In Knoxville. Coming soon to a gas station near you, if not already there.

I'm waiting for $1.85. Far enough from $2 to seem like real "less than $2" gas.

'Round me, the current low price is around $2.17, and falling.

Via Instapundit.

PS: If any of the above information is incorrect and/or possibly actionable, it was meant as a parody.

Hah, hah. Get it? Knock knock. Who's there? Gas falls under $2. Gas falls under $2 who? Michelle Malkin is a hypocrital hussy.

Pretty good stuff, right?

Posted by: Ace at 10:23 AM | Comments (21)
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Michelle responds to the rather-stupid charge of Ken Layne and the Gawker goons that she's just seeking attention by responding to libel.

Was it Michelle or Ken Layne who hit-whored with this libel? It was all so long ago I forget the details.

Is she suing? It seems not, but she keeps hope alive with this:

There is a time to be tolerant and there is a time to draw lines. If you don't draw those lines, bullies will be emboldened. The smug Gawker smear machine is all about pushing those boundaries with the expectation that no one will push back. They project their own cynicism, recklessness with facts, intellectual laziness, and bad faith on everyone else.

But outside of Manhattan and Los Angeles, not all of us think blogging is a for-profit enterprise founded solely to tear people down with gossip, rumor-mongering, and damaging lies disguised as "satire." Funny how some of the loudest voices decrying the lack of civility in the blogosphere are the biggest promoters of the bottom-feeders and debasers at Gawker Media.

That is not what my blogs are about. That is not what I am about.

She also notes, as I did, that Gawker/Layne/Wonkette have retreated into the legally-useful lie that this was all meant as a "parody." Now, it's impossible to sue for defamation of a public figure over true parody; it is however quite possible to sue for libel presented as fact. Many commenters insist it's well-nigh impossible to sue for the latter, but it's not-- it's very difficult, requiring the showing of "malice," with malice defined as a gross recklessness as to the veracity of the claims made. Given that this was obviously a photoshop, of dubious provenance, and Gawker/Layne/Wonkette seem to have done no fact-checking whatsoever, they indeed acted with legal malice.

Thus, the lie that it was only a parody. Because they can't win on any other grounds.

Now, it's difficult for a public figure to sue for libel. But it is not impossible. Otherwise I'd be free to, say, claim in an Ace of Spades Exclusive that I have IM's from John Kerry to an unidentified teen reading thus:

JenjisKhak: What are you wearing?

Teen: Shorts and a shirt.

JenjisKhak: Mmmmm.... sounds hot. Why don't you take them off?

Teen: Okay... what are you wearing?

JenjisKhak: Nothing but a cockring and my lucky CIA hat.

That flies because it's obviously parody, and I called it such. But what if I represented those were genuine emails? You can get away with a lot of erroneous reporting as regards false information about public figures, but you can't get away with information you 1) knew to be false when you printed it or 2) had good reason to suspect was false and failed to do a mininum level of verification to prove either way.

Nick Denton is on the hook, legally, if Michelle wanted to press the suit. I don't know if it would be worth it to her -- this isn't a multimillion dollar claim, obviously -- and there's no guarantee she could win. On the advice of counsel, Layne & Co. will all claim, like the Tobacco Executives, that of course it was all a parody, even though it wasn't presented as such, and in fact arguments were made based off it (hypocrite, etc.) that disprove any parodistic intent.

I mean: Please. You don't present a "parody" and then make a litany of charges based on that parody. That would be like me immediately calling John Kerry a hypocritical pederast based on the real parody offered above.

You make charges of hypocrisy based upon a claim you're presenting as true. Otherwise, it simply makes no fucking sense, now does it?

See if you can follow my scary-complex logic here, Nicky and Kenny-Boy: You don't base real charges upon something presented as obviously false information.

Michelle probably won't sue, though, because of a general blogger just-roll-with-it ethic, and also, probably, that she wouldn't want her home address revealed through court filings. The left would, of course, be just delighted at that.

Meanwhile, a far more damning pic has emerged from 2005's CPAC, showing Michelle Malkin apparently endorsing a troglogytic, racist, sexist, homphobic gob-smackingly "Ceasarist"* hate-stie:

Photoshop? Real? I say it's "possibly legitimate."

However, should there be any threats of lawsuits, I will immediately segue into my "parody" defense.

Come on -- it's obviously a joke, right?

Ken Layne Is A Goddamned Contemptible Liar: And that ain't a parody, jagoff-- that's the real thing. That's a genuine charge.

All you have in the blogopshere is your credibility, and rather than confessing error, you chose to lie and claim a "parody" for legal reasons rather than tell the truth and apologize and correct.

You're a goddamned liar, and you have no business being considered a respected member of the media.

Oh wait-- you're not considered a respected member of the media. My bad.

Remember: When you read any of Nick Denton's bullshit blogs, you never know if you're reading something that's being represented as true or something that will be claimed to be "obviously parody" a few hours after being represented as true.

So why bother at all?

* Thanks to Purple Avenger for the "Caesarist" charge, compliments of St. Andrew of the Sacred Heart-Ache.

PS: As others have noted, even if this were true (and not, as it turns out, and exceedingly subtle Ken Layne "parody"), what the hell would it matter?

There's a difference between underage girl celebrities like Charlotte Church selling an idea of adult sexuality to her even-younger fans and a college-age woman daring to wear a bikini and keep a private picture of it.

How the hell is there any hypocrisy there? Someone who agitates for sexual modesty and against the sexualization of very young girls has not necessarily sworn off wearing a freakin' bikini, for crying out loud.

Liberals love to pretend that the conservative critique of sexual permissiveness and a hypersexualized media is the equivalent to our calling for an end to sexuality altogther.

No one's calling for that, idiots. This "hypocrisy" exists entirely in your minds.

PPS: To the goddamned proven liar Ken Layne:

Got a problem with the charge? Find, respond to it. Please point out lanaguage in your post suggesting that the image was obviously intended as a parody, as you now claim.

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (35)
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Perhaps you knew this; I just caught it on Fox News.

The emails that the leadership knew about were from one page, the 16 year old. The St. Petersberg Times knew about these, and even spoke to the page in question, but chose not to run with it. The kid's parents apparently wanted it kept quiet.

The more sexually-explicit IM's -- the ones in which a teen seems receptive to Foley's overtures (not that that makes it right, etc.) -- were only recently disclosed, and were written to an entirely different teenaged boy.

So: The Republican Leadership does not seem to have known anything about the truly sexual IM's -- the ones in which it appears cybersex occurs -- and in fact does not even seem to have known about the boy with whom these IM's were exchanged.

Anna Marie Cox makes the case that, having known of the original emails, "creepy" is enough to launch an investigation. However, it has to be noted that Foley was apparently read the riot act. Further, there wasn't this additional evidence at the time -- the damning IM's were released only in the past several days.

She says it wouldn't have been too hard to find out about this other boy, had the GOP leadership wanted to know, and that Foley's behavior was "well-known." Well, if it was well-known, as Anna Marie Cox claims, why wasn't the media better tuned in? Where was their investigation? Surely they could have gotten a list of male Congressional pages and make some phone calls as well.

Cox seems to be talking out of both sides of her mouth -- she implicitly concedes there wasn't enough here for the media, including her employer Time Magazine, to investigate more fully, and yet the GOP should have realized the full dimension of the Foley Problem and released the hounds.

More likely, I think, is that the media and the GOP both saw the same evidence-- creepy, but not damningly pederast emails, a teen and his parents all unwilling to speak more about it or make an issue of it, and chose to (incorrectly) assume relative innocence and leave it lay.

Again, though, someone knew about this second boy, obviously. Those someones seem to have been Democratic operatives. They seemed to have enough evidence to realize the police should be called in.

Why didn't they call the police?

Posted by: Ace at 09:28 AM | Comments (13)
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At this point, the claim is that House leadership only saw less-incriminiating emails, not enough to set off serious alarm bells.

Which makes some amount of sense; purely as a crass political calculation, if they knew the extent of this, it would have made more sense to force Foley out (threatening to expose him themselves) and put a new candidate up in Foley's fairly Republican-friendly district.

However, the Republicans are so stupid that I expect there's another shoe to drop.

Dean Wormer might have dropped the big one, guys. It may be all over.

Questioning the Timing: Of course this disclosure is perfectly timed to impact the upcoming elections.

The left, though, won't note this true question-the-timing situation. Not many on the right are even bothering to note it.

Which makes sense. The Democrats hardly had any obligation to time the disclosure in order to help the GOP, now did they?

I have a sick feeling this is going to get worse. Was this kid promised anything if he kept his mouth shut? I imagine someone, somewhere promised him something.

More... Allah has decent evidence at this point that Hastert only saw the more innocuous, worrying-but-not-damning emails, which only got as bad as asking the kid for a pic in a non-sexual context. (Which is, we all can agree, inappropriate and enough to raise a red flag, but not necessarily enough to make someone cry "Pederast!")

If true, then this is a defensible decision.

Of course, the media and the Democrats (but I repeat myself) aren't exactly going to advertise the fact that Hastert only saw the less-sinister emails.

Questioning The Timing II: Reading down in Allah's link, find this link to RightWing NutHouse. See Update II.

If we're talking cover-up-- what precisely did the Democrats know, and when did they know it? I wrote above they had no obligation to time the revelation of this to do anything except damage the Republicans -- at least in political terms.

But what about in law-enforcement/protect the children terms?

If Democratic operatives, and therefore, presumably, the DNC itself, had the full details of this months or even a year ago, did they allow a pederast to roam free for a year purely for partisan advantage?

Did the Democrats know more than the GOP did, and if so, didn't they have an obligation to share this evidence with the police, a year ago, and not just ABCNews a month out from an election?

"Parents Didn't Want Any Action Taken:" According to Newt Gingrich.

Posted by: Ace at 08:05 AM | Comments (54)
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Does this really surprise anyone?

The United States and the European Union failed to reach a new deal on sharing air passenger data by Saturday's deadline, though officials said negotiations would continue.

Oh Good.

Reaching a new deal before a court-imposed deadline was an EU priority to ensure airlines could continue to legally submit 34 pieces of data about passengers flying from Europe to U.S. destinations. Such data - including passengers' names, addresses and credit card details - must be transferred to U.S. authorities within 15 minutes of a flight's departure for the United States.

The EU's top court in May ruled that the deal put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States was illegal because it was not using the right legal basis under EU law. It did not rule on the deal's content.

An EU court allowed the data to keep flowing until Sept. 30 to give officials time to negotiate a new deal.

So ... for anyone thinking that the EU was anything but a bureaucratic machine intended to obfuscate policy with more laws: you were wrong. Again.

The good news? The Bush Administration is pretty clear on this too. They know who they're dealing with.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:18 AM | Comments (72)
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