Happy Thursday.

Sorry guys, almost no links from me again this morning; I've been swamped at work. Howie Kurtz did provide some amusement on Twitter last night, and that's all I've got.

Oh, and I just saw on Twitter, another electric car maker filed for bankruptcy.

Oh, and what the hell. Here's NYTimes' frontpage plug for a story on Medicaid:

There's an editorial decision here to trumpet the findings "reduced depression!" and "financially secure!" and to contrast that with "Florida's time runs out!" Not to mention the snore-inducing headline, properly translated: "taxpayer-funded healthcare increases use of healthcare." But if you go into the story, you'll find this thing that's kinduva bombshell:

It found that those who gained Medicaid coverage spent more on health care, making more visits to doctors and trips to the hospital. But the study suggests that Medicaid coverage did not make those adults much healthier, at least within the two-year time frame of the research, judging by their blood pressure, blood sugar and other measures. It did, however, substantially reduce the incidence of depression, and it made them vastly more financially secure.

Making and keeping people healthier is the reason for the program. But, hey, did you know that people are more financially secure when somebody else pays their medical bills? NYTimes really wants you to know that.

And note also the weasel words, the contrast between the almost casual "did not make those adults much healthier" and the strident "substantially reduce" and "vastly more financially secure."

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:28 AM | Comments (848)
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My day in a nutshell.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:31 PM | Comments (689)
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You can apparently be sent to prison for preemptive "pre-criminal dangerousness".

...Ricardo is serving three years for "pre-criminal dangerousness". He was arrested for having no job and associating with "undesirable elements".

"I didn't rob, or kill, or anything. They labelled me 'dangerous' just for spending time with former prisoners and sent me here."...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 06:15 PM | Comments (87)
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“It’s easy to get decent beer in Germany. We call it boredom on a high level," says one German beer drinker.

The problem standards is that sometimes they become standard.

Interesting article from the WaPo, and maybe yet another reason for American chest-pounding. We beat the French at wine and now we're going to beat the Germans at beer.*

[U]nlike the United States, where in recent years many supermarkets have expanded their beer selection to include dozens of styles from the far reaches of the globe, most German stores have remained resolutely unvaried, almost always offering just a handful of manufacturers and only rarely throwing a non-German beer into the mix.

Now Rauschmann and others are proselytizing, traveling Germany to spread the gospel of unusual tastes. His company, Braufactum, is owned by German beer giant Radeberger, which Rauschmann said was trying to help spark a new beer culture in the country where it has been a major producer since 1872.

For some beer businesspeople, that change canÂ’t happen fast enough.

“The German beer industry has to reinvent itself in a hurry, or it’s going to be a small fraction of what it is now,” said Eric Ottaway, the general manager of Brooklyn Brewery, which has been expanding in Europe and has been exporting its beer to Germany through Braufactum, which sells a 12-ounce bottle of Brooklyn Lager in upscale grocery stores for the equivalent of $4.20 — almost three times its typical American price.

* Bottle Shock with Jeff Daniels and Chris "Captain Kirk" Pine was a pretty good based-on-true-events Rocky-style movie about an upstart California vinter entering a France vs. America wine competition. It's not great, but it's good. It used to be free on Netflix.

Posted by: Ace at 04:05 PM | Comments (338)
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I dare you to try to read this without laughing.

GLOVERSVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — The chilly relationship between rival upstate New York ice cream truck operators got out of hand this season, with Sno Cone Joe trying to chase Mr. Ding-A-Ling out of the market, authorities said Wednesday.

Gloversville police told local media outlets two Sno Cone Joe operators face harassment and stalking charges after heated confrontations last month that included one of them yelling "This is my town!" at a Mr. Ding-A-Ling driver.

The driver told police that Sno Cone Joe owners Joshua Malatino and Amanda Scott followed his truck, playing their music at high volume and trying to lure away customers with promises of free ice cream.

