Ted Cruz may have sunk Hagel.

The Israel question won't hurt Hagel too much -- it's a niche question that only Jews and conservatives care about. Non-Jewish Democrats despise Israel and generally agree with Hagel's dark conspiracies about the "Jewish Lobby."

But Cruz might have made Hagel a very difficult for Democrats. Cruz played audio of Hagel agreeing with a questioner's premise that the US was "the world's bully," complimenting that sentiment as an "important observation" (or words to that effect).

Will our troops really be led by someone who calls them The World's Bully?

Little bonus on that question and response: Hagel said this on.. Al Jazeera.

Consider the politics there.

The left's counter-spin -- and they are already spinning like tops, all the "reporters" like Chuck Todd -- is that Hagel "merely accepted" the premise, he did not offer it himself. And, they say further, is someone appearing on Al Jazeera really required to dispute all premises he disagrees with?

But the same people have claimed that politicians are indeed required to dispute questioner's premises -- see, for example, the ruckus they made when Rick Santorum failed to object to the premise that Obama was a Muslim. And you of course remember all the media attacks in 2008 over McCain's/Palin's failure to silence every single dumb shout at a rally.

But now they're claiming someone can call the US (and its military, of course) "the world's bully" on Al Jazeera and Chuck Hagel can call this an "important observation" and that's okay because We Said.

Update: Here's the Al Jazeera clip in question.

via @brianfaughan and @amandacarpenter

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 AM | Comments (148)
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Later on today, there will be video from Hagel's hearings. Right now as I type this Lindsey Graham is brutalizing him ( on CSPAN, the main one).

As this will be recapped in an hour or three, I won't bother now.

Brit Hume made a simple but deadly observation about Hagel's performance -- "he's just not very bright."

And he's not. While the media is intensely interested in the intellectual capacity of any Republican (unless that Republican is obviously intelligent, in which case they don't mention IQ at all), they never discuss the intelligence of the dimmer-bulb Democrats or Republicans like Hagel, who can be counted as allies.

Hagel's dumb. He's just not smart enough to be Secretary of Defense. Our troops deserve a bright man who understands complex systems and has the intellectual curiosity to discover what he doesn't know. Not a bumbling dummy whose deepest thoughts are about the "Jewish lobby."

Brief Clip: Alas this is just a short one. But this basic sort of thing went on for ten minutes. It's a cumulative thing. Seeing someone stumble and bumble for 90 seconds is no big deal; but ten minutes of stumbling and bumbling looks dumb.

Longer Clip:

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:32 AM | Comments (451)
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AP actually calls NBC out for this. I made this point yesterday: NBC issued a statement claiming they'd reviewed the controversy, and they decided that opinions could vary on whether or not the father was "heckled" at the proceeding.

That's a whitewash in and of itself (no, there is no question), but the characterization of the controversy as such is itself deceptive: The real question -- and there is no question about the answer to this question -- was whether or not NBC

once again

doctored video or audio to create a false impression for purposes of sensationalizing a story for its liberal partisan audience.

Because that question has a brutally simple answer -- "Yes" -- NBC just pretended it wasn't a question at all.

And AP does in fact notice this.

MSNBC invited viewers Wednesday to draw their own conclusions about whether the parent of a Connecticut school shooting victim was heckled at a legislative hearing but didn't address criticism that it aired a deceptively edited video of the event.

The NBC-owned cable news network found itself under attack for its editing practices less than a year after three employees of NBC or an NBC-owned station lost their jobs over the editing of a 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case.

...

The passage as aired by MSNBC received criticism for being deceptive.

"This is not how a legitimate, professional news organization operates," said Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog. "MSNBC's relentless anti-gun advocacy is bad enough, but this is downright dishonest."

MSNBC spokeswoman Lauren Skowronski did not immediately address questions about why MSNBC made the changes or whether criticism that it was misleading is valid.

Posted by: Ace at 08:44 AM | Comments (217)
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It's almost like the hysteria over "assault rifles" is pure political theater.

