Yup, he said "tea-baggers."

Posted by: Ace at 02:06 PM | Comments (212)
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No serious, check out her greatest hits.

Morales has been caught in multiple lies, telling co-workers she shaved her head because she had brain cancer and later telling them it was her friend who had brain cancer, her colleagues and friends said.

And there's more.

Posted by: Ace at 12:33 PM | Comments (298)
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On video (the chasing part, not the wacking part), The New Inquisition.

Posted by: Ace at 11:35 AM | Comments (176)
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Great and deadly point, by Stewart Baker at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Greenwald's latest bombshell is that American Intelligence considered revealing jihadists' sexual and financial hypocrisies in order to undermine their moral authority. The author of the piece at Volokh, Stuart Baker, gave a comment to Greenwald's co-writer, asking, rhetorically, “Why wouldn’t we consider doing to Islamic extremists what Glenn Greenwald does routinely to Republicans?”

Greenwald's piece quotes almost everything else Stewart Baker said to the co-writer-- but not that part. Why? For the obvious reason:

It turns out that Glenn Greenwald has written an entire book devoted to exposing the contradiction between Republicans’ ideology and their private lives. In Greenwald’s words, “While the right wing endlessly exploits claims of moral superiority … virtually its entire top leadership have lives characterized by the most decadent, hedonistic, and morally unrestrained behavior imaginable …[including] a string of shattered marriages, active out-of-wedlock sex lives, and highly ‘untraditional’ and ‘un-Christian’ personal lives [endless detail omitted].” His book certainly makes the NSA memo sound restrained and cautious, but both are motivated by the same idea.

Grim and Greenwald very likely cut the quote because it would have undermined the narrative of the piece, which combines solicitude for the poor Islamists whose sexual and financial hypocrisy might be exposed with outrage at the NSA for even considering such a tactic. The quote would have made them look like, well, hypocrites.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (143)
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From @benk84. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:58 AM | Comments (142)
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During Monica-Gate, the press suddenly took a very keen interest in the proposition that Everyone Lies About Sex, and ran quite a few articles advancing this proposition.

You can't teach an old leftist new tricks, but they can adapt old tricks to cover new situations.

Old and Busted: Everyone lies about sex

New Hotness: Everyone lies about the most consequential legislation in a decade

At CNN -- supposedly a neutral news reporting organization -- an article now declares Of Course Presidents Lie, and adds this:

You might say lying is the verbal lubricant that keeps the Oval Office engine running.

This idiot divides lies into two categories, forgivable and unforgivable. The former are lies intended to "help people," and the latter are lies intended to protect and extend political power.

Guess which category he claims Obama's huge lies fall into? He doesn't even consider the possibility that Obama may have lied to protect his political power.

And because Obama's been telling a lot of lies, he goes further: Hey, the lies about what the NSA does are also in the category of "helping people," because, you know, he's so keen on anti-terrorism.

But he's not done yet-- because he's determined to excuse Clinton's lies, too, by his forgivable/unforgivable test. Amazing:

The ultimate test of whether the American public will accept a lie from a president is if the nation determines that the lie serves the national interests.
That distinction is why Bill Clinton remains popular, and George W. Bush remains reviled for his "lie," says Allan Cooper, a political scientist and historian at Otterbein University in Ohio.

In a nationally televised address in 2003, Bush said that invading Iraq was necessary "to eliminate weapons of mass destruction."

"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," Bush said.

Clinton told the nation that he did "not have sexual relations with that woman."
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

"Clinton's lies about a sexual affair were understandable given his interest to protect his marriage and to shield the nation's children from having to ask their parents to explain the phenomenon of oral sex," Cooper says.

Uh-huh.

So just to recap, of the recent presidents whose legacies are still political hot topics and influence the results in current elections, the objective news organization finds the following division between forgivable and unforgivable lies:

Clinton: Forgivable. He wanted to spare his wife pain, and is such a Boy Scout that he sought to keep the topic of oral sex from the children. Unlike Republicans, who wanted to talk to kids about blowjobs.

Bush: Unforgivable. He lied just to lie because that's what liars do when they lie which is always.

Obama: Forgivable. He just wanted to "help people" and "protect Americans" and stuff. Did you see Batman: The Dark Knight? Well Obama isn't the hero America deserves, but he's the hero America needs.

Not a great joke. But they parody themselves. What is left for a wise-ass?

From James Taranto, who scrutinizes this claim that Obama's lie was offered for the benefit of And the Middle Class, and finds the record does not support that. Throughout the Administration's roll-out, they sought to dishonestly spin and throw blame to others... which I'm pretty sure would be lies to protect political power, and, hence, unforgivable.

Posted by: Ace at 09:54 AM | Comments (183)
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What provoked Joan Walsh's self-brag, I don't know. But every progressive is about one synapse-firing away from bragging about themselves and denigrating others.

Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (181)
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POLITICO reporting administration is completely pulling the plug on online enrollment for small businesses in 2014. Can't get it to work.

— Brendan Buck (@BrendanBuck) November 27, 2013

Politico article here. Repeal this rolling calamity of destruction. It's actually going to hurt people.

The left loves to talk about the extremism and fanaticism of the Republican Party. This law is extreme. The left's devotion to this catastrophe is indeed, fanatical. Enough.

Added: Wonky political commentator mystified by timing of this announcement.

I donÂ’t really understand the logic of dumping this kind of bad news on holiday weekends.

— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 27, 2013

Yeah, Ezra. It's a God damn mystery.

Posted by: JohnE. at 08:59 AM | Comments (288)
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Is the universe squishy or hard? What happens when all that you thought you knew is called into question?

For example: something as seemingly well established as the radius of the lowly proton is being called into question.

(Phys.org) —Officially, the radius of a proton is 0.88 ± 0.01 femtometers (fm, or 10-15 m). Researchers attained that value using two methods: first, by measuring the proton's energy levels using hydrogen spectroscopy, and second, by using electron scattering experiments, where an electron beam is shot at a proton and the way the electrons scatter is used to calculate the proton's size. But when trying to further improve the precision of the proton radius value in 2010 with a third experimental technique, physicists got a value of 0.842 ± 0.001 fm—a difference of 7 deviations from the official value.

Explanations for this discrepancy are actively being sought. We're like prehistoric cave men looking at shadows dancing on the cave wall. We're just waving our hands and making shit up a lot of the time.

And apparently we really don't know squat about how the Sun really operates. Ra does this kinda shit just to remind us how much we don't know about Ra. Our "reality" is held hostage by the limitations of our ability to see. It is at best an approximation.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 10:48 AM | Comments (87)
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So it turns out there's a reason why the statements about the Iran deal from the White House are so wildly different from the other involved governments'. It's not just normal White House lying to the American public, but extraordinary lying to foreign governments too.

The aftermath of the deal struck early Sunday in Geneva has been marked by confusion. According to Iranian media, the country's Foreign Ministry is now claiming that the White House put out an invalid fact sheet about the agreement.

A ministry spokeswoman called it a "one-sided interpretation of the agreed text," and said parts of it "contradict" the actual plan, according to Fars News Agency.

The Foreign Ministry did not specify what language might have clashed with their interpretation of the agreement, but called the White House statement a "modified version of the deal" -- and released their own version of the plan.

That document, among other distinctions, recognizes Iran's "right to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes," something the White House statement does not mention.

The State Department's response to this was to say that this was just an outline of an agreement, with the details to be worked out later. When asked how long before an actual agreement will be reached that actually is meant to be final and binding, State Department spox Jen Psaki said (surprise!), "I don't have a specific timeline for you."

So let's step back a second. If there was no deal and no idea when a deal would be reached, why would Obama make a special Saturday night address to announce a non-deal "breakthrough" with Iran? You know why.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:35 AM | Comments (400)
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