Openthread:Sundaymorningtalkingheads

Open thread: Sunday morning talking heads

posted at 8:01 am on February 23, 2014 by Allahpundit

Set those DVRs: It’s always a capital-e Event when Susan Rice hits the Sunday shows to push some misleading White House spin. She’ll be on “Meet the Press” this morning to warn Viktor Yanukovych and his pal Vladimir that they’d better not cross Obama’s red line in Ukraine or else we’ll … just have to look the other way and pretend that they haven’t.

If you’d rather wait and watch the Rice segment in a week or two after some new fact’s emerged to prove that she lied, flip to “This Week” and watch Dubya chat with Stephanopoulos about his presidency in retrospect. An obvious question at the moment: What exactly did Bush see in Putin’s “soul” the first time they met? (Actually, Bush has already explained that.)

Meanwhile, Scott Walker will be on “Fox News Sunday” to patiently remind the media yet again that the big scandal they’re babbling about this week is a juicy, if stale, nothingburger. The full line-up is at Politico.

Tags: bush, Olympics, putin, Sunday, talk shows, Ukraine

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Openthread:Sundaymorningtalkingheads

Open thread: Sunday morning talking heads

posted at 8:01 am on February 23, 2014 by Allahpundit

Set those DVRs: It’s always a capital-e Event when Susan Rice hits the Sunday shows to push some misleading White House spin. She’ll be on “Meet the Press” this morning to warn Viktor Yanukovych and his pal Vladimir that they’d better not cross Obama’s red line in Ukraine or else we’ll … just have to look the other way and pretend that they haven’t.

If you’d rather wait and watch the Rice segment in a week or two after some new fact’s emerged to prove that she lied, flip to “This Week” and watch Dubya chat with Stephanopoulos about his presidency in retrospect. An obvious question at the moment: What exactly did Bush see in Putin’s “soul” the first time they met? (Actually, Bush has already explained that.)

Meanwhile, Scott Walker will be on “Fox News Sunday” to patiently remind the media yet again that the big scandal they’re babbling about this week is a juicy, if stale, nothingburger. The full line-up is at Politico.

Tags: bush, Olympics, putin, Sunday, talk shows, Ukraine

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Openthread:U.S.vs.CanadainOlympichockey

Open thread: U.S. vs. Canada in Olympic hockey semifinal

posted at 11:21 am on February 21, 2014 by Allahpundit

Noon ET on NBC Sports, or you can watch the livestream online by logging in via your cable-provider username and password. For hockey fans, it’s a rematch of the scintillating 2010 gold-medal game between two evergreen powerhouses. For the other 97 percent of us, it’s a magical brew of nationalism and revenge for not one but two overtime heartbreaks. According to Gallup, 93 percent of Americans rate Canada favorably; if they beat the U.S. again, that number could sink to the high 80s. Stakes are high.

The winner gets Sweden, which survived the Scandinavian version of U.S./Canada in the other semifinal, for the gold on Sunday. The U.S. has made it to the finals twice in the past 30 years but hasn’t won it all since Miracle on Ice. While we wait, enjoy this dissection of possible shenanigans in the judging for last night’s women’s figure skating finals. Experts seem shocked that a Russian skater, on Russian ice, somehow outpointed Yuna Kim and Carolina Kostner, the favorites. Could there be … corruption at Sochi?

Update: Here’s the livestream.

Tags: Canada, hockey, medal, Olympics, semifinal, sochi, usa

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Openthread:U.Svs.CanadainOlympichockey

Open thread: U.S vs. Canada in Olympic hockey semifinal

posted at 11:21 am on February 21, 2014 by Allahpundit

Noon ET on NBC Sports, or you can watch the livestream online by logging in via your cable-provider username and password. For hockey fans, it’s a rematch of the scintillating 2010 gold-medal game between two evergreen powerhouses. For the other 97 percent of us, it’s a magical brew of nationalism and revenge for not one but two overtime heartbreaks. According to Gallup, 93 percent of Americans rate Canada favorably; if they beat the U.S. again, that number could sink to the high 80s. Stakes are high.

