I encourage Tyler to show no mercy to this sorry subhuman. I wouldn’t.Indeed.
From the comments: “Progs really are going Full Metal Retard these days.”
Very important piece by David @herszenhorn on how, in part, the crisis in #Ukraine is the West's fault. http://t.co/zrFJ0otTmt
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) March 25, 2014SEVASTOPOL, Crimea — With a single diesel-electric submarine and a hodgepodge of other aging vessels, Russia’s rickety Black Sea Fleet would be no match for the United States’ Sixth Fleet, based in Italy, which boasts the latest in seaborne military technology and has been running drills nearby.More.
Still, the legendary Russian fleet, whose headquarters have been here since 1783, is within a day’s sailing of the Mediterranean and remains crucial to the Kremlin’s ability to exert strategic influence in the Middle East and beyond.
Safeguarding this maritime muscle may well have been one reason President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia sent armed forces to seize Crimea. But is it possible that the Sevastopol base is just the most concrete manifestation of Russia’s deep interests in Ukraine that the United States and its NATO allies either ignored or forgot as they tried to bind it more tightly with the West?
For years, Mr. Putin has complained about the West moving unilaterally to reorder the Continental balance of power — promoting Western capitalism and democracy — with little indication anyone was heeding his concerns. Its courting of Ukraine, apparently, was a step too far, prompting Mr. Putin to risk sanctions and the worst conflict since the Cold War to make clear that Washington and its friends do not call all of the shots anymore.
The annexation here, and the Russian troops still massed on the border of eastern Ukraine, seem a clear and sharp message from Mr. Putin that the future of Ukraine and the broader region, especially Moldova and Georgia, which are also being courted by Europe, will not be decided by the West alone.
“For 23 years after 1991, Russia has been treated consciously or subconsciously as defeated in the Cold War,” said Dmitry Kosyrev, a writer and political commentator with the RIA Novosti news agency in Moscow. “Russia has not accepted this mentality. We have something to say. We have not only interest, but experience. We are not a defeated country in the Cold War; we are something separate like India, like China.”
Mr. Kosyrev added, “Not talking to us, not accepting our point of view, that’s exactly what brought Europe and the United States to the crisis in Ukraine.”
The Obama administration and European leaders, of course, insist that it is Russia and Mr. Putin who acted aggressively and unilaterally, refusing to hear the view of Ukrainian citizens who took to the streets of Kiev in November after the president at the time, Viktor F. Yanukovych, broke his promise to sign political and trade accords with the European Union.
The contest for influence in Ukraine, long torn between Russia and the West, stretches back much further than last autumn. It is part of a wider tug-of-war that the West had dominated since the fall of the Soviet Union, drawing into Europe’s fold not just former Eastern bloc nations like Poland and Bulgaria, but the ex-Soviet republics — Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — in the Baltics.
Mr. Putin and many Russians believe that the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev had received assurances that the NATO alliance would not extend beyond a reunited Germany. They consider it a betrayal that NATO now includes the Baltics, reaching Russia’s borders — a point that Mr. Putin stressed in his speech announcing the annexation of Crimea.
“They have lied to us many times, made decisions behind our backs, placed us before an accomplished fact,” Mr. Putin said. “This happened with NATO’s expansion to the East, as well as the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They kept telling us the same thing: ‘Well, this does not concern you.’ That’s easy to say.”
This is the story of MSNBC in a nutshell: It rose to prominence on its criticism of George W. Bush, peaked during Barack Obama's historic 2008 campaign, and, by criticizing Republicans and championing liberal causes, sustained its viewership in the years that followed.Sheesh.
Until now.
MSNBC suffered harder loses in 2013 -- in terms of both viewership and revenue -- than either of its competitors at Fox News and CNN, according to Nielsen data featured in a new Pew Research report. Prime-time viewership declined by a staggering 24 percent (nearly twice the loss sustained by CNN and four-times that sustained by Fox News). Daytime viewership fell by 15 percent, even as it rose at both of the other networks.
On the revenue side, MSNBC was projected to decline by 2 percent, while both CNN and Fox News were projected to experience growth of 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively. MSNBC was expected to bring in $475 million in revenue: less than half what CNN will make and roughly one-quarter of what Fox News will make.
Conventional wisdom has it that cable news doesn't have much of a future: The audience is old and getting older, the television landscape is growing more and more fractured, appointment viewing is becoming a thing of the past, etc. Certainly, every cable news network lost viewers last year. But this version of events often ignores the incredible revenue gains made each year by Fox News (like a rocket) and CNN (far more gradual, but we're still talking billions).
MSNBC isn't seeing that growth, and it's not clear how it will. In a world where liberals wanted to be outraged by George Bush every night, or celebrate the rise of Barack Obama, MSNBC had a theory of the case. But now Obama's presidency has turned into a slog, and MSNBC isn't compelling. Prime time is just hours of what often seems like feigned outrage. And the daytime strategy -- giving shows to kids in their 20s and 30s, in an apparent bid to reach the youths -- is comically bad, and rendered absurd at every commercial break when the catheter ads come on...
