• More Sitcom Than CENTCOM
  
• Back From Vacation, Obama Tackling Multiple Crises at NYC Fundraisers
  
• Dem Controlled State Legislature Quietly Passes 20 Week Abortion Ban
  
• Koch's Donate Money To Hospital, Liberal Protest
  
• How Idaho's Governor Ended Up In A Soft Core Porn Film
  
• Iran's Weapons Shipment Safely In Israeli Hands
  
• NYT: Why Poland Cares About The Ukraine
  
• Me: Why Poland Cares About The Ukraine
  
• Has Obama Changed His Mind About Syria?
  
• A Late Surge For Republicans In FL-13?
  
• Obama To Cut Key Reconnaissance Fleet By 25 Percent
  
• Sharyl Attkisson Resigns From CBS
  
• The New Glenn Beck
  
• The Murders Before The Marathon
  
• NHL Game Postponed After Player Collapses On Bench
  

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:22 AM | Comments (299)
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Time-lapse photography so good you'll have to say "FAKE!!!"

Damn, this is pretty impressive. Storms, the Milky Way, buttes, and cornfields. What's not to like?

It's like the trailer for the next True Detective. The killer will violate people with corn.

It was shot by a guy called Randy Halverston, who calls it "Dakotalapse."

Very sweet pictures. You could take any eight of them and insert them into Cosmos tomorrow and people would say "Wow, professional shots." If I'm reading him right he caught all of this in just six days.

Thanks to @rdbrewer4. You might want to check out the Jovian photography in the sidebar, too.

And Open Thread.

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Posted by: Ace at 03:43 PM | Comments (696)
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Ideological bias is last year's news.

Now it's more about simple partisan bias.

This sounds like CAP ejecting the left's anti-war ideological stance to help out a partisan figure they approve of.

Of course, this writer was read the riot act after White House officials called to complain about the piece.

Completely unrelated I'm sure, but Sharyl Attkisson's stories dropped by two thirds in terms of making it on to the CBS Evening News since shortly after Obama took office.

She was the 18th most aired reporter among all network reporters from 2008-2009... and then fell to 78th place.

Apparently her digging into political wrongdoing was appreciated up until Obama was sworn into office, and not so much thereafter.

Posted by: Ace at 03:04 PM | Comments (135)
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Turley avoids calling him a dictator and in fact says he's not.

But...

The United States is at a constitutional tipping point: The rise of an uber presidency unchecked by the other two branches.

This massive shift of authority threatens the stability and functionality of our tripartite system of checks and balances....

James Madison fashioned a government of three bodies locked in a synchronous orbit by their countervailing powers. The system of separation of powers was not created to protect the authority of each branch for its own sake. Rather, it is the primary protection of individual rights because it prevents the concentration of power in any one branch. In this sense, Obama is not simply posing a danger to the constitutional system; he has become the very danger that separation of powers was designed to avoid.

The suspension of a portion of the ACA is only the latest such action related to the healthcare law...

Not even the power of the purse, which belongs exclusively to Congress, is sufficient to deter the White House. The Obama administration took $454 million from a fund established to help prevent illness and put the money instead toward paying for the federal health insurance exchange. Even leading Democratic members denounced this as "a violation of both the letter and spirit of this landmark law."

Meanwhile, Peggy Noonan questions whether Obamcare is even a "law" anymore.

@charlescwcooke summed this up a while back on the podcast: It's not a law. It might have been passed in a law-like form, but it has been "interpreted" by Obama to not be a law at all.

It is simply an Enabling Act, a block grant of legislative authority to the executive on anything in the category of "health care."

This, of course, is illegal, and unconstitutional. Even if Congress wished to give their powers to the Executive, it would be illegal for them to do so, and the Supreme Court would call it illegal.

And yet here the President simply asserts that Congress has handed him his powers, and only a brave few say anything about it at all.

Posted by: Ace at 01:53 PM | Comments (348)
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You can check out their video Press Release at vox.com.

I only have a few thoughts here.

First, Klein/Yglesias are attempting to create a product that highlights their particular talents (such as they may be...). Nothing unusual in that.

However, there is a general history of failure when people attempt to create a "New Form of Entertainment!!!" that highlights their hybrid skills (such as they may be...)

Fact of the matter is, actors, dancers, and singers are in high demand in entertainment. Someone who can do it all -- the oft-claimed, seldom-seen "triple threat" of actor/dancer/singer -- is probably going to wind up being an actor, or a dancer, or a singer.

Klein and Yglesias seem to be like a "Triple Threat" of yore staging a two-man show (well, three, there's some woman involved too) which plays to their skill set of acting while singing while also dancing.

Those two-man Showcases of Talent! are generally known for not being known.

Second, Klein/Ygelias' pitch -- that they're going to take advantage of the format of the internet to make things more explanatory and richer in background information -- is, as it stands anyway, the sudden discovery of the Hyperlink.

Since the beginning of the Internet, people have been claiming the Hyperlink -- why, something's linked which provides background information, and you can click on it, or not, as you choose! -- was going to be the One Big Thing that would give the Internet the advantage over the print article.

I think one guy wrote a hyperlinked novel to demonstrate how the wonders of technology could transform the experience of reading a novel.

I don't know the name of it. I doubt more than 100 people do. Even the guy who wrote it would have to check Wikipedia.

The hyperlink has not in fact changed everything. Most people ignore the hyperlinks now embedded in news articles because they seem to be put in there by a not-terribly-smart computer, and usually just disclose a Bing search. (Or an ad.)

But let's suppose that Klein and Yglesias actually exploit the usefulness of the hyperlink, which, while currently available, is not being exploited much at all:

How much does that really add? It adds something; don't get me wrong. Convenience is in fact Added Value. If they offer a three paragraph digest on the Ukraine protests in every Ukraine article, well, that's not unhelpful. Someone coming in late to the story can click on that and get caught up to speed with a short, superficial blurb. (And short superficial blurbs do have their value.)

But I'm a bit underwhelmed that ultimately their Business Model -- their brand differentiation; their shot at immortality -- is to finally fully exploit the Hyperlink.

Well, that's not quite fair. They talk about all these new and innovative ways they're going to empower the reader to use technology so as to be More Informed Than Ever Before, but they offer no details about this. I think they flash a graph up for a moment (in which the the things being charted are unidentified -- so the yellow bars in the graph might just be representing the length of various yellow bars).

Given the lack of detail as to how they're going to dual-handedly transform the news-consumption experience and empower the reader like never before: I think they're just going to be doing hyperlinks.

And some chatty videos. People do enjoy discussions, so offering people discussing news topics adds a bit of value to the print version. Hey, we ourselves do a podcast.

And some chatty "faux-conversational" explainer pieces. In fact, Vox explains itself via a video, and then a "faux-conversational" explainer piece.

But mostly, I think, it's going to be the Hyperlink, and brief stubs explaining terms of art and key ideas.

I don't exactly wish them ill because I'm not exactly allied with their competitors (the regular media), and, to be honest, anyone making money from the internet sort of helps anyone else working on the internet.

But videos talking about the news, a blogger's chatty, casual style, and hyperlinks are not exactly cutting edge technologies in 2014.

I suppose design and execution might make all of this work better than one might be inclined to guess. Integration is itself a thing; the iPhone only did what five or six gadgets already did. The iPhone, however, successfully integrated them into one device.

So... I guess this could turn out to be the iPhone of blogs.

But I think one's guesses about the fate of the enterprise depend, to a large degree, upon one's estimation of the combined, triple-threat talents of Messrs. Klein and Yglesias.

Meh.

They're no True Detectives, I'll say that much.

Bo Knows Retractions: I included a mention of Bo Jackson as a double-threat who only turned out to be a single threat. This has generated argument in the comments, with some saying he played baseball at a "high level" until his serious 1991 injury.

I forget, to be honest. I will assume Commenters Are Always Right and credit Jackson with being a true double-threat until his injury.

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (591)
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Nothing more than this:

weft-cut loop posted this excerpt from Politico:

Attkisson, who has been with CBS News for two decades, had grown
frustrated with what she saw as the network's liberal bias, an outsized influence by the network's corporate partners and a lack of dedication to investigative reporting, several sources said. She increasingly felt like her work was no longer supported and that it was a struggle to get her reporting on air.

The Politico article is actually very heavy on suggesting that political bias is the cause for the resignation (or at least that Attkisson would call it the reason).

