I just exhaustedly made it back to my hotel room so I guess you know where I'm going with this excuse....

Mind the Gap: Why Income Differences Don't Matter

An absolutely excellent essay on why the left's complaints about income inequality are really based on cloudy thinking and basic fallacies and a whole lot of emoting. I'd excerpt the whole thing but laziness and fair use laws but mostly laziness prevent me.

Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill. But for some reason we treat this skill differently. No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.

Why? The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other skill. What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?

I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society. As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second outdated, and the third empirically false. Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?

Quote of the Day: Shockingly Russians Are Interested in Russia's Interests

And will pursue them as far as they can get away with i.e. the Krauthammer explains Political Reality 101:

Remember the speech he gave at the U.N. when he started his administration? He said no nation can or should dominate another. I mean, there's not a 12-year-old in the world who believes that. And he said the alignment of nations rooted in the cleavages of the long ago Cold War make no sense in this interconnected world.

As our Secretary of State said today, or yesterday, after all this, this is a 19th century action in a 21st century world. As if what he means his actions where governments pursue expansion, territory domination, no longer exist in this century, as if that hasn't been a constant in all of human history since Hannibal.

They imagine the world as a new interconnected world where climate change is the biggest threat and they are shocked that the Russians actually are interested in territory.

No matter how '19th century' acting in your own self-interest is.

Apropos that warm water port, a liberal asked me "Why is Putin doing this?"  My response aside from the obvious "because he can," was "because he wants a warm water port."  The liberal sneered at me that this isn't the 19th century anymore.  I suspect that he hadn't read that Lurch er . . . Kerry said exactly the same thing.  Instead, this is just a default Leftist sneer.  In fact, as I noted above, a warm water port is an excellent thing for the Russians and Putin knows it.  He is therefore following State Craft Rule 101:  act in your own self-interest.  As Tom Rogan explains, no airy-fairy theory in the world will override this number one rule of governance.

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Catching up late to this story. Althouse introduces an excerpted transcript of Issa on the Chris Wallace show.

The Fox News moderator, Chris Wallace, quoted the report by the Republicans on Issa's committee, which said that Lerner "was keenly aware of acute political pressure to crack down on conservative-leaning organizations." Who put this pressure on Lerner?

ISSA: That's one of our questions. She says things like they put pressure. So e-mails indicate that there was pressure. We don't know whether it was the president shaking his fingers at the House, the Senate, and the Supreme Court over Citizens United or whether it was...

WALLACE: During the State of the Union Address?

ISSA: During the State of the Union, where she felt the pressure. Only she can tell us where she thought that pressure was.

WALLACE: The report also cites a newly discovered e-mail from September 16th, 2010, in which Lerner discusses how to check whether groups seeking tax exempt status are engaged in improper political activity. This is an e-mail to other people in the IRS. And she says, quote, "We need to have a plan. We need to be caution so it isn't a per se political project." What do you think that e-mail shouts?

Open thread.

Posted by: Ace at 04:12 PM | Comments (342)
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Well, that's what this guy says Putin's "Eurasian Union" is ultimately about.

I don't know if that's true-- it could be that Putin is just using that term ("Eurasian") and this other character uses it for his weird Soviet Nazi hybrid.

Worth reading, though.

Putin is sometimes described as a revanchist, seeking to recreate the Soviet Union. That is a useful shorthand, but it is not really accurate. Putin and many of his gang may have once been Communists, but they are not that today. Rather, they have embraced a new totalitarian political ideology known as “Eurasianism.”

The roots of Eurasianism go back to czarist émigrés interacting with fascist thinkers in between-the-wars France and Germany. But in recent years, its primary exponent has been the very prominent and prolific political theorist Aleksandr Dugin.

Born in 1962, Dugin was admitted to the Moscow Aviation Institute in 1979, but then was expelled because of his involvement with mystic neo-Nazi groups... after which he became a founder and chief ideologue of the Eurasianist National Bolshevik Party (NBP) in 1994.

Nazism, it will be recalled, was an abbreviation for National Socialism. National Bolshevism, therefore, put itself forth as an ideology that relates to National Socialism in much the same way as Bolshevism relates to Socialism. This open self-identification with Nazism is also shown clearly in the NBP flag, which looks exactly like a Nazi flag, with a red background surrounding a white circle, except that the black swastika at the center is replaced by a black hammer and sickle.

...

