way is to understand completely what the people need to fish themselves out of their lake. Then I could support them with my iPod money.

I tell people I joined the Peace Corps to understand what it means to be poor, but that's just part of the story. I joined the Peace Corps to figure out how to escape the guilt of having so much while other people have so little.

But alas even working in the Peace Corps did not fix her guilt problem:

All this seems to me a pretty depressing lose-lose situation. Either I ignore the hunger of a child, or I create jealousy amongst her peers. And either way she will be hungry again next year after I go back to America. How do I cope with all of this burden? How do any of us cope?

I feel like the go-to answer is to try drop it behind somewhere on our two year journey. Just throw that heavy sack in the arroyo. Remind yourself of the hours of work you put into that project, the tears you shed as you squatted homesick in your host family's overflowing latrine. The opportunity cost of doing the Peace Corps, all those tens of thousands of dollars you like to think you could have made if you were employed these two years in the U.S.

But unfortunately, that reasoning doesn't do it for me. Nor does the argument that extreme wealth needs to exist because people need a goal to strive for. I mean, what would Maria say if I told her I'm going to the Lady Gaga concert in Asuncion so that she can strive to have enough money to do that too some day? She doesn't get enough to eat, can't read and lives in a wooden shack with no water.

So how did she finally overcome her tragic guilt? By redistributing it of course.

For me, this is the solution to the heap-ton of Peace Corps guilt clamping down on my shoulders.

Goal 3: to help people back home understand human need and realize their responsibility to throw that lifesaver. In a sustainable way, of course. Because the guilt that we are allowing people to drown is not mine. It is ours.

Well I for one am sad that we live in a world where thousands of people suffer from First World guilt everyday but aren't lucky enough to have an entire village of Paraguayans to help them work out their guilt issues.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:32 PM | Comments (700)
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Bears and 49ers.

If you're into that sort of thing.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:48 PM | Comments (286)
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