The winner gets Sweden, which survived the Scandinavian version of U.S./Canada in the other semifinal, for the gold on Sunday. The U.S. has made it to the finals twice in the past 30 years but hasn’t won it all since Miracle on Ice. While we wait, enjoy this dissection of possible shenanigans in the judging for last night’s women’s figure skating finals. Experts seem shocked that a Russian skater, on Russian ice, somehow outpointed Yuna Kim and Carolina Kostner, the favorites. Could there be … corruption at Sochi?

Tags: Canada, hockey, medal, Olympics, semifinal, sochi, usa

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Brutal: Canada stuns U.S. with late comeback in women’s hockey gold-medal game

Brutal:CanadastunsU.S.withlatecomebackin

NBC: Young married twentysomething Olympian with a two-year-old daughter is living an “alternative lifestyle”

NBC:YoungmarriedtwentysomethingOlympianwithatwo-year-old

Openthread:Sundaymorningtalkingheads

Open thread: Sunday morning talking heads

posted at 8:01 am on February 9, 2014 by Allahpundit

Hey, want to watch Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin try to attack Boehner’s latest immigration stalling without attacking him so harshly that he shelves amnesty for another year? No? Me neither. But that’s what’s on the menu this morning at “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation,” respectively.

Otherwise it’s a slate of familiar natsec names plus Sochi coverage on “MTP” and “State of the Union” exploring which new “pivotal experiments” Russia has planned for the world. At last check, the one in Syria’s not going so well. The full line-up is at Politico.

Tags: durbin, immigration, Olympics, putin, schumer, sochi, Sunday, talk shows

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SchumertoRussia:OurGreek-yogurtshipmentstoU.S.

Schumer to Russia: Our Greek-yogurt shipments to U.S. athletes will not be denied!

posted at 3:21 pm on February 7, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer has had a long and fruitful career in securing plenty of cozy little government contracts, grants, and earmarks for the several yogurt companies and the dairy industry in New York, the largest in the country behind only California and Wisconsin. He’s already been working on winning an expansion of a federal school-lunch contract on behalf of Chobani under the banner of “for the children!” martyrdom, and this week, his yogurt-kickbacking found yet another rallying cry: “For the athletes!”

The Russian government is refusing to allow New York-made yogurt to be shipped to the Winter Olympics, and Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York wants to end the impasse.The yogurt, intended for consumption by members of the U.S. Olympic team and the media, is made by Chobani, an official sponsor of the U.S. Winter Olympic and Paralympics teams. Chobani says 5,000 single-serve cups and multiserve containers await shipment in a temperature-controlled facility. …

“I understand the need for high food safety standards for dairy products,’’ Schumer wrote in a letter to Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, and Thomas Bach, head of the International Olympic Committee. “However, the U.S. government has confirmed that sanitary standards have been met to ensure that this yogurt will be safe for consumption by American citizens attending and participating in the 2014 Winter Olympics.” …

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has asked the Russian government to approve a USDA sanitary certificate for the Chobani yogurt with an assurance the yogurt would be consumed only by U.S. citizens.

Why are Russians denying the US Olympic Team its @Chobani? #Sochi2014 http://t.co/BjmzmkPx1M

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) February 5, 2014

Look. I understand that Russia is happy to thumb its nose at us whenever they can on even the silliest things, and that taking on some foreign-policy-ish tasks on behalf of your home-state interests is not a crime — but this would all be a little more laudable if A) Schumber was willing to stand up for removing trade barriers when it came to more than just yogurt, and B) Schumer weren’t so heavily involved in securing every type of regulatory and federal advantage for the dairy companies in his pocket.

— Schumer, who was the chairman of the 2013 Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, chose Fage yogurt, also produced in N.Y., to be served backstage at the Inaugural Ceremony for President Barack Obama last year.

— He recently pushed the Department of Agriculture to expand its less-than one-year-old contract with Chobani for a Greek yogurt program in schools. Chobani already has supplied more than 200,000 pounds of its products to schools in four states.

— In 2012, Schumer helped secure about $2.6 million in grants for two other yogurt plants in Batavia, N.Y.

And I don’t even want to think about the massive farm bill the just passed, ugh.

The Farm Bill the House passed Wednesday will help New York dairy farms, fruit and vegetable growers and maple producers, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer says. …

The Farm Bill also strengthens Rural Development grant and loan programs, such as the value-added producers grant program, which helps dairy farmers that start producing artisanal cheese or apple growers that enter the hard cider industry.

I know it all seems like pretty small beans in the grand scheme of things, but it’s just another part of the special-interest-serving culture of cronyism that our hugely metastasized federal government makes possible. (See what I did there?)

Tags: agriculture, Chuck Schumer, corruption, crony capitalism, exports, free trade, Olympics, regulations, Russia

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Video:NBC’snotgoingtowhitewashPutinin

Video: NBC’s not going to whitewash Putin in its Olympics coverage, is it?

posted at 2:41 pm on February 7, 2014 by Allahpundit

Via the Daily Caller, a subplot worth following as the Games begin. No way, no how, no chance will NBC whitewash Russia’s treatment of gays; the network has more to fear from activists back home if it looks the other way at that than it does from Putin by zeroing in it. Expect multiple interstitial segments on the subject. (It’s even mentioned in the ostensible Putin “highlight reel” below, in fact.) What about the rest of his record, though — endemic corruption, sponsorship of the Assad war machine, protection for Iran’s nuclear ambitions at the UN, and assorted acts of general thuggishness? Ignoring him entirely and focusing on the events isn’t an option, and not just because, since Munich at least, Olympics coverage has always had a politics/news component built into it. These are “Putin’s Games” to an extent rarely achieved by other foreign leaders in hosting past Olympics. He dominates his country in a way that individual members of other authoritarian regimes, like China’s, seldom do. And he spent more money — lots more — than anyone else in history to make Sochi a testament to Russia’s, i.e. his, greatness.

The theme of these Games is simple: this is Putin’s pop-culture reassertion of Russia, a worldwide media-saturated insistence on its modern power and capacities, all done with a flash and a reach that no diplomatic summit could ever match. Dissident Russian voices such as Alexei Navalny, Masha Gessen, and the members of Pussy Riot all call these “Putin’s Games”; they talk of a pharaoh intent on building, and displaying, his pyramids. In fact, minus the tone of derision, when you talk to Russian officials close to Putin, the explanation for his motives is not so different. The level of risk may be greater than anyone quite imagined in 2007, but Putin wants to show that his country is capable of doing more than sucking oil and gas out of the ground and building a new Dubai in Russia. Putin, obviously, is no democrat. Not remotely. He is not interested in the contemporary requirements of human rights. He is not interested in empowering a real legislature or ceding true independence to the courts. Democracy is not his interest. Stability and development—those are his themes, first and last. And Putin regards any and all attempts from the West, from human-rights organizations, and from the press to call him to account on nearly any issue as acts of anti-Russian self-righteousness and hypocrisy. That is how he sees the world and his critics. He doesn’t hide it. He performs his contempt. That is part of the hard-man persona.

You can’t ignore him but you can whitewash him, especially if you’re worried that too much criticism might lead to problems with access that NBC’s counting on for its broadcasts. And the Syria bit below is, in fact, a whitewash: The reason Assad was in a position to use chemical weapons in the first place was because Putin, along with his friends in Tehran, has helped prop him up for the past three years. The WMD disarmament deal he brokered was a sham from the start, too. Assad isn’t disarming, just like we all knew he wouldn’t, but our dopey president had to play along once he realized there was no support in the U.S. for a attack on Syria to enforce his “red line.” Six months after that fiasco, Putin’s alleged peacemaking in the country now involves ignoring the fact that his close ally is dropping barrel bombs on Syrian cities. Maybe NBC will get to all of this in due time — the opening ceremony is happening as I write this but hasn’t even aired in the U.S. yet — but as I say, it’s a subplot worth following.