Spencer Davis was chatting up tourists on the Venice boardwalk when police officers pulled up in front of his display of plastic alien heads.More.
Had Davis seen a man threatening people with a chain saw, they asked?
"Not today," he quipped with a smile, assuming that the officers were joking.
Then he turned around and saw police officers, their guns drawn, with a man holding a chain saw.
"Just when you think you've seen it all…" Davis said.
For all the gentrification, designer homes and tourist attractions, Venice is still that kind of place — where artists, the homeless, Silicon Beach hipsters, surfers, inline skaters and tourists come together along a circus-like boardwalk.
Over the last few decades, the city has tried to tame the scene on Ocean Front Walk, but with limited success. Now, City Hall is making what some locals consider the most concerted effort yet to bring control to the area.
The city is considering a series of safety measures, including security cameras, more lights and a public address system, as well as closing off about 20 of the 32 streets that dead-end onto Ocean Front Walk. To accomplish that, the plan also calls for the installation of automated retractable posts, as well as gates, planters or other measures at the locations to prevent cars from getting onto the boardwalk....
Critics say that the city is trying to turn the beloved boardwalk — one of California's top tourist draws — into "Fortress Venice."
"If you can't even go to the beach without being watched," said Venice Neighborhood Council President Linda Lucks, "where can you go?"
CHICAGO — With the selection of a multimillionaire businessman to be the Republican candidate for governor in Illinois, union leaders have begun bracing for one of their starkest campaign battles of the year over the fate of public sector labor unions, pensions and pay.What a great guy!
The first-time candidate, Bruce Rauner, has been denounced by union leaders, some of whom say they fear he will try to be the next Mitch Daniels, the former Republican governor of Indiana who ended collective bargaining for state workers by executive order, or a knockoff of Gov. Scott Walker, the Wisconsin Republican who led efforts to cut collective bargaining rights for most public employees in his state.
“He’s clearly a man obsessed with destroying unions,” Roberta Lynch, deputy director of the local council of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said on Wednesday, a day after Mr. Rauner won a closer-than-expected race against three veterans of Illinois politics. “He’s trying to stir up resentment of public employees — teachers, police officers, firefighters.”
Behold one of the most chronically misinformed members of the US Senate surprising utterly no one with the extent of her insight into the Hobby Lobby case. Barbara Boxer appeared on MSNBC this morning to declare her support for the HHS contraception mandate, claiming at one point that it protects the religious freedom of employees. As Twitchy captured in this segment, Boxer then goes on to challenge Hobby Lobby’s owners for hypocrisy for not opposing insurance coverage of Viagra for men … which even flummoxes Boxer’s MSNBC interviewer...A blithering blight of mendacity.
First and foremost, Viagra (and other erectile-dysfunction drugs and treatments) aren’t widely covered by insurance. That’s one reason why a large online market for inexpensive purchases of the drugs exist. Second, as anyone who gives a moment’s thought about the subject would realize, such drugs would be appropriate to help empower natural procreation, which isn’t against anyone’s religion, last I checked. Lastly, and this is a more minor point, Boxer ignorantly invokes the Catholicism of the plaintiffs in this court hearing, when none of them are actually Catholic.
The religious objection is to contraception and sterilization, and in the Hobby Lobby case, it’s narrowed to a specific kind of contraception — abortifacients. Boxer blithely dismisses the distinction and blathers about the employer taking away the woman’s right to choose her form of contraception — which is nonsense....
Protip: If you have to bring Viagra into a discussion about birth control, you don't really have any idea of what you're talking about.
— RB (@RBPundit) March 25, 2014Footage that’s simultaneously old and new. The jump happened six months ago but the clip didn’t hit YouTube until yesterday, when the responsible parties finally surrendered to the NYPD to face charges of burglary, reckless endangerment, and jumping from a structure. (“Burglary” in New York is broader than theft committed while inside a building unlawfully.) The cops have been looking for them since September. Partly that’s because the idea of strange men parachuting onto the streets of lower Manhattan with impunity is … problematic, and partly that’s because it’s a staggering security lapse for the city to have missed a bunch of guys sneaking undetected into the tower that replaced the World Trade Center. (According to one defendant, they simply stepped through a hole in the fence around the perimeter that was covered with a tarp.)
So, with nothing left to lose and maybe a little to gain, the BASErs finally put the clip online...
Washington Examiner...More.
Here’s an astonishing poll: David Freddoso at Conservative Intelligence Briefing links to a report by the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake that West Virginia 3rd district incumbent Rep. Nick Rahall trails Republican challenger state Sen. Evan Jenkins by a 54-percent to 40-percent margin. The poll was conducted by the Tarrance Group, a Republican firm which, like several Democratic and other Republican firms, has had a good record for reliability over the years.
This is astonishing for several reasons. Rahall, first elected in 1976, is now the seventh most senior member of the House, with three of the more senior members retiring (John Dingell, Henry Waxman, George Miller) and another with a serious primary challenge (Charlie Rangel). Moreover, his district in southern West Virginia has historically been very Democratic; in its previous boundaries it voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in 1984. Rahall won in 1976 by 46 percent to 37 percent over Ken Hechler, his predecessor in the seat, who after losing a Democratic primary for governor ran as a write-in candidate; the Republican nominee received only 18 percent of the vote. From 1978 to 2008, Rahall was re-elected with at least 64 percent of the vote, except in 1990 when he beat Republican Marianne Brewster by only 52 percent to 48 percent.
But this is coal country, and Rahall’s margins have gone down after President Obama was elected president. In 2010, Rahall won by a reduced margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, and in 2012, his margin was only 54 percent to 46 percent. Obama’s unpopularity surely cost him: John McCain carried the district within its then-boundaries by a 56-percent to 42-percent margin in 2008, and Mitt Romney carried the current district 65 percent to 33 percent in 2012. Rahall is ranking Democrat on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and was Chairman of the Natural Resources Committee when Democrats had a majority in the House; these are committee positions of importance to a mountainous coal district, but apparently they are not enough to help him now...
OK, Glass, it's time to change journalism.Something tells me we still need good old-fashioned journalism, like reporters digging for the truth and reporting it. But hey, it's the 21st century so everything has to be cutting edge.
That will be the collective mindset of students taking "Glass Journalism," a new course slated for the fall semester at the University of Southern California, where students will be tasked with thinking up new ways for journalists to tell stories using augmented reality and Google Glass.
It's a first-of-its-kind class for USC, and web-journalism professor Robert Hernandez believes the class offers a rare opportunity for journalism to get ahead of a budding technology trend. Hernandez said journalists have been followers — not trailblazers — when using other technology like mobile and social media, but that the industry has a chance for a head start with Glass.
"As someone who hijacks technology for journalism, I want to be proactive about shaping what journalism will look like on this," said Hernandez, who worked most recently as director of development for The Seattle Times before joining USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in 2009. “This platform is so new, no one has defined what journalism looks like on there. It’s such an opportunity for the journalism industry to jump on there.”
“Now we are in the almost unimaginable position of looking back at Jimmy Carter as an example of comparatively sure, savvy leadership. The Russians invaded Afghanistan and Carter armed the rebels. The Russians invaded Crimea and Barack Obama went on Ellen to hear the hostess gush about how much America loves Obamacare.”True, but Carter's about face was too little too late.
Several weeks ago, reputable news organizations like Politico and CNN reported the results of a survey of Americans in which support for the Afghanistan war, now in its thirteenth year, was lower than public support had ever been for the Vietnam conflict. Reportedly, this polling data is influencing White House advisors to President Obama, who favor a rapid end to the war, including perhaps even a "zero option" for next year (after the current NATO mission there will have ended).Yes, but either way, the results will be the same: a precipitous U.S. withdraw and a power vacuum filled by America's international rivals, especially Russia. There's already jockeying for position in Kabul. At the New York Times, "Breaking With the West, Afghan Leader Supports Russia’s Annexation of Crimea." And Moscow seeks to maximize its economic gains as well. At the Washington Post, "As U.S. war ends, Russia returns to Afghanistan with series of investment projects."
On its surface, the views of political advisors to the president seem easy to understand. After all, Vietnam brought down President Johnson. In such a context, getting the United States out of Afghanistan as completely and quickly as possible would seem imperative for the Obama administration.
Balderdash. In fact, this reading of the recent polls on Afghanistan is simply wrong, and the way in which the American media tended to report on it was fundamentally misleading.
Anyone who thinks the Afghanistan mission is less popular than Vietnam does not remember or understand the latter conflict. Unlike the case with the war in Southeast Asia, the nation's intensity of sentiment about Afghanistan, while admittedly not positive, is very mild.
It is true that less than 20 percent of all Americans view the Afghanistan war positively. In light of its length, its many frustrations, and President Karzai's attitude towards the United States, this is not entirely surprising.
But the attitudes about Afghanistan are not deeply felt across the public or the electorate. To be sure, among troops and diplomats and others who have served, and their families, the sacrifice has often been great and the sentiments about the war can be powerful—for good and for bad. But such a group, even very broadly defined, constitutes about 1 percent of the country.
The fine testimony before Congress last week of war commander General Joseph Dunford was notable largely for the lack of coverage it produced by the media, and the lack of interest by most Americans. There were no huge protests, no big newspaper advertisements calling for an end to the war, and relatively little partisan skirmishing on the subject even in these politically tumultuous times.
Any student of polling should know that polls about given subjects in public policy are only meaningful if they capture intensity. Vietnam tore this country apart. Afghanistan makes it yawn...
