Not even Michelle Obama could save the Oscars. Well, duh. Why would anyone other than a leftist Obamaton think so?

Mary McNamara gives her review off the Oscars in today’s Los Angeles Times:

Well, that didn’t work.

Despite the valiant efforts of Adele, Barbra Streisand and a surprisingly witty Daniel Day-Lewis, not to mention a last-minute surprise appearance by First Lady Michelle Obama as co-presenter of the best picture award, touted as the first Oscar telecast with a theme — a tribute to musical Hollywood — was long, self-indulgent and dull even by the show’s time-honored dull-defining standards.

And we had such hopes. The choice of Seth MacFarlane as host of the 85th Academy Awards offered the tantalizing possibility of a new sort of telecast — sharp, peppy, with more than a little bite. The edgy, high-energy creator and costar of a trio of television shows including “The Family Guy,” as well as this year’s feature film “Ted,” has made his career satirizing, often profanely, the contradictions and self-indulgence of American popular culture. The entertainment community prepared to be roasted, the Standards and Practices folks went on high alert.

Then the show began.

Or tried to begin. After a few jokes that carefully pushed a few buttons — the story of “Argo” was so top secret that “the director is unknown to the academy,” the story of “Django”was “of a man fighting to get back his woman, who’s been subjected to unspeakable violence — or as Chris Brown andRihanna call it, a date movie” — MacFarlane spent more than 16 minutes discussing how badly he was going to fare as a host. Pretty badly, according to William Shatner, who appeared in a pre-taped bit during the opening as “Star Trek’s” Captain Kirk, returning from the future to keep MacFarlane from destroying the Oscars.

Here’s the thing about making a joke about bombing at the Oscars: For the joke to work, you really need to avoid doing that. As expected, MacFarlane was occasionally crude and mildly offensive; unfortunately, he wasn’t very funny. Which is a pretty big problem for a comedian and one not at all mitigated by playing up the possibility of being named the worst host in history.

His opening included three song and dance numbers (one simply a musical list of female performers who have bared their breasts called “We Saw Your Boobs”) and an adaptation of the film “Flight” by sock puppets. It was ambitious, but unforgivably self-conscious and, like the rest of the show, it couldn’t finally decide what note it was trying to strike.

Though if Amy Poehler and Tina Fey are not, as MacFarlane promised, available to host next year, may we suggest the sock puppets? Or William Shatner. Or Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway.

Oh, wait a minute, those two hosted already, with mixed results; maybe if they did it together this time.

Never as entertaining as the Tonys, and recently in danger of being eclipsed by the Grammys or even the Golden Globes, the Oscars have yet to hit upon a tone that is both interesting to modern audiences and can carry the show from year to year. Glamour just doesn’t cut it anymore; as Adele said of her dress, it’s pretty, but it’s so heavy that hitting the high notes can be a chore.

The rest here.

Reminds me of Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes. I know nussing! Via USA Today:

It’s remarkable to consider how much drone strikes are discussed in public these days.

At one time, the White House spokesman was told not not admit the program existed.

Robert Gibbs, who came to the White House with President Obama in 2009, told MSNBC this weekend that “when I went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the first things they told me was, you’re not even to acknowledge the drone program … You’re not even to discuss that it exists.”

Gibbs called it a “crazy” proposition: ”You’re being asked a question based on reporting of a program that exists. So you’re the official government spokesperson acting as if the entire program … pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

The way reporters identify immigration skeptics is always fun to complain about — “Anti-immigrant activists disagreed, saying . . .” — but descriptions of people on the other side is also interesting. Specifically, the MSM often fails to disclose relevant affiliations of immigration expansionists.

For instance, D. A. King is an immigration-control dynamo in Georgia, where he heads the Dustin Inman Society. The Atlanta Journal Constitution did a February 9 story featuring King’s efforts to get an Atlanta-area county to adopt a federal program to prevent illegal employment. (It’s called IMAGE certification, sort of E-Verify-Plus.)

