Ridiculous, of course.

Mitch McConnell has had a habit of justifying substantive caves for claims that he extracted some sort of concession that will prove to be a fruitful political issue.* I imagine any Republican even thinking about this deal expects Obama to break his promise -- in fact, the promise may not even be seriously offered. Republicans might even be just saying "You have to give us a fig leaf of cover."

So, the idea is that we just give Obama everything he wants substantively but we've extracted a promise from him, which he will then of course break, and so we "win" politically later by running against his broken promise.

This is the stupidest thing I ever heard. Not only would this plan be craven and dishonest itself (the plan to extract a promise you don't even believe will be honored as a "concession," and then act surprised it's being dishonored, is itself dishonest), but it has no chance of actually working in the first place.

1. Cuts are unpopular. Unpopular but necessary, of course, but unpopular. No one holds it against someone too much for breaking a promise to do something they didn't really want him to do in the first place.

2. Any "promise to cut" will involve some sort of later negotiations, and Obama can and will claim he intended to keep his promise, but Republicans once again sabotaged the "discussions."

Thus this whole idea is an attempt to avoid a major political confrontation which Obama would probably win... by setting up a later political confrontation which Obama also would probably win.

Let's not forget why we have the sequestration deal: We have it because Mitch McConnell decided it "wasn't the right time for a real political confrontation" and so put it off into the future. And now that that moment's here, surprise surprise, they're looking to concede, again and delay the actual confrontation until later, again.

And when that moment comes, what will they do?

If you can't fight now-- when the next elections are two years away -- when precisely would be a politically opportune time to fight?

Thanks to @benk84. This is from his headlines post.

* During the initial ObamaCare voting, when it was still in the Senate, Republicans had the opportunity to keep the Senate in session through the holidays and keep a filibuster against ObamaCare going. Instead, they agreed to hold a vote on ObamaCare -- and this was the vote that created ObamaCare -- and Mitch McConnell claimed he'd won an important political victory because Obama had agreed to hold a vote on the debt ceiling at some particular time that Mitch McConnell claimed would create maximum exposure on the issue and the maximum political problems for Obama.

Does anyone even remember that vote? It wasn't a big deal at the time, and we ended up losing on it too.

Plus, we got ObamaCare. Just so the Senators wouldn't have to stay at their jobs in DC over the holidays.

McConnell is forever justifying these major sell-outs by claiming he's so cleverly extracted a dynamite political concession that will wind up making the Democrats' victory a poison pill. It's either delusional or dishonest.

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Comments (375)
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He just left his meeting with Turbo Tim Geitner. He seems to be throwing cold water on the talks and saying the White House isn't taking this seriously.

[Update: Press conference over. Video Below]

Boehner called on the White House and Democrats to publically name what cuts they would accept. Boehner called the current deal "way out of balance." He didn't mention what was in it.

"Revenue is only on the table if there are serious spending cuts that are part of this agreement.

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:47 AM | Comments (275)
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• Must Read: The Incestuous Bleeding Of The Republican Party
  
• Bend Over, We're About To Get F***ed Again
  
• Krauthammer: Republicans Who Cave On Entitlements And Buy Obama's Promise Are Fools
  
• MSNBC Personality Cracks Gay Joke About Lindsay Graham
  
• Germany Changes Their Mind On Voting Against The Palestinian Bid
  
• Former ACORN Honcho Wants To Unionize NYC Fast Food Workers
  
• State Senator Floats Idea Of Dissolving Detroit Into Wayne County
  
• Appeals Cout Issues An Injunction Against HHS Contraception Mandate
  
• We're Going Over The Cliff
  
• Lindsay Lohan Arrested Again
  
• The Rise Of Faux Diversity
  
• 96% Of Political Donations From Ivy League Schools Went To Obama
  
• Afghan Savages Behead 15 Year Old Girl After She Turns Down Marriage Proposal
  
• MSNBC Can't Tell The Difference Between Black People
  
• California Pension Fund Sues Bankrupt City
  
• All That's Old Is New Again
  
• Another Climate Confab Going Down In Flames
  
• Two Powerball Tickets Sold
  
• Deans, Deans Everywhere And No Professors To Teach
  
• "Independent" Regulator For UK Press?
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:11 AM | Comments (294)
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Good Morning.

I'll leave you with this until I post the news dump. A Belgian man finds out his wife of 19 years was born a man. No photos at the link. I'm sure they'll leak out as this story gets legs.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:07 AM | Comments (206)
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What's In a Face

Can you judge a human book by its cover?

