She's posing for GQ. Looking sort of... you know.

Mediaite ponders whether this pose is inconsistent with Kelly being taken seriously as a newswoman.

I don't know, but I'm not sure direct male-to-female comparisons are appropriate. Someone might say that a male reporter, considered good-looking, would never pose sexy like this. But they do -- men just show their sexiness in a different way, by and large. A good-looking male reporter might be pictured in a less overtly "sexy" way -- like maybe he's casually leaning back against a wall with his top button undone -- but that kind of shot is the male equivalent of a sexy pose, right?

I'm also not sure that just looking sexy, for either gender, is incompatible with being professional and "serious." Serious people aren't interested in sex? Serious people don't deliberately put out sexy vibes?

There's always all this cluck-clucking over this sort of thing, as people resent that good-looking people have an unfair advantage in all things, including their careers. Over on the feminist side of things, they've created a big (very inconsistently and selectively applied) code to attack good-looking women for doing this sort of thing, to discourage it. (They've been more successful at it than men, certainly, who really don't have anything beyond lame put-downs like "prettyboy" to knock rivals getting an advantage due to looks.)

But show me a feminist author who can sell a few more books on Oprah by talking a lot about sex and showing some cleavage and I'll show you a feminist author who is on Oprah talking about sex and showing some cleavage.

In summary: I would hit that so hard I'd split atoms in her privates.

Thanks to Nathan.

Posted by: Ace at 01:28 PM | Comments (175)
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The previous count had the challenger, Randy Altschuler, ahead of Democrat incumbent Tim Bishop in NY-1 (eastern Long Island) by around 400 votes.

Now, after the absentees are tallied, surprise surprise, the Democrat pulls just ahead:

After a hectic week of absentee ballot counting Republican Randy Altschuler is now trailing incumbent Democrat Tim Bishop by fifteen (15) votes. We have just the remainder of one town (Brookhaven) left to count with about 48 of 300 election districts in that town already counted plus military ballots that have a deadline of this coming Monday to be logged in. If it remains this close it make take a bit longer to resolve as there are approximately 1,000 contested absentee ballots that will have to be reviewed and decided to either count or toss.

That's from a tipster in a listserv I'm on; I don't know if I'm supposed to use his real name or not.

Corrected: For some reason I got it in my head this was in NY-23 (which I think was actually the Owens race, the one Doug Hoffman kind of spoiled.) But it's NY-1.

More Cheating! Two whole voting machines "discovered" in Buffalo, where a Republican just coincidentally is leading his Democrat incumbent rival by 821 votes.

Gee, I wonder if the Democrat will come out +1000 from those machines.

Posted by: Ace at 01:12 PM | Comments (35)
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It's rare we win these. It looks pretty good, though. The Buerkle campaign goes so far to say "mathematical certainty."

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (78)
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At a bar watching my Cowboys, so no picture (my phone is smart, but not that smart). So here's a space to talk about the games, at least until one of the cob-loggers wakes up and makes a genuine football post.

UPDATE [DiT]: Okay, okay.. I was doing yard work. And by "yard work" I meant hacking at mexican palms until one of those suckers kicked back and sliced my head open.

Goddang things.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:19 AM | Comments (48)
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If you're looking for something to read this morning, I've been enjoying McQ's rejoinders to Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association. Fischer took the occasion of Staff Sgt. Sal Giunta's being recognized with the highest national honor to suggest that his award and the other seven Medals of Honor awarded during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been "feminized."

Fischer's original post is here. McQ responds here and then here and finally today's response here.

I think McQ has shown noteworthy restraint in the face of Fischer's ignorance. And he's damned funny too. I know if I were responding I wouldn't be able to suppress my inner Col. Jessep.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:27 AM | Comments (103)
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I don't understand why so many Americans are ignoring this show. It's educational.

Kathleen managed to get one out of three facts right, that'll surely keep their audience riveted. He was the first Secretary of the Treasury. Other than that, as commenter Vic notes, he was a British subject when he came to NY, which was at the time a British colony.

Alexander Hamilton just sent word through my Quija board that "James Madison did the heavy lifting on the Constitution, and also Aaron Burr is still a 'f'n whiny bitch'."

UPDATE: Hamilton adds "Oh. No offense"

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 06:15 AM | Comments (132)
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You can pray for a quick death. Which you ain't gonna get.

Les, Mary and Listerine:

In which weÂ’re treated to some fine guitar work interspersed with a lesson on oral hygiene. Because there's that whole "not so fresh in the morning" thing going on.

There's a contest down there below the fold. A very very stupid contest. more...

Posted by: Genghis at 05:07 PM | Comments (804)
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Above the post update:
Details now, but it's a strange ruling:

The district court judge has ordered that the election certification be halted if Miller files his lawsuit in state court by Monday. It's exceptionally unclear to me what jurisdiction the district court judge has to tell the Division of Elections or the state court what to do if he is dismissing the lawsuit. Maybe a lawyer who has dealt with a "conditional" injunction like this can put me some knowledge.

Ordinarily, since the federal judge is saying this is a state matter which it can't remedy, the court would dismiss the lawsuit. Then Miller could go to the state court and seek his injunction there, where he has a possibility of getting a remedy. But that's not what happened here. The federal judge seems to be saying, "Your lawsuit's not properly in front of me, but I'll usurp the Alaska court's prerogative to issue an injunction in this matter and just do it myself anyway."

Explanation? It's not my area of law, so somebody learn me something.

Original Post:
Just coming across Fox News now, but doesn't seem to be a slam dunk for Miller. ADN tweets that a federal judge has "conditionally" halted certification of the results.

I suspect this is just a temporary stay to preserve the status quo while the judge considers the merits of Miller's prelim injunction request. And the fact that the judge suggested to the parties that this lawsuit should have been filed in state court rather than the federal district court makes me think that Miller's motion will not be granted.

Background on Miller's exact-spelling lawsuit is here.

More: The Alaska Division of Elections is done counting. Murky has a lead of about 10,400 votes. Miller has challenged 8,153 ballots. The Division was to certify results on November 29. Miller filed a motion for preliminary injunction yesterday to stop certification while his two lawsuits are pending.

Thursday's injunction [motion] modifies Miller's original lawsuit challenging how the state handled Murkowski's write-in campaign, in which Miller argued it was illegal for the state to accept write-in ballots with any kind of errors.

According to the state tally, Murkowski has a lead of about 10,400 votes. Even if the state threw out all of the write-in votes Miller's camp challenged, Murkowski would still lead by more than 2,000 votes.

However, the Miller campaign is now arguing in its injunction [motion] that the volunteers they recruited to observe the vote count did not have enough time to be properly trained because the write-in vote tally started ahead of schedule.

"My campaign team and I were forced to pull together volunteer observers at the last minute, and did not have time to adequately and fully recruit and train them before counting began," Miller wrote, the Associated Press reports. "As a result, an indeterminate number of ballots with candidates' names misspelled were counted without being challenged during the first several days of counting."

Note, in addition to his two lawsuits, Miller has stated his intention to ask for a recount. By statute, he cannot make an official request for a recount until after the Division of Elections has certified the result. (See Alaska Stat. Sec. 15.20.430.) So, assuming for a second he gets his injunction, we'd have to wait for the lawsuits to be resolved before he could have his recount.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:25 PM | Comments (154)
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Well played, Nurse. Very well played.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (124)
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At Hot Air, This time, it's personal.

Murkowski also goes on to say that she is committed to all the people in Alaska. The only thing she was committed to was saving herself a job as senator. Instead of accepting the outcome of the primary, she had to put her own self-interest above those of the party who voted her out. She was on last nightÂ’s PBS Newshour claiming she is the one that best represents AlaskaÂ’s interests since she is no longer affiliated to a party.

Wonderful! And it's amazing that she can keep the straight-face as she claims to be an "outsider," despite being given her Senate seat by daddy and having no greater ambition than to serve as a teller in the favor-bank of Washington, DC, and to be serving Alaska's interests, when no one with an IQ north of 60 can fail to recognize this was all a personal and very personalized feud with Palin for her. She wanted to prove she was an Alpha Grrl; that's all. Playground crap.

What great reform did she promise as her central campaign plank? To keep federal pork flowing to Alaska, that's all. And yet this is a victory for Justice or something.

Now that Joe Miller is clearly done, I will restate that I thought he was a great candidate... on paper. He failed, ultimately, because he ventured outside of the Overton Window in his rhetoric and promises.

This is a problem I keep having with unpolished, neophyte, Tea Party-type candidates. Yes, on one hand it's great that they inject into the debate forbidden ideas.

However, there is often a real lack of of strategic thinking going on here, too, cost-benefit analysis, realistic appraisal of current policy possibilities, that usually costs them in some way. When Joe Miller made his pronouncements about pork, he was showing integrity to his ideology, but he wasn't being particularly smart about what can fly in American, or specifically Alaskan, politics.

Note that I supported Joe Miller unequivocally, so this isn't an "I Told You So" situation. I thought he was a great candidate (based, I have to admit, just on resume and general conservative tendencies, that is, I didn't investigate into specifics of his platform).

So I'm not telling any readers "I Told You So" about supporting him -- I supported him wholeheartedly. But he did make mistakes, similar to the ones other Tea Party type candidates made. And the net result is that he lost the election, and cannot put his agenda into tangible effect. At least not now.

Third rails should probably not be seized with aplomb by candidates with an uphill battle for election.

ABC News' Rick Klein reports: Tea Party-backed Senate candidate Joe Miller today added his voice to those who are critical of Democrats' efforts to expand unemployment insurance, and went even further than most candidates in saying that federally backed compensation to the unemployed isn't "constitutionally authorized."

“The unemployment compensation benefits have gotten -- first of all, it's not constitutionally authorized,” Miller, R-Alaska, said on ABC/Washington Post’s “Top Line.” “I think that’s the first thing that's gotta be looked at, so I do not favor their extension.”

Miller also talked up privatization of Social Security, which is admirable and all, but certainly he would be in a better position to advance his ideas in this area if he had... sugar coated it? Been evasive? Been dishonest?

Yes, candor is all well and good but it tends to be punished at the polls.

Why not just take a less-committed position on something that really will have to involve a Great National Debate and say "I'm looking at various reforms?" Not really dishonest, per se, so much as... less forthcoming than he could be.

I don't know his full argument about the unemployment extension not being "constitutionally authorized," but it cost him, I'm sure, to be talking down extending unemployment benefits when so many people are out of work for reasons beyond their control. Whatever someone's ideology, if it's between ideology and feeding their kids, their kids are going to eat.

This is the sort of thing I wish that Tea Party candidates would avoid. They cannot change this situation -- they seem to believe that just by talking about a radical idea, it tends to bring that radical idea closer to pass. I don't think that's accurate -- if an idea seems too radical to too many people, you just might wind up retarding the cause, rather than furthering it, because your suggestion will be repudiated by the ultimate Constitutional arbiter -- the vote.

Or, like Rand Paul and his musings on the unconstitutionality of the Civil Rights Act, you'll be forced to repudiate your own words and claim you never really meant to say that, and in fact would have voted for the Civil Rights Act. How does that advance that particular cause? A cause which I think is completely wrongheaded, but ignore that; even if you do agree with Paul, how does it advance that cause to float the idea and then have to repudiate and recant within days?

These things are outside the Overton Window. They are, currently, not among the policy options available. Why pick fights that can't be won at the cost of fights that can be won? What Rand Paul did was even less necessary -- he was talking about his hypothetical vote on a 50 year old vote. What does it matter, really, which way he would have voted? He doesn't have a time machine. Why stir up a racial hornets' nest on something so hypothetical and moot?

Or, to put it in a slightly different way: These aren't the issues you lead with. You lead on the more popular stuff, or the stuff that isn't popular but still is within the Overton Window of possibilities. You signal, quietly, your willingness to go further than the Overton Window, but you don't go so far as to commit yourself to positions outside that window.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:41 AM | Comments (180)
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