Anyway, King is quoted, and described as “a longtime activist for enforcement of U.S. immigration and employment laws” and “president of the Cobb-based Dustin Inman Society.” Fair enough.

But then the story quotes someone opposing use of the program, calling it “a monumentally stupid idea.” He’s Charles Kuck (pronounced “cook”), and is described merely as an “Atlanta immigration attorney”. But in addition to that, he’s vice chairman of GALEO, an anti-enforcement lobbying group — seems like that would be relevant to a story on immigration enforcement. And this wasn’t a one-time lapse; the paper seems to routinely mask Kuck’s advocacy role, as I wrote a couple of years ago.

Another example of the disclosure deficit among immigration expansionists is Linda Chavez. She routinely writes on immigration, most recently earlier this month, when she retailed smears about the Center for Immigration Studies and other immigration skeptics, ably disputed by John O’Sullivan among others. But in promoting amnesty and unlimited immigration, it would seem relevant to note in her columns that she is on the board of directors of ABM, a building-cleaning and -maintenance firm (originally known as American Building Maintenance) that profits from cheap immigrant labor, especially that of illegal aliens. A few years ago, for instance, her firm was forced to fire 1,200 illegal-immigrant janitors when their status was uncovered by ICE.

What’s more, she used to be on the board of Pilgrim’s Pride, a chicken-processor since bought out by a Brazilian firm. That firm also made extensive use of illegal labor, and was forced to pay millions to avoid prosecution for a conspiracy to employ illegals, a scheme exposed only as a result of the immigration raids that took place late in the Bush administration after the failure of the previous amnesty push.

This financial interest in an expansionist immigration policy is nowhere mentioned in her columns on immigration, a clear example of journalistic malpractice.

Imagine the opposite situation. Say that I were on the board of Corrections Corporation of America, CCA, which runs a number of immigration detention centers. If I wrote a column calling for increased immigration enforcement without mentioning that affiliation, editors and activists would be all over me, and with good reason. But what’s sauce for the restrictionist goose is apparently not sauce for the expansionist gander.

. . . with a logo-tribute to illustrator Edward Gorey:

Yeah — almost the same.

Well, not intentionally but that’s the unstated common denominator in this piece of theirs titled, “At Least 5 People Were Accidentally Shot In A Single Day This Week.”

Here are the five:

1. A 4-year-old girl was shot in the leg by a family member who was putting his gun away.

Idiot family member who doesn’t know basic gun safety.

2. A 3-year-old boy found a handgun under the mattress in his parents’ bendroom and shot a family friend in the head.

Idiot parents who shouldn’t have a gun where a child can get at it.

3. A member of the Air Force pulled the trigger on his gun, reportedly thinking it was unloaded, and sent a bullet that hit a 14-month-old baby in the hand in a nearby apartment.

An idiot who pulled the trigger on his handgun not knowing it was loaded.

4. A woman reportedly spun her handgun around and pointed it at her head. She died of a gunshot wound to the head.

An idiot who, according to the article, liked to “play” with her gun.

5. A 3-year-old was fatally shot in what police said appeared to be a tragic accident.

There aren’t any details yet, but all indications point to idiotic behavior where a child or adult was messing with a loaded gun in the home.

Why doesn’t President Obama just tell Joe Biden, who has been tapped to lead the effort to pass new gun legislation, to propose new laws against idiots?

Oh, that’s right. The Vice President himself falls into this club, via Eliana over in the Corner:

On Guns, Biden Likely Advised Wife to Break Law

Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday relayed the self-defense tips he gave his wife, Jill Biden. As it turns out, his advice could land her behind bars. In response to a questioner during a Facebook town hall, Biden said, “I said, ‘Jill, if there’s ever a problem, just walk out on the balcony here, walk out and put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house.’” 

Delaware law, however, prohibits residents from firing guns on their own property if they are not doing so in a life-threatening situation, according to U.S. News and World Report.  

The rest here.

Idiots everywhere.

New York Post:

Actor Alec Baldwin allegedly called a black Post photographer a racial epithet, a “crackhead” and a “drug dealer” during a confrontation on an East Village street yesterday morning, prompting police to intervene.

Baldwin had first been approached by a Post reporter while walking his dogs outside his East 10th Street pad at around 10:50 a.m. He was asked for comment on a lawsuit against his wife, Hilaria, involving her work as a yoga instructor.

 

The “30 Rock’’ star grabbed the reporter, Tara Palmeri, by her arm and told her, “I want you to choke to death,” Palmeri told police, for whom she played an audiotape of the conversation.

He then called G.N. Miller — a decorated retired detective with the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau and a staff photographer for The Post — a “coon, a drug dealer,’’ Miller’s police statement said.

At one point, Miller showed Baldwin ID to prove he’s a retired NYPD cop, which Baldwin dismissed as “fake.”

Cops were called, and Miller, 56, and Baldwin, 54, both filed harassment claims against each other.

Minutes later, Baldwin ranted on Twitter.

“Thank u 2 NYPD officers who came to my home 2day so that I could file a formal complaint against NY Post “photographer’’ who assaulted me,’’ he tweeted.

In another post, Baldwin referred to Miller, for unknown reasons, as “Ralston,” writing, “Moments after I tweet about the Post, Ralston, the ex-crackhead ‘photographer’ shows up at my door w 1 of Murdoch’s nieces in tow.”

He added, “Ralston claims he’s ex NYPD!! That can’t be!!! Ex NYPD don’t become crackhead, ex jailhouse paparazzi!”

The actor eventually removed most of the posts.

 

Hilary Rosen — last heard from when she said Ann Romney never worked a day in her life — has been hired by the Washington Post to write for their “Insiders” column. The Post hails her “independent mind.” Here’s her piece from today on Jack Lew:

We often forget that the government we have for the people by the people is actually “of the people.” And when one of those people is Jack Lew, I know that he has his priorities right — putting poor and middle-class Americans first.

In a pretty unprecedented turn, the next Treasury secretary will not be a captain of industry or a longtime successful Wall Streeter. No, the next Treasury secretary is a man who has worked almost his entire professional career of 35 years, save for a two-year stint, in public service of one kind or another. A graduate of Harvard College, like much of the country’s elite, Lew perfected his values at a different Boston institution, the office of former House speaker Tip O’Neill, where I first met him.

That’s an “independent” voice? More like head of Obama’s cheerleaders.

And maybe Lew is not a “longtime successful Wall Streeter,” but he certainly had short-term success while working at Citi from 2006 to 2008. You know, the time that the bank was doing all that stuff that President Obama has said ruined the economy he inherited?

John Cassidy wrote a much more honest assessment of Lew in the New Yorker back in January. An excerpt:

The knocks on Lew will largely come from the left. . .

[He's serious about those attacks from the Left, by the way]

. . .Do we need yet another Rubinite, with close ties to Wall Street, as Treasury Secretary? During the Bush Administration, Lew worked for Citigroup, where Robert Rubin was then chairman. He served as managing director of Citi Global Wealth Management and chief operating officer of another unit, Alternative Investments, which included a proprietary trading desk that reportedly made money betting against the housing market. Subsequently, the federal government bailed out Citigroup, which is only now recovering from its near collapse in 2008-09.

Lew’s time at Citi is sure to come up in his confirmation hearings, where he’ll also face more questions about his views on financial regulation. As an informative piece about him at the Huffington Post points out, some of his answers during his 2010 confirmation hearing, when he was up for head of O.M.B., weren’t exactly revealing. Asked whether deregulation had been responsible for the financial crisis, he replied: “I don’t believe that deregulation was the proximate cause…. I would defer to others who are more expert about the industry to try and parse it better than that.”

Some critics will view Lew’s appointment as another sop to the banks on Obama’s part. It’s certainly not very imaginative, but Lew deserves a chance to prove himself. An alternative reading is that given his history with Citi, and the need to assure the public he isn’t a Wall Street patsy, he will be driven to adopt a tougher approach to financial regulation than his predecessor, Timothy Geithner.

Odd. “Indpendent” Rosen sees Lew much differently. 

Rosen continues her piece with a defense of Lew’s Cayman Island connections:

The Republicans’ faux outrage that Lew invested some of his money — and he doesn’t seem to have very much of it — in a Cayman Islands fund is amusing. It is supposed to be a huge “gotcha” because President Obama accused Mitt Romney of sheltering much of his fortune overseas.  Unfortunately, this argument backfires on Ed Rogers and the GOP, because Lew has actually advocated policies against his own interest, unlike the GOP.  

Oh, please. The point isn’t Lew’s investment in one Cayman fund, it’s what he did while he was at Citigroup. CNBC reports:

How involved was Lew with Citi’s Cayman Islands ventures? Hard to pinpoint.

A 2007 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission lists 90 Citigroup subsidiaries based in the Cayman Islands. The next year’s filing lists 114 Cayman Islands subsidiaries.

It is not clear from the filing how many of these Cayman Islands subsidiaries were part of the Alternative Investments unit, a financial advisory unit catering to high-net-worth individual investors and institutional investors with financial products that included venture capital funds, hedge funds and private equity funds.

A former employee of the unit, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that it is likely a “substantial amount” of these subsidiaries were run by the unit.

Lew worked at Citigroup from 2006 to 2008. In January 2008, he became the chief operating officer of the Citi Alternative Investments unit. Before joining that group, he was chief operating officer of Citi Global Wealth Management. Lew was also a member of the Citi Management Committee — a board of senior managers from many businesses within the bank.

Rosen ends her piece with, “Jack Lew is pretty much the most upstanding guy in government.”

We shall see.

In summary, a Latino Senator might have had relations with a child prostitute while a different Latino Senator drank some water on camera, and it’s the one who drank water on camera that might have ended his career?

As Esquire defends it’s Phil Bronstein piece yesterday on the alleged SEAL who shot bin Laden, the milbloggers at Blackfive aren’t convinced, going as far as calling the article “fiction”:

See Mr Phil, I don’t think this is all adding up.  As we’ve seen, ST6 is not a term used anymore; hasn’t been for many years.  And I doubt he’d be using it just in front of you.  Does DELTA still use that name for themselves?  Don’t think so.  That would out a phony pretty quick.

The main thing with this article that really burns is that this ‘SEAL’ is left hanging.  I don’t think that’s the case here.  I think either you’ve been rolled, Mr Phil, or you don’t have the full story, or you don’t know enough to even ask.  See we here at Blackfive constitute a military blog — we have enough experience among us to recognize when something ain’t right — and your story ain’t cutting it so far.  And to me, your background ain’t either.

Why would a team guy go blabbing to a journo with no military cred, who has basically been hanging out in San Fran all his life?   Berkeley, in fact.  Not San Diego, where he might meet a few dudes like this over the years and build rapport.  Or near Ft Bragg, or in Florida.  Hell, even DC.  Is it possible that Phil has ‘connections’ that set him up with this dude, in order to put even more ‘spin’ for the administration?  I’m not going that far…yet. 

Further in his article for Esquire, Phil quotes the wife: “the loss of income and insurance and no pension aside, she can no longer walk onto a local base… they’ve surrendered their military IDs.”  “He’s lost some vision, he can’t get his neck straight for any period of time…”  If this were indeed the case, this is easy stuff to document in the out-processing; and they DO do a medical when you out-process for a separation physical.  Period.  If his vision, alone, was affected, they’d document it.  Neck issues?  The x-rays would pick it up.

He then writes that according to Shooter, ‘’if I come back alive and retire, I won’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of for the rest of my life.’'  So what do you have now?  If Shooter had retired, he’d have an income and med coverage, at a minimum.  So he comes back from the 4-month deployment, leaves, and STILL has nothing?  He’d have been better off waiting.  At 18 years, he could have reached ‘sanctuary’ and been what we call ‘retired on active duty’. 

More and more issues show up the more I read the article.  It’s good fiction, but that’s all it is — fiction. 

The entire Blackfive post here.