The core idea of Dugin’s Eurasianism is that “liberalism” (by which is meant the entire Western consensus) represents an assault on the traditional hierarchical organization of the world....

In order to be so united, this Eurasian Union will need a defining ideology, and for this purpose Dugin has developed a new “Fourth Political Theory” combining all the strongest points of Communism, Nazism, Ecologism, and Traditionalism, thereby allowing it to appeal to the adherents of all of these diverse anti-liberal creeds. He would adopt Communism’s opposition to free enterprise. However, he would drop the Marxist commitment to technological progress, a liberal-derived ideal, in favor of Ecologism’s demagogic appeal to stop the advance of industry and modernity. From Traditionalism, he derives a justification for stopping free thought. All the rest is straight out of Nazism, ranging from legal theories justifying unlimited state power and the elimination of individual rights, to the need for populations “rooted” in the soil, to weird gnostic ideas about the secret origin of the Aryan race in the North Pole.

Uh, I did not quote one important part of this, because of fair use, and because it was so Crazy Crank I felt embarrassed even having it on the site.

But it goes like this: This guy Dugin claims that there has been a battle since the beginning of time between the evil, cunning agents of Atlantis (yes, that Atlantis), who today make up all the world's maritime and mercantile peoples, and the good land-based farmer folk of the inland parts of the world.

Almost all of the world's conflicts of the past 10,000 years, he thinks, were really proxy wars between the Atlanteans and the Land People.

This is where I started to think, "There's no way Putin believes this."

But then, Hitler is said to embraced lots of crazy Blavatskyan mystical hokum, so there is precedent, I guess.

(Actually I think there's some debate on this, and while this idea that Hitler was "just crazy about the occult" is popular (and is of course the foundation of the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark), I don't know if it's established that Hitler himself was a member of the Thule Society and all that. I mean, he was obviously a lunatic, but I don't know if it's as true as popular culture tells us that he was into runes, Atlantis, and all the other sort of theosophical crap that had been bubbling up since the 1870s.)

Posted by: Ace at 02:24 PM | Comments (367)
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Volunteers are still adding in the results- Pinellas is just rollling them in, but Jolly has won the race. We are canvassing and updating precincts now, but there's nothing left for Sink

Also- big kudos to Pinellas County: even with 15 volunteers hammering away, over 180,000 votes reported in under a half hour!

AOSHQDD lives again. Follow live, minute-by-minute returns here.

We will also be tweeting out results at @AOSHQDD

Our official prediction is Sink winning in the low single digits (2-3 points now), but an upset would be nice.

I want to thank JohnE for rebuilding the site, Joel Fagin (@ningrim) for designing our source sheet, and all of the horde who are volunteering. We will make a call as soon as we are confident.

Posted by: CAC at 02:46 PM | Comments (833)
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Three contests I've received emails about in one big state: the Republican primary for U.S. Senator, where incumbent Senator John Cornyn had been facing at least the possibility of a runoff race with Rep. Steve Stockman, though that seems very unlikely at thist point; the Republican primary for Lt. Governor, where incumbent David Dewhurst faces the risk of a runoff race; and TX-32, where incumbent representative Pete Sessions faces a potential threat from Tea Party-backed Katrina Pierson. I expect incumbents to win in all three, though I think Dewhurst is the most vulnerable.

Next week, we really kick things off at the Decision Desk with the hotly contested special election to fill Florida's 13th congressional district.

Results will be put in the thread below. more...

Posted by: CAC at 03:51 PM | Comments (522)
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Three charter schools had been granted "co-location" permits by Bloomberg -- permitting them to set up shop in the unused parts of already-existing public schools.

De Blasio, "The People's Candidate," is suddenly canceling that permission, giving the three charter schools little time at all to find new places to teach. It's already March, and these schools thought they had classrooms for September. But now they don't, because De Blasio says he doesn't want to "rush" these decisions.

Gee, I wonder why he'd do something like this.

Andrew Malone, principal of Success Academy Harlem Central, which is no longer approved to co-locate next year, told me he doesn’t know what his school is going to do. “It’s terrifying,” he says. “For the families, it is already nearly March. To be given no warning that the school is closing makes it impossible for them to find another option, and for the majority, unfortunately, their zone schools are failing.”

...

Considering New York City’s sky-high rent process, [a charter school called] Success will most likely close — a shame, given that it’s lived up to its moniker.

“We are a very high-performing school,” Malone says, noting that last year his sixth graders had the highest pass rate in the entire state of New York on the state math tests and that both sixth and fifth grades had the No. 1 academic achievement ranking in the borough of Manhattan in 2012.

The Harlem-based school also serves traditionally underprivileged communities — the students come from either upper Manhattan or the Bronx. Ninety percent are black, 10 percent Hispanic; 80 percent receive either a free or reduced-priced lunch.

“Just in the last 48 hours it is has been extremely challenging just seeing the children’s faces,” Malone says. “To tell them we won’t exist next year even when we are extremely successful is hard to swallow.”

Fapoumata Kebe, the mother of three children currently attending Success charter schools, would rather homeschool her children then send them to a traditional district school.

“They want my children to go to a school that is not performing well,” she says. “If they do that, I want to homeschool my children, because I want them to have a chance to succeed.”

Indignant at the surprise decision, Kebe thinks de Blasio is the cause of her children’s uncertain future. “What de Blasio wants to do is to take the children who are succeeding and take them from that school that is performing perfectly to send them to a school that is not good at all,” she says.

If these schools were failing, De Blasio and his union stooges wouldn't see them as a threat. In fact, they'd probably offer them tax subsidies, were they failing.

Posted by: Ace at 12:39 PM | Comments (385)
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Over at Hot Air, some are taking a second look at Rubio.

I liked his speech calling out Tom Harkin and the useful idiots on Cuba and Venezuela, but this does seem like too quick a bout of forgiveness. There might be some Cheap Date-ism going on in the party.

Meanwhile, a New Republic writer admits that Romney's much-media-derided "geopolitical foe" statement about Russia "seems exactly right."

Bonfire of the Vanities: Mead has a column up at The American Interest about how Crimea weakens Obama.

Facts destroy theory, every time.

WashingtonÂ’s flat-footed, deer-in-the-headlights incomprehension about RussiaÂ’s Crimean adventure undermines President ObamaÂ’s broader credibility in a deeply damaging way. If he could be this blind and misguided about Vladimir Putin, how smart is he about the Ayatollah Khameni, a much more difficult figure to read? President Obama is about to have a difficult meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu in which he will tell Netanyahu essentially that Israel should ground its national security policy on the wisdom of President Obama and his profound grasp of the forces of history. The effect will be somewhat undermined by President ObamaÂ’s failure to understand the most elementary things about Vladimir Putin.

With Hitler-style lies blasting from the well-tuned Russia propaganda machine (attacks on ethnic Russians! mass flight of refugees! fascism!) and armed soldiers backing up thugs in Crimea and elsewhere, President Putin is not exactly looking like a partner for peace at the moment—and Obama’s decision to work with him isn’t making President Obama look like a foreign policy genius.

Prime Minister Netanyahu—and many other world leaders—will be looking at President Obama with cold and calculating eyes. They can see that he turned to Russia for help when his Syrian red line policy collapsed; they can see that he is betting heavily that Russia will help him with Iran, both in the negotiations and at the UN Security Council. They observe how Washington was flabbergasted and stunned by the events in Ukraine, and they are likely to conclude that President Obama’s Middle East policy is in much worse shape than he thinks.

Both friends and foes are also probably thinking today that President Obama is going to have less control over the future of American foreign policy than he might like.

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I know some folks in the Ukraine who might disagree with this assessment.

Apparently some people told Finemann he was a dumbass.

In the more noted Oscars story, Matthew McConaughey gave an acceptance speech that was by turns humble and interesting.

I'm not sure if I fully understand his idea that his hero is the self he wishes to be (but never will be) ten years from now, but it's an interesting idea. And of course he thanked his God and parents quite a bit, only mentioning three people from the film he won for, rather than the usual litany of accountants, agents, business managers.

"First off I want to thank God, because that's who I look up to. He's graced my life with opportunities that I know are not of my hand or any other human hand," the 44-year-old Texas native said. "He has shown me that it's a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates. In the words of the late (British actor) Charlie Laughton, who said, 'When you got God you got a friend and that friend is you.'"

...

"To my father, I know he's up there right now with a big pot of gumbo, he's got a lemon meringue pie, he's probably up there in his underwear, he's got a cold can of Miller lite and he's dancing right now," he continued. "To my dad, you taught me what it means to be a man, to my mother, who's here tonight, you taught me and my two brothers, demanded, that we respect ourselves. What we in turn learned was, we were then better able to respect others."

The self-appointed Agents of Tolerance of course turned to their favorite past time of XXXtreme Tolerance:

"OK so you really deserved it McConaughey. Just stop the stupid god talk," tweeted one observer, as others concurred.

"I thought we could get through the Oscars without someone thanking god but no he had to ruin it. F**k you McConaughey."

Incidentally, it has been bruited about that he didn't win for Dallas Buyer's Club per se, but for his entire year of work, which many people are saying is the best year for an actor in quite a long time. And included in that year's work is of course the show which everyone in Hollywood is watching, True Detective.*

By the way, I don't love him in True Detective the way many do. He's good; don't get me wrong. But he's giving a very mannered, "Actorey" sort of performance, giving Rust too many Big Tics. I'm always a little put off by acting that insists upon itself.

If I see Rust describe facial scars with that hammy gesture around the jaw one more time, I'll hunt McConaughey down, put antlers on him, and pose him in a sugarcane field.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:09 AM | Comments (454)
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It's behind a paywall, but you can read him calling Morgan "a ghastly little weasel."

A tabloid, the Mirror, quotes more of Clarkson's piece. Quotes from Clarkson:

"I heard that he was going to be dropped about six months ago.

"And have been sitting here for all of that time, loving his stupid Twitter boasts about his huge fame and lavish lifestyle, knowing that he didn't know what I knew.

"This was a show, remember, that was being aired round the world.

"Billions had the ability to watch it but few did.

"In fact, Morgan attracted a global audience smaller than the BBC daytime show Cash in the Attic.

"He's trying to argue his CNN show failed because the Americans didn't take kindly to his misguided attempt to spark a debate on gun control.

"Nonsense. His show failed because the viewers hated him.

"Everyone hates him.

"And that's a big problem when you are trying to play the fame game.

"You can upset some of the people some of the time and survive - thrive even.

"But if you upset all of the people all of the time, you will fail - and he has.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 AM | Comments (204)
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Admitting error is, to me, one of the main qualifications of someone as an expert or an "elite." How the hell can anyone trust an "expert" whose ego is such that he can't say when he's gotten something baldly wrong?

But the self-styled "elites," who got Russia so wrong and criticized Palin for getting it right, aren't retreating. They're reloading.

With more dumb.

This Federalist piece notes that the Obama Administration's reaction to Romney's alleged gaffe -- calling Russia America's number one "global foe" -- seems out-of-touch now, doesn't it? Obama's legions quipped "The eighties called, they want their foreign policy back."

Well, the seventies just called for Obama -- and they want their own foreign policy back.

Even the reliably-liberal Washington Post editorial board says that Obama's foreign policy -- such as it may be -- is based on "fantasy."

Excerpts at that link, full editorial here.

If you remember, Obama suggested in 2008 that he would bring us "smart power," rather than Bush's dumb power. This was the Obama's recasting of "soft power" as "smart," and Bush's "hard power" as, impliedly, not smart.

But the ace arrow in their quiver always seemed to be -- as it continues to seem to be -- that all they have to do is patiently inform Russia (or Iran, or China, or whoever) that it is in their own countries' best interest to act as "civilized" members of the "community of nations."

This is so arrogant and dumb I don't know what to say about it.

Did they really think that not a one of Bush's diplomats thought to say something utterly obvious like "You know, it's actually in your own interests to agree with us?" This is the first or second thing said in any negotiation, over anything at all -- buying a car, buying a house, arguing with a spouse about who changes the diapers... The "it's really in your own interest" is such a common gambit that it indicates the incredibly dull-witted nature of Obama's squad to imagine this was new or novel to anyone else.

The second level of arrogance concerns the foreign nation in question -- Does Obama or Kerry (or did Hillary) really imagine these countries hadn't already gamed out in their own heads what their own best interest was? Did they really think that Putin, for example, had utterly failed to consider the benefits of being a good actor in the "civilized community of nations" would net him, and what being a bad actor would lose him?

I have to imagine that our counter-parties in these "smart power" negotiations are somewhat annoyed to be held by Obama's people as slow children who haven't bothered to think about the most basic things, such that they want and need Obama to remind them of the most basic things.

Did they really think they could just Jedi Mind Trick the whole world?

Just because it works on the weak-minded -- Democrats, the media -- doesn't mean it works on everyone.

Posted by: Ace at 08:17 AM | Comments (428)
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