This is what a mass killer looks like, according to a Department of Homeland Security analysis. He works alone. He uses a semi-automatic handgun. HeÂ’s a he. And he probably didnÂ’t serve in the U.S. military.

That’s the conclusion of a November 28 analysis by the New Jersey branch of the Department of Homeland Security’s partnership with state and local law enforcement. The so-called intelligence “Fusion Center” sifted through data on 29 major mass killings in the U.S. since 1999, starting with the Littleton, Colorado school shooting. Its practical advice is to be more concerned by your co-worker with the bad hygiene who mutters about putting his “things in order” than by the war veteran in the next cubicle.

Data? That stuff's not important when you're simply using a tragedy to advance your long-stated policy goals.

The report (pdf) is worth a read to show just how little difference any of the proposals from the left would do to actually address the topic. This fact in particular just leaped off the page at me ("literally" as gun-grabbing Joe Biden might say):

Typically, the immediate deployment of law enforcement
is required to stop the shooting and mitigate further harm to victims. Typically, active shooter situations are over within 10 to 15 minutes.

Let me rephrase that for you: "Typically, victims are sitting ducks for the 10-15 minutes it takes law enforcement to arrive."

This is what happens when the government mis-focuses its crime prevention efforts on preventing law-abiding citizens from using firearms to defend themselves. When the left says, "the police are there to protect you", what it really means is, "you're expendable".

(h/t to the inimitable S. Weasel for the PhotoShop)

Posted by: andy at 06:45 AM | Comments (486)
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• Obama: I'm Not A King
  
• Menendez's Underaged Prostitute Supplier Owes The IRS 11 Million
  
• Pro-Gun Newton Resident Also "Heckled" At Gun Hearing
  
• CNN To Dump John Uh Uh Uh King For Jake Tapper?
  
• Polish Is Britain's Second Language And Nearly One In Five Londoners Speak English As A Second Language
  
• Chinese Hackers Infiltrate NYT, Find No Intelligence
  
• Life After Blue: The Middle Class Will Beat The Seven Trolls
  
• Man Killed With Bow And Arrow
  
• Ben Howe: Why I Love Twitter
  
• New E15 Gas Can Ruin Engines
  
• Heller Case Attorney: 7 Round Limit Clearly Unconstitutional
  
• The Guns Of Villaraigosa
  
• Ron Jeremy Hospitalized And In Critical Condition
  
• Millionaire Athletes Look For Way Out Of California
  
• DHS Has Been Watching Too Many Action Movies
  
• Jobless Claims Jump Most Since Sandy
  
• Feel Good Gun Story Of The Day
  
• Intrepid Citizens Save Timbuktu's Priceless Manuscripts
  

Follow me on twitter.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:10 AM | Comments (229)
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Happy Thursday.

Yeah, about that "heckling" business, I really like the second video embedded here.

Bad sign: insurance companies in the individual market have stopped guaranteeing annual premium rates. Now they're going month to month, and it's not because they expect premiums to be going down.

Oh, and there's a "glitch" in Obamacare that will price some families out of the health insurance market. Democrats were apparently hoping the IRS would undo the law via regulation, but the regs were issued yesterday and no luck. The most IRS says it will do is decline to fine families who can't afford insurance under the mandate, which, uh...seems to me does away with the mandate.

Jim Pethokoukis pushes back on the Democrats' silly idea that 'austerity' is responsible for Obama's disastrous economy.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:49 AM | Comments (242)
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You don't say ...

In a little-noticed email published online Wednesday by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a young Dominican woman wrote nine months ago that she slept with 59-year-old New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez at a series of sex parties organized by Dr. Salomon Melgen, a longtime Menendez campaign donor.

“That Senator also likes the youngest and newest girls,” the woman wrote on April 21, 2002, according to an English translation provided to The Daily Caller by a native Spanish speaker.

“In the beginning he seemed so serious, because he never spoke to anyone, but he is just like the others and has just about the same tastes as the doctor, very refined. I think they were taking us more often to get us checked [medically] because of him.”

