Here’s the photo which, I promise, you’ve seen for years.

And here’s what she had to say about it:

A fan posted this on my wall. Apparently California is requiring a warning label be put on McDonalds food. Like cigarettes. This is why I tell you never to eat this crap or feed it to your kids.

Except, dumbass, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

Here’s what acrylamide is and how it’s formed (From the FDA):

What kinds of cooking lead to acrylamide formation? In what foods?
High temperature cooking, such as frying, roasting, or baking, is most likely to cause acrylamide formation. Boiling and steaming do not typically form acrylamide. Acrylamide is found mainly in foods made from plants, such as potato products, grain products, or coffee. Acrylamide does not form, or forms at lower levels, in dairy, meat, and fish products. Generally, acrylamide is more likely to accumulate when cooking is done for longer periods or at higher temperatures.

In other words, that wholesome stuff you make at home has it also. So what, Jillian, are you gonna ban baking, roasting, and frying at home too?

Moron.

I have no tolerance for people who spread crap like this and don’t bother to do a little research first, especially when they claim to be a health and fitness expert.

Joke is more like it.

Feingold later came out and chastised people for not understanding that his post was a joke. Yeah. Didn’t you catch the humor in there?

What, you missed it too?

Paul’s immediate answer, of course, was no. Here’s the entire exchange (from this transcript), not just the part that the libs want you to see.

BLITZER: Thank you, Governor. Before I get to Michele Bachmann, I want to just — you’re a physician, Ron Paul, so you’re a doctor. You know something about this subject. Let me ask you this hypothetical question.

A healthy 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides, you know what? I’m not going to spend $200 or $300 a month for health insurance because I’m healthy, I don’t need it. But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it.

Who’s going to pay if he goes into a coma, for example? Who pays for that?

PAUL: Well, in a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him.

BLITZER: Well, what do you want?

PAUL: But what he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself. My advice to him would have a major medical policy, but not be forced —

BLITZER: But he doesn’t have that. He doesn’t have it, and he needs intensive care for six months. Who pays?

PAUL: That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks. This whole idea that you have to prepare and take care of everybody —

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?

PAUL: No. I practiced medicine before we had Medicaid, in the early 1960s, when I got out of medical school. I practiced at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, and the churches took care of them. We never turned anybody away from the hospitals.

(APPLAUSE)

PAUL: And we’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves. Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it. This whole idea, that’s the reason the cost is so high.

The cost is so high because they dump it on the government, it becomes a bureaucracy. It becomes special interests. It kowtows to the insurance companies and the drug companies, and then on top of that, you have the inflation. The inflation devalues the dollar, we have lack of competition.

There’s no competition in medicine. Everybody is protected by licensing. And we should actually legalize alternative health care, allow people to practice what they want.

Ron Paul’s point is clearly that if we have come to a point where we expect the government to nurse us back to health every time we get ill, then that “dying man” would expect the government to come and rescue him in spite of the fact that his health should be his responsibility.

He also clearly says that in spite of the fact that said hypothetical man did not take the proper precautions with his life and health, he should not be allowed to die. Not only that, but it is in fact illegal for an emergency room to turn anyone away for any reason, so once the care is not as urgent to save the man’s life, he would be moved to a not-for-profit hospital nearby for care. In other words, he would get the care he needed, regardless of the fact that he was stupid and didn’t have insurance because he thought he was invincible.

So knowing all of this obvious information, including Ron Paul’s clear “no” to Wolf Blitzer’s antagonistic “Should society just let him die?” question, how does the media react? I’ll let the MRC show you what the leg-tingler in chief did with the video.

It’s clear that a few people in the audience did in fact say “Yeah” when Blitzer asked if society should just let him die. I’ll give the lib media the benefit of the doubt and say 3 or 4 people out of the thousand or so that were there did in fact say yes, this fictional man that Wolf Blitzer was advocating for as a vessel to pursue his own agenda, should die, although I think they were answering more from a “Why should he not have to live with the consequences of his stupid decision” more than some bloodthirsty desire to see the “man” dead.

In the context of the conversation, Ron Paul’s line a few sentences before the question was key.

PAUL: Well, in a society that you accept welfarism and socialism, he expects the government to take care of him.

BLITZER: Well, what do you want?

PAUL: But what he should do is whatever he wants to do, and assume responsibility for himself. My advice to him would have a major medical policy, but not be forced —

When someone chooses not to have insurance as a healthy 30 year old and making a good living, whose responsibility is it when he gets sick? His? Or mine? And if his decision is that he doesn’t need insurance, why should I have to protect him from his decision? That’s truly the question, isn’t it? Why should I have to stop you from making stupid decisions that affect you? Isn’t that the individual’s job? To make decisions for themselves and deal with the consequences?

This is something we need to examine as a country. Not because we need to figure out how to become even more responsible for our neighbor, but because we need to decide as a society how much of your life is yours and how much of your decisions you have to deal with when they go wrong. Until we start talking to each other like adults, we’ll keep treating each other like children that need to be saved by mommy and daddy every time they get a boo boo.

Notice, the question he answered was “When did the President become aware that his Uncle had been arrested?”

He didn’t actually answer the question of whether or not he knew his uncle was in the country illegally.

I wonder if we’ll ever get to the answer on that one?

(credit to Ann Althouse for noticing this one)

The word “unprecedented” has come up quite a few times; the claim being that the Speaker has never in history rejected a President’s request for a joint session.

Yeah, you know where this is going.

Much of the media has been running with the claim that a president’s request to speak to Congress has never been rejected until this week. Various Capitol Hill “historians” have been quoted saying that House Speaker John Boehner took unprecedented action when he cited the difficulty of hosting President Obama on the president’s requested date of Sept. 7. We’re not so sure.

The truth is that you don’t have to go back that far in the nation’s history to find a similar circumstance. And unlike the current speaker, who quickly agreed to host the president on the following day, Sept. 8, a previous holder of the gavel refused to grant the White House request, regardless of the date and time.

The June 24, 1986, edition of The Wall Street Journal featured a story headlined, “President’s Bid to Address the House On Nicaragua Is Rejected by Speaker.” That’s right, no quibbling over the date and time, just a flat-out rejection. In that case, President Ronald Reagan wanted to address the House before its critical vote on funding for the anti-communist “Contra” rebels in Nicaragua. Then-Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neil said that he was willing to host a Reagan speech if it was expanded to include the Senate in a joint session, or he would allow the President to speak to the House alone if the President would also agree to take questions from lawmakers. Otherwise, there would be no Reagan speech in the House chamber. Reagan already had the votes to prevail in the Senate, and Mr. O’Neil wanted to avoid having the spotlight turned on the House, which would make him and his colleagues accountable to the public if Contra aid were rejected.

You think this will put together the “unprecedented” claims and the howls of racism? Yeah. Me neither.

Source

What do you think?

THE STUDY published last week in Science magazine revealing a racial bias in the allocation of biomedical research funds by the National Institutes of Health defies easy analysis. Black scientists were significantly less likely to get research funding than equally qualified scientists of other backgrounds – even though the NIH has no official way of knowing the race of the applicants. The bias, it seems, was unconscious.

There’s something unconscious going on here, alright. It’s the unconscious presumption that any time a black person doesn’t succeed at something it’s race-related, which I would argue is the most insidious and offensive racism of all.

With no way of knowing the race of applicants, all crying racism does is create an excuse. End of story.

The Globe also states…

This is troubling, not just because it means that potentially important research by African-American scientists is not being pursued.

Really? Such as? I mean, if they know that potentially important research isn’t getting done, surely they can elaborate on what that research that was so potentially important actually was, right? One example to buttress their case would’ve been nice.

Without any proof of a bias whatsoever, the Globe has run full-bore with the racism angle. If that isn’t TLB (Typical Leftist Behavior), I don’t know what is. All it would’ve taken was some examples of the bias we’re supposedly seeing examples of and the opinion would’ve been infinitely more valid. Instead, we got the equivalent of “It just is, trust us.”

Source

Okay… Rick Perry gives a speech, and in it he makes a quote. Ed Schultz takes said quote and edits it from this:

” … that big black cloud that is hanging over America,that debt that is so monstrous …”

to this…

” … that big black cloud that is hanging over America …”

In an effort to create the impression that Perry was calling President Obama a black cloud (a not too far off analogy, considering he is in fact black, and blows in the direction of the wind).

Breitbart calls Schultz out for his selective editing.

Joan Walsh jumps into the fray, defending Schultz, and insulting Breitbart.

In case you don’t know who Joan Walsh is, she writes for Salon and accused Breitbart and Big Journalism Editor Dana Loesch of hacking Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account and placing the penis picture there, never once apologizing once he admitted it was in fact his shlong.

Al Sharpton used the reference on his show. We’re now hitting critical racist mass.

Then Schultz admitted, of course, that he edited the clip selectively and apologized.

“We did not present the full context of those clips …”
It was a mistake and we regret the error … we should not have included it in our coverage of his overheated rhetoric. That’s our mistake.

Indeed. Now it would be nice if Sharpton and Walsh apologized to Andrew Breitbart as well as Rick Perry for spreading the rumor that he made a racist remark. Of course that won’t happen; the first rule of lib club is that you don’t apologize when you’re caught making a mistake.

I’m not a huge Perry fan, but it’s amazing how well the MSNBC confirmation bias worked in this case.

Oh, and for my friend who thinks Media Matters reprimands the left equally to the right, I anxiously await their commentary on this whole circle jerk.

I could watch this over and over again.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that they hired this race-baiting piece of crap, this is a demonstration of his on-air chops?

What a joke.  How about this, you piece of garbage race hustler; why don’t you stick to pretending people got raped and not paying when you lose lawsuits and leave talking on television to people with brains?

Cenk Uygur must be laughing his ass off right about now at what replaced him.  I hated that asshole too, but at least he was decent on camera.

Secondly: How embarrassing is it that Williams, a professional commentator, didn’t recognize that quote which has been played again and again over the past year and I did?

Open mouth, insert foot.

After Caylee went missing in mid-June 2008, a series of suspicious actions by Casey led to her indictment in October 2008. Two months later, Caylee’s skeletal remains were discovered on December 11, 2008. A legal team assembled to defend Casey, but the legal fees soon overwhelmed the low-income defendant.

To help pay the bills, defense attorney Jose Baez revealed last March that Casey’s team had accepted $200,000 from ABC News to help pay off her legal bills in exchange for exclusive pictures and videos. A spokesperson for ABC News told Mediabistro, “In August 2008 we licensed exclusive rights to an extensive library of photos and home video for use by our broadcasts, platforms, affiliates and international partners. No use of the material was tied to any interview.”

It reportedly wasn’t the first time ABC helped the Anthony family, either. Mediabistro reported that “[n]ewly released court documents reveal[ed] ABC News paid for a three-night hotel stay at a Central Florida Ritz-Carlton for the grandparents of murdered toddler Caylee Anthony,” only days after Caylee’s remains were found.

ABC also paid $15,000 to meter reader Roy Kronk, the man who originally found Caylee’s decaying remains. He was paid for a picture he took of a rattlesnake in the woods taken in the same vicinity where he found a mysterious object that later turned out to be Caylee’s decomposed body. Of course, with a payment that large, Kronk figured an interview was in the works as well, and within days, he appeared on Good Morning America.

The network also landed one of the other most coveted Casey Anthony trial interviews. Only a day after Casey was acquitted of murder, ABC gave Barbara Walters the first post-trial interview with Baez, raising suspicions of how the network so easily landed the spot.

With two of the biggest trial-related interviews already under its belt, thanks to payments to Baez for legal fees and Kronk for the picture, ABC’s checkbook might be staying open a little longer. Casey Anthony makes no income, so if a televised interview is to occur, it will surely come with a large price tag. Having already made a good name for themselves in Anthony’s camp, ABC easily tops the list of potential interviewers, as long as they are willing to shell out another huge sum of money.

The network’s questionable behavior comes in the form of a we’ll scratch your back if you scratch ours reward. It reflects poorly on them to be so closely associated with a woman who the world has condemned as guilty, but if ABC lands the interview with her, it will have been worth the investment to them.

Worth it, indeed, especially if they give ABC News a few exclusives.

Do you feel this hurts ABC’s integrity, or do you think it’s just par for the course? I already know my opinion, but I’d like to hear what you all have to say.

Source

Wait, what am I saying? It’s because the mainstream media isn’t interested in doing journalism where Planned Parenthood is concerned, just parroting their talking points.

Recently, after Indiana began moving to defund Planned Parenthood, they claimed it would severely hinder their ability to provide medical care to Medicaid patients. Realizing that this was, as it usually is, a load of crap, Lila Rose and her team started calling Planned Parenthood clinics in Indiana to find out how much care you could get as a Medicaid patient.

Guess what they found?

Hint, it’s the same thing they found when they checked out the “mammogram” lie.

You can get the same services from your doctor if you’re on Medicaid. Imagine that.

So what’s the point of Planned Parenthood?

When are our stewards of truth, the mainstream media, going to actually do some journalism with regards to Planned Parenthood?

I always find it amazing how when an “editing mistake” happens on the pledge, it happens at the same point.

Of course, even when there is no “editing,” the edits happen anyway… After all, sometimes you just have to breathe…

NBC later apologized after a flood of pissed off people jumped in to alert them of the fact.

And by the way, don’t even attempt to make the idiotic argument that the pledge didn’t contain those words in the beginning. It does now. Invalid argument. Move along.

What happens when she does?

Those are two screengrabs from two stories taken a few months apart.  Notice anything missing?

Yeah, that’s right.  The traffic.  There is nary a car to be found in this area that’s dangerously congested due to bike lanes.

I’ve long praised CBS for their local news, and I still think they’re quite good, but this is just ludicrous and embarrassing.

Pictures via Brooklyn Spoke

I feel like my arm is all warmed up and I don’t have a game to pitch. I was primed to review “Atlas Shrugged.” I figured it might provide a parable of Ayn Rand’s philosophy that I could discuss. For me, that philosophy reduces itself to: “I’m on board; pull up the lifeline.” There are however people who take Ayn Rand even more seriously than comic-book fans take “Watchmen.” I expect to receive learned and sarcastic lectures on the pathetic failings of my review.

That’s how you set up your critics; you try to defuse them before you write your piece of crap so that when they do criticize you, you can just go “See? I told you.”

And now I am faced with this movie, the most anticlimactic non-event since Geraldo Rivera broke into Al Capone’s vault. I suspect only someone very familiar with Rand’s 1957 novel could understand the film at all, and I doubt they will be happy with it. For the rest of us, it involves a series of business meetings in luxurious retro leather-and-brass board rooms and offices, and restaurants and bedrooms that look borrowed from a hotel no doubt known as the Robber Baron Arms.

My lovely wife understood every word of it. Of course, she didn’t go into the movie looking for a reason to hate or ridicule it, so that probably had a lot to do with it. As for the pretention that the movie is shot in hotels and offices and so on, well, that’s about 50% true because there are plenty of scenes outdoors, plenty of shots of the urban decay brought about by the looters, and plenty of breathtaking shots of the midwest shot from helicopters along the John Galt Line (or at least shot along the valleys it ran through with the “train” digitally added in later). You can criticize plenty about this movie, but the cinematography is certainly not something deserving criticism.

During these meetings, everybody drinks. More wine is poured and sipped in this film than at a convention of oenophiliacs. There are conversations in English after which I sometimes found myself asking, “What did they just say?” The dialogue seems to have been ripped throbbing with passion from the pages of Investors’ Business Daily. Much of the excitement centers on the tensile strength of steel.

Yet again, he proves his ignorance. He couldn’t follow this? Now I’m a political junkie and a current events consumer par extraordinaire, but my wife is not and, again, she understood all of it. It wasn’t in a foreign language, and the dialog wasn’t difficult. It was pretty straightforward stuff if, of course, you were paying attention.

The story involves Dagny Taggart (Taylor Schilling), a young woman who controls a railroad company named Taggart Transcontinental (its motto: “Ocean to Ocean”). She is a fearless and visionary entrepreneur, who is determined to use a revolutionary new steel to repair her train tracks. Vast forces seem to conspire against her.

Wrong. She’s not a fearless and brilliant entrepreneur, and she doesn’t “control the company.” The company, her Father’s, is controlled by James Taggart, her brother. She’s the VP of Operations (as evidenced by the title on her door and the nameplate on her desk). Ebert obviously wasn’t watching the movie because James Taggart appears in the boardroom in the movie to talk to the board about Dagny’s decisions, and also meets with politicians to discuss the future of the company. Dagny, on the other hand, runs the trains themselves. She does not, however, control the company. In fact, when she builds the John Galt Line, she leaves the company entirely to do so. Her ability to do that stems from the fact that she does not, in fact, control Taggart Transcontinental.

As for the vast forces “seem” to conspire against her part, that’s a total misreading of the plot. No one is conspiring against Dagny with the exception of the unions, who only get brief mention in one scene with the head threatening Dagny and being shown the door. The true conspiracy is against Hank Rearden and his product, Rearden Metal, and that conspiracy isn’t a “seems,” it’s obvious and blatant. It becomes central to the story.

That is, of course, if you watched it.

It’s a few years in the future. America has become a state in which mediocrity is the goal, and high-achieving individuals the enemy. Laws have been passed prohibiting companies from owning other companies. Dagny’s new steel, which is produced by her sometime lover, Hank Rearden (Grant Bowler), has been legislated against because it’s better than other steels. The Union of Railroad Engineers has decided it will not operate Dagny’s trains. Just to show you how bad things have become, a government minister announces “a tax will be applied to the state of Colorado, in order to equalize our national economy.” So you see how governments and unions are the enemy of visionary entrepreneurs.

The law prohibiting ownership of multiple companies happens midway through the movie. The Metal was legislated against because Rearden wouldn’t give it to the government and wouldn’t sell it to anyone just because he was told to. The Union did object, but Dagny, as mentioned above, sent the guy packing. The tax part wasn’t announced until the last few minutes of the movie where Wesley Mouch, flanked by James Taggart, gave a speech at the State Science Institute, announcing said tax.

But you’re thinking, railroads? Yes, although airplanes exist in this future, trains are where it’s at. When I was 6, my Aunt Martha brought me to Chicago to attend the great Railroad Fair of 1948, at which the nation’s rail companies celebrated the wonders that were on the way. They didn’t quite foresee mass air transportation. “Atlas Shrugged” seems to buy into the fair’s glowing vision of the future of trains. Rarely, perhaps never, has television news covered the laying of new railroad track with the breathless urgency of the news channels shown in this movie.

So this is completely explained in the movie, again, if you bothered to watch it. In the first 9 minutes of the movie, there’s a montage explaining the state that the country is in. The year is 2016. Gas prices are $37.50 a gallon. Unemployment is at 30%. The country is falling apart. Infrastructure is crumbling, cars are being abandoned, and the only transportation that’s affordable in this climate are the railroads. To miss this point, a point made in the first 10 minutes of the movie, means not only did Ebert not “get through” the movie, he somehow managed to ignore the opening scene.

So OK. Let’s say you know the novel, you agree with Ayn Rand, you’re an objectivist or a libertarian, and you’ve been waiting eagerly for this movie. Man, are you going to get a letdown. It’s not enough that a movie agree with you, in however an incoherent and murky fashion. It would help if it were like, you know, entertaining?

I don’t know one libertarian who’s found this movie to be uninteresting or unentertaining. Not one. I know plenty of liberals who reviewed the Cliff Notes of the book and pawned it off as a movie review *cough* Ebert *cough*, though, and it shows quite obviously.

The movie is constructed of a few kinds of scenes: (1) People sipping their drinks in clubby surroundings and exchanging dialogue that sounds like corporate lingo; (2) railroads, and lots of ’em; (3) limousines driving through cities in ruin and arriving at ornate buildings; (4) city skylines; (5) the beauties of Colorado. There is also a love scene, which is shown not merely from the waist up but from the ears up. The man keeps his shirt on. This may be disappointing for libertarians, who I believe enjoy rumpy-pumpy as much as anyone.

Obviously you didn’t read the book or get the movie; the reasons for that are plenty obvious. As for the critiques of the scenes, it’s a movie about a steel magnate and a railroad executive. What did you expect? The Death Star and Darth Vader?

Oh, and there is Wisconsin. Dagny and Hank ride blissfully in Taggart’s new high-speed train, and then Hank suggests they take a trip to Wisconsin, where the state’s policies caused the suppression of an engine that runs on the ozone in the air, or something (the film’s detailed explanation won’t clear this up). They decide to drive there. That’s when you’ll enjoy the beautiful landscape photography of the deserts of Wisconsin. My advice to the filmmakers: If you want to use a desert, why not just refer to Wisconsin as “New Mexico”?

More proof that he didn’t watch the movie, or didn’t pay attention.

Dagny and Hank go to Wisconsin to check out a plant that shut down. The plant used to make train engines. Ebert says that the state’s policies caused the suppression of the engine. That simply isn’t true, and the explanation is clearly given in the movie. The plant itself made changes in the pay structure for the plant, rewarding those who needed the money more than those who earned it. Pay was based on need, not merit. The smartest people left the company because their work was not being rewarded. The motor was never known by Dagny or Hank, or anyone else at Twentieth Century Motors, the company in question. It was developed in secret by a brilliant young engineer at the plant who quit when the plant’s “minds” left.

The big mystery about the engine that the film doesn’t explain? Dagny at one point says “It converts the static electricity in the air into energy!” That’s it. That’s the complicated explanation that Roger Ebert couldn’t understand in one complete clear sentence. As for the “dessert” of Wisconsin, that isn’t true either and there’s plenty of green along the way, but many areas of the midwest where people used to farm are not farmed anymore. What happens when you let crops die? Do they become lush greenery? Ebert would have you believe you were seeing the painted dessert and sand dunes. Dare I repeat again, it’s because he didn’t actually see the movie?

“Atlas Shrugged” closes with a title card saying, “End of Part 1.” Frequently throughout the film, characters repeat the phrase, “Who is John Galt?” Well they might ask. A man in black, always shot in shadow, is apparently John Galt. If you want to get a good look at him and find out why everybody is asking, I hope you can find out in Part 2. I don’t think you can hold out for Part 3.

Actually, you won’t find out until Part III. That’s when he’s revealed in the book.

It’s pretty obvious Ebert didn’t see the movie, or if he did, he went through the cursory motions of attending a screening intending to slam the movie without bothering to ingest it. I’ll never make the case that Atlas Shrugged is the best movie ever made, but I think it’s only fair that if you’re going to critique a movie and give it 1 star, you should have some basic comprehension of the plot, the characters, their motives, and the story surrounding the events in the movie. If you can’t even manage that, how are we to trust the quality of your reviews?

Ebert didn’t watch this movie. His review stands on its own as proof of that.

This is what you get when you try and have a serious discussion with a mental midget.

That being said, I wouldn’t trash the people who would go to see it  To each their own, I say.

Roger Ebert, on the other hand, isn’t me.

You would think this prick would’ve learned some humility after his brush with death and subsequent health problems and handicap, right?

Wow.  What an asshole.  If your tastes aren’t in line with his, you’re a moron.  Got that?