In lieu of an exit question, note the symbolism at the big opener in keeping with Putin’s theme of a return to Russian “greatness”:

Russia in the house. #Sochi pic.twitter.com/CLUy9FUzNo

— Rachel Bachman (@Bachscore) February 7, 2014

Tags: Bob Costas, chemical weapons, gay rights, Iran, NBC, Olympics, putin, Syria

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Sochi venues turning into Olympic-style nightmares

SochivenuesturningintoOlympic-stylenightmares posted

ObamaCaregoingforyouthswithanOlympicsad

ObamaCare going for youths with an Olympics ad blitz

posted at 6:51 pm on January 8, 2014 by Erika Johnsen

Are enough young and healthy people signing up for health insurance plans through the ObamaCare exchanges to balance out the new and costlier risk pools created by older and sicker individuals more likely to be interested in doing so? We don’t know, because the White House is flatly refusing to tell us — which doesn’t seem too bode well for them (you know that they would be reveling in the release of that information if the numbers were on their side), and they certainly aren’t slowing down on their sustained PR effort to convince the all-important youth demographic that ObamaCare is just about the best thing that will ever happen to them. Via ABC:

The White House is planning to make a major play to sign up young and healthy Americans for Obamacare when the Winter Olympics open next month.

The Department of Health and Human Services will launch a TV ad blitz to take advantage of anticipated increased viewership on NBC stations which will carry the Olympic coverage between Feb. 7 and 23, an administration official confirmed to ABC News.

The official said the ads would run in markets with the highest rates of uninsured, but declined to specify the locations or the amount that would be spent.

The ads will encourage uninsured people, particularly young adults, to enroll in Obamacare coverage before the March 31 deadline.

No word on exactly how big the buy is or what the ads will look like, but it’s probably a good call on the advertising front — Wide audience? Check. High-injury extreme sports? Check. Advantageous and prolonged timing smack in the middle of the latter half of the enrollment period? Check — and it sounds like the White House is going to need it.

Tags: advertising, health insurance, ObamaCare, Olympics, young

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NoObamas,Bidens,CabinetmemberswillattendSochi

No Obamas, Bidens, Cabinet members will attend Sochi Olympics

posted at 8:51 pm on December 17, 2013 by Mary Katharine Ham

Sorry, we’re not sorry, Putin.

WASHINGTON — The United States will not be sending any of its top officials — either President or Mrs. Obama or Vice President or Dr. Biden — to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, as part of its delegation to the games.

A former federal official, Janet Napolitano, will instead be leading the U.S. delegation, the White House announced Tuesday, and two out LGBT athletes — Billie Jean King and Caitlin Cahow — will be a part of the delegation as well.

In addition to the Obamas and Bidens not attending the Olympics, no current cabinet members will be a part of the country’s delegation either.

“The U.S. Delegation to the Olympic Games represents the diversity that is the United States,” White House spokesman Shin Inouye told BuzzFeed. “All our delegation members are distinguished by their accomplishments in government service, civic activism, and sports. We are proud of each and every one of them and think they will serve as great ambassadors of the United States to the Olympic Games.”

On the other hand, can it really be considered a snub to deprive a country of Joe Biden to thoroughly grope their womenfolk at formal events?

Enjoy Janet Napolitano, Russia! Tennis star Billie Jean King, who is openly gay, will attend the ceremonies— likely a reference to and critique of Putin’s recent crackdown on gay Russians.

Obama’s delegation to the closing ceremonies in Sochi will include speed skaters Bonnie Blair and Eric Heiden, along with women’s ice hockey star Caitlin Cahow.
The presence of the openly gay King on Feb. 7 in Sochi is likely a direct slam on Russia’s anti-homosexuality laws; but Dmitry Chernyshenko, who leads Russia’s Olympic organizing committee, has said there will be no repercussions against athletes who wear rainbow pins or show other small-scale disdain for the government policy.

Tags: Barack Obama, Beijing, Billie Jean King, Janet Napolitano, Joe Biden, Olympics, sochi

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