Well when it comes to faces, people can - albeit not perfectly but definitely better than chance.

Several years ago, a woman named Brook White appeared on the reality TV competition show American Idol. White was 24 years old, blond, and strikingly pretty. When she sang her song, "Like a Star," she struck a familiar chord among some viewers. White said nothing about her religion, but Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, were certain that she was one of their own.

"She has the Mormon Glow," one blogger wrote, referring to the belief that the faithful radiate the Holy Spirit. White mentioned that she never drank a cup of coffee or watched an R-rated movie-signs of a Mormon-like squeaky-clean lifestyle. But the "glow" clinched it, and it turned out that her fans were right. "I didn't know I was setting off the Mormon radar," White remarked later in an interview with The Arizona Republic.

Soon after, psychologists Nalini Ambady, then at Tufts University, and Nicholas Rule, at the University of Toronto, set out to test the Mormon glow. One way to do this is to see if even non-Mormons can detect it. The psychologists began their experiment by cropping head shots of Mormons and non-Mormons and asking undergraduate volunteers whether they could pick out the Mormons.

They certainly could-and in just a glance. While random guessing would yield 50 percent accuracy, as in a coin toss, the volunteers accurately identified Mormon men and women 60 percent of the time. (Mormons themselves were only slightly more accurate.)

And people don't just have 'Mordar', they've also been proven to have 'gaydar' and even 'crimidar':

At Cornell University, psychologist Jeffrey Valla and his colleagues set out to test just how readily people can spot criminals based on facial appearance alone. They prepared close-cropped, expressionless, facial photos of clean-shaven Caucasian men in their twenties and asked volunteers to identify the murderers, rapists, thieves, forgers, drug dealers, and so on. Men and women alike could distinguish convicts from noncriminals with above-chance accuracy, but, interestingly, not violent offenders from nonviolent ones.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:52 PM | Comments (524)
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The GOP seems to think that raising taxes is some kind of a solution. It's not. It's a poison pill.

Obama does in fact want to take the country over the cliff. It's win-win-win-win-win.* He gets to raise taxes (including on the middle class, which he needs to pay for his welfare state), he gets some cuts to the the military he despises, he gets cuts for Medicare (not part of his coalition), he gets to blame the GOP for all of this, and, bonus, he gets to claim the coming recession he's already engineered is the GOP's fault, too.

The GOP is in a bad situation and will try to give the store away to avoid this. We shouldn't. Let Obama have the economy he wants, and let him take responsibility for it, too.

* Update: It's a political winner until he gets his fullscale global meltdown Depression 2.0. Then we'll see how much John Q. Sixpack really loves Obama.

Posted by: Ace at 05:02 PM | Comments (227)
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I've been asking this too a lot.

Actually I sort of think this is barking up the wrong tree. A tree near the right tree, but still the wrong tree. I don't really love political messages in entertainment of either stripe. I roll my eyes at both.

Still, it's near the right tree.

Posted by: Ace at 03:13 PM | Comments (372)
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I've avoided this topic because we've had it sixty three thousand times before and, especially right after the election, I thought it would be nice to decompress.

But at some point I guess we're going to have to have this argument.

Here's one guy making the case that RINOs once again didn't listen to TrueCons and destroyed everything.

I just have so little patience for or interest in this argument. To me it boils down to 1, "If Only They Had Listened To Me," a political evergreen, and 2, a gorilla-like dominance/aggression display that I've seen before -- a lot.

The article talks up about how wrong it was to nominate Romney without ever -- and this is the part of these arguments I find so childish -- without ever actually saying which of the other candidates would have been better.

See, this is that Pie Chart situation I talked about in politics. When you announce a specific policy -- or support a specific candidate -- you're defending a rather narrow wedge of the pie. The pie represents the Sum Total of All Possible Policy Responses (or Possible Candidates), so anytime someone criticizes your tiny slice of the pie without placing his flag on his own tiny slice of the pie, he's engaging in an easy political maneuver -- you have to defend a tiny bit of pie whereas his argument appeals to anyone who wanted any other slice of pie. That is, his vagueness on who we actually should have nominated allows the partisans of every other possibility -- Bachmann, Santorum, Gingrich, Cain, Huntsman (!), Johnson (!), Perry, and who-all else -- to say "Yes, I agree with that. Rather than that one piece of pie, we should have selected one of the seven or ten others."

But which one? If this guy came forward and said "and that's why we should have picked Santorum," he'd have a tougher case to make.

