And found this:

It’s obviously a hiccup as they are launching a new look for the site — which is happening any moment now, and which I hear is fantastic.

Still. The irony is not lost on me.

UPDATE: I’m told we’ll see the new site within the next hour. They’ve really talked it up, so I’m excited.

UPDATE x2: Apparently this is one of those sites where you need the “www” in front of the name, narciso points out.

I can at least reach the site now, but it’s the old version. Again, sometime in the next hour we should see it.

Nothing says “thanks for teaching my kid!” like a free boob job at taxpayer expense:

As thousands of teachers face layoffs across the country, teachers in Buffalo, New York are getting lipo? Yep. And nose jobs and whatever else they want. All on the taxpayers’ dime. How is this happening?

. . . .

The sweet deal that all the 3,400 teachers in Buffalo are eligible to get under one of their insurance plan options, they are billed nothing for any plastic surgery procedure, such as botox, liposuction, tummy tucks, and there is no deductible.

Linda Tokarz teaches second grade and says she gets regular treatments. She says, “I think its great for us. I wouldn’t want to see it taken away.”

Well, what’s the problem? The taxpayers can well afford it, right?

Of course they can’t:

Last year, Buffalo’s schools spent $5.9 million on plastic surgery which is also known as a cosmetic rider. And Buffalo teachers have had this rider for nearly four decades.

Now you might think Buffalo’s school district must be flush with cash to be offering perks like free plastic surgery, right? Wrong. Louis Petrucci, the president of the Buffalo Board of Education says he is projecting a $42 million deficit in next year’s school budget.

If it were up to me, I would put the matter to a vote. Then I would find out who the teachers were who voted for the benefit and fire them all.

But I guess that would be illegal or something. It reminds me of the classic Mr. Burns quote:

“Ironic, isn’t it Smithers? This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for you.” –Mr. Burns

Since my plan won’t work, here’s Plan B. Contact the hackers who used e-voting machines to elect Bender the robot from Futurama to the Washington D.C. school board (h/t Aaron Worthing) — and send them to Buffalo.

Plan C: establish fiscal sanity in this country.

Never mind. That plan is too far-fetched.

Thanks to Dana.

I found this transcript in the dumpster where iowahawk finds all his discarded notes and transcripts. For some reason this one was in a box labeled “unfunny.” Anyway, here it is:

Hey, Sandra. Barack here. Hey, thanks for that testimony you gave. I know you thought it was risky because you’re really a 30-year-old activist, and that you claimed you have to pay $3000 for contraception when you can actually get free birth control from Planned Parenthood, and failing that can get birth control pills for 9 bucks a month at Target. I know you thought that might make you look like a whiny nanny-state activist who wants other people to buy her all the inexpensive things she might want.

But I could have told you not to worry. We got Eric Boehlert calling you a college student when he knows damn well you’re not. The newspapers aren’t going to report the real price of contraception or your age or past activism. Best of all, we got Rush Limbaugh to make fun of you in a way that he wasn’t willing to stand by when the advertisers started balking.

So that’s the story. You’re officially a victim now. The narrative is written.

There was this guy named Andrew Breitbart who went around telling everyone that the real problem in this country is the media. That every screwed-up policy that gets through Congress can ultimately be traced to an electorate misled by the cabal in charge of information. But he’s dead now, and I think that effectively killed his message.

So anyway, it was very helpful, Ms. Fluke, and I thank you for your service to your count — wait, someone just handed me a note. Something about that Breitbart guy’s message surviving his death. And they’re even talking about a newly designed Breitbart site coming online today. I, I gotta go, Ms. Fluke. I gotta go.

I have no idea what any of this means. I just pass it along.

[Posted by Karl]

RCP’s Sean Trende is having none of this defeatism:

Conservative opinion maker George Will compares the GOP’s presidential fate to Barry Goldwater’s flop. Many key Republicans reportedly believe they are indeed “consigned to defeat.” Conservative blogger Erick Erickson promises that defeat if the GOP nominates Mitt Romney. Liberal analyst Ruy Teixeira predicts that Obama will retain the White House as decisively as he attained it four years ago.

RTWT for a wide-ranging explanation of what should be obvious to the doomsayers, i.e., the 2012 presidential election is far from over.  I will focus of Teixera’s analysis from a different angle from Trende, because it turns out that I have already debunked most of it before it was written.

