TONIGHT ON THE INDEPENDENTS (written by Matt Welch, taken from Reason)
---------------------------
Which is a bit different than President Obama's characterization of the now-disgraced Gruber at a press conference Sunday as "some advisor who never worked on our staff" and whose opinion "I completely disagree" with. When Obama was asked at that conference whether he misled the American people to get his signature bill passed, he replied "No, I did not." Which definitely comes as news to us who were paying attention in real time.

Party Panelists Guy Benson (Townhall Political Editor) and Will Rahn (Daily Beast senior editor) help sort through that mess, plus the pre-emptive state of emergency in Ferguson, Bill Cosby's sexual assault allegations, and the Drug Enforcement Administration's sudden interest in football locker rooms.

Bill Nye the Science Guy will be on to talk about his new book, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation. Foreign policy analyst Michael Weiss will talk about the latest ISIS beheading. Author/energy analyst Robert Bryce will discuss the Keystone pipeline. And Kmele Foster will give the pros and cons of the controversial, surveillance-reforming USA Freedom Act, which may go up for a Senate vote as soon as this week.

INFO
----
Ripped with the Diamond VC500. Using the software that came packaged with the dongle. (It's called EZ Ripper.) In that software there's a "DVD Standard" which rips the video to .mpg at 720x480 with some terrible black bars. I load that file into AVIDemux. Cut the file into multiple parts to remove the commercials. Rejoin, crop, and resize those files using the same tool. For conversion I used MPEG4 AVC (x264), 2 pass on video and AAC (faac) on audio.

Not part of the scene. Just admire their naming standards.

General 
Complete name : The.Independents.2014.11.17.WS.SDTV.x264-XAiO.mp4 
Format : MPEG-4 
Format profile : Base Media 
Codec ID : isom 
File size : 352 MiB 
Duration : 42mn 14s 
Overall bit rate : 1 165 Kbps 
Writing application : Lavf54.63.104 

Video 
ID : 1 
Format : AVC 
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec 
Format profile : High@L3.0 
Format settings, CABAC : Yes 
Format settings, ReFrames : 4 frames 
Codec ID : avc1 
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding 
Duration : 42mn 14s 
Bit rate : 1 026 Kbps 
Width : 720 pixels 
Height : 404 pixels 
Display aspect ratio : 16:9 
Frame rate mode : Variable 
Frame rate : 29.970 fps 
Minimum frame rate : 9.990 fps 
Maximum frame rate : 29.970 fps 
Color space : YUV 
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0 
Bit depth : 8 bits 
Scan type : Progressive 
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.118 
Stream size : 310 MiB (88%) 
Writing library : x264 core 123 r2189 35cf912 
Encoding settings : cabac=1 / ref=3 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x3:0x133 / me=hex / subme=7 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.00 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=1 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=-2 / threads=6 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=3 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=1 / b_bias=0 / direct=1 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=250 / keyint_min=25 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=40 / rc=2pass / mbtree=1 / bitrate=1026 / ratetol=1.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=10 / qpmax=51 / qpstep=4 / cplxblur=20.0 / qblur=0.5 / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:1.00 

Audio 
ID : 2 
Format : AAC 
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec 
Format profile : LC 
Codec ID : 40 
Duration : 42mn 14s 
Bit rate mode : Constant 
Bit rate : 128 Kbps 
Channel(s) : 2 channels 
Channel positions : Front: L R 
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz 
Compression mode : Lossy 
Stream size : 38.7 MiB (11%) 
Language : unk