But it makes the easy one -- we shouldn't have picked Romney, but instead one of the thousand other Republican office-holders or opinion-leaders who are Not Romney -- and anyone who likes any of those thousand other options can agree.

It's a silly bit of positioning which invites opponents to defend a flawed man, or a flawed position, while one nobly argues for The Hypothetical Ideal, and the Ideal is undefined so it can be one thing to one person and another thing to someone else.

Romney was a major disappointment to me. I feel responsible for this loss, as I was one of the people who got on the Romney train midway -- not at the beginning, but earlier than most, too. I feel that certain representations I made (and I believed) turned out to be false. I thought, for example, that this intelligence and ability and past successes would count in his favor; I thought people might like that in a candidate. (Actually, I earlier supported Pawlenty, and then Perry, precisely because I thought that a more blue-collar standard-bearer was better. But they lost, and Santorum, while having a certain blue-collar appeal I thought was attractive, seemed otherwise too flawed to nominate, so I wound up convincing myself that the public could embrace an aspirational, success-story figure, rather than grousing about how Rich That Guy Is.)

I thought that his "moderate New England tone" on social issues would make him more appealing to swing voters, particularly women.

I thought his prior ability to organize large sprawling concerns would wind up giving us a big advantage in get out the vote and such -- and it didn't. In fact, his campaign seems to have been much more poorly organized than most.

For these things, I'm sorry. I was wrong. I thought he would be a better candidate. I thought he would win. He wasn't and he didn't.

On the other hand, I'm still not seeing any good arguments for the notion that another candidate would have won. Now, no one could do worse than Romney -- he lost, after all. You can't do worse than losing. So there would not be any particular bad outcome attached had we nominated, let's say, Herman Cain.

But I'm still finding it rather incredible that the more flamboyant and/or limited-niche candidates would somehow have won, just because, supposedly, they would have been pushing Conservative Principles more effectively.

I think Romney pushed a fairly strong conservative economic policy -- mind you, without a very good conservative economic argument.

I just haven't seen the case made that we should have nominated this specific candidate, say Gingrich, and he would have won, as opposed to the kind of empty and vague statement that we should have nominated someone better.

I would have loved to have nominated someone better.

But who?

Anyway, it's unavoidable that we have just this "My Segment of the Party Is Quite Clearly the Most Popular and Victory-Producing Part of It So Let's All Gather Under My Flag" argument at some point. Unfortunately, after a loss, that's what people do. They have to do this. It's not even something I can really say "Hey let's not do this" to. It's something that has to happen. It's part of the process.

So let the knives be drawn and let the blood be spilled.

Posted by: Ace at 01:12 PM | Comments (645)
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I saw part of a documentary on Monopoly (available on Netflix) and they mentioned this neat bit trivia.

Someone mentioned Hogan's Heroes in a comment. So, here was some Hogan's Heroes stuff. This was kept top secret for 45 years.

The British distributor of Monopoly, by the way, was in on the espionage.

It's a story that will forever change the way you think of the phrase, "Get Out of Jail Free."

During World War II, as the number of British airmen held hostage behind enemy lines escalated, the country's secret service enlisted an unlikely partner in the ongoing war effort: The board game Monopoly.

It was the perfect accomplice.

Included in the items the German army allowed humanitarian groups to distribute in care packages to imprisoned soldiers, the game was too innocent to raise suspicion. But it was the ideal size for a top-secret escape kit that could help spring British POWs from German war camps.

The British secret service conspired with the U.K. manufacturer to stuff a compass, small metal tools, such as files, and, most importantly, a map, into cut-out compartments in the Monopoly board itself.

The British maker of Monopoly, Waddington's, turns out to have already perfected, for another industry, printing on sheets of silk. This made them especially well-positioned to make maps for would-be escapees. Military maps had to be durable, and so were often printed on silk.

Here's another bit of trivia I learned from the documentary: The game wasn't actually invented by Charles Darrow (as most believe, and when I say "most," I mean "some of the very few people who know any trivia about Monopoly at all).

It was actually invented by a Philadelphia Socialite Socialist who wanted the game to be a subversive "teachable moment" sort of thing which would demonstrate to people that property was a tool of repression and unfair and enslaving and all of that. Her idea was that the game would be sort of cruel and random. That was sort of the point of the arbitrary "Go Directly to Jail" and the cruel misfortunes, and undeserved rewards, of the Chance and Community Chest cards.

And then people would learn capitalism was evil. The game is unfair, arbitrary, impoverishing, and rigged against you, you were supposed to learn.

