The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.03.13

Posted on | January 3, 2013 | 6 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
House Refuses To Take Up Sandy Relief

NJ Governor Chris Christie

Christie, NJ congressmen blast Boehner for delay in vote

SecState Clinton Discharged From Hospital
Docs confident she’ll make full recovery from clot

Workers’ Taxes To Increase Despite Fiscal Cliff Deal
Social Security payroll tax cut expires; rate goes back to 6.2%



POLITICS
Coming Out Swinging? Scott Brown Questions Markey’s Residency

Ex-Senator Scott Brown v. Congressman Ed Markey for Kerry’s seat?

“You got Ed Markey: Does he even live here? You’ve got to check the travel records. Now I’ve come back and forth every weekend, almost for three years, and I see, you know, most of the delegation. I have never seen Ed on the airplane, ever.”
Related: Stephen Lynch Mulls Run, Could Take On Markey In Primary

Obama, Homeland Security Sidestep Congress On Immigration Again

Illinois Legislators Take Up Gay Marriage

Journal-News Outs Gun Owners, Sparks Retaliation, Hires Armed Guards

Obama Signs $633 Billion Defense Bill Despite Vow To Veto

The Ten Weirdest Parts Of The Fiscal Cliff Bill



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Brent Hits 11-Month High On Fiscal Cliff Deal, PRC Data: NYMEX $93.87, Brent $112.70
Avis Buying Zipcar To Kick-Start Growth
Stock Market Up; So Are Your Taxes
Starbucks To Open First Vietnamese Store Next Month
Bank of America Closes Above $12 Amid Market Gains
Fiscal Cliff Euphoria Fades As Investor Caution Returns
Apple Says Do Not Disturb Bug Will Fix Itself
Ubuntu’s Phone OS Is Nothing Without Hardware
Microsoft Buys R2 Studios To Boost XBox
Polarois To Open Fotobar Stores To Print Pix From Phones
Microsoft’s “Major Nelson” Counts Down To E3 2013
Hyundai Adopts Google Maps, Begins The Apple v. Google Car Wars



SPORTS
Louisville Upsets Florida, Wins Sugar Bowl 33-23

Louisville QB Teddy Bridgewater warming up before the game

Teddy Bridgewater leads the #21 Cardinals to victory past stunned Gators


 Ravens’ Ray Lewis To Retire After Playoffs

NHL Talks To Resume Today With Mediator Present

Nyets Snap Thunder’s Home Win Streak; Durant Ejected

Bills To Interview Oregon’s Chip Kelly

Heat Rally To Beat Mavs In OT, 119-109

#7 Syracuse Beats Rutgers, Boeheim Passes Bobby Knight With Win #903

Hornets Still Struggling, Fall To Rockets 104-92

Black Caps Lambasted For Cape Town “Shambles”



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Patti Page Dead At 85

Clara Ann Fowler, 1927-2013, RIP

Most successful female singer of the 1950s, best known for “Tennessee Waltz” and “(How Much Is That) Doggie In The Window”

Dead Papparazzo Absolutely Convinced Bieber Was Toking

Unspeakable Armenian’s Paternity De Jure

Julianne Hough Claims She Was Abused As A Child

Jennifer Lawrence On How Acting Is Stupid

Sofia Vergara’s Fiance Thrown Out Of Miami Hot Spot


Ke$ha Plays For Both Teams, IYKWIMAITYD

Did Brad Pitt And Angelina Jolie Get Married On Christmas?

Holiday Box Office: “Django” Almost Catches “Hobbit” On New Year’s Day

So Much For A Quiet New Year’s Eve, Eh Lindsay?

