Normally, I'm unimpressed by shiny new things...but this Samsung thingie seems pretty shiny.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:30 AM | Comments (21)
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The Homemade Elizabeth Colbert Busch Attack Video

It's over the top, shameless, brutal, and funny. Which is exactly why it would be effective - and also why the SC GOP would never ever use it.

Still Sanford has now jumped to +1 over Busch so I guess SC voters prefer the crazy they know.

Meanwhile SC Democrat Suggests Indian-American Nikki Haley Go 'Back To Wherever The Hell She Came From'

Which would be Bamberg, SC. Of course a guy with a name like Harpootlian might not want to play the less ethnic than thou game. But then the D after his name means he'll never be called on it.

How to Destroy Your Business Part I: Dick's Sales Dip After EBR Ban

How to Destroy Your Business Part II: Toss in a $100 Per Flight Fee

How to Destroy Your Business Part III: Colorado Chases Magpul Away

How to Destroy Your Business Part IV: Pass an Internet Sales Tax

Thank you bipartisan GOP senators.

How to Destroy Your Business Part V: No More Boogie Nights in LA

Applications for permits for porn shoots have dropped to almost zero in LA. This comes after a city ordinance that now requires all porn actors to wear condoms during shooting, or prior to shooting, as it were. Just like any other film shoot, porn flicks need permits. In the past, LA county issued 500+ permits for adult films every year. Last year it dropped to 2.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:39 PM | Comments (763)
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She rejects the political fiction of a "clump of cells" that the left and the media (but I repeat myself) pushes.

I’ll put my cards on the table: I think life begins at conception and would love to live in a world where no women ever felt she needed to get an abortion. However, I know enough people who are pro-abortion rights—indeed, I was one of them for most of my life—to know that reasonable and sincere people can disagree about when meaningful life begins. They also can disagree about how to weigh that moral uncertainty against a woman’s right to control her body—and her own life. I have only ever voted for Democrats, so overturning Roe v. Wade is not one of my priorities. I never want to return to the days of gruesome back-alley abortions.

But medical advances since Roe v. Wade have made it clear to me that late-term abortion is not a moral gray area, and we need to stop pretending it is. No six-months-pregnant woman is picking out names for her “fetus.” It’s a baby. Let’s stop playing Orwellian word games. We are talking about human beings here.

How is this OK? Even liberal Europe gets this. In France, Germany, Italy, and Norway, abortion is illegal after 12 weeks. In addition to the life-of-mother exception, they provide narrow health exceptions that require approval from multiple doctors or in some cases going before a board. In the U.S., if you suggest such stringent regulation and oversight of later-term abortions, you are tarred within seconds by the abortion rights movement as a misogynist who doesn’t “trust women.”

Speaking as a liberal who endorses more government regulation of practically everything—banks, water, air, food, oil drilling, animal safety—I am eternally perplexed by the fury the abortion rights contingent displays at the suggestion that the government might have a serious role to play in the issue of abortion, especially later-term abortion.

She then analogizes NARAL to the NRA, a comparison that occurred to me as well, though I would put it differently than Kristen Powers. Let's look at the media's alleged problem with the NRA.

What is the problem with the NRA? That the NRA, to protect a core right, illogically and wrongly blocks "common sense legislation" on the outer peripheries of that right, and this is terrible because the "great majority of the public" wants such "common sense legislation." Furthermore, the NRA, because of its central position in politics, is able to scare off politicians from "doing the right thing" by branding them as weak in The Cause. That dratted NRA just won't compromise.

Remember that the media is required to disguise all substantive policy opinions as merely opinions about procedure. That's why their beef against the NRA is phrased as if the substance of the right, the right to be armed, is the furthest thing from their mind. No, as the media tells the tale, their disapproval with the NRA is not about what the NRA protects but merely how it protects it.

Well: if all we're talking about is tactics and not substance, how is NARAL different than the NRA at all?

Watch how easy it is for me to re-write the above paragraph starting "What's the problem with the NRA?" to direct it against NARAL:

What is the problem with NARAL? That the NARAL, to protect a core right, illogically and wrongly blocks "common sense legislation" on the outer peripheries of that right, and this is terrible because the "great majority of the public" wants such "common sense legislation." Furthermore, NARAL, because of its central position in politics, is able to scare off politicians from "doing the right thing" by branding them as weak in The Cause. That dratted NARAL just won't compromise.

Now, if the media's objection to the NRA is strictly procedural and not about the substance of which rights the media believes should be guaranteed by the Constitution -- why isn't NARAL attacked by the media for the same sins?

Note: I'm not actually analogizing the two. I'm saying that if the media claims this is its problem with the NRA, and this has nothing to do with its leftist bias, why aren't they flogging NARAL for similarly pushing the "most extreme interpretation of the right under question" and "absolutely refusing to cede even the smallest amount of territory in the name of common-sense compromise?"

Recently we saw a Planned Parenthood representative stating that it was her opinion, and her employers' opinion, that the decision whether or not to kill an already-born baby was between the mother and her doctor.

Where's the media's interest in "extremism"? Oh right, they're goddamned liars and they're not against "extremism" so long as it's extremism of the left.

Posted by: Ace at 03:36 PM | Comments (251)
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$6.3 trillion in full.

Quick, let's pass it before they yank this golden opportunity away from us.

The comprehensive immigration overhaul being taken up in the Senate this week could cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion if 11 million illegal immigrants are granted legal status, according to a long-awaited estimate by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The cost would arise from illegal immigrants tapping into the government's vast network of benefits and services, many of which are currently unavailable to them. This includes everything from standard benefits like Social Security and Medicare to dozens of welfare programs ranging from housing assistance to food stamps.

The study may include some arguable expenses (such as highway building for extra traffic). But...

...

But most of that cost would be new spending, according to Heritage, as illegal immigrants gain access to additional government programs. The study acknowledges that, for a 10-year period, illegal immigrants seeking a reprieve would be barred from these benefits. After that window, though, Heritage forecasts the costs skyrocketing.

On an annual basis, the report estimates the cost will be $106 billion after the interim phase is over. In the course of their lifetime, the report estimates that illegal immigrant households would receive an average of $592,000 in government benefits.

The bill is just chock full of bullshit intended to mislead the public. Supposedly, according to the law, those immigrants who don't pay fines and back taxes will be deported.

Does anyone believe this? No, of course not; if this were true, the Amnestias would be fighting tooth and nail. But they know it's not going to happen. So there will be two cohorts of illegals, those who pay the requisite fines and get amnesty, and those who continue to "hide in the shadows," same as they do now.

Does anyone think Step Two won't be "Hey, it's really not fair to keep someone in the shadows just because they're poor"? Of course it will be. This Amnesty is just a prelude for the next one.

There's been a lot of embarrassment over the "MarcoPhone" claim, the idea that the bill will give immigrants a free phone. The phone will be given, according to the law, to residents and property-owners along the border, to call the authorities if they see a border crossing.

That's the problem right there. You see, the Amnestias don't want to do anything to actually control the border. The Amnestias main bloc are those who reject the idea of a border outright!

So when we on the right ask for real enforcement, and real fence, and E-verify, and so forth, we're constantly told "no you can't have that but, as a consolation prize, we'll provide some free cellphones to border residents so that they can report border crossings."

Wait-- you're saying these people don't have phones already? Of course they do!

So if they already have phones, how will giving them phones help control the border?

Answer: Because the people trying to trick you into signing on to this want to be able to say "We're spending X billion on new border enforcement," and they don't know how to spend that money otherwise, because they've decided not to build the fence, and ergo have to think up new non-fence ways to spend the money so it sounds all like Gee Willickers You Sure Are Spending A Lot on Border Security, I Guess It's Just a Matter of Spending Lots of Tax Dollars!

This "MarcoPhone" thing is not the thing it was originally reported as -- it's not a free phone for illegals. But what it most assuredly is is yet another deception, another way to offer "a highly-technological, multi-phase full-spectrum range of advanced next-gen virtual fencing" instead of, oh, let's say, just a Plain Old Fence.

And the will to actually enforce that fence.

Crap like the MarcoPhone and all the various doo-dads are just about tricking the majority -- which is steadfastly against opening up the border -- into permitting a small but vigorous minority to open up the border to all comers.

The government never shows the will to actually close the border. Here's why: Because they don't actually want to close the border.

And all this jazz about high-tech "virtual fences" and "smart fences" is just a way to hide from you the fact they're not giving you what you asked for: An actual fucking fence.

Virtual fence = Sucker bait.

We can talk about amnesty when the Political Class finally accedes to our demand that the border be controlled, preferably with a fence. And not before then.

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (407)
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Last week I linked an article about the meteoric rise of oil and gas production in the state of Texas which has doubled since 2005. It helped create hundreds of thousands of good paying jobs, and pumps billions of dollars into the economy.

California has vast reserves too but isn't taking advantage of them. Guess why.

Another contrast is that most Texas oil is on private lands, which owners are willing to lease at a price. In California much of the oil-rich areas are state or federally owned, and leasing doesnÂ’t happen because of political constraints. In California it can take weeks or even months to get approval for an oil rig. The average in Texas? Four days.

In short, Texas loves being an oil-producing state while California is embarrassed by it. And itÂ’s no accident that Texas has been leading the nation in job creation since the recession ended. The energy boom is creating thousands of jobs related to drilling but also in downstream industries such as transportation, high-technology, construction and manufacturing. The Texas jobless rate is 6.4% while CaliforniaÂ’s is still the third highest at 9.4%.

Who needs jobs and billions of dollars if it means pissing off environmentalist whackjobs because it's that dirty nasty stuff in the ground that's killin Gaia?

Oh, right, California needs those things. Very much.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 12:49 PM | Comments (209)
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Apologies for lifting the "Damn,..." joke from Hot Air.

The era of Big Government is wonderful.

: Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, and creative, and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can't be trusted.

We have never been a people who place all our faith in government to solve our problems. We shouldn't want to. But we don't think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it's not about what America can do for us, it's about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government. And class of 2013, you have to be involved in that process.

I seem to remember a lot of concern expressed by the Founders who gave ups this "unique experiment in self-rule" about the omnipresent threat of tyranny and a government that rules a people rather than the other way 'round.

It should be noted that the government isn't much in the business anymore of acting as a collective pool for national accomplishment. By which I mean: Going to the Moon is obviously something none of us could have achieved ourselves, but we authorized the government, with our dollars, to make that happen.

Obama talks in vague terms which seem to suggest such matters but his chief concern is using government as a catspaw by which to extract money from Citizen A and give those dollars (minus the bureaucrats' vig) to Citizen B.

Posted by: Ace at 11:29 AM | Comments (439)
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Obama and Hillary claimed there was no stand-down order and it was all a right-wing confabulation.

Then the entire leftwing political messaging machine went into overdrive to cover-up for them.

Now, via CBSNews' Sharyl Atkisson, a whistleblower is directly contradicting them and, by implication, branding them liars.

The deputy of slain U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens has told congressional investigators that a team of Special Forces prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command South Africa.

The account from Gregory Hicks is in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized. Hicks gave private testimony to congressional investigators last month in advance of his upcoming appearance at a congressional hearing Wednesday.

According to excerpts released Monday, Hicks told investigators that SOCAFRICA commander Lt. Col. Gibson and his team were on their way to board a C-130 from Tripoli for Benghazi prior to an attack on a second U.S. compound "when [Col. Gibson] got a phone call from SOCAFRICA which said, 'you can't go now, you don't have the authority to go now.' And so they missed the flight ... They were told not to board the flight, so they missed it."

No assistance arrived from the U.S. military outside of Libya during the hours that Americans were under attack or trapped inside compounds by hostile forces armed with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and AK-47 rifles.

More at Hot Air, including this gem:

The left now has an explanation as to why they screamed so furiously that all was right in the world in Benghazi:

It's conservatives' fault. We tricked them into being so gullible and so fact-deprived. By lodging criticism, we forced them to call all criticism beyond the pale and indeed signs of a worrisome psychological infirmity.

If the three new witnesses donÂ’t get the attention they deserve, Fox News and its ilk deserves much of the blame.

So Fox was correct in pushing the story, but it's their fault that no other media outlet followed up (one major exception: A single reporter at CBS named Sharyl Atkisson), because, Fox, 8rs.

Posted by: Ace at 10:10 AM | Comments (486)
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He went trolling around FaceBook and other social-networking platforms, using a pseudonym with a Salafist backstory.

His conclusion:

The constant on my feed—the thing that made me long for the Facebook where high-school friends squabbled about the efficacy of gun control legislation—was ceaseless images of dead children, mostly killed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Everywhere I clicked, there were piles of murdered children; their limbs twisted and bloodless faces staring past the camera. With every login, there were dozens more, blurring into one easily recalled composite dead child. I took to squinting at my laptop, deliberately blurring my vision; when the fuzzy contours of a child appeared, I jerked my head away from the screen and kept scrolling. But when my eyes returned, another lifeless kid was always waiting for me.

...

After my week among the online jihadists, it seemed unlikely to me that their corner of the Internet could immediately capture an undamaged soul. There were no appeals to reason here, and the content seemed intended for the already converted.

Which is to say: it seemed implausible that the Web had somehow made Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev into jihadists. But it did strike me that the world of online jihad could have had another effect on the Boston bombers: it might well have inured them to violence. The further I crawled down the extremist rabbit hole and the more caved-in skulls and headless corpses I saw, the more I found that my natural revulsion, usually an uncontrollable instinct, was easier to suppress.

Well, it's Murder Porn, isn't it?

One other point he makes, in passing, is that his experience made him more paranoid. He encountered a bunch of screen-names which he felt were too over the top to be real. He suspects, or perhaps just fantasizes, that the monickers belong to counter-terrorism agents sitting in an office in Berlin.

Likely, some of them were indeed infiltrators.

I imagine that paranoia helps feed the jihadis' fantasies, their grievances, their sense of being part of a bloody brotherhood.

It occurs to me as I write this that this observation may be taken to suggest "So then we shouldn't monitor them and have our own agents posing as them." No, I don't mean to suggest that at all. I'm just offering the observation itself, not that conclusion, which would be silly. Of course we have to monitor these guys and of course we need infiltrators among them.

I just mean that it's a well-known dynamic that as a fringe group becomes more fringe, the beliefs of that group tend to harden even further, and anger and resentment towards the non-fringe majority grows. An ego-protecting mentality takes hold and the fringe belief is infused with heroism.

Deeply disturbed persons can accept one of two propositions: Either they are deeply disturbed, or they are Heroes, and their lunacy, hatred, and bloodlust are actually virtues. Of course, the overwhelming majority will choose the latter approach.

One thought that strikes me: Pretty much any person pushing this sort of thing is already a terrorist, if in spirit if not in deed. Moynihan may be suggesting that (or perhaps I over-read him) when he says this sort of thing is not intended to proselytize to the pagan, but to fill the already-converted with murderous zeal.

Were I King of America, then, I wouldn't have any hesitation about deporting any of these guys, or jailing them for the maximum sentence permissible for any infraction I found them to have committed.

They have already revealed motive and means; only opportunity awaits them.

Posted by: Ace at 09:20 AM | Comments (175)
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He compares his use of bombs to law-abiding hunting, as opposed to shooting up a mall.

Does he believe his bombs were legal? The only redeeming quality his bombs had was that they were poorly made. And one blew up as his girlfriend was playing with it and killed her. (She was a terrorist too.)

Also from @benk84, a reporter finally asks him about this:

There is no relationship at all between what Weather Underground members did and the bombings that two brothers allegedly committed on April 15 in Massachusetts, Ayers said in response to a reporterÂ’s question. No one died in the Weather Underground bombings.

“How different is the shooting in Connecticut from shooting at a hunting range?” Ayers said. “Just because they use the same thing, there’s no relationship

...

The United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, Ayers said.

...

“To conflate a group of fundamentalist people [in Boston] who are nihilistic in some way with a group of people who spent their lives trying to oppose the murder of 6,000 people a week … and still the killing went on. And still the killing went on. What would you have done?” Ayers said. “There’s no equivalence [with Boston]. Property damage. That’s what we did."

...

Authorities said the bombs were intended to be used at a dance at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey.

Then he continues asking how he's any different from John McCain.

Related: Jason Mattera asks Robert Redford, producer and star of a movie glamorizing and humanizing the Weather Underground terrorists, if he has any plans to give any of the film's proceeds to the victims.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:07 AM | Comments (301)
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Whistleblowing.

Hicks, who did not appear on the show but whose reactions were featured based on transcripts of interviews with Issa's committee, said he was stunned by what UN Ambassador Susan Rice claimed on five different news shows on Sep. 16. When she appeared on Face the Nation, she followed an interview with the President of Libya who claimed he had "no doubt" it was a terror attack. Moments later, Amb. Rice contradicted him and claimed a spontaneous protest was more likely.

Acting Ambassador Hicks watched the Sunday shows and said he found this contradiction shocking. "The net impact of what has transpired is the spokesperson of the most powerful country in the world has basically said that the President of Libya is either a liar or doesn't know what he's talking about," he accused. Hicks added, "My jaw hit the floor as I watched this...I've never been as embarrassed in my life, in my career as on that day."

Hicks believes the stunning failure of diplomacy on the Sunday news shows explains why it took the FBI three weeks to gain access to the Benghazi site. The U.S. had effectively humiliated the Libyan President on national TV. That decision, he believed, probably compromised our ability to investigate and track down those responsible.

Already linked by @benk84, but worth highlighting:

On the night of Sept. 11, as the Obama administration scrambled to respond to the Benghazi terror attacks, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a key aide effectively tried to cut the department’s own counterterrorism bureau out of the chain of reporting and decision-making, according to a “whistle-blower” witness from that bureau who will soon testify to the charge before Congress, Fox News has learned.

That witness is Mark I. Thompson, a former Marine and now the deputy coordinator for operations in the agencyÂ’s counterterrorism bureau...

ThompsonÂ’s lawyer, Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. attorney, has further alleged that his client has been subjected to threats and intimidation by as-yet-unnamed superiors at State, in advance of his cooperation with Congress.

Posted by: Ace at 07:28 AM | Comments (228)
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