Let the speculations commence.

Posted by: Ace at 10:56 AM | Comments (379)
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The scolds and There Are Other Things To Discuss Brigades are out,* so here's their thread.

Question:

Why do you think it is that seeing someone take an interest in something you're not personally interested in causes you so much discomfort? Why is someone else's interest taken as a hostile attack on the self?

Aren't you defining the borders of your selfness a bit over-large, such that no one can take step you don't take without in some way giving offense to you, kicking at your worldview and ego?

Is anyone allowed to take any interest apart from the three or four you share?

Is mere difference a signal of hostility that must be challenged and confronted?

These are important questions.

My problem here is the hostility, as if I've given personal offense by acknowledging cultural phenomena not appreciated by some. True Detective was a big thread on Hot Air; the Dunham thing I got from the top center of Drudge.

These things are going on. This hostility over mere discussion of interests some don't share is a drag, and I'm tired of it.

Both posts qualify as political -- the True Detective one especially. Both are certainly cultural-political.

Some of you are turning cultural rejectivism into a type of cult and it's annoying. You can belong to any cult you like, but those of us not in the cult don't want to hear about it every day.

* Burn the Witch says "Brigades? You're talking about four people."

True.

But hostility is, by definition, hostile. One notices it.

On Rejectivism:

>>> ace, I really don't know what to make of much of the America I find myself in. Much is alien, nowadays. Pop "culture" is mostly irrelevant to me, and junk. Vulgar, and shallow. This, from a guy who rode choppers on the street as a young man. I just sort of stand back in awe about how bad much of America has become. -- backhoe

I get that, and I share, to a fair extent, the cultural rejectivism embraced by many.

But it's annoying to have people constantly harp that you must join them at their exact level of cultural rejectivism. If they've completely tuned out, everyone else must completely tune out.

It's not even expressed as an argument, which would be less annoying, because an argument is always interesting.

It's just expressed as a hostile resentment. And then what do I say in return?

There is an interesting argument as to whether someone should (or even could) completely unplug from the current american culture.

I'd be interested in having it.

But this drive by resentment/hostility shit -- that's not an argument, that's just negative emotionalism.

I think 90% of the right tends to reject most of our current culture. Obviously, we will each make exceptions here and there for things we find meritorious.

Can we please stop treating such minor, trivial cultural preferences as important and status-conferring and Tribal Loyalty Signaling?

I liked True Detective because I like smart detective shows. Period. That's not an attack on someone who has tuned out of current culture. I just happened to turn on the TV, and it was on.

And that's it.

If you're reading more into than that, I would suggest you should probably think about not reading so much political/tribal/cultural import into everything.

I knocked some of the left for being determined to read a narrative of Tribal Flattery into True Detective.

The reactionary version of this -- the simple act of discussing True Detective is an act of betrayal against the right-leaning tribe -- is no less ridiculous.

Posted by: Ace at 10:08 AM | Comments (514)
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I saw a bit of this, just because it was so heavily promoted and I figured I should watch it, just as part of my job.

Truth Revolt headlines an article that one sketch featured Dunham "poking fun at the biblical narrative." That's true in a minor way -- the Eden story was handled irreverently, surely -- but the main target of the sketch was not the Eden story, but rather Dunham's screen persona as a narcissistic neurotic. She was playing her "Hannah" role from Girls in the sketch, and reduced everything in the Garden of Eden to her own list of shallow preoccupations. When "Adam" says that she was made from his rib, she objects "That's so sexist!"

When "God" speaks to her at the end, she only wants to ask about whether her publishing deal is still on. Hannah is forever worrying about whether her book will be published.

And of course it poked fun at her reputation for appearing nude at the drop of a hat. I think one "critic" said of the movie, "A lot of nudity... even for Dunham."

(One thing I think Dunham's critics either miss or do not confess often enough is that while Hannah is a neurotic narcissist, Dunham is aware of that fact, and makes Hannah the butt of jokes. That is, there seems to be an unexpressed belief that Dunham endorses all of Hannah's selfish, shallow dopiness, when in fact the show's position is that she is deeply flawed and quite mockable. She's still the hero of the show, don't get me wrong; but George Costanza was often the hero of Seinfeld, without Jerry Seinfeld or Jason Alexander ever being charged with believing that Costanza was the sort of character that people should aspire to be.

That doesn't mean I'm a fan-- I don't watch this show (except inadvertently, or by osmosis, because it gets chattered about a bunch). But it's just wrong to assert that Dunham is championing Hannah as a heroic ideal. Quite the opposite -- Hannah is intended as a deeply flawed comedic loser-hero. I'd say a "female Charlie Brown," but good ol' Chuck was highly ethical and thoughtful, which Hannah, in the main, is not.)

I really don't think that the Eden story was the main target of humor, here. It was the incongruity of seeing pampered, narcissistic, neurotic Hannah in the Garden of Eden, and to some extent about Dunham herself. Irreverent about God and the Bible, sure, but much more about Hollywood's interpretation of Bible stories than about actual Bible stories.

I mean, it's not a funny sketch, certainly. It just references Dunham's most famous role and puts that character in a different context. Meh. But I don't think the target here was the Bible. And if someone is goofing on herself, I give them latitude to goof on other things along the way.

Of course, later in the show, they featured a sketch in which a "male rights activist" was shown to be a loser h8r without troubling themselves to add any actual comedy to the piece. At the end, his out-of-his-league girlfriend tells him to hit the road. Yay, comeuppance for mustache-twirling stereotypes and cult hate objects!

There are so many problems with this that I really don’t want to take the time to parse them all. Suffice it to say that the creepy misogynist who opposes abortion just because he wants to keep women down is the left-wing P.C. equivalent of the equally bogus right-wing P.C. cliché that feminists are shrill, physically unattractive, and driven into their ideology by resentment at their failure to get men. Of course, in the case of every P.C. stereotype (whether it’s the P.C. of the Left or the Right) there are some individuals who conform to that stereotype. There are some pro-life activists who are misogynists who resent women’s equality; there are some pro-choice feminists who are shrill and motivated by resentment against men. But as broad-brush generalizations, both of these are, in my experience spanning almost five decades now, false.

Most readers will at this point expect me to denounce the SNL sketch because it expresses a political opinion different from mine. Nope: That’s totally fine with me. The day I can’t laugh at a joke by Rush Limbaugh or Jon Stewart or P. J. O’Rourke just because I don’t happen to agree with the political point of the particular joke is the day I will have to give up and register myself as “Humorless Person, Class A.” No, what really annoys me about that sketch is that I don’t remember there being any jokes in it. I am, among other things, a feminist and a pro-lifer, and I’m okay with people telling jokes about feminists and pro-lifers. But when you have an attack on any group, and don’t include any actual, you know, jokes, then what you’re left with is not a comedy sketch but merely an act of verbal aggression and ritual humiliation of the unpopular Other (in this case, the men’s-rights anti-abortion guy). As such, it of course deserves my protection from censorship, because I’m a First Amendment absolutist; what it does not deserve is my respect.

I understand that creative people like injecting "messages" important to them into their work, but such a piece has to also stand on its non-"message" merits to be a success. In this piece, there was nothing more than The Message. Girls good, h8rs bad.*

I only watched three or four sketches, to be honest. It just wasn't funny. That's not really Dunham's fault -- the show is never funny, and has not even been intermittently funny for about five or six years now. The only thing I thought was mildly funny (though really in an end-of-the-show weakest-sketches-that-made-the-cut sort of way) was this easy sketch about Bad Rap from Goofy White People. Easy and dumb, and I feel like I've seen this before, but still, if I'm being honest, I kind of smiled.

The show's ratings were down.

I'm really not sure why anyone watches it anymore.

Mildly Funny: This clip isn't from this show, but a previous one hosted by Tina Fey. It goofs on Girls.
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Posted by: Ace at 09:17 AM | Comments (354)
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Well, it's all over. Spoiler alert: The Yellow King Theory was 100% right.

Mild Spoiler Stuff below. I didn't think this was major spoiler stuff because I don't get into details about the plot, and the plot was already largely revealed (or was it???).

But artisanelle ette notes that there is still some Spoilerage here, so I'm putting this all below the fold. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:46 AM | Comments (476)
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Ukraine is quickly becoming a proxy war. Not between the West and Russia but between Ted Cruz and Rand Paul on foreign policy.

Yesterday on ABC's This Week Ted Cruz followed up on a position he brought out at CPAC trying to walk a line between the John McCain school of Bomb all the Places and what many believe to be Rand Paul's libertarian Leave Them All Alone And We Can Be Friends approach to the world.

"I think U.S. leadership is critical in the world. And I agree with him that we should be very reluctant to deploy military force aboard," Cruz explained. "But I think there is a vital role, just as Ronald Reagan did."

Last month, Paul suggested that some Republicans were "stuck in the Cold War era" because they wanted to "tweak Russia all the time."

During the interview, Cruz pointed out that Reagan "changed the course of history" with his aggressive stance towards Russia, suggesting that perhaps a perspective like Paul's might have led to different results.

Today Paul hits back in a piece at Breitbart's Big Peace.

I donÂ’t claim to be the next Ronald Reagan nor do I attempt to disparage fellow Republicans as not being sufficiently Reaganesque. But I will remind anyone who thinks we will win elections by trashing previous Republican nominees or holding oneself out as some paragon in the mold of Reagan, that splintering the party is not the route to victory.

I met Ronald Reagan as a teenager when my father was a Reagan delegate in 1976. I greatly admire ReaganÂ’s projection of "Peace through Strength." I believe, as he did, that our National Defense should be second to none, that defense of the country is the primary Constitutional role of the Federal Government.

There is no greater priority for Congress than defense of the nation.

I also greatly admire that Reagan was not rash or reckless with regard to war. Reagan advised potential foreign adversaries not to mistake our reluctance for war for a lack of resolve.

What America needs today is a Commander-in-Chief who will defend the country and project strength, but who is also not eager for war.

Paul also points out that hawks considered Reagan's willingness to negotiate with the Soviets as proof he was soft on Communism. One prominent conservative of the time even went so far as to call Reagan "a useful idiot" for the Soviets (sorry kids, you didn't build the "true con" vs the rest of the world fight. It's old. Very old.)

I can't tell you how much I hate the idea of the GOP focusing on foreign policy, especially Russia (unless things change a lot between now and then) but it looks like we're going to have at least a temporary fight over it.

I want to like Rand Paul but he just makes me nervous.

It's hard to shake the feeling that if you just scratch the surface enough his dad's craziness will be there.

On the other hand, I like his shrink the government instincts and his attempt to round off some of the harsher edges of the various GOP voting blocs to try and get them to fit together better. I don't know if you can square social conservatism with the more secular leaning fiscal-con wing but at least Paul is trying. Casting drug legalization and prison reform as moral issues of failure and forgiveness might be a bridge between social-cons and his more libertarian base. They don't have to love each other, just see one another as people who aren't directly opposed to the other's goals or hostile on a personal level.

Paul is really good at this stuff and does it in way that isn't condescending or more true-con than you.

Look at his invocation of his dad in that piece. People like me who are freaked out that Rand may just bit a chip off the old crazy bloc get a subtle reminder that Ron Paul maybe a kook but he was an early adopter of the thing we profess to hold dear. Now he skirts over the fact that Reagan would have been appalled by a lot of the things we know Ron Paul was writing about at the time but that's details most people who aren't political junkies will know about. They'll just get the message that the Paul family are old time Reaganites, isn't that nice!

The same goes for Paul's outreach to black voters. He knows he's not going to win a significant number of black voters (but an insignificant number in the right place could help a lot). It's about being "a different kind of Republican". He's not saying Republicans are racists he's just showing that he's a different kind of Republican. And who will be impressed by the nice young man who isn't like all those other crazy Republicans? White swing voters.

There's a lot I like about Paul (and Cruz) but I just can't shake the feeling we're one slip away from the mask slipping and finding out it's really Ron in there. That may not be fair and it may not be true but it's something I think a lot of people who might be incline to support him feel. If his name was Rand Smith it would be a lot easier to get on board with.

Of course there's also the whole, first term Senator with no executive experience hasn't worked out too well recently thing. That obviously cuts against both Paul and Cruz.

Either way, you don't need a time machine to get to 2016. It's here and the fight is on.

Added: Via @allahpundit, Rand Paul's been busy. He also has a piece in Time urging the US to be tough on Putin over Ukraine.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:26 AM | Comments (446)
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