I guess it's possible that this will turn out to be some kind of government shake-down.

Ironically enough.

Former congressman Melvin Reynolds (D-Ill.) has been arrested by immigration officers in Zimbabwe, the Associated Press reports.

An immigration official, Ario Mabika, told AP that Reynolds was arrested for an immigration violation and possessing pornography. The state-run newspaper also reports Reynolds has failed to pay more than $24,000 in hotel bills.

Reynolds had also, in 1995, faced charges for solicitation of child pornography.

I don't know what kind of porn the Zimbabweans are saying he had.

Clinton commuted the last two years of Reynolds' sentence, as he was leaving office, in 2001.

Hot Air notes that only The Hill bothers to note his party affiliation.

Posted by: Ace at 01:11 PM | Comments (238)
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R E T R A C T E D

As AllahPundit explains, this claim is so misleading and twisted as to be not only insupportable, but indefensible.

This entire post is retracted in red-faced error. YouGov is now changing their claim.

I won't ever link them again.

...

71%, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll.

However, the poll does not detect much new enthusiasm for Romney, either, because you know he gave a dog a gay haircut and then cancer.

Still, given the choice of Obama versus Romney, Obama supporters said they would stick with their guy, 79 percent to 10 percent for Romney.

But 10% of Obama's 53.5% is about 5.35% of the vote. Would that have turned the election?

As for Romney, his favorable ratings have dropped, but he would edge Obama by about three million votes, probably because Americans are not wowed by Obama's second term performance, not because they like Romney more.

Now, this being politics and political writers needing easy stories, you know what this means: Time for a second third look at Romney? As in Romney 2016?

But in recent weeks, a strange thing has happened: Some supporters and donors, pollsters and pundits are starting to suggest — without irony — that the former Massachusetts governor run for president in 2016.
“Once a month, someone would e-mail or call and say he should run again,” said Ron Kaufman, a longtime Romney adviser. “Now I get it every day — from the grass roots, and from donors. I get it every day.”

Exit question: Is this for real?

Exit answer: No.

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (382)
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This story is old, but Rusty of Mental Recession is looking back at the failure of Obama's stimulus at its five year anniversary, and he notes this story from 2010.

While the stimulus didn't create many jobs, but you should know, seriously man, about all the "lives touched" by government funding.

“Lives Touched” is a figure that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) uses to track the amount of people who have been positively affected by the Recovery Act funds. This total would include people who have been provided full time employment (i.e. saved and created jobs) through the Recovery Act and people who at some point have supported a project funded by the Recovery Act.

So, they decided to count people who politically supported a program funded by the stimulus? So if they said "Good" when the government wasted billions on electric cars, their "lives" were "touched," and they are included in the numbers as Stimulus Winners?

The post is a reflection on the Recovery, now it its fifth year of failure. The "lives touched" was a new metric (did I just call it a metric?) Obama's Department of Energy created in 2010. Personally, I never heard of this before, so while it's a Flashback, it's New To Me (TM).

Posted by: Ace at 02:13 PM | Comments (354)
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Prediction is a tough thing.

I don't really think it's terrible that government meteorologists failed to predict how tough, cold, and snowy this Global Warmening winter would be. Predicting the future, like hitting a curveball, is hard.

But, of course: I'm a bit skeptical when they move straight from one near-term failed prediction to a long-term prediction, also failed, at least for the last 17 years, and tell me "Serious You Guys you have to trust on this, the Science is Settled."

Surprised by how tough this winter has been? YouÂ’re in good company: Last fall the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted that temperatures would be above normal from November through January across much of the Lower 48 states. This graphic shows just how wrong the official forecast of the U.S. government was:

I don't even know what the hell this means
but this article says it's all f***ed up and its sh*t's all r****ded

The big red blotch in the top map represents parts of the country in which the Climate Prediction Center forecast above-average temperatures. The frigid-looking blue blotch in the bottom “verification” map shows areas where temperatures turned out to be below average.

“Not one of our better forecasts,” admits Mike Halpert, the Climate Prediction Center’s acting director.

...

Climatologists are trying to use their big miss this winter as a learning experience.

...

Oh that's lovely, I was wondering when they would.

I didn't quote a part of the article that notes that the accuracy of weather predictions is rated on a scale running from -50 to +100. Yeah I know, whatever. Well, the prediction about the first half of winter scored a -22 or -23.