I'm not sure if Darrow removed or softened these elements from the game he began making (having now changed the names of the streets to, famously, the streets in Atlantic City). Or if people just decided they didn't care about the intended Lesson in Marxism and just wanted to have fun bankrupting their opponents.

One guy in this documentary pointed out that in a way this woman's socialist point remains in the game: One guy wins and has everything, and everyone else is in the poorhouse.

It kind of makes me want to play Monopoly, and for real this time. When I say "real," I mean... with trading.

When I was a kid, I never traded crap. I didn't even understand that was the main point of the game. I just wanted to go around the board and get lucky and buy Boardwalk and Park Place.

We almost never traded, ever. Ever. Like, I think it happened twice. I just could not get over the idea that if my brother wanted one of my Orange properties, I ought not to give it to him, because he certainly had malice on his mind.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (177)
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Angus T. Jones, who plays the kid on the show (not really a kid anymore), has found Christ and now finds Two and Half Men's jokes -- which are largely about sex -- spiritually poisonous.

I only saw parts of this show twice -- once was on an airplane, when I had few other viewing options. (The airplane wasn't streaming TV; it was playing a few recorded TV shows, and Two and a Half Men was among my two and a half options.) I was surprised by two things: First, it was kind of funny, actually, although I was on a plane, of course, and thus desperate for distraction. And second, that every joke -- every joke -- was about sex. At least the episode I saw. It involved Charlie Sheen and his therapist, played by Jane Lynch. I saw part of another episode recently, and there the jokes weren't about sex.

Angus T. Jones is of course currently being gently ministered to by the Tolerance Brigade, which as usual is showing its tolerance through jeering, insult, and hate.

Also a good deal of jealousy, though at least that I can understand as response: A washed-up former actor like Zack Branff (or whatever his name is) is understandably annoyed by someone working on a hit TV show making at least $350,000 per episode. Envy isn't a good emotion, certainly, but at least I can understand it.

What I can't understand is the simple hate, the hate for hate's sake, the hate of The Other for the sake of Self-Affirmation. I especially can't understand the hate coming from the sort of people who will insist to you, quite seriously, that they have essentially purged all primitive and dark emotion from themselves and now exist on an elevated Oprah/Chopra plane of pidgin Zen harmony and balance.

There are two ways, it seems to me, to deal with the hatred that lurks in every human heart:

1. Acknowledge it, acknowledge one's flaws, acknowledge one's darker tendencies, and by acknowledging them, increase the control over them. Same idea as with alcoholism: You can't address a problem until you have acknowledged its simple existence.

Or, the route that I see most benighted "progressives" going:

2. Insist that there is no hatred in your heart, because you are simply that ennobled a human being. When your hatred (which still exists, despite your callow claims to the contrary) exhibits itself, engage in a silly semantic game in which you claim your "hate" isn't hate at all but something else, like, I don't know, "teachable moments" or whatever. Give free vent to all your spleen and all your venom and just insist, like a child caught with his pudgy fingers in a cookie jar, that he was actually looking for the healthy vegetables, and thought maybe they might be hidden among the Oreos.

All that said, I do not really understand this notion among Christians (or among many of the godly) that laughing at a human foible, or laughing at bad behavior, is something akin to taking delight in that foible, or engaging in that bad behavior oneself.

I know the idea is something like "If you can laugh at it, you're not taking it seriously" and thus "mainstreaming" it. But I heard the same thing in college, when I'd use the word "gay." "If you're saying 'that's gay,' you're not taking the problem of homophobia seriously, and you have genuine hate in your heart."

I didn't see the connection when offered from the left/secularists, and I still don't see the connection when offered by the right/religious. Enjoying a vengeance movie where the good guy slaughters the bad guys doesn't have much connection to a true intention to kill. I will concede that there must be some connection there -- which is why particular fantasies appeal to particular people, and why men tend to like Vengeance/Omnicompetence fantasies and women prefer, I don't know, Twilight, whatever the hell that is -- but it's such a thin and weak connection it seems to me to be a rounding error in the accounting of human flaws.

Instapundit used to joke about the feds announcing this or that crusade against a new moral panic: Well, I'm glad we've got all the other problems taken care of, then.

Likewise this sort of thing -- the "taking delight" or laughing at some kind of human flaw or sin -- is of such a de minimis or venial nature that I wonder if we overconcern ourselves with this sort of thing in order to avoid thinking too much about more serious things.

Small problems and small sins are reassuring in that way, aren't they? People enjoy, say, worrying about leveling up in a videogame precisely because it is so meaningless and permits them an escape from more pressing problems.

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Comments (382)
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