Unsurprisingly, Teixeira leads with some Emerging Democratic Majority theory, based on the results of a recent Pew poll.  The most recent Quinnipiac poll still has Obama short of his demographic targets.

However, Teixeira spends most of his time with three cherry-picked election forecasting models (such models are generally developed to help explain elections, but people cannot help from forecasting with them).  I have already written about two of them.  Political scientists have found Nate Silver’s model has a larger mean average error than all of the most well-known election forecasting models.  Alan Abramowitz’s “Time For a Change” model favors Obama, in part through the power of incumbency — but his model has over-predicted the vote of the incumbent candidate by at least 1.85% in each of the last four presidential elections.  The third model, from Larry Bartels, relies not only on incumbency, but also implies that that income loss in 2009 will translate into a gain of more than 7 percentage points in Obama’s expected vote margin this year.  Although untested by other political scientists, Bartels himself notes this theory runs contrary to his prior argument that “voters are overwhelmingly focused on the here and now” and “must be taken with a large grain of salt,” particularly given the high ratio of parameters to data.

Indeed, this is why I prefer simpler models that Teixeira conveniently avoids.  The “Bread and Peace” model from Douglas Hibbs uses only two variables (real disposable personal income per capita and military fatalities in unprovoked wars).  That model’s results last month were not encouraging for Obama, even if you modify the model to give him credit as the incumbent.  Since then, real disposable income has fallen.

Among newer models, there is the “Nowcast,” from professors Charles Tien of and Michael Lewis-Beck, who have done a fair amount of work in this area.  The Nowcast is based largely on the National Business Index (NBI), which the authors define as the percentage of respondents who say “business conditions are better” minus the percentage of respondents who say “business conditions are worse,” as measured in the national University of Michigan Survey of Consumers.  This NBI, measured in April six months before the November election, correlates highly with incumbent vote share since 1980.  The most recent Nowcast (.pdf) — just one month from April — has Obama at 47.4%, which not only projects an Obama loss but one outside the average overall model error of 2.2%.

In short, it is easy to be bearish on the GOP amid a fractious fight among ostensibly weak candidates.  It is also easy to understand why someone like Teixeira would want to proclaim inevitable doom even before the GOP nominee.  But it seems like Will and Erickson are letting their opinions of Romney cloud their judgment.

–Karl

Link courtesy of katy at Hot Air:

This video is a horrible way to treat a real victim. Luckily, it appears Ms. Fluke is no such thing.

[Posted by Karl]

It seems like people care about this even less than Michigan and Arizona, although it’s the last stop before Super Tuesday.  RCP’s Scott Conroy notes the result is anyone’s guess.  The state’s GOP chairman predicts a win for either Mitt Romney or Ron Paul.  In a primary campaign marked by low turnout, there are reports of standing-room-only crowds at many locations.  In fact, about 1,500 people were turned away from pooled Benton County caucuses in Kennewick by event organizers after rooms at the Three Rivers Convention Center reached capacity this morning.  The rules are not unlike those for Iowa, with a straw poll followed by votes that actually select the delegates.  Inasmuch as people need not stick around past the straw poll, Ron Paul could make trouble for Mitt Romney on the actual delegate selection.

Here’s your map.

Update: Romney wins.  Paul and Santorum very close to each other for second.

–Karl

Andrew Breitbart’s Twitter feed was hacked tonight. The post went up less than an hour ago. It has since been removed but can still be seen on the timeline:

It’s obviously a spammer and not David Frum. So why do I mention David Frum in the headline?

The principle is this: a man is dead, but there is a buck to be made. So, we take the fact that there are a lot of eyeballs on this issue, and we put up something that has zero content, but that might make us some money. And so we attempt to cynically profit from a man’s death.

In a similar manner, David Frum tried to profit, financially but also in terms of his self-image, from Andrew Breitbart’s recent death. Frum tried (and miserably failed) to elevate himself at the expense of a man who had not been dead for 24 hours, with distortions that are patently at odds with the actual man himself.

I’m not going to link Frum’s piece, and I’m not going to quote it. It’s linked and quoted in Mickey Kaus’s piece yesterday and in Michael Walsh’s post at The Corner.