For the latter half, they're now nearly "zero-ish" in terms of accuracy. So, big win on that big goose-egg.

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (320)
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Let's regulate all the things.

With the region hit by yet another blast of winter weather, a mountain of 40,000 tons of rock salt destined for New Jersey is being held up at a port in Maine by a century-old maritime law, forcing state officials to scramble to retrieve a portion of the load even as salt sheds across the state are down to their final grains.

...

Jim Simpson, New JerseyÂ’s transportation commissioner, said in a radio interview on Friday that there was a ship in Maine that could carry the entire load to the Port of Newark within days but cannot do so because it does not sail under an American flag.

“We’ve been going back and forth with the feds for the last two days,” Mr. Simpson told the station, New Jersey 101.5 FM. “This is the kind of stuff we’re dealing with. Even government, the federal government, gets in the way.”

On Tuesday, Joseph Dee, a spokesman for the transportation department, said that the stateÂ’s request for a waiver had been denied on Thursday and that they were not sure that the larger ship was even in port anymore.

As an alternative, they dispatched a barge to retrieve 9,500 tons of salt. It will take several trips to transport all 40,000 tons, which could take weeks.

Apparently there's some protectionist law that says only American-flagged ships can transport our precious patriotic rock salt from American port to American port. Because America.*

We need to start passing laws that sunset huge blocks of law within, say, three years. Give Congress a chance to re-pass the ones that make sense. But it's time to just start repealing laws en masse.

Oh, by the way: Notice the Obama Administration, by denying a crucial waiver, is not just shutting down a bridge for one day, but is shutting down all the state roads.

Time for some traffic problems in New Jersey?

From @slublog.

*It's a standard leftist trope to goof on the right for what they claim to be false assertions of patriotic spirit for various laws and measures. And yet when it comes down to ridiculous protectionist schemes such as this one -- a scheme which is actually putting people in actual danger, as snowy, icy roads are an oft-lethal hazard -- they will of course resort to claiming that we need to protect our patriotic American-flagged ships from foreign competition, Because America.

Clarification/Correction: Blaster tells me the law specifically forbids foreign-flagged ships from carrying goods from one American port to another:

The law is that only US flagged ships may go from US port to US port.

So they could take that ship full of rock salt under non-US flag up to Canada, then go to New Jersey.

Posted by: Ace at 06:55 AM | Comments (491)
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You know how courts often (largely to our chagrin) look to state laws and decide that a "national consensus" on an issue has been reached (sometimes with as few as 27 out of 50 states supporting that "consensus"), and then impose that supposed "consensus" on all the other states, taking away states' rights to make their own laws?

You know how sometimes questions just go on for far too long? How they just get away from the writer, sometimes?

Anyway, Washington Post bloggers The Volokh Conspiracy find a new national consensus on the right to carry.

The Yellow states (arbitrary permitting) were the national norm in 1986, but they are now outliers. Unless the 9th CircuitsÂ’ decision in Peruta is overturned, California and Hawaii will have to become Shall Issue states.
This will leave Yellow states at less than 1/7 of the U.S. population.

...

The six hold-out states are increasingly isolated.

The writer notes:

It is interesting to compare the above chart to the map showing the demise of laws against “sodomy” (oral or anal sex), between 1970 and 2003. On the eve of Lawrence v. Texas, there were still 13 states which had sodomy statutes.

And we know how that went.

Obviously I have become a libertarian (where I was once merely libertarian-leaning), so I view this all as good. I am just increasingly suspicious of -- and hostile to -- people who believe they are so possessed of the truth about how any particular person ought to live his life that they can and should seek legislative action to impose this truth upon people.

From Instapundit, who frequently writes of the growing "Leave Me Alone" coalition.

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 AM | Comments (306)
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Via Hot Air, Michael Barone considers Fred Siegel's "revealing" new book, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.

The novels of Sinclair Lewis, the journalism of H. L. Mencken, and the literary criticism of Van Wyck Brooks heaped scorn on the vast and supposedly mindless Americans who worked hard at their jobs and joined civic groups — Mencken’s “booboisie.”