Russell Crowe Responds to Adam Lambert’s “Les Miz” Slam



FOREIGNERS
India Rape Suspects Face Murder Charges
Pakistani Officials Credit Missile Strike With Six Kills Including Mullah Nazir
UN Estimates Over 60K Killed In Syrian Fighting
ROK Press Receives Great Successor’s Speech With Cynicism
Venezuela Unsettled By Silence Regarding Chavez
President Of Central African Republic Fires Son From Defense Minister Post; Army Chief Also Sacked As Rebels Continue Advance
Google CEO To Visit North Korea
Pressure Builds To Nix Gift Of Tanks, Fighters To Egypt



BLOGS & STUFF
Protein Wisdom: “Why The Obama Tax Hikes Have Only Just Begun”
Belmont Club: Till Grendel Come To Heorot
Sister Toldjah: Why Was The Senate’s Sandy Bill Larded Up With Unrelated Pork?
Breitbart: Enough Republicans Willing To Dump Boehner
Power Line: Up Next, Attacking The Filibuster
National Review: Limiting The Damage
Atlas Shrugs: Leftist Jihadist Media Nexus
Newsmax: GOP Braces For Next Fight Over Debt Ceiling
NewsBusters: Krugman Says Obama May Go Down In History As The Wimp Who Threw It All Away
Gateway Pundit: Obama Says Fiscal Cliff Bill Will Reduce Deficit (Deal Adds $4 Trillion To Deficit)
Jihad Watch: Muslims Brutally Beat American Jewish Student In Venice
Hot Air: Democratic Rep On Cliff Deal – No Worries, Your Unemployment Check Is In The Mail
Doug Powers: After Warning Congress About Spending, Obama Heads Back To Hawaii

Category: Live at Five

Tina Brown’s Mysterious Career: How Much Is That Zeitgeist in the Window?

Posted on | January 2, 2013 | 48 Comments

Cheap easy-to-use digital self-publishing software has made many things obsolete, including overpaid magazine editors who once allegedly had an inerrant instinct for finding The Next New Thing:

Audaciously drawing grand (and almost completely unsupportable) conclusions from small things. Carnival barking in print form. Everything’s the Most Important, the Latest, the Best. News You Can Use; Is Your Hair-Dryer Giving You Brain Cancer? Tune in next paragraph to find out. . . .
I guess it turned out that Tina Brown didn’t have a skill so much as she had an inclination, and it turned out many thousands of other people had the same inclination, and the same level of skill. Her One Great Big Trick — making splashy but daffy claims about What It All Means — turned out to be a pretty small trick, easily duplicated.

That’s from Ace of Spades, who’s probably getting tired of me grabbing his good ideas and then yammering on forever like I’ve made some kind of glorious discovery, seeing as how this is the second time today I’ve run that predictable play. But if you run off-tackle left on first down and gain six yards, what the hell? Run off-tackle left on second down, and keep running it as long as you’re still gaining good yardage.

Stick with what works, and force the defense to adjust, then hit them with something new — a play-action pass that starts out looking like off-tackle left — to take advantage of their adjustment. Otherwise . . . off-tackle left.

The meta-analytic point I’m trying to make is that nothing is so fresh and original that it can’t grow stale, or be replaced by imitations. If you are no longer having success producing the same thing you were producing 10 or 15 years ago, consider the possibility that you have failed to adjust efficiently to changes in the market.

So, back to Tina Brown: Was she ever really all that? Or was it the case that Tina Brown developed an exaggerated prestige as a magazine editor based on misperceptions that she deliberately exploited in order to enhance her image as Queen of the Zeitgeist?

What is Tina Brown’s great skill? I would argue that it is her ability to persuade rich people to lose money. Lots and lots of money. More than two years ago, when the “Newsbeast” merger was announced, I pointed out this trait and made a prediction:

Looking through the history of Ms. Brown’s career — Tatler, Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Talk . . . .
The investors can expect to lose a crapload of cash in the process. The New Yorker reportedly lost $42 million in three years (1995-97) under Ms. Brown’s editorship. Talk lost an impressive $80 million during its two-year existence. Whatever else you might say about Tina Brown, she’s undeniably brilliant at convincing investors to lose money on her projects.

How many people can run a business that loses $42 million in three years, then convince someone to back them on a new project that loses $80 million in two years? And if you’ve got that kind of money to throw around — “Here, Tina, go lose us $20 million a year” — you can buy yourself an awful lot of prestige, e.g., two tables at the White House Correspondents Dinner and an after-party to die for.

With $20 million a year to throw away on a Web site, one of the things you can do with that money is hire a roomful of publicists to promote the idea that you’re an innovative genius.

Maybe, once upon a time, Tina Brown really did have something fresh and original, but her reputation as the magazine “It Girl” was always a very expensive product, one she purchased with other people’s money.

