Possibly NSFW, a second confirmed case of Scottwalkeritis.

Posted by: CAC at 02:22 PM | Comments (313)
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Good video. He uses his supporters in a call-and-response exercise to shout down the shouting (likely paid) hecklers.

Note that this anti-Romney heckling was performed, via a time machine, as retaliation against anti-Obama heckling that will take place on August 27th. A lightning bolt containing 1.41 gigawatts of energy will strike the Old Clock on that day.

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (130)
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Not "gain" them at a pace too slow to even match population growth, but actually lose them. A bona fide contraction.

Pethokoukis' piece is short enough to just say "read the whole thing."

And all of this is before Europe craters, too.

This is horrible. The only thing that makes it seem less horrible is that I was pretty confident this was going to happen. Since before the end of the past year, when it was pretty clear the economy was not going to recover, I began switching my thinking to the likely possibility of a second dip. By February, I was pretty sure.

All of those Monty "DOOM" posts. And no signal of a true recovery.

So this is already baked into my mental cake. I'm sure that's true of most of you.

I do not understand why economists kept insisting this was a "recovery" when it looked almost nothing like a recovery. Yet they kept making predictions based on the notion that we were recovering.

Thanks to JackStraw.

Posted by: Ace at 01:16 PM | Comments (216)
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The very question is insulting. Why would Romney tell other American citizens what to do, how to exercise their First Amendment rights?

And it's egregious that the media continues imagining conservatives as unruly, needing a Strong Man on a White Horse to bring order to their chaos.

I never heard the media ask if Obama would ask Occupiers to stop shitting on police cars.

In any event, Romney refused.

Mitt Romney wonÂ’t ask his supporters to stop heckling President Obama and his surrogates at campaign events.

During a radio interview on Tuesday, the presumptive GOP nominee declined an opportunity to ask his supporters to stop, saying his campaign didn’t “believe in unilateral disarmament.”

Supporters of the president have, in return, begun heckling Romney during his five-day, six-state bus tour this week, disrupting campaign events in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

They just began this? In retaliation?

Do they own time machine?

Did they go back in time to "begin" heckling months ago?

Do they intend to only use their time machine for heckling? Couldn't a time machine be used for more important purposes?

Meanwhile, the pro-Obama hecklers heckling Romney in the present are being paid to do so.

At the candidate's afternoon stop outside a bakery in DeWitt, a group of about 15 protesters stood behind a police barricade, a few of them chanting in support of Obama. Asked why he was protesting, a man dressed in a grim reaper costume pointed a reporter to a pair of "designated representatives" standing in the shade.

"I can't talk, you gotta get one of those people over there to talk to y'all," he said. "They're the ones who can talk to reporters."

Neither of the representatives agreed to give their names, but two protesters said they were getting paid to stand outside for the rally, though the wage is unclear: one said she was getting $7.25 per hour, while another man said they were being paid $17 per hour.

Meanwhile, about 50 feet away, another protest had been organized by local Democrats in conjunction with the Obama campaign. A campaign official told BuzzFeed they had nothing to do with the other group — which he said he believed they had been sent by the labor-backed "Good Jobs Now" — and confirmed that they were being paid.

If I had a time machine, as these folks do, I would just go back 100 years, and put a single penny in the bank accounts of the paid hecklers. By now, with interest, that would be -- well, like, ten million dollars or something!

And think of all the heckling you'd do if you were paid ten million dollars (or something).

That's what I mean. This time machine just isn't being used optimally.

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (199)
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They just can't stop talking to the press.

Here, I sense the motive is payback against Israel, because, they say Israel implemented cyberattacks against Iran's oil industry without US blessing.

So of course they leak.

The United States and Israel jointly developed a sophisticated computer virus nicknamed Flame that collected critical intelligence in preparation for cyber-sabotage attacks aimed at slowing IranÂ’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, according to Western officials with knowledge of the effort.

The massive piece of malware was designed to secretly map IranÂ’s computer networks and monitor the computers of Iranian officials, sending back a steady stream of intelligence used to enable an ongoing cyberwarfare campaign, according to the officials.

The effort, involving the National Security Agency, the CIA and IsraelÂ’s military, has included the use of destructive software such as the so-called Stuxnet virus to cause malfunctions in IranÂ’s nuclear enrichment equipment.

The emerging details about Flame provide new clues about what is believed to be the first sustained campaign of cyber-sabotage against an adversary of the United States.

“This is about preparing the battlefield for another type of covert action,” said one former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official, who added that Flame and Stuxnet were elements of a broader assault that continues today. “Cyber collection against the Iranian program is way further down the road than this.”

Flame came to light last month after Iran detected a series of cyberattacks on its oil industry. The disruption was directed by Israel in a unilateral operation that apparently caught its U.S. partners offguard, according to several U.S. and Western officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

You want technical details, you say? Well, the Obama Administration is pleased to provide you with technical details.

The virus is among the most sophisticated and subversive pieces of malware exposed to date. Experts said the program was designed to replicate across even highly secure networks, then control everyday computer functions to send a flow of secrets back to its creators. The code could activate computer microphones and cameras, log keyboard strokes, take computer screen shots, extract geolocation data from images and send and receive commands and data through Bluetooth wireless technology.

Flame was designed to do all this while masquerading as a routine Microsoft software update, evading detection for several years by using a sophisticated program to crack an encryption algorithm.

There's no possible way Iran (or any other targeted country) can benefit from knowing the virus' tricks and tasks and Trojans, I guess.

Take that Bluetooth thing. A closed system does not have any connection to the internet, so even if you have a keylogger installed on it, how do you get that information back to you?

Well, it appears that the virus sends a signal to a portable device with a Bluetooth, the sort that someone might take into the area. And then when that device is brought home, it sends from there.

That's a neat trick.

Now, how many Bluetooth-enabled devices do you imagine Iran will be permitting near secure computers in the future?

How about none?

This scandal just ticked up a notch, because the leakers are continuing to leak, even while being investigated, and even leaking more critical information. They must be found and arrested at once.

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 AM | Comments (147)
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Corrected: It looks like this isn't actually a biopic of L. Ron Hubbard, but rather a fictionalized version of it.

Why? I don't know. Lawsuits, I guess.

Because it's just made up, and sort of lame for that, I'm thinking it's not "Something" any more. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:09 AM | Comments (146)
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Finally.

Scott Brown already accepted two debates. Ted Kennedy's widow, Vicky Kennedy, proposed a third, with herself as organizer (I'm not clear if she'd have any role beyond that).

He's agreed to permit Tom Brokaw as the moderatort, but what he will not agree to is the progressive advocacy organization MSNBC hosting or broadcasting the debate.

Senator Scott Brown said he will accept a debate at the ­Edward M. Kennedy Institute but only on the condition that Vicki Kennedy stay neutral in the election and that MSNBC not be included as a broadcast partner.

The Brown campaign said in a press release that it would agree to allow former NBC ­anchor Tom Brokaw to moderate.

...

In a letter to the Institute Monday, Brown’s campaign manager Jim Barnett wrote: “In order to proceed, we need to know that in keeping with the spirit of neutrality ­expressed in Vicki Kennedy’s letter that she will not endorse or otherwise get involved in this race.

Posted by: Ace at 10:40 AM | Comments (208)
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A couple of missed chances -- for example, in one California district, two Republicans finished in the "Top Two" in their goofy system, and thus the Democrats have literally no hope of winning the election there.

The Hill goes on to say it "projects" the Democrats winning 10-15 seats. Not enough to take the House, but a win, of sorts.

But... why?

Rasmussen has had the Republicans with a consistent, and now large, lead in the Congressional generic ballot.

It's currently 45-38. And you have to go back aways to find the Democrats ahead.

Republicans have consistently held a modest advantage over Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot since June 2009. During 2012, support for Democrats on the generic ballot has ranged from 36% to 41%. Republicans have stayed between 40% and 46% in that same time period.

Maybe the Democrats are expecting some good economic news? Well, maybe they are, but the Fed doesn't seem to be.

The U.S. central bank will most likely ease monetary policy when it meets this week as recent data point to a worsening labor market and the crisis in Europe intensifies, Goldman Sachs said.

The Federal Open Market Committee will likely say it would buy assets such as mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasurys when it meets for a two-day meeting starting Tuesday, Jan Hatzius, the investment bankÂ’s Chief U.S. Economist said in a report on Monday.

“We would be quite surprised if we saw no easing this week,” Hatzius wrote in the report.

This sort of intervention is of course undertaken when the economy is expected to deteriorate. (So far, these interventions have not produced good growth, of course.)

I'm not sure what on earth the Hill is basing its predictions on, apart from hope, and the built-in desire to "predict" something that looks like a regression to the mean.

But that's not a real regression to the mean.

It also helps to know what the "mean" actually is. They keep seeming to imagine the "mean" -- the baseline -- in politics is Democratic rule, so any Republican victory should be short-lived, soon "corrected."

Posted by: Ace at 10:07 AM | Comments (135)
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The "undervote" is the count of people who vote in an election, but choose, for whatever reason, to not vote for a candidate in an uncontested primary, or some no-name.

If Democratic voters come out to vote in Democratic primaries, and dutifully vote for Congressman, AG, and so forth, but elect not to bother voting for Obama, what does that mean?

Mike Flynn says it means trouble for Obama.

[T]hese numbers are based solely on Democrat primary voters. There are no Republican or Independent voters in this. This is Obama's base. That said, look at the map above, in only about three counties is he winning the support of more than 90% of Democrat voters in an uncontested primary. In over 27 counties, he is winning less than 70%. In a few counties, he is winning 55%.

Our old rule of thumb was that any undervote more than 20% was a reason to go to DefCon 1. It signaled a serious problem with the base and would necessitate our adapting campaign strategy and tactics to shore up our support. I have never seen a situation where a candidate had an undervote of 30-40% and went on to win the general election. In fact, in such situations, we would often pull out of the race entirely.

One caveat here is that Obama's lowest undervote percentages are in the Philadelphia area, and those infamous Bucks County suburbs that put the Democratic candidate on top in every recent presidential election. Those are the most populous counties (well, those and Pittsburgh), so a county-by-county analysis is worse for Obama than the actual statewide undervote. In the Philly area, the undervote is, it is said (this disagrees with Flynn) "well within historical norms," and is only 15% or thereabouts.

But that means that statewide it's higher, around 20% or so, or more.

Over at the liberal New Republic, analyst William Galston puts Pennsylvania in the swing column, and that was before this data was published.

The latest Quinnipiac survey gives the president a 6-point edge (46-40), but his support remains well below 50 percent, as it has in most previous surveys for the past six months. ObamaÂ’s job approval among Pennsylvanians stands at only 46, versus 49 percent who disapprove of his performance as president. Forty-eight percent think he deserves to be reelected, while 47 percent do not. And 56 percent are dissatisfied with the way things are going in their state, versus 43 percent who are satisfied.

At this point, the odds still favor an Obama victory in Pennsylvania this November. But the evidence suggests that Romney has a shot in the state—and Romney himself seems to think so.

Southwestern Pennsylvania shares some commonalities with bordering West Virginia, including coal, and voters who are socially conservative but economically in favor of big government's allegedly helping hand.

It also now features a significant undervote for President Obama, and perhaps a growing desire on the part of Democrats to skip the presidential race entirely.

Three Democrats from West Virginia, including first-term Sen. Joe Manchin, are skipping the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. this September, where President Obama will formally receive the party's presidential nomination.

The West Virginia Democratic Party told reporters Monday that in addition to Manchin, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin and Rep. Nick Rahall do not plan to join West Virginia's delegation. State Party Chair Larry Puccio said Sen. Jay Rockefeller will attend and will serve as the group's honorary chair.

Mr. Obama is unpopular in the state and lost 41 percent of the West Virginia primary vote to a convicted felon. Manchin -- who faces his own re-election battle this year -- has said he's not sure he'll vote for Mr. Obama.

He says he'll just stay home and keep working for West Virginia, or something.

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (138)
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A spokeswoman for MSNBC earlier said they were looking into the matter.

Apparently this is the result of their investigation. She only plays a few more seconds of the remark (his summation, but not the earlier contrast he drew with the government sector), and does not even mention that the edit has been called deceptive.

All she says is that there was more and “we didn’t get a chance to play it."

No, what you did is deliberately edit the remarks into a meaning plainly never intended by the speaker.

It's.... pretty bad. When I saw this I was pretty certain The Right Scoop had posted the wrong video. But apparently this is MSNBC's full statement on the matter.

What I'm Going to Do To Your Mouth

It's amazing! Amazing!

Posted by: Ace at 09:25 AM | Comments (129)
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