Like many others, Frum foisted upon his eager audience of leftists and losers a phony picture of Andrew — one that sharply contrasted with the far more accurate picture of him painted by people like Kaus, Walsh, and myself — who actually knew him. Mickey said of Andrew: “I would go so far as to say that Breitbart had an instinctive honesty–pretty much the opposite of what Frum charges.” That is exactly right. And as Michael observes: “As for the implicit charge of racism — these days, the last refuge of a scoundrel — that is prima facie absurd.” Also quite true.

Frum’s claim that Andrew was a dishonest racist, published the day we learned Andrew had died, was little different than a spammer who tries to make money by posting his crap product on a dead man’s Twitter feed. Frum is simply spamming the Internet with the vision of himself as Reasonable Conservative, and the occasion of Andrew’s death was simply a convenient moment for Frum to advance that pointless and stupid (but self-serving) message. Frum’s piece is an example of psychopathy — an utter lack of empathy in the cause of advancing one’s personal interests. I have chosen that word carefully and it is exactly what I mean.

In fact, I believe Frum is actually worse than the spammer. The spammer says: buy my product, it will help you lose weight, and I will make money. Frum says: buy my vision of myself as the One True Reasonable Conservative, it will help you feel good about myself . . . and I will make money. And I will feel good about myself.

But a spammer just irritates. Frum, by criticizing Andrew thoughtlessly and unfairly hours after his death, acts as a ghoulish predator who feasts on the remains of a fresh body for personal gain.

What must go through Frum’s mind, or the mind of Matt Yglesias, when they write things like this? “Somewhere, a widow and her children may stumble across my post, and see a distorted view of a man they loved, who was at the center of my life. But didn’t you hear what I said? I will feel good about myself!”

Over the years, as I have met more and more people in person about whom I had previously read things, I have come to realize that often the things you read are just flatly wrong.

And during my life I have watched other people try to rewrite my life story in front of my eyes, and even in life it’s a difficult thing to fight. It’s tremendously depressing to know that it will happen again when I die, and I won’t even have the ability to fight it.

I hope I still have friends who will.

But ultimately the work and the man have to speak for themselves. And Andrew and his work did. If someone chooses to distort him and his life’s work — to rewrite another’s story to elevate their own — that is, I have to believe, a losing strategy.

Which is why Ace says:

David Frum exceeded Andrew Breitbart in one measure only, span of life.

But not in life.

David Frum will die as he lived, gray, timid, small, spiteful, cramped in thought and bent in spirit, slender of talent and obese in self-regard, unloved, unnoticed, unremembered and unread.

. . . .

As I type this, Breitbart is more alive than David Frum has ever been.

I doubt very much that will change as the years march on.

It is the nature of the rat to envy the lion.

We should not fault the rat overly for this. For what else can the rat do?

But we should say that there are lions, and there are rats. And they are easily distinguishable.

And they are as different from each other as the sun is from the mirror that reflects it.

Scavengers have their place. They serve a function.

But scavengers know their place.

And scavengers only challenge the lion when it lies, safely, dead.

Take a look again the screenshot of the message from the spammer who hopped onto Andrew Breitbart’s Twitter feed to make a buck from Andrew’s death.

David Frum has less honor than that.

UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for the link. New readers, please bookmark the site! If you missed my post with my personal memories of Breitbart, please read it here. Trust me, my post is far more accurate a portrait than the crap spewed by Frum.

[Posted by Karl]

It seems like most of the mediasphere cannot stop talking about Rush Limbaugh’s insult of political operative Sandra Fluke.  I cannot stop thinking of Up‘s Dug the Dog:

While I like Up, I have seen this version of the movie before:

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey and Allahpundit think they have a disagreement over the point of the anti-Rush Limbaugh campaign being waged by Obama Administration, labor unions and the establishment media.  Morrissey calls it a deliberate strategy to cover up the Democrats’ economic incompetence and massively ineffective spending programs.  Allahpundit that “the Democrats are really trying to do is rebrand the GOP.”  Morrissey thinks any rebranding is ”secondary.”

The reality is that the focus on Limbaugh is all of those things.  The GOP is a minority party with no single titular leader at the moment.  Obama’s Alinskyite politics require that the Left “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”  The folks running this effort thus go to the influential – yet polarizing — figure of Rush Limbaugh.  Doing so necessarily promotes him, with the hope of forcing Republicans to either downplay Limbaugh (driving a wedge between them and their conservative base) or defend him (thereby making a polarizing figure more the face of the GOP).  It is no surprise to learn that James Carville and Paul Begala are part of this effort, as it is a variation of the Clinton Administration’s effort to make Newt Gingrich Bob Dole’s running mate in 1996.  The people behind this campaign do not see it as an “either-or” proposition; they see it as a “win-win” proposition.

Morrissey is also correct in asserting that it keeps the GOP on defense, though this is largely because GOP functionaries are only now figuring out that the attack on Limbaugh can be used to paint the Democrats as not keeping their eye on the economy, or trying to distract from the poor reception the Democrats’ agenda is getting in the financial markets.  The GOP might eventually figure out that they could have used the media’s uncritical parroting of the Left’s campaign against the media, which would quickly stop them from pursuing GOP functionaries about it.

Here we are again, with the WaPo proclaiming Republicans can no longer avoid their “Rush Limbaugh problem,” paired with the obligatory “question raising” coverage in its news coverage.  And tiresome concern troll Conor Friedersdorf again demands that the folks at National Review denounce Rush.  Meanwhile, Friedersdorf will politely disagree with his mentor Andrew Sullivan on Trig Trutherism and Sullivan’s baseless, ghoulish attempt to blame Sarah Palin for the Gabrielle Giffords shooting without indignantly admitting that Sullivan’s unhinged bile corrodes the public discourse in the same way Friedersdorf believes Rush does.   It is all very transparent, but the GOP and its supposed leaders bite anyway.  Then again, no one ever accused the GOP of being the Smart Party.

Barack Obama’s campaign to convince voters that “America is back” is a dud, so they want everyone to look at the squirrel.  When the media comes asking about Limbaugh, the Republican politician’s response ought to be: “I want to discuss the issues Americans actually care about — don’t you?”

–Karl

[Posted by Karl]

As usual, you are positively encouraged to engage in sockpuppetry in this thread. The usual rules apply.

Please, be sure to switch back to your regular handle when commenting on other threads. I have made that mistake myself.

Sockpuppet comments about the Republican primary race are strictly prohibited. If you wish to use sockpuppets for that purpose, confine your comments to this thread. Same goes for any discussion that is not funny where people want to get angry at each other. Offending comments will be summarily deleted and the violators flogged.

And remember: the worst sin you can commit on this thread is not being funny.

—

It’s going to be hard for the Excitable Boy to ever top the unhinged dementia of Trig Trutherism, but it won’t be for lack of trying.  Andrew Sullivan’s latest fever dream involves not Sarah Palin, but one of his other favorite designated villains, the Prime Minister of Israel:

Here’s a prediction. Netanyahu, in league and concert with Romney, Santorum and Gingrich, will make his move to get rid of Obama soon. And he will be more lethal to this president than any of his domestic foes.

Sully does not quite have Benjamin Netanyahu on a grassy knoll… not yet, anyway.  Rather, he imagines Netanyahu in a conspiracy to launch a war against Iran to advantage the GOP in this year’s election, undoubtedly (and ironically) stroking a white Persian cat as he issues the attack orders.

A sane person might read stories of Israeli saber-rattling and at least consider the possibility that Israel is actually trying to avoid military action.  Or that stories about Israel not warning the US of an attack on Iran are designed to create plausible deniability for the Obama administration.  Instead, Andrew Sullivan apparently believed Andrew Adler’s lunatic comment speculating that Israel’s most inner circles have thought about ordering a hit on Pres. Obama — and he’s running with it.

Perhaps this is not a surprise, given the role Sullivan has awarded the Likud party in some of the bizarre conspiracy theories he has floated in recent years.  However, this new delusion almost necessarily implicates Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a former head of the Labor Party. Indeed, Sullivan also believes Netanyahu would rally “a key part of the Democratic fundraising machinery to side entirely with Israel against the US president.”  To whom is Sullivan referring?  He could mean anyone.  After all, this latest conspiracy theory is diverse, involving not just Jews, but a Mormon and a couple of Catholics (if only as henchmen).

What I really want to know: Who will portray Sullivan when this is turned into a major motion picture by Oliver Stone?

–Karl

“Conservatives used to take it, and we’re not taking it any more.”

– Andrew Breitbart

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus is dead on. And David Frum has solidified my decision not to respect Frum at all.