I asked “when did we start naming winter storms?” on Twitter over the weekend and reader @cindykilkenny provided me with this release from the Weather Channel. As you read, note that there’s no discussion of the increase in weather-alarmism this move will cause, nor do I understand why the rest of the media just decided to follow the Weather Channel on this. All a bunch of lemmings: 

During the upcoming 2012-13 winter season The Weather Channel will name noteworthy winter storms. Our goal is to better communicate the threat and the timing of the significant impacts that accompany these events. The fact is, a storm with a name is easier to follow, which will mean fewer surprises and more preparation.  

Naming Winter Storms

Hurricanes and tropical storms have been given names since the 1940s. In the late 1800s, tropical systems near Australia were named as well. Weather systems, including winter storms, have been named in Europe since the 1950s.  Important dividends have resulted from attaching names to these storms:

• Naming a storm raises awareness.
• Attaching a name makes it much easier to follow a weather system’s progress.
• A storm with a name takes on a personality all its own, which adds to awareness.
• In today’s social media world, a name makes it much easier to reference in communication.
• A named storm is easier to remember and refer to in the future.

(MORE: Check Out the New Storm Names for the 2012-2013 Season)

The question then begs to ask “Why aren’t winter storms named?”  In fact, in Europe the naming of weather systems has been going on for a long time.  Here in the U.S., summer time storms including thunderstorms and tornadoes occur on such a small time and space scale that there would be little benefit and much confusion trying to attach names to them. However, winter weather is different. Winter storms occur on a time and space scale that is similar to tropical systems.

In fact, historically many major winter storms have been named during or after the event has occurred. Examples include “The President’s Day Storm” and “Snowmageddon.” Yet, until now, there has been no organized naming system for these storms before they impact population centers.

One of the reasons this may be true is that there is no national center, such as the National Hurricane Center, to coordinate and communicate information on a multi-state scale to cover such big events. The National Centers for Environmental Prediction’s Hydrometeorological Prediction Center (HPC) does issue discussions and snowfall forecasts on a national scale but it does not fill the same role as the NHC in naming storms. Therefore, it would be a great benefit for a partner in the weather industry to take on the responsibility of developing a new concept.   

This is where a world-class organization such as The Weather Channel will play a significant role. We have the meteorological ability, support and technology to provide the same level of reporting for winter storms that we have done for years with tropical weather systems. 

The rest here.

Part of the brand identity of the Washington Post is its coverage of international affairs. That’s why basic, easily checkable mistakes in foreign coverage are so damaging — if they can’t get elementary things right, how can you trust the reporting that you can’t easily check yourself?

A story in Saturday’s paper (posted online Friday night) reports that some of the Druze in Syria have decided to side with the rebels against the Assad forces, even though, as a minority, they face great risk from a Sunni fundamentalist regime (which is the only possible successor to the current Alawite regime). I was running through the story till I got to a sentence that said the Druze “live in the mountainous region of southeast Syria” and that there had been “half-dozen anti-government protests in Sweida province, the ancestral homeland of the Druze in the southeast that had remained relatively quiet since the uprising began nearly two years ago.”

I’m no expert on Syria, but I was pretty sure that the southeastern part of the country is flat, sparsely populated desert. What’s more, there are lots of Druze in Lebanon, which is to the west of Syria. Sure enough, as a quick visit to Wikipedia shows, Sweida (or Suwayda) is in the southwest of the country. Maybe it doesn’t matter where Sweida is to the story, but if you’re going to explain its location within the country (partly, I assume, to show that it’s not happening up near the Turkish border, where much of the action has been) then you’d darn well better get it right.

What’s more, whatever error the three reporters given credit on this story may have made, it’s laughable that a foreign-news editor didn’t catch something so basic. It’s not like this was published in the sports section, where stories on Syrian politics seldom appear. It’s not even like it’s a story about Mexico, which despite being the most important country in the world with regard to America’s vital interests, bores reporters and policy types, who consider it uncool. This is the Middle East, which, if you judge from the news coverage (or confirmation hearings or presidential debates) is the only place in the world that matters to anyone. The Post has been writing about the Syrian fighting for two years — and they still can’t get basic geography right?

Oh, and on top of that, the MSM’s complete unfamiliarity with elementary religious concepts is no doubt the reason the report refers to “Sunni religious extremists among the rebels, some of whom consider the Druze faith to be apostasy.” Uh, no. Apostasy is voluntary abandonment of a faith you once held. Few, probably none, of the Druze are apostates, because they were all raised in their centuries-old faith and did not renounce standard Islam. What the writer meant was the Sunni extremists consider the Druze to be heretics, i.e., people who hold unorthodox religious beliefs.

I had an editor once, at a small-town paper, who wrote the cutline (caption) for a story on the local synagogue’s chocolate fundraiser (you paid a fee and got to try treats made by a variety of local restaurants) and referred to “chocolate moose.” This was not supposed to be a play on words, like the quirky D.C. gift shop by that name, but was actually meant to refer to the dessert. When the error was explained to her (she got the job due to skills unrelated to grammar), she said they’d fix it during roll change (halfway through the press run, when the giant rolls of paper were replaced), and that no one would notice anyway.

As absurd as that was, it wasn’t completely unbelievable at a tiny local paper. But the Washington Post’s making comparable errors makes me wonder why I keep subscribing to it.

To sum up yesterday’s confirmation hearing for John Brennan to lead the CIA, he never believes “it’s better to kill a terrorist than to detain him,” but if we catch a terrorist, waterboarding will “never will be” used to interrogate said terrorist.

Brennan, who is often called the “architect” of Obama’s drone program might think catching terrorists is a grand idea, but how many terrorists have we actually captured since we started blowing them up with drones? Here’s a piece from The New Atlantis in 2010 asking if President Obama is relying on drone strikes to avoid the annoying issue of where to actually detain terrorists captured alive:

The Obama administration has not been blind to the effectiveness of these targeted killings. And perhaps the administration’s opposition to Guantánamo and to enhanced interrogation has led it to see even more clearly the convenience of taking the fight to the enemies’ homes and hideouts and killing them before they come within the purview of the U.S. justice system. For example, the Los Angeles Times reported that an al Qaeda-linked suspect named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was killed by a September 2009 helicopter attack in Somalia, rather than captured, because “officials had debated trying to take him alive but decided against doing so in part because of uncertainty over where to hold him.”

Targeted killing may be expedient for a president who disdains detention and interrogation, but as a matter of strategy, it is not costless. First, a dead terrorist isn’t always as good as a detained terrorist. As Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel, put it in 2002: “If they’re dead, they’re not talking to you, and you create more martyrs.” When possible, argues Daniel Byman, the director of Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies, “It’s almost always better to arrest terrorists than to kill them. You get intelligence then. Dead men tell no tales.”

And as far as waterboarding, Brennan was quite happy with its results back in 2007. 

Summary: Waterboarding was good, before it was bad; and we should capture as many terrorists as possible, if our drones don’t get them first. 

As widely reported, the ex-Los Angeles police officer Chris Dorner who (allegedly) has gone on a murderous rampage in Southern California left a “manifesto” of sorts where he praises Senator Feinstein, presses for an assault weapons ban and goes after those who criticize President Obama. Dorner also plays media critic:

Willie Geist, you’re a talented and charismatic journalist.Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Pat Harvey, Brian Williams, Soledad Obrien, Wolf Blitzer, Meredith Viera, Tavis Smiley, and Anderson Cooper, keep up the great work and follow Cronkite’s lead. I hold many of you in the same regard as Tom Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings. Cooper, stop nagging and berating your guest, they’re your (guest). Mr. Scarborough, we met at McGuire’s pub in P-cola in 2002 when I was stationed there. It was an honor conversing with you about politics, family, and life.

[. . .]

Revoke the citizenship of Fareed Zakaria and deport him. I’ve never heard a positive word about America or its interest from his mouth, ever. On the same day, give Piers Morgan an indefinite resident alien and Visa card. Mr. Morgan, the problem that many American gun owners have with you and your continuous discussion of gun control is that you are not an American citizen and have an accent that is distinct and clarifies that you are a foreigner. I want you to know that I agree with you 100% on enacting stricter firearm laws but you must understand that your critics will always have in the back of their mind that you are native to a country that we won our sovereignty from while using firearms as a last resort in defense and you come from a country that has no legal private ownership of firearms. That is disheartening to American gun owners and rightfully so.

He goes on and on, but as Charles Cooke points out on Twitter, there is “No mention of the political contents of Dorner’s manifesto in a combined 3240 words in lead stories from NYT, LA Times, and AP.”

Compare the lack-of-politics as a motive for Dorner’s rampage to the Gabby Giffords shooting, when the media found it credible that Sarah Palin’s map inspired Jared Loughner in Arizona. Paul Krugman, for example:

We don’t have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was. She’s been the target of violence before. And for those wondering why a Blue Dog Democrat, the kind Republicans might be able to work with, might be a target, the answer is that she’s a Democrat who survived what was otherwise a GOP sweep in Arizona, precisely because the Republicans nominated a Tea Party activist. (Her father says that “the whole Tea Party” was her enemy.) And yes, she was on Sarah Palin’s infamous “crosshairs” list. [...]

Now, I personally don’t blame politics for Dorner’s killings, but who am I to argue with a Nobel Prize winner like Paul Krugman? If he says politics are a motivating factor, then it must be true. 

Stewart is disingenuous here: al-Awlaki was killed in 2011 and Stewart is now just noticing that the president killed an American with a drone? But Stewart does do a good job at exposing the hypocrisy of Team Obama keeping his memos classified while releasing Bush-era documents. Part 1 here:

Part 2 here:

Hilarious. Al Gorezeera might turn into the network that holds the president accountable.

Details here.

Piers Morgan was at a gun shop in Katy, Texas, yesterday and, among other things, shot a machine gun. Watch the video here.

But it’s this tweet that Morgan wrote to promote last night’s episode that stood out:

Rather large protest growing outside this Houston gun store now. Feels slightly tyrannical, ironically… #GunsInAmericaCNN 9pm

Freedom of assembly is tyrannical? I believe we solved this one back in 1776.

Via The Right Sphere, Touré went “From Anti-Drone to Pro-Drone In Seven Weeks.”

There’s just no pleasing some people:

And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, “I need a caretaker.” So God made a farmer.

God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn and call his state senator to complain about expensive new slurry pit legislation, spend all day with his ag lobby board strategizing about more laws against private raw milk sales, take that state senator out for steak and wine at dinner, and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board at the school he wants to eliminate with a voucher program.” So God made a farmer.

God said, “I need somebody that can tell an employee to go shape an ax handle, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire, make a harness out of hay wire, and not report dangerous working conditions involved in doing those things. And, who, at planting time and harvest season, can get together with his Tea Party friends and complain about unchecked government spending while cashing Farm Bill subsidy and crop insurance checks. Then, painin’ from ‘golf cart back,’ put in another 72 minutes penning an op-ed to the local paper about socialism ruining the invisible hand of the market.

And on it goes. It must be tiresome being upset at the world all the time.  

It was my favorite ad, too:

Anheuser-Busch climbed back into the saddle with the Super Bowl’s top commercial — a heart-tugging tale of the bond between a trainer and the Budweiser Clydesdale he raised.

But it was a horse race.

This was the Super Bowl when ads with heart got all the love in USA TODAY’S Ad Meter, which, for its 25th anniversary, vastly expanded in scope by going online to 7,619 pre-registered panelists.

AD METER: Complete results

SEE ALL THE ADS: Those you missed, those you like

Procter & Gamble’s Tide laundry detergent pulled off a close No. 2, ahead of many Super Bowl regulars, with gentle humor.

Its ad had an image of football legend Joe Montana miraculously appearing in a salsa stain on a rabid fan’s jersey.

Here’s the video ICYMI: