Watch and retch.

A compilation of the media's fawning.

Posted by: Ace at 01:01 PM | Add Comment
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

Still a good number for him, but it's coming down, and is almost certainly padded by 3-4% by people who don't want to admit to a pollster they don't favor him.

Which would explain why his policies routinely draw less than 50% support and yet his number remains at 58% or so -- because it's not racist to disagree with a policy.

Well, of course it is, if it's a policy favored by liberals. But less racist, at least.

Thanks to ANFF Geoff.

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Add Comment
Post contains 97 words, total size 1 kb.

Supposedly it's the G20 donating the money, but, as a previous post noted, our European cousins are railing against "crass Keynesianism" even in their own countries. They are not likely to give up much of their precious money to stimulate other countries.

Un. Fucking. Believable.

Remember all that crap about how we're spending money in Iraq that could be spent in America?

Well, America's now spending that money on the IMF and World Bank rather than in America.

It's almost as if he's some kind of transnational radical with a primary orientation towards the third-world rather than America.

Oh well, it's just a trillion. In five years it will be worth one-third that.

Thanks to Memomachine, via Drudge.

Posted by: Ace at 12:27 PM | Add Comment
Post contains 142 words, total size 1 kb.

This isn't a recount, note. Just a "re-canvass," which I guess just means making sure you entered in the right tallies.

So, Tedisco leads, barely... until the inevitable recount begins discovering hundreds of votes from Al Franken supporting sections of Minnesota.

More [DrewM.] Here's a round up of the returned absentee ballots to date by party and county.

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Add Comment
Post contains 79 words, total size 1 kb.

She just plumed charmed 1000 years of royal protocol off her.

Michelle Obama's meeting with Queen Elizabeth II began with a handshake and ended in a hug.

...

Mrs. Obama clearly made an impression with the 82-year-old monarch — so much that the smiling queen strayed slightly from protocol and briefly wrapped her arm around the first lady in a rare public show of affection.

Either that, or she was trying to undo the faux pas of Michelle Obama hugging her by reciprocating... reluctantly.

The AP is pretty sure they know which it is, though.

In more Michelle Obama adulation, the world is going ga-ga over Michelle Obama's fashion disasters.

In a report, Tina Brown suggested that Nicolas Sarkozy's wife -- a former model, who is still smokin' hot -- did not join the Obama's on this trip because Mrs. Sarkozy -- the model, remember, who is as well-put together as anyone -- because she feared she'd be compared "unfavorably" to the sublimely beautiful Michelle Obama.

The media does this frequently with women they like -- we had to endure sixteen years of deadpan insistence that Hillary Clinton was "beautiful," for example. But never to this extent.

I don't mind some light let's-pretend-to-be-nice flattery of a quite average looking woman like Hillary or Michelle Obama. Women's looks are always commented upon -- even though in a supposedly enlightened age they shouldn't be, especially by the press, at the vanguard of sexual enlightenment -- and if you're forced to comment on an average woman's appearance, sure, occasionally claim she's "beautiful." Just to be polite.

This insistence -- apparently on the square, too -- that the gargantuan sasquatch Michelle Obama is beautiful and puts to shame a top fashion model is positively ludicrous.

I know what's going on -- over-the-top liberal partisans wish to call her beautiful partly to reward her for helping Obama win the election. (Republican women, of course, are punished for their political achievements by endless media attacks on their looks and fashion choices.) And no one in the editorial section can ask reporters to calm down with these obviously fantastical claims because the moment they say, "Hey, let's not oversell this too much; it's a bit shaky even claiming it less hyperbolically," they'll get rapped as (wait for it) racists who cannot appreciate a black woman's beauty.

There are, of course, any number of beautiful black women. Some of them are even top fashion models, but these too, I'm sure, would be compared "unfavorably" to Michelle Obama should they dare to stand in the same room as she.

It's not the polite-but-silly flattery that bugs me. If this were just some occasional bit of puffery, fine. I get it: Women's looks are important (more important than they should be, our media betters are always quick to point out), and some light, um, overstatement as to Michelle Obama's pulchritude may be necessary. Or at least chivalrous.

I'm a conservative. I have no problems with some outdated, heteronormative, male-chauvanistic, martial-virtues-inspired chivarly.

But the media has gone way past the boundaries of let's-just-be-nice-and-pretend mode. They are determined that we all accept that, despite the report of our very eyes, that Michelle Obama is among the most physically beautiful specimens of womanhood in the entire world, easily outclassing women who made millions of dollars simply because they were, in fact, actually beautiful.

Now is Michelle Obama actually ugly? I kid about it for purposes of push-back, and I note her resemblance to Lt. Worf of Star Trek, but no, she's not ugly. What she is is what many of us are -- neither attractive enough nor unattractive enough to warrant particular comment one way or another.

Unless you have an agenda, of course.

I don't find her attractive. But she's in that gray area, which, again, most people are in, where someone could find you attractive, if their eyes responded to your good features and somehow didn't notice your bad features.

More or less average, again. Like many husbands and many wives. Attractive enough to their partner, but not attractive enough that most would notice.

Let me point out that Laura Bush was an attractive enough woman -- no stunner, no model, no head-turner, but pleasant enough to look at. And I am having trouble recalling her ever being called "beautiful."

Or ever having heard the suggestion that, say, Heidi Klum had passed on a White House invite for fear of the uncharitable comparisons with Mrs. Bush.

I'm sure that Mrs. Bush would have appreciated a bit of flattery from the press, having endured eight years of stress and the occasional nasty attack on her daughters.

But the press doesn't wish to reward her. They don't like her.

I guess this just proves the obvious: You find the one you love to be beautiful. And the press has definitely found the ones they love.

P-Shop:

Look at that. Look at her bold fashion choices in ceremonial armor. The long clean lines of Vera Wang mixed with the titanium-mesh protection of famed Romulan armorer Kana Tren of Luxor 7.

I'm told the Consort to the Overwarlord of the Klingon Empire refused to show up for this picture, afraid her looks, her fashion, and her skills with the bat'leth double-sword might be compared unfavorably to Michelle "Weapons Officer" Obama.

Please, media. I don't particularly enjoy bashing Michelle Obama on something as trivial as her looks. Which, again, are unremarkable in any way. If you can just cool it with claiming she's Aphrodite Risen Again From the Sea, then the rest of us can stop telling you um, not so much.

And Oh... Here is Carla Bruni, Sarkozy's wife. (Whom I mistakenly called "Mrs. Sarkozy" above.)

Yeah. See how much she has to worry about?

I mean, look at her. She has biceps like a girl for crying out loud.

Thanks to Aaron S. for the p-shop and DrewM. for the tip on Sarkozy's wife.

Disagreement: from a reader--

Michelle is hawt. I would totally hit that.

Posted by: The Predator

Well, like I said: It's all in the eye of the beholder. Or the infrared targeting lenses of the beholder. Whichever.

Posted by: Ace at 11:28 AM | Comments (13)
Post contains 1061 words, total size 7 kb.

Remember when Obama said Joe Biden was in charge of making sure no one wasted stimulus money? Well, after forgetting the 'website number' where projects would be tracked, Sheriff Joe is on the job and taking credit for funding projects that were authorized during the Bush administration.

Biden and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack announced a new wave of $10.4 billion in federal stimulus money for home loans across the country, and billions more for essential services in rural communities such as Pikeville, which is getting money for a new fire station. Biden used the outdated, current station as a backdrop. Pikeville is just north of Goldsboro in Wayne County.

"We're investing in places like this all across the country," Biden said, "to demonstrate the vital role towns like this play in the recovery."

Most of the money for the station that was announced Wednesday, however, had been secured last year under the Bush administration, according to fire department officials.

State Sen. David Rouzer, a Republican who represents Pikeville and worked in the Agriculture Department under President Bush, said he helped secure the fire department money last year out of the federal agency's regular programs.

"They're coming in and cherry picking the best projects and switching out the money, saying it's stimulus money," Rouzer said. "But it was already approved and in the pipeline. It's totally disingenuous to come down here and say this is stimulus money, when regardless of whether a stimulus bill passed, they were getting the money."

Sarah Palin, whose legendary stupidity nearly destroyed the planet just by running for VP, was unavailable for comment.

Don't you feel better that all that so-called "stimulus" money is being spent under the watchful eyes of Joe "I'm Smarter Than You" Biden?

There's a new sheriff in town! Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

As always, Slushop courtesy of the Slublog Collection.

Posted by: DrewM at 11:18 AM | Add Comment
Post contains 328 words, total size 2 kb.

What does Petraeus know about defeating an insurgency, anyway.

Petraeus acknowledged that the ratio of coalition and Afghan security forces to the population is projected through 2011 to be significantly lower than the 20 troops per 1,000 people prescribed by the Army counterinsurgency manual he helped write.

“If you assume there is an insurgency throughout the country . . . you need more forces,” Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as head of U.S. Central Command, said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said the Pentagon has not yet forwarded the troop request to the White House.

Obama disagrees and claims he's "properly resourced" the war.

Petraeus literally wrote the book on CI operations. And the book worked. And yet here is Obama, who campaigned heavily on the promise to win the war that needed to be won in Afghanistan, and rapped Bush for "taking his eyes off the ball," undermanning the war effort.

Here's his rationale:

Asked how he would handle requests from commanders for more troops, he said: “What I will not do is to simply assume that more troops always result in an improved situation. . . . There may be a point of diminishing returns.”

Odd. That was the thinking under Bush -- thinking that, while understandable, turned out to be wrong. Thinking that Candidate Obama castigated. Thinking that Candidate Obama promised to reverse.

But I suppose all those promises weren't really Obama's -- merely the Magic Teleprompter's -- so he feels no strong reason to deliver on them.

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Comments (1)
Post contains 277 words, total size 2 kb.

From the New Yorker:

In American politics, “Europe” is usually a code word for “big government.” So in the midst of a global recession, with the U.S. and China shelling out trillions in fiscal stimulus, you might expect that European governments would be spending furiously, too. Far from it. While the U.S. is devoting almost six per cent of its G.D.P. to fiscal stimulus, France and Germany are spending a barely noticeable twenty-six billion euros and fifty billion euros, respectively. Whereas the U.S. hopes that the upcoming G20 summit will lead to a global stimulus package, European policymakers have been warning against the dangers of “crass Keynesianism.” The U.S. Federal Reserve has been flooding our economy with money, but the European Central Bank has cut interest rates slowly and reluctantly. Far from wild-eyed leftists, Europeans are looking downright conservative.

Wonderful.

It gets a bit worse -- even if somehow "crass Keynesianism" works, it will have been America that foot the bill, and America that lives with the debt, inflation, and diminished prosperity for decades.

And if it doesn't work? Well. A crippled economy plus massive debt and inflation, and no more bullets in the fiscal revolver left to shoot.

Thanks to MattM.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Add Comment
Post contains 214 words, total size 2 kb.

Omen?

Imagine saving enough money to buy the love of your life a beautiful diamond ring only to drop it off the Brooklyn Bridge just as she agrees to marry you.

A local groom-to-be experienced the horror for himself.

Don Walling planned the day with the precision of a classroom lesson. He would propose to his girlfriend, Gina Pellicani, on the Brooklyn BridgeÂ’s pedestrian walkway. His family would be looking on and his sister-in-law would videotape the whole thing.

But at the moment of truth – with ring in hand – disaster struck, and it wasn’t because Gina refused to say, “I do.” Walling dropped the ring through a crack in the pedestrian bridge and into traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge roadway below.

There's more -- he jumped down to the lower roadway and dodged cars trying to find the ring.

He found it.

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (4)
Post contains 152 words, total size 1 kb.

In case you don't know, liberals have long demanded the inclusion of "sampling" techniques -- polling, basically -- to "supplement" the actual number of people counted in the census.

They claim that such techniques are more accurate than actually counting.

The Constitution, however, has something to say about this: It specifies an "actual ennumeration" (that is, an actual count, not a poll, not a "sampling") to apportion House seats.

And yet Obama will appoint a sampling expert to head the census.

The Supreme Court should rule any use of "sampling" in the census unconstitutional... but alas we need to count on Anthony Kennedy, who has lately found that the US is bound by treaties it never signed.

Thanks to Anti-Harkonen Freedom Fighter Geoff.

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (1)
Post contains 141 words, total size 1 kb.