Well, he'd be the one to know.

The parrot trained by Chris Matthews to always agree with a leftist's racial demagoguery, Mike "Plagiarist" Barnicle, immediately parrots Sharpton.

You won't be surprised to know that you cannot disagree with the left on any points without immediately being accused of a whole raft of monstrous motivations.

Which brings me to Ashley Judd.

It's actually possible to have a difference of opoinion & not cast aspersions on each others' souls. It's just not practiced much.

Is it? Will she be taking her MSNBC supporters to task, then? Or does she just mean she doesn't want her "soul" questioned but retains the right to question everyone else's?

Of course it's the latter. Although I got into the weeds with Conor Friedersdorf over his link-bait liberal-flattering deliberate Blogger War with Michelle Malkin, I objected to his piece on a much more general level.

After Sexton pointed out that Friedersdorf had made very similar statements to the ones he called Michelle Malkin a hateful, America-destroying xenophobe for, he wrote what he intended to be a thoughtful reply noting his errors.

But why are his statements merely forgivable errors whereas Michelle Malkin's statements are reason for link-whoring Blog Warring liberal-ego-flattering condemnation? Well, because while liberals are Righteously Censorious about the alleged sins of their enemies, they are admirably forgiving of their own trespasses, of course.

As Sexton wrote about Friedersdorf's later Mistakes Were Inadvertently Made column...

So Friedersdorf admits he could have written his post on xenophobic panic about himself. Thank you. That was exactly my point. And if he'd done so the whole contretemps would have been avoided. But of course he didn't do that. Instead he seized on an 11 year old column and blamed someone else for saying the things he wrote and felt, somehow forgetting he more or less agreed. Friedersdorf calls this an "ostensible 'gotcha'" but I don't see anything ostensible about it.

Well, exactly. What is galling is that Conor Friedersdorf postures (and preens) as a thoughtful guy who's just Interested in the Truth. And yet the columns he produces are link-whoring troll-baiting stuff.

He could have actually written an initial column about ideas. That is how he flatters himself -- he writes about ideas. Except he doesn't. Instead of writing about an idea -- and one that he himself had espoused, and now walks away from, chagrined, with the emotional heat confined to a critique of himself -- he chose instead to write about a personality, and throw out Michelle Malkin's name for all the Michelle Malkin haters at the very liberal Atlantic website.

He wasn't writing about ideas or policies. He was writing about personalities, period, because he knew it would be an easy piece to write and he knew it would go over well with his liberal readers. He knew they'd devour the red meat he was serving up.

He was right.

And I don't really question his Giving the Partisans What They Want tour. That is, doubtless, one of the four major food groups of blogging. (At least one of them, maybe three of them.)

But please do spare me this cloying pussymouth horseshit about being somehow elevated and merely a Seeker of Truth. Please, do spare me that. Keep your embarrassing self-flatteries where they belong, in the privacy of your own home, privately among your own friends, as you all mutually stroke each other off about how noble you are compared to the Evil Other.

Please spare us of the social horror of being forced to publicly witness this embarrassing peacocking.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:34 AM | Comments (215)
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via @lachlan, the shape of things to come to America, and soon.

Customs officials said border guards at the counrtry’s air and sea ports have been instructed to check baggage and monitor whether travelers are taking more than €10,000 (about $13,000) out of the country. Any amount above that €10,000 threshold can be confiscated.

And it is coming to America. Have no doubt.

What I find most interesting about this story are the repeated assurances - often delivered with a sneer at doomsday prepper hysteria - that nothing of the sort could ever happen in the United States. But every article pooh-poohing the "hysterics" mentions something our government is doing, or has done, that echoes the crisis in Cyprus. They talked about raiding pension funds and stuffing them with government I.O.U.s; American liberals are salivating at the thought of doing the same to our 401k accounts....

It all boils down to governments making promises they can't keep... and insisting those promises are still valid, long past the point of no return, unto the point of systemic collapse.

At some point debts must be paid, and ugly debts results in ugly solutions. No one, I don't think, really imagined France would simply seize all of the property owned by the Catholic church to pay its debts in 1792... until they did.

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (424)
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If Red States keep electing pink Senators, what can anyone do?

Posted by: Ace at 09:34 AM | Comments (357)
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My Error: Burt Wonderstone already came out and already tanked. So I guess I should headline this as "Jim Carrey Seeks Distraction from Latest in a Long String of Bombs."

He's got a movie coming out called Burt Wonderstone, where he plays the villain, not the hero, and the commercials look pretty bad. It looks like Blades of Glory with magic, minus laughs.

So I guess he needs to prepare an excuse for the film's likely failure.

The parody song seems sort of funny... if you're in the mind to insult half the country. His act used to be mostly impressions, and he deploys decent impressions of Charlton Heston and Sam Elliot here. The main lyric, that it takes a "cold dead hand" to pull the trigger, is... well, clever-ish for internet baiting.

But that's all it is, isn't it? Baiting? The disconnect here is that Jim Carrey imagines himself as heroically changing the public debate and speaking great truths to power... when in fact he's poisoning the well. He's not shifting the public debate; he's freezing it further.

By choosing a strategy of thoughtless, insulting personalization of the issue, he blows up any path but the one himself chose. That is, does he expect a non-personalized, thoughtful response to his personalized, thoughtless baiting? He simultaneously seems very self-congratulatory about his baiting on Twitter, promoting his Dr. Demento song as if it's going to change the world.

One of the great conceits of liberal psychology is that the liberal espousing the philosophy is rational and not "angry." ("Anger" is one of the few Biblical sins they acknowledge as a genuine sin.) But Carrey is plainly angry, and plainly hateful, and furthermore plainly irrational -- because a reasonable man would realize that persuasion isn't punctuated by a middle finger (as his parody song concludes).

This song isn't championing an issue; it's championing Jim Carrey, and flattering his ego. Were he as rational and intelligent as his self-flattery has it, he'd have realized that.

Posted by: Ace at 08:42 AM | Comments (317)
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He's a regular Assault Journalist, mowing down facts by the gross, without even stopping to reload.

@jaycaruso lays it all out for you here.

Nearly 30% of the people who acquired firearms either received them as a gift or inherited them. That blows the “40% of guns sales are conducted without a background check” right out of the water on its own.

...

Even if we are generous and include sales between family members and friends, we are left with a figure of eleven percent. Not forty percent.

But forty percent sounds scarier. So forty percent it is.

Posted by: andy at 07:30 AM | Comments (253)
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• Cyprus To Steal Up To 40% From Bank Accounts
  
• Cuomo Still Working On Ways To Roll Back Parts Of His Gun Law
  
• CBS Showed Communist Propaganda During A TV Show Last Week
  
• Morsi Laying The Groundwork For A Complete Takeover
  
• Problems For Another NJ Democrat
  
• McCain Emerges As Key Republican In Expanding Background Checks
  
• Hundreds Of Thousands Take To Streets In Paris To Protest Gay Marriage
  
• Straight News Reporter On CBS Rips Karl Rove Over Gun Rights
  
• Showdown Over Mail Delivery
  
• Coming Soon To The US, A Two Day Wait For Doctors
  
• French Scrap 75% Tax On The Rich
  
• Mississippi State Legislator Found Dead From Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound
  
• Check Out This Awesome Golf Shot
  
• Obamacare Premium Spike Goes National
  
• Is America At The Point Where HIV Testing Should Be Routine
  
• Detroit Bracing For Regime Change
  
• Jim Carrey Thinks You Should Protect You Kid By Giving Them VaccinationsBanning Guns
  
• This Seems Ill Advised
  
• Senior Syrian Rebel Leader Wounded In Bomb Attack
  
• Best Of The Web, Revenge Of The Nerds
  

Follow me on the twitter

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:35 AM | Comments (369)
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Happy Monday.

The Supreme Court will hear the Prop 8 case Tuesday and the DOMA case Wednesday. Here's an outline of how the Court could rule. But what if the Chief Justice decides it's a tax, or something?

Many of the Sunday shows were discussing the issue. Sen. Paul had previously suggested that the government shouldn't be in the marriage business. Yesterday he also said that the federal government shouldn't be telling the states what to do on marriage.

The FDA is still trying to expand its authority to regulate cigars.

A pal of mine put together an outstanding guide to the various immigration reform proposals detailing their similarities and differences. The Gang of Eight plan looks better than both the White House's and Sen. Paul's, and ain't that a kick in the pants.

The IRS wasted a pile of money on a Star Trek parody video.

And, just so you're sure you're living in a crapsack world, a 58-year-old man was exonerated after 23 years in prison. Two days later, he suffered a massive heart attack.

Oh, but this is cool. Astronomers got an infrared snap-shot of an object, either a planet or a failed star, in orbit around a binary system.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:47 AM | Comments (324)
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So the Fed has been pulling out all the stops to make sure that saving money is a chump's game, and yet economists are surprised that people are saving less. And Boomer retirees are paying the price not only for the Fed's saver-hostile monetary policy, but also by their own inability (or unwillingness) to save enough for their retirements.

Some interesting chart-fu on global retirement trends.

Employee benefit packages often compose a quarter or more of total compensation in many jobs, yet few employees really have a good idea of what these benefits are worth...or how much the cost is to their employers.

Cyprus makes the same devil's bargain that Greece made in order to avoid bankruptcy and ejection from the Euro. Basically, they're committing to a program of austerity and fiscal policies that have no support in the population. And like in Greece, they're not buying salvation so much as years of grinding recession, civil unrest, and political upheaval. Cyprus is still going to steal some depositor money; it's just that they moved their arbitrary cut-off to a higher amount so they'd only be stealing from the relatively wealthy. This was done to fool the rubes so there wouldn't be a run on the banks. So the takeaway from this episode is: it's okay to steal from the rich. Class-warfare is policy now, there and here.

And lest you think that Cyprus will be the end of the Eurozone's troubles, Nigel Farage is here to remind you that Spain is still a bomb on the verge of exploding as well. There wasn't much trust in the Eurozone banking system prior to the Cypriot bailout, but now there will be none at all. That lack of trust will have implications that the Eurocrats and their pet bankers haven't really thought all the way through just yet.

There are a lot of eventualities that come into play when planning for retirement, but the best solution is one I've been harping on all along: don't depend on Social Security for the foundation of your retirement income. Think of it as frosting on the cake, not the cake itself. If you make sure that you can meet your retirement needs of your own resources, Social Security acts as a buffer...which is what it was intended to be at first.

Is California still boned? Why, yes. Yes they are.

Larry Kudlow suggests that maybe Teh Bernank deserves a pat on the back rather than a kick in the nuts. (I'm still resolutely in the "kick in the nuts" camp, however.)

Just remember that dollars your state or municipality are spending on employee pensions are dollars they're not spending on stuff like roads, bridges, and state parks. More and more tax dollars get funneled into the black-hole of the unfunded pension programs (and healthcare benefits), and less and less into stuff the state and local governments are actually supposed to be doing. more...

Posted by: Monty at 04:24 AM | Comments (171)
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Ace needs your donations

So even if you're hurting, dig deep and find at least something for the ewok for the all entertainment he brings day after day.

Or God forbid he might end up at Hot Air or finally <shudder> have to get a real job.

A cautionary tale for us all: Henri the Cat eventually had to sell out to get food - YouTube comments don't fill the food bowl after all. And now he's a mere shell of the existential cat he used to be. Don't let this happen to Ace.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:37 PM | Comments (567)
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Some reports said he was shot by one of his own bodyguards and in serious condition and a hospital.

Later reports said he was not shot and in "high spirits."

In related news, many other people have either been shot or not shot.

Posted by: Ace at 05:08 PM | Comments (417)
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