Nice work, if you can get it. But there are lots of smart people who lack Tina Brown’s knack for talking rich people out of their money, and it’s a crying shame they can’t afford a roomful of publicists to promote their reputations as innovative geniuses.

That’s why I promote Ace of Spades for free. It’s the least I can do, considering how much of his stuff I steal every day.

ACE OF SPADES
If Blogging Were Astrophysics,
He’d Be as Famous as Stephen Hawking

UPDATE: Brace yourselves for emetic news:

Andrew Sullivan raises over $100,000
for ad-free blog in first six hours
Shortly after announcing that he would be leaving The Daily Beast and moving to a purely subscription-based business model, blogger Andrew Sullivan says he has seen “amazing” results. “We’re well into the six figures,” he tells TechCrunch. Sullivan estimates that in the roughly half-day since he made his announcement, about a third of the people who paid for a subscription to The Dish have given more than the $19.99 per year minimum

I’d stick my head in the oven, but our oven is electric . . .




 

UPDATE II: Let any independent conservative blogger try to answer this question: “What the hell is it with liberals and the ‘more money than sense’ factor?”

Sullivan said he wasn’t sure how many subscribers at a base rate of $19.99 a year he would need to make the enterprise work long-term; the blog not only consists of him, but seven staffers. (Reuters’ Felix Salmon estimates that he’ll need to earn $750,000 a year to keep the operation running.)
“To tell you the truth I’m not entirely sure, because the price point has more or less been blown through by about a third of our subscribers. About a third of them are paying more than we asked for,” he said, adding that the largest individual subscription thus far was for $10,000.

TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS? A blog with a staff of seven? Hot Air went for years with a staff of three.

If any right-wing billionaires want to know why liberals dominate the media, I’d be willing to explain it to them for, say, $8 million or so.

 

Category: Ace of Spades, Journalism

Obama ‘Has Brought Us to Our Knees. He Is Lowering Our Standard of Living.’

Posted on | January 2, 2013 | 13 Comments

Jennifer Stefano of Americans for Prosperity was a guest today on Neil Cavuto’s show, and she wasn’t pulling her punches:

“The president has lied on a number of issues. He promised not to raise taxes on the middle-class — he raised taxes on us today. . . . If any of us are stupid enough to go do work and collect a paycheck and not take from the government? We are now paying more to the government. . . .
“The president said he would fundamentally transform America. He has. He has brought us to our knees. He is lowering our standard of living. He is deliberately doing the fiscal initiatives that will hurt and cripple us. . . . This is a long dark period we are going into for America and I would like to say positive things because i am an optimist but it is hard. This is going to hammer us. We are going to be hammered.”

You can follow Jennifer Stefano on Twitter and also be sure to follow her AFP colleague Katy Abram — these ladies know how to fight!

Category: Barack Obama, Budget, Taxes, Tea Party

Ted Cruz Vows to Lead Opposition to Dianne Feinstein’s Gun-Grab Bill

Posted on | January 2, 2013 | 28 Comments

Incoming Texas Sen. Ted Cruz vowed Wednesday to “speak out loudly” against anti-gun legislation proposed by California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and supported by President Obama.

Cruz said it was “wrong, cynical and misguided” for liberals to “exploit” this month’s shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, as an excuse to promote legislation that he denounced as “unconstitutional.” The Texas Republican told a conference call of bloggers and journalists that the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the “right to keep and bear arms” is an “integral part of the Bill of Rights.”

Just two days after the Dec. 14 shooting that killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary, Feinstein said on NBC’s Meet the Press that she would introduce a bill to “ban the sale, the transfer, the transportation and the possession” of certain semi-automatic weapons, as well as of “big clips, drums or strips of more than 10 bullets.” Feinstein was a leading proponent of the so-called “assault weapons ban” that Congress and then-President Clinton enacted in 1994, but which expired in 2004.

Cruz said Feinstein’s bill would “create a national firearms registry,” a measure he denounced as having historically been a prelude to the confiscation of firearms. He said “everyone was horrified” by the Newtown massacre, but said he would oppose “misguided policy” such Feinstein’s proposal that he said would in effect strip citizens of their gun ownership rights.