"The doctor," I assume, refers to one Melgen, a big Menendez donor. It was on this Melgen's private jet that Menendez swooped down on the Dominican Republic (rather like a fat bird of prey).

There's more tawdry details to the story. (I have a caveat about this I'm putting under the fold because my own caveat is based on an imperfect understanding.)

There's more to this story: Did Menendez reimburse Melgen for the flight costs, or disclose that he was accepting a gift from a "personal friend"? This is important, because not reimbursing someone, or disclosing the gift, would be a violation in its own right; and, further, if this trip was kept off-books, it suggests maybe there's a reason for a dark flight.

Now, Menendez did reimburse Melgen... "recently."

Senators may also accept travel on a plane owned by a personal friend, so long as the person is not a lobbyist, and report the travel as a gift on disclosure forms. A gift worth more than $250 also requires approval of the Ethics Committee and disclosure by the senator, notes Ken Gross, a partner at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. Menendez does not appear to have reported such gifts on his disclosure documents in recent years.

...

Menendez Chief of Staff Danny OÂ’Brien told NBC on Wednesday that the senator recently paid Melgen $58,000 as reimbursement for two trips on the doctorÂ’s plane. OÂ’Brien said MenendezÂ’s staff discovered the error after an ethics complaint was filed by a New Jersey Republican official last November.

O’Brien said he was “chalking it up to an oversight.” A Menendez spokeswoman, who also spoke to NBC, added that the senator was not claiming the plane trips were a gift, which he would have needed pre-approval for from the Ethics Committee.

So, he didn't reimburse, until recently, when this started to become a problem. Menendez's own chief of staff says he's "chalking it up to an oversight."

Well, if you're satisfied it was an "oversight," certainly I'm satisfied then.

The actual trip was taken back around Easter 2012 (April?), was "overlooked" as late as November when a Republican filed a complaint, and only "recently," as emails trickle out, is reimbursement made.

Yeah, I'm going to say I don't like that.

Now remember this stuff in the context of the FBI raid, for as-of-yet unknown reasons, of the doctor's (Melgen's) offices, which just happened a few days ago.

Thanks to @johnekdahl for both pieces.

The Caveat:
more...

Posted by: Ace at 05:45 AM | Comments (304)
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Wha - you thought it was going to get better? Nope.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:15 PM | Comments (743)
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As @johnekdahl noted earlier, Bart Feder now says he didn't mean too ethnic when he said too ethnic.

To clarify, Feder’s issue with “Starting Point” was that the audience was too small and happened to be predominately African American. A source close to the show insists that the ethnicity of the audience was never the issue, it was the size. Feder in no way meant to imply that the audience was too ethnic.

He just meant too small. Too small, too ethnic. You can see how close those words are to each other. They're virtually homophones.*

But, thanks to some Twitter troublemaking, in which I congratulated Roland S. Martin numerous times for his prudence in saying nothing about the affair and just taking the check, nice and quiet, I can report that Roland S. Martin, at least, does not believe Feder's claims.

When I asked him why he wasn't saying anything about it, he responded:

"If you only knew!"

And then, thereafter, reasserted how much he's saying about the ethnic cleansing. Behind the scenes, I imagine.

He also seems to be hinting that he's got a Plan B, if he needs it.

At no point did he ever contradict the premise of the question, to wit, that Soledad O'Brien was fired for having an audience that was "too ethnic."

I'd really like to print this all up for you but Twitchy usually does this for me...

* Homophones are gay phones, such as the iPhone, or Android, or Galaxy. Pretty much all of them, actually. Oddly enough, the only straight phone I know of is the Nokia Cock-N-Go. They should probably change the name.

Posted by: Ace at 05:07 PM | Comments (278)
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From UCB, via @slublog.

And as a funny thing, Adam Carolla on why he hates John Lennon, via Ed Driscoll and Kathy Shaidle.

Worth a listen.

Oh and rather than taking the time to look up what it is, here's NASA's live launch of the TDRS-K.

It's a new satellite. 2:50 to launch.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:42 PM | Comments (141)
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