Police said Malatino also called the suburban Albany headquarters of Mr. Ding-A-Ling and said "I own this town!" while claiming Sno Cone Joe controls the frozen treats market in Gloversville, a former manufacturing city about 35 miles northwest of Albany.

Gettin' rough out there. Stay safe, morons.

Posted by: JohnE. at 03:22 PM | Comments (212)
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Worth reading. Carlson, to her credit, concedes a lot of territory that a less honest hack would refuse to give an inch on.

She does start out poorly:

Margaret: Ramesh, I'm sensitive about your side criticizing mine for not jumping on the Kermit Gosnell case. By the time conservative critics were doing their criticizing, it had been covered (although I'm ashamed to say not by me; I wish I'd known what was going on but I didn't). And conservatives were covering it in the meta sense -- writing about the coverage. That's because there is no fight from the other side. None. How could anyone support what Gosnell is accused of doing, never mind the conditions of filth and neglect, or the inhumanity to both mother and child?

But there is fight from "the other side," and futhermore, most of "the other side" is fighting with silence. They know they have no good answers, no water to douse the fire out, so they've settled on the tactic of suffocating the fire, denying it oxygen.

Which is the most dishonest form of fighting, after all. Silence is an admission that they know their side is in the wrong and couldn't possibly offer any plausible argument against that obvious fact, so instead they deliberately, and knowingly, decide to keep that a secret. They know their side is wrong on this, but rather than being candid and adult about it, they engage in a conspiracy of silence.

Now, once Carlson (a dyed in the wool liberal) offers that nonsense as her opening gambit, she's much more thoughtful and candid in the rest of the discussion.

Margaret: Let me answer the question you raise: Yes, we have gone too far. Since we're talking about what we wrote, during last year's Democratic convention I wrote about how terrible it was that Democrats took out of their platform that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." As I read the Gosnell case coverage, I've learned that late-term abortions aren't as rare as I thought. Gosnell is charged with repeatedly and openly killing babies born alive. That is something doctors who perform abortions sometimes have to contemplate. Just yesterday, a pro-life group released a video of a doctor in a Washington clinic explaining what would happen if the baby were accidentally born alive. He wasn't much different from Gosnell.

Ramesh: And of course this was an issue in Illinois when President Barack Obama was a state senator. He voted against legislation to clarify that infants who survive abortions should be protected, because he worried that it was inconsistent with abortion rights. It's a vote his defenders have been trying to explain away ever since.

Margaret: This is where a constitutional law professor can go wrong, way wrong, and it's something Obama must regret. I hope he does. When I look at the law and what's happening, I see Roe v. Wade on a collision course with our own eyes. The trimester construct is set akilter anytime you go into a neonatal unit. Babies live at 20 weeks. Someone -- the court, the states -- has to deal with the viability question. Roe was meant to prohibit abortions after viability and to protect a woman's primacy to decide before that. You might not agree with that, Ramesh, but there was a balancing of rights -- those of the mother and the fetus. That line has changed, and something should be done to address that.

The other huge problem is how wide the "health of mother" exception is. It can be anything -- age, emotional health, financial condition. The loopholes are so large a nine-month pregnant woman could go through them.

Overall, it's a good exchange, in which both participants have their Adult Hats on and discuss things without a whole bunch of Perfect Bullshit talking points.

Who would have guessed that conversations are a lot more productive when conducted in the spirit of honesty? Talking points, lies, hackery, all of it, tends to be a tit-for-tat game; once one opponent starts engaging in it, the other will usually begin offering up his own dishonest rhetoric.

On the other hand, there's Tamara Holder, and her strange threat to tell on Katie Pavlich for talkin' about her behind her back.

It occurs to me that there is a possible paradigm by which honesty can be encouraged and dishonesty discouraged.

I'm going to guess here that Margaret Carlson feels that, because this is a one-on-one written discussion, she's representing herself.

Two things flow from that: 1, if you're representing yourself, you feel more strongly compelled towards honesty and candor, because you're not just offering a position -- you're offering your own honor. That is to say, your reputation is on the line.

Further, if you're representing yourself, and not your tribe, 2, you don't feel as required to act as a spokesman/mouthpiece/shyster lawyer for third parties. Which you might feel compelled to offer if you are cast in the role of "defending the left's position on abortion," that is, representing millions of persons who are not yourself. You might give yourself the excuse that you have to offer up some bullshit spin, because The Left, as a group, has essentially hired you as Crisis Communications Manager.

It's a different set of ethics that attach when you're representing yourself as opposed to a group of others.

It might be helpful in interviews and debates to push people off one paradigm (acting as loyal mouthpiece for ten million clients) and into the more interesting and honest one (acting as a mouthpiece only for your own thoughts).

Who knows, maybe Tamara Holder could have been pushed off her thoughtless nonsense if Hannity badgered her to say what her personal beliefs were. That is, strip her of the armor that allows her to say thoughtless and stupid things (the idea that she's got 10 million NARAL members dependin' on her) and force her to just speak for herself.

Probably not, of course. It's probably dumb all the way down. But hey, maybe it's a useful experiment.

Posted by: Ace at 02:42 PM | Comments (159)
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We had to destroy Free Speech in order to save it.

Democrats are actually floating the idea of withdrawing pension investments from firms that may finance the Koch Brothers' hypothetical purchase of the LA Times-- a straight-up state exercise of power to block someone's speech rights. And, as Allah supposes, so odious as to quickly get censured by a court, should it ever actually happen.

The Newspaper Guild has weighed in, calling on the Tribune to reject a Koch Brothers offer:

Recently youÂ’ve seen many petitions asking that the Koch brothers not be allowed to buy the Tribune CompanyÂ’s newspapers. We understand why the Kochs breed this distrust. They are active political proponents of harsh right-wing positions. WeÂ’re also not certain that Tribune will listen to anything but money when the final decision is made.

What we do know is that great papers publish credible, trusted journalism online and on the printed page. Whoever comes to own these mastheads needs to understand that protecting newsrooms from ideological taint is no small thing. The future of American journalism depends on the ability to print truth, not opinion.

Facts such as these?

Meghan McArdle wrote about this issue recently, specifically the new claims flowing from the left that newspapers are naturally and inevitably left-leaning (with the unstated suggestion that any deviation from this situation would be aberrant, immoral, and Just Plain Wrong). The claim goes that natural free-market forces compel a newspaper to be liberal, and therefore that's the natural state of things, and any deviation from that could only come from an unnatural commitment to an ideological position.

After digesting these claims, McArdle scotches them:

[M]any newspapers used to be conservative. But the media consolidation of the 1950s, when the rise television and radio drove most cities down to a single daily, actually gave newspapers considerable freedom to ignore the preferences of their readership. Not entirely; in most places you could not endorse the student riots, or communism. But you could afford to drift to the left of your readership as long as you maintained an agreeable tone about it. What were the readers going to do about it? Go without a newspaper?

I find this whole line of argument pretty absurd (and it comes from an absurd thinker, Something Faranze-Gupta or whatever, a serial offender in soft cryptomarxist stupidity).

Let's look at Europe. Europeans are our betters, are they not? Isn't that usually the left's claim when they seek a transformation of society?

London is England's city and perennially elects a leftwing mayor. And yet a plurality of its newspapers are conservative-leaning, in all categories, from the downscale tabloids to the upscale broadsheets.

Apparently in London "natural market forces" do not dictate that all major newspapers must be left-leaning. Most of them are actually Tory!

Similarly, in France, the conservative-leaning Le Figaro (published in Paris, generally mostly about Paris, as most French media is) is the second largest selling newspaper in the country. Yes, the top slot does go to a left-leaning paper, but apparently Paris, too, can successfully field a center-right newspaper.

(Note that both Paris and London are a bit different than the US, because both are sort of... city-states, in a way. That is, the distinction between "Paris" and "France" or "London" and "England" is slimmer one than the difference, say, between "Los Angeles" and "America." In France and England, the newspapers of the First City are de facto "national" newspapers in a way that no newspaper in the US is a de facto "national" newspaper.)*

Matt Welch looks at the example of the Houston Chronicle, a newspaper serving a huge right-of-center city, which has not been conservative sine the 50s.

"Natural market forces" do not demand that the Chronicle be left-of-center; rather, reporters at the Chronicle demand it be left-of-center.

These reporters are not serving their client base; they're serving themselves. They're not reflecting the preferences of their readers, but only their own.

This is nothing but protection of a particular ideology's power base. There is no "natural" reason that a media must be left-leaning, but leftists are goddamned determined that it remain so.

If natural market forces mean that all media must be liberal, someone should tell those California Democrats to stop using artificial, ideological state power to keep a leftist power-base in line. After all, natural market forces should take care of it on their own schedule, no?

* It occurs to me that the Founders kept the US from becoming a "city-state," if you will, dominated by one great city, when they insisted that the political capital of the United States should not be one of its commercial, financial, and population capitals. In the early days of the fledgling Republic, the "capital" famously circulated around a whole heck of a lot before moving permanently to a converted no-man's-land of a swamp straddling two different states.

And so the political power center of the US was kept physically separate from the financial, commercial, and media power centers. Until recently, at least, when the media-government-corporate power centers decided to merge because People Just Can't Think For Themselves and Because Socialism Is Teh Future.

Posted by: Ace at 12:59 PM | Comments (266)
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No.

A well-known female liberal blogger and radio host at the University of Wyoming (UW) is being accused by police of fabricating a rape threat against herself to appear as if it came from a conservative.

Before the post was removed, Lanker-Simons commented on it and on her own blog, calling it “disgusting, misogynistic, and apparently something the admins of this page think is a perfectly acceptable sentiment.

...

But on Monday, The University of Wyoming Police Department issued a citation to Lanker-Simons for “interference” for “false statements she made to the UW Police Department,” according to a UW statement referred to by Laramie Boomerang Online.

The cops say the "disgusting, mysoginistic" comment came from her very own computer, when the computer was in her exclusive possession.

She actually brought this to the cops? If you read the comment she faked, it isn't even really a threat.

I wonder what would cause someone to be so filled with fury and lunacy, that such an odious method of drawing attention to oneself seems acceptable?

Oh. Ohhhhhh.

Nevermind.

It Gets Worse: The picture above turns out to be a rather fetching one, relatively.

Enjoy more from JWF.

Posted by: Ace at 11:52 AM | Comments (362)
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thunderb asks a great question.

First, the background. The three friends of the Chechens arrested today claim they are innocent of any terrorist intent and only removed certain articles from the Tsarnaev's home to keep their friends from getting into trouble. So apparently they're copping to the lesser charges of obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting a fugitive but are claiming to have had no bad intent beyond helpin' out a pal.

Okay. So that's the story.

Now, here are the articles they removed and attempted to dispose of:

Two men from Kazakhstan and a man from Cambridge were arrested and charged today in the Boston Marathon bombings investigation, federal prosecutors said.

Azamat Tazhayakov and Dias Kadyrbayev, both 19 and of New Bedford, were charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice by plotting to dispose of a laptop computer and a backpack containing fireworks belonging to bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the US attorneyÂ’s office said in a statement.

Robel Phillipos, 19, of Cambridge was charged with making false statements to law enforcement officials in a terrorism investigation, prosecutors said. All three began attending the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2011, the same university Tsarnaev attended.

...

Three days after the blasts, on April 18, the three men allegedly removed TsarnaevÂ’s backpack, which contained fireworks that had been opened and emptied of gunpowder, from his dormitory room.

Suspecting that Tsarnaev was involved in the bombing after authorities released surveillance video of the bombers that afternoon, the trio decided to throw the backpack and fireworks in the trash “because they did not want to get Tsarnaev into trouble,” according to an affidavit filed by an FBI agent in support of the charges.

On Friday, authorities recovered the backpack from a landfill in New Bedford. Inside, agents found fireworks, a jar of Vaseline, and a UMass Dartmouth homework assignment sheet, among other things. The homework sheet was for a class in which Tsarnaev was enrolled, the agent said in the sworn statement. It wasnÂ’t clear from the affidavit what happened to the laptop.

Vaseline? Why would they dispose of Vaseline?

I'm not trying to be crude here, but if you spotted a jar of Vasline in the room of a man, would you assume it was Evidence Against Him in a Bombing Crime?

Or would you assume it was for cosmetic purposes, or masturbation?

Why would you think that Vasline was evidence against him in a bombing?

Now, can Vaseline be used in making bombs?

Well wonder of wonders, Vaseline is in fact a common ingredient in homemade bombs!

I didn't know that. Did you know that? Maybe I've heard that once or twice on like 24 or something, but the use of Vaseline in home explosives (mix five parts Vaseline to one part explosive powder!) was not in my Active Knowledge Base.

Was it part of yours?

You know whose Active Knowledge Base apparently did contain this lethal bit of trivia?

The three people arrested today, who seemed to immediately recognize the explosive combination of gunpowder + Vaseline.

Just helpin' out a friend. Luckily for the Brothers Tsarnaev, these three college students just happened to also know a thing or two about how to make a homemade bomb, and so knew to dispose of the Vaseline.

Caveat: MWR catches me making an assumption I didn't know I'd made, but I did.

I assumed the three friends gathered the stuff and placed it into the backpack. In fact, we don't know that:

Just to play devil's advocate, the article doesn't say that these three people packed the backpack. It says that they chose to dispose of the backpack THAT CONTAINED the empty firecrackers.

Right, he's right, I made that assumption, and I have no evidence for it, now that I see the assumption.

It could have happened as MWR suggests

Update: Nope, the original assumption, while an assumption I shouldn't have made, does turn out to be correct. Per the affidavit, specifically Para 27 of the facts alleged, specifies that one of the three friends grabbed the Vaseline precisely because he thought it was used in bomb-making.

What a useful thing to know when you're collecting up evidence that might land your friend in the gas chamber. I guess some people are just lucky.

Corrected: I thought the three friends were also Chechens but commenters say at least two were Kazahks. And also, that all are male. I actually don't know so I've simply rewritten to avoid any characterization of country of origin or gender. I gotta catch up on this stuff, but I wanted to get rid of the apparently-wrong information first.

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Comments (385)
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Yes, long ago.

Hillary Clinton employed this same tactic in the Whitewater investigation.

Early in the investigation, she refused to comment because it was "too early" to do so and she wanted to "let the investigation proceed" so she could "have all the facts."

Now, after about a year -- a year over the course of which it was always "too early" to discuss these matters -- she announced that it was now too late to discuss them, as Whitewater was now "old news" and "all of the questions have been asked and answered before."

Well, no. They were asked, but never answered, as you always previously claimed it was "too early" to answer them. And now, Bang!, without notice, it's announced that it has suddenly moved from "far too early" to "far too late."

Same thing here in Benghazi. We went from it being too early to discuss these matters or ask questions about it to, Bang!, without any prior notice, it now being too late, as this is all ancient history that could not possibly have anything to do with current events.

Apparently there was a sweet spot in there, perhaps lasting several minutes to an hour, when it was neither too early to answer questions about Benghazi, nor too late. And this Time of Ripeness, alas, passed without our knowing it. They forgot to mention that for sixteen minutes it was now The Right Time to ask and answer questions about Benghazi, and we didn't notice ourselves, so now it's Just Too Late and that's Our Fault for not divining those Golden Minutes when questions could be asked.

UPDATE [JohnE.]: Video below the fold. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:34 AM | Comments (263)
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