These 1920s liberals idealized the “noble aspiration” and “fine aristocratic pride” in an imaginary Europe, and considered Americans, in the words of a Lewis character, “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food,” and “listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”

This contempt for ordinary Americans mostly persisted in changing political environments. During the Great Depression, many liberals became Communists, proclaiming themselves tribunes of a virtuous oppressed proletariat that would have an enlightened rule.

For a moment, idealization of the working man, but not the middle-class striver, came into vogue. But in the postwar years, what Siegel calls “the political and cultural snobbery” of liberals returned.

Jonah Goldberg has written about this book, and I wrote about him writing about it.

Incidentally, I think it is inevitable that class and culture wind up essentially driving "politics," but that people ought to recognize this and work to restrain this tendency.

I've often complained of both some on the right (and most on the left) turning what ought to be questions of policy into personal fights undertaken to establish a particular, idiosyncratic expression of a culture as dominant and favored.

There are cultures I favor and think have more on the ball than others, but even within specific cultures, I have criticisms of cultures I favor, and I find good things in cultures I don't.

I just don't see the wisdom of making politics a proxy fight for whose culture is better, nor of encoding most particulars of a culture's creed into the U.S. legal code.
Such things are for argument and rhetorical suasion, not mandates and laws.

Videos: Fred Siegel discusses his book here, in a ten minute excerpt.

The full hour is here.

Sent by Yip.

Posted by: Ace at 02:06 PM | Comments (218)
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Eli Lake interviewed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Clapper. There are two grabby quotes.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Clapper said the problems facing the U.S. intelligence community over its collection of phone records could have been avoided. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will. Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11—which is the genesis of the 215 program—and said both to the American people and to their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap, we need to make sure this never happens to us again, so here is what we are going to set up, here is how it’s going to work, and why we have to do it, and here are the safeguards… We wouldn’t have had the problem we had,” Clapper said.

“What did us in here, what worked against us was this shocking revelation,” he said, referring to the first disclosures from Snowden. If the program had been publicly introduced in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, most Americans would probably have supported it.”

Clapper then claims he didn't commit perjury in his Congressional testimony. You will recall that Ron Wyden directly asked him if the NSA collected "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?"

Clapper said: "No."

This was false.

His defense is twofold -- and his alternate defenses seem to contradict each other.

First, he claims that it was improper for Wyden to ask the question when he knew the answer was classified. This, he says, put him in a "when did you stop beating your wife" situation.

Note, however, that that defense suggests that Clapper knew what Wyden meant.

But his other defense is that he thought Wyden was talking about something else:

Clapper told The Daily Beast that he simply misunderstood Wyden’s question. At the time of the hearing last March, Congress had just finished consideration of a bill to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Section 702 of that legislation gives the National Security Agency the authority to collect the electronic communications of non-U.S. persons. In his question, Wyden asked initially if the United States had collected “dossiers” on American citizens and referred to an answer to this question by then NSA director, Keith Alexander.

Either he knew what Wyden meant or he didn't. He's calling "splunge" -- Wyden trapped me improperly, and I did my best to observe my duty to avoid disclosing a classified program, and also I thought he was talking about something else, whether we collected "dossiers." Note that he didn't consider this last question a matter of classified information.

“I was not even thinking of what he was asking about, which is of course we now all know as section 215 of the Patriot Act governing the acquisition and storage of telephony business records metadata,” Clapper said. “Wasn’t even thinking of that.” The director of national intelligence said he thought Wyden’s question was actually about section 702 of FISA.

Clapper finishes up by saying no one can prove what he meant when he said "No."

“There is only one person on the planet who actually knows what I was thinking,” Clapper said of his testimony from last March. “Not the media, and not certain members of Congress, only I know what I was thinking.”

Update from DrewM.: Drew says this by email.

Reminder...Wyden told Clapper a day in advance he was going to be asked the data collection question.

[Link to story establishing that Wyden's question had been submitted in advance.]

With that notice Clapper didn't have a better plan than perjury?

Correction: I claimed Clapper was "head of the NSA" because, frankly, I was high. Like off-my-face zonked on spray paint and nail thinner.

Baldilocks has corrected me. He's DNI, not head of the NSA.

Posted by: Ace at 08:28 AM | Comments (254)
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Otra Vez

Communism* is nothing more than an organized crime ring run by the state. It just extorts, parasitizes, and kills everything it touches, and then fails. Always. Always, and again. Punitive redistribution absolutely requires the creation of a brutal tyranny to carry it out.

Self-regarded 'elite,' but actually very dumb journalists have to be shown this, and their own stupidity, over and over again, and the dimwits made to understand that the repetitive failure of leftist ideology to produce a livable state, is absolutely preordained by its own tenets and goals.

So how many times do we humans have to try Communism before we figure out it doesn't work?

As Carin notes, it's happening in real time. Again. Right here in our hemisphere.

And the foolish newscasters are silent, because the foolish newscasters all loved Hugo Chavez, who was 'democratically elected,' in an election that was 'certified by former President Carter!' more...

Posted by: LauraW at 09:09 AM | Comments (345)
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Aebly digested by Maet last night, a new survey suggests that The Party of Science may not be quite as firm on the concept of science as advertised.

I think this whole argument -- who's "smarter," as an enormous group -- is stupid. And I don't lay that at AllahPundit's feet nor at Maet's; it is the left which endlessly propagates their, um, propaganda that "We're smarter and we love science." Surveys such as this one are discussed on the right not to establish the contrary proposition ("no, we're smarter, and we love science") but to undermine the left's original claim.

It's a stupid argument made by stupid people. I look down on people who attempt to elevate themselves by associating themselves with a larger group which they claim to be "superior" or "elite." I laugh at Ku Klux Klanners who talk up, for example, the accomplishments of the White Race. Absolutely, I'd agree, members of the White race have achieved a great many good and important things, but what the hell has that to do with you, Grand Cyclops, drinking yourself into oblivion as you mutter darkly about how "The Blacks" are keeping you from opening that business you've been talking about for ten years?

The argument of Achievement by Association is always made by the least-achieved members -- and the lowest-ranking members -- of any particular group. It is a low-level MSNBC line producer who will say something along the lines of "Liberals (implicitly: "such as myself") are much more creative and talented, as proven by all the great liberal directors, such as Steven Spielberg."

You will never hear Steven Spielberg say "Liberals are much more creative and talented, as proven by this low-level MSNBC line producer I never heard of and doubt I ever will."

The entire argument is made from a position of, essentially, admitted failure, or at least of admitted non-achievement.

I cannot tell you how many times I've heard someone on the left say something along the lines of members of the left being superior, because there are so many funny comedians who are left-leaning.

This argument is nearly always made by someone who is resolutely unfunny, born with a congenital immunity to humorousness of any kind.

Many members of this sad clade believe that appending an exclamation point or three to any sarcastic sentence -- "Conservatives sure love kids before they're born!!!" -- transmutes it not only into a joke, but a joke that is strong enough to be written in a permanent medium and endure, if not forever, at least until we abandon the internet in favor of BrainGrams or whatever.

And here now the news that more liberals/Democrats seem to think that astrology just might have something to it, and maybe this Nicolaus Copernicus feller was all wet.

What accounts for this? Is it just that they don't understand the important difference a few letters make in the words "astrology" and "astronomy"? Even if that's the case, that's hideously embarrassing.

And what could possibly account for the failure to have heard, at this late, that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the reverse?

The differences on these questions, by political ideology, are not great. The more important takeaway, I think, is this: "Holy Long Discredited Superstition, a large number of Americans believe in astrology."

One difference, I think, is this: I have known a fair number of very intelligent women who believe, sort of, in either astrology or some other nonsense magic or pseudoscience. It is my experience that men buy into this less, and women more.

And, as I say, smart women buy into this. Women I would never ever call "dumb" or anything like that. But there does seem to be (at least in my experience) and openness to Dumb Stuff like astrology among women, even women who are otherwise keenly intelligent and well-informed.

I imagine there is a large psychological factor here, rivaling other factors such as natural intelligence and education. And for whatever reason, women seem more psychologically primed to be willing to believe in New Agey type things.

That, I think, accounts for at least some of the difference, by ideology, given that women skew liberal.

So while I would not join the sad, unaccomplished left in plumping for "The Right's superior understanding of science," I will indulge myself in a Nelson Muntz "Ha, ha!" at the finding that the Party of Science What Loves Science and Sciencey Things is more likely than the general public to believe that astrology is a scientific science, and less likely than the general public to have gotten late word that Copernicus was right.

Posted by: Ace at 07:18 AM | Comments (395)
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