Strongly backed by the Tea Party movement, Cruz was elected by a landslide margin in Texas after winning a hard-fought GOP primary, and is viewed as a rising star among conservative Republicans. He said the GOP “got clobbered” in this year’s election because they did “a singularly poor job” of articulating their party’s core principles.

Cruz said those who are writing the Tea Party’s “obituary” are mistaken, and predicted a “strong year” for the GOP in 2004 if “Republicans stand for principle” — something he said they failed to do in recent budget negotations with President Obama.

Cruz called the “fiscal cliff” legislation that Congress passed yesterday “a really lousy deal” and said he “would have voted no” on the bill if he had been in office. “It was a mistake for Republicans to be complicit” in raising taxes, Cruz said, adding that the deal “did nothing to solve the problem” of a “federal budget [that] is out of control.”

 


Category: Constitution, Senate, Texas

Kathy Griffin, Andrew Sullivan and Other Desperately Unfunny ‘Faggot’ Jokes

Posted on | January 2, 2013 | 23 Comments

When Charlie Sheen recently made headlines by shouting “lying faggot assholes” at the opening of his new bar in Cabo, the joke was that it was “homophobic” nature of his words that constituted something truly scandalous. Charlie’s whore-mongering and cocaine habit are not controversial — “Hey, who are we to judge?” — but it’s an impermissible ThoughtCrime for him to speak the word “faggot.”

This reveals the totalitarian impulse behind identity politics and what is dismissively called “political correctness”: Attempting to control thought by setting boundaries on language, supposedly to protect those who are victimized and oppressed by society. It is not necessary to present evidence that Charlie Sheen has ever harmed homosexuals — or that his words were motivated by hostility to homosexuals — in order for the Thought Police to make a political example of him with the casual accusation of “homophobia.”

The moral of the story is clear: Whore-mongers and drug addicts are OK with the Thought Police, but woe be unto ye homophobes!

Anyway, Kathy Griffin made a spectacle of herself on New Year’s Eve by sexually harassing her CNN co-host Anderson Cooper who — in case you missed the news — is gay.

Griffin is what is known, in gay jargon, as a “fag hag”: A woman who tries to be “one of the boys” by hanging around gay bars.

The psychology of the fag hag is probably worth an essay of several thousand words that I don’t feel an urge to write today, except to say that these are usually rather unattractive women who seem to derive a secondhand frisson from socializing with ostentatiously gorgeous men in a hypersexualized environment. This satisfies an immature impulse — a desire for superficial “popularity” — and provides the fag hag with a low-risk source of male companionship, along with an obvious excuse to protect herself from feelings of sexual rejection.

Which, if you’re Kathy Griffin, you’ve had to deal with a lot.

Griffin has parlayed her fag-hag act into a career, having discovered that gay men will buy tickets to hear ugly women tell raunchy jokes, in much the way that its always the old fat drag queens who serve as wisecracking emcees for transvestite beauty pageants. Ace of Spades remarks on Griffin’s act:

Kathy Griffin, who is to comedy what Cher is to music, that is to say, irrelevant and old and weird-looking from plastic surgery, continues scrabbling at her last possible handhold of cultural relevance. . . .
Almost all of the media continues chasing the same minority cohort — liberal, urban, sexually loose.

Two words, Ace: Disposable income.

Unlike the respectable bourgeois suburban Republicans working to pay their mortgages and send their kids to college, the hip urbanites have money to throw away on name-brand fashion products and other gaudy expensive baubles that the Wal-Mart shoppers don’t buy. Also, the urban market in New York, L.A. and D.C. includes people who are cultural trend-setters in ways that pudgy accountants in New Jersey, Bakersfield and Fauqier County can never hope to be. But I digress . . .

Speaking of people Ace despises, Andrew Sullivan has treated us to a hilariously pompous display of hand-wringing as he announces he will take his “Daily Dish” blog — which in 2011 switched to Tina Brown’s Daily Beast after years under James Fallows’s Atlantic umbrella — back to a stand-alone site with a $19.99 subscription model:

In return for purchasing a subscription, Sullivan promises his readers, “No corporate ownership, no advertising demands, no pressure for pageviews … just a concept designed to make your reading experience as good as possible, and to lead us not into temptation.”
For now, Sullivan is offering readers a chance to sign up for $19.99 a year, which he notes, “translates to $1.67 a month.”

Translation: “I think I can make more money this way, but let me drape this crude financial calculus in a lot of altruistic anti-commercial argle-bargle, just to maintain my credibility as an intellectual idealist — which is, of course, my stock in trade.”

Me? I’m just a Shameless Capitalist Blogger, reminding you once more of The Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

At least I spare you the phony “progressive” idealism, eh?




 

UPDATE: Bill Quick at Daily Pundit:

What all this glosses over, I think, is that The Daily Beast didn’t want to keep Sullivan on.
I wonder why?

That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I mean, it was regarded as something of a coup for Tina Brown to sign Sullivan in April 2011. Now, barely a year and a half later, she decides he’s not worth the cost of keeping? Hmmmm.

UPDATE II: Christine Haughney of the New York Times:

Mr. Sullivan said in an e-mail message that he could have remained at the Daily Beast under a new contract. But he said that as he and his two partners started negotiating, they “began to see the overpowering logic of real independence.”
He added that the Dish is going to stay in New York City, where he and his two business partners are based, “for the foreseeable future.” He added, “We need to be together as a group.”

It’s important to understand that Sully had “real independence” at his blog for many years, from 2000 until he transferred it under Time magazine’s editorial umbrella. He subsequently switched it from Time to the Atlantic and then to Tina’s Daily Beast, so that he’s been sort of a blogging free agent all along.

So it’s difficult to see why, amid contract negotiations with Tina, “the overpowering logic of real independence” should suddenly occur to Sully and his business partners. Something about this narrative doesn’t exactly add up, does it?

 

Category: Ace of Spades, Andrew Sullivan, Celebrities, Culture

The Demographics of Envy

Posted on | January 2, 2013 | 17 Comments

“No one has been through the fire more so than our congressperson, and we in the district have sent him back because we have faith in him, and that he has our interests in mind, and quite frankly he’s one of us.”
— Keith L. T. Wright, co-chairman of the New York Democratic Party, praising Rep. Charles Rangel, June 25, 2012

“It is the inordinately selfish . . . who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness.”
— Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, 1951

Advocates of economic redistribution do not generally think of themselves as motivated by selfishness. Egalitarianism typically presents itself as a species of humanitarian philanthropy so that its political advocates are seldom compelled to defend their implicit claims to be acting in the altruistic spirit of charity.

The Democratic Party gets a free pass in this regard. Let any thievish political scoundrel put a “D” beside his name, and he thereby gains for himself the presumption that his every impulse is motivated by a selfless concern for the plight of the downtrodden poor.

As a hustle — a scam, a racket — this is brilliant. And it is an insult to people with common sense to expect us to buy into this hustle.

So last night, as the House debated the “fiscal cliff” deal, I was insulted when Charles Rangel got up and began ranting about how wrong it was for Republicans to want to reduce the deficit by cutting spending.

While I have been unable to find a transcript or video of that speech, it was shocking to think that Rangel expected his political sermon to be taken seriously, given what we know about his own shabby ethics:

A House panel on Tuesday [Nov. 16, 2010] found Representative Charles B. Rangel guilty of 11 counts of ethical violations, ruling that his failure to pay some taxes, improper solicitation of charitable donations and failure to accurately report his personal income had brought dishonor on the House. . . .
Since the accusations were first raised two years ago, Mr. Rangel has acknowledged bookkeeping errors in his financial disclosure forms and has said that his failure to pay more than $60,000 in taxes on rental income from a Dominican beach house was an oversight, caused, in part, by his inability to speak Spanish. . . .
The investigation of Mr. Rangel began after news reports that he had accepted four rent-stabilized apartments at prices hundreds of dollars per month below market value.
In the months that followed, Mr. Rangel confronted more ethics accusations. He was accused of failing to declare hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal assets on his financial disclosure forms, failing to pay state and federal taxes on rental income on his villa in the Dominican Republic and helping to preserve a tax loophole worth hundreds of millions of dollars for an oil company at the same time that he was seeking a $1 million contribution to the Rangel Center from a company executive.

Every cell of Charles Rangel’s being  is corrupt and immoral. His entire career has been one enormous lie and everyone who ever voted for him should feel a deep sense of personal shame. Yet despite his proven wrongdoing — which would have been enough to send any  ordinary citizen to federal prison — this congressional crook was re-elected by his constituents and remains a Democrat in good standing.

Why do Republicans sit silently and accept this? What combination of cowardice and stupidity in the GOP leadership grants a free pass to such despicable creatures as Charles Rangel?

Do Republicans actually believe that citizens of Harlem and other such deep-blue districts are incapable of understanding that the absurd philantropic pose of Democrats like Charles Rangel — “He has our interests in mind”! — is a perverse crime against truth?

Rangel is peddling the Big Lie, and until the GOP stands up to Big Liars like him, spare me your lame excuses about “demographics”:

Americans have been repeatedly told in recent years that “the rich” (however that term is defined) are not paying “their fair share” of taxes, and that this greedy unfairness is the explanation of anything that needs explaining. Did the local factory lay off workers? The rich are not paying their fair share! Is your daughter struggling to repay her student loans? The rich are not paying their fair share!
Especially in the “swing states” during last year’s election campaign, voters heard this Democrat message so often, in so many iterations, that it must have seemed like the universal panacea, a sort of snake-oil miracle cure. Whatever your problem — obesity, dandruff, halitosis, chronic flatulence — the Democrats promised to cure it by finally forcing the rich to Pay Their Fair Share. This message proved to be amply satisfactory to people too stupid or too lazy to bother themselves with arithmetic. Perhaps it is not entirely a coincidence that comparatively few of those math-deficient voters are themselves rich.
Since their Election Day catastrophe, Republicans have been wringing their hands over “demographics” (by which they mean black and Hispanic voters), but exit-poll data show that economics may explain more than demographics. Barack Obama spent much of the campaign espousing a message that pitted “the rich” against “the middle class,” but in the end, a majority of the middle class actually voted for Mitt Romney. While the Republican challenger got 53 percent among those earning more than $50,000 a year — who comprised 59 percent of the electorate, according to exit polls — Obama won by piling up massive margins among the poor and those struggling at the lower edges of middle-class status. Although voters making less than $30,000 a year were only 20 percent of the electorate, Obama got 63 percent of their vote, and he got 57 percent of those with annual incomes between $30,000 and $50,000. Among the Seven Deadly Sins, not even Lust is more important than Envy when it comes to electing Democrats. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 

 


Category: Budget, Charlie Rangel, Congress, Conservatism 101, Corruption, New York, Taxes

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.02.13

Posted on | January 2, 2013 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
House Approves Fiscal Cliff “Compromise”

Republicans oppose bill 85-151; Democrats push it through 172-16
When will we ever get spending cuts?

Great Successor Calls For Better Living Standards & Weapons For Norks
Lotsa luck with that, chubby.

France’s Hollande Vows To Revive Supertax
Still plans to raise top rate after 75% tax struck down on technical grounds



POLITICS
Minimum Wage Gap Between States Grows Wider

A fistful of dollars, not coming to a paycheck near you

Washington State went to $9.19/hour yesterday, other states also bump minimum wages

Maine Says F. Lee Bailey Too Crooked To Practice Law

Colorado Pot Clubs Celebrate The New Year With Newly Legal Weed

Pennsylvania Governor To Sue NCAA Over Penn State Sanctions

Chicago’s Cardinal George Opposes Proposed Gay Marriage Bill

Alaska Senators Join Chorus Of Pols Rejecting Congressional Pay Raise

SecState Clinton Getting Blood Thinners To Dissolve Clot

Drilling Rig Grounded On Kodiak Island Provokes Usual Chorus Of Whining About Arctic Drilling



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Oil Rises To Two-Month High On Fiscal Cliff Optimism; NYMEX $91.81, Brent $111.11
Asian Stocks Rise, Yen Sinks As US Passes Budget Deal
Singapore Avoids Recession With Q4 Growth
Tribune Company Exits Bankruptcy
Lights Go Out On 75-Watt Bulbs
AA Flight Attendants Poised To Approve US Air Merger Plan
Game Over: Zynga Shuts Down PetVille, Ten Other Games
iPhone 6, iOS 7 Start Showing Up In Usage Logs
Intel To Unveil Set-Top Box, TV Service At CES
Open WebOS Ported To The Nexus 7 Gives Us The Touchpad Go That Might Have Been
Wary Of Instagram-Like Backlash, Foursquare makes Privacy Tweaks



SPORTS
Nuggets End Clippers’ Win Streak At 17

Denver forward Danilo Gallinari knocks the ball loose from Clippers center DeAndre Jordan

Swarming defense key to a 92-78 win for Denver

#13 Seminoles Beat NIU 31-10 In Orange Bowl

Rays Avoid Arbitration, Sign David Price To One Year/$10 Million

Stanford Wins Rose Bowl, Beats Badgers 20-14

Blazers Spoil Stoudemire’s Debut, Beat Knicks 105-100

Andy Reid: Fired By Eagles, Hired By Cardinals?

NHL Lockout: Neither Side Saying Much, But There Appears To be Progress

Pistons Hold Off Kings 103-97 For Third Straight Win

Jets Fire GM Tannenbaum, Keep Coach Ryan



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Scarlett Johansson On Marriage

Scarlett Johansson

“It isn’t important. I’m not having kids any time soon.”

Unspeakable Armenian Not Suffering From Morning Sickness
The rest of us are nauseous enough, thanks

Paparazzo Killed In Hit & Run While Trying To Snap Bieber’s Ferrari

Hugh Hefner & Crystal Harris Tie The Knot


Strictly Hush-Hush: Len Goodman Gets Married Again

Jennifer Lawrence: Addicted To Junk Food & Reality TV

Ryan Seacrest: Hosting New Year’s Eve Without Dick Clark “Surreal”



FOREIGNERS
Thousands March Against Hong Kong Leader C.Y. Leung
61 Killed In Ivory Coast New Year’s Stampede
Venezuelans On Edge Amid Shifting Signals On Chavez’ Condition
Israel Eases Some Restrictions On Gaza
NYT Reporter Denied Visa, Kicked Out Of PRC
Teenage Indian Student Busted By Singapore Cops After Bomb Threat
Is India’s Government Serious About Amending Rape Laws?



BLOGS & STUFF
Gateway Pundit: Fiscal Cliff Deal Actually Adds $4 Trillion To National Debt
Protein Wisdom: Define “Postmodern Compromise”
ZeroHedge: Putting America’s Tax Hike In Perspective
NRO Corner: It’s Not Gridlock, It’s Collapse – Our Crisis Is Political, Not Economic
Legal Insurrection: Group Claims To Have Hacked Subscriber Database Of NY Newspaper That Published Gun Owner Map
Weasel Zippers: Assploding Irony – Journal News Hires Armed Security Guards After Publishing Map Of Gun Owners
Power Line: An Optimistic Take On The Cliff Deal
Breitbart: Hollywood Gets Tax Incentive Extension
NewsBusters: Michael Moore’s New Year’s Resolution
Ed Driscoll: CNN Rings In The New Year
JustOneMinute: Obamacare – The War On Marriage Continues

Category: Live at Five

House Passes Fiscal-Cliff Deal 257-167

Posted on | January 1, 2013 | 41 Comments

Earlier today, it was reported that House Republicans would insist on adding spending cuts to the version of the fiscal-cliff deal that the Senate passed. However, faced with the likelihood that President Obama would denounce such a measure, and the Democrat-led Senate would reject the House version, the decision has now reportedly been made to permit a straight up-or-down vote on the Senate bill. It is currently being “debated” on the House floor and is expected to pass.

UPDATE: Darrell Issa has an interesting theory on the Republican Senators who voted for this deal:

BLITZER: All of those 89, including all of those conservative Republicans, including Pat Toomey and others, they were wrong?
ISSA: You know, Wolf, frankly I can’t account for what happens after midnight and all of that partying and revelry and drinking that goes on on New Years Eve at 2:00 in the morning.

Just don’t say they were “spending like drunken sailors.” At least sailors spend their own money.

They just began one hour of final debate on the bill at 9:46 p.m. ET, which means the vote should conclude shortly after 11.

UPDATE II: And they just voted to pass it, 257-167, with Democrats voting overwhelmingly in favor, and Republicans voting against it by about a 2-to-1 margin.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Barack Obama, Budget, Congress, Senate, Taxes
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin