'Tis the season for gay subversion, and I mean gay in the fa-la-la song way.

That links to a short post noting that recently Christmas trees have been used as propaganda weapons against two odious regimes, North Korea and the FARC narco-terrorists of Columbia.

Here's the Columbia article:

Special forces infiltrated the remote Macarena mountain range to dress a 25m (82ft) high tree with 2,000 lights.

Movement sensors will make the tree light up when guerrillas approach.

The army says it will put up trees in nine other rebel-held zones to spread the message that Christmas is a good time to abandon armed struggle.

"Operation Christmas," the covert mission was called, carried out by special forces in Blackhawk helicopters, thereby virtually requiring it be made into a Christian-conservative-studio's film, almost certainly starring Kirk Cameron as Captain Eduardo "Capitan Kringle" Rojas.

No but seriously, I'd see the film, even with Kirk Cameron.

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 PM | Comments (25)
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Subhed: Obama's losing electoral votes and it's not even 2011 yet.

Texas is the biggest winner, with four new Representatives (and electoral votes); Florida gains two more. NY and Ohio each lose two.

Other winners included Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington. They each gained one seat.

States losing one seat each were Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Obama states lost six, net, though that's kind of misleading, as Ohio was a 2008 Obama state which is either a toss-up or leans GOP for 2012.

That doesn't mean Obama is doomed -- he had a lot of cushion in 2008 and can afford to lose some states, and some votes in the remaining states. But it does make his path to victory narrower and twistier. But still, unfortunately, quite doable.

In terms of the 2010 map, if you rank the states from the largest Obama margin to the largest McCain margin, Colorado was the state that put Obama over 270 (276). That does not change with the new apportionment — Colorado would now put Obama at exactly 270.

That means that there is a path to victory that does not include winning Virginia, Ohio, Florida, the 2nd CD in Nebraska, Indiana, or North Carolina.

I guess that Democratic analyst means he's writing off the tough-gets (OH, FL, that at-large district in NE, IN, and NC, all of which Obama carried) and saying he can squeak by with exactly the majority of electoral seats if he holds Colorado and Missouri. (Just looked that up to double-check: Nope, McCain won Missouri, so Obama doesn't need that to win.)

Colorado seems to get more liberal every year. Yikes. The GOP challenger needs, then, in all likelihood, a flip of one of Obama's other states, like New Hampshire.

Goddamnit. Do you realize that with one more move of a single electoral vote from a blue state to a red state Obama would need one of the hard-to-get states and thus start out in a huge hole? As it stands, he can afford to lose almost all the purple states and still win.

(Wait, just realized: I guess this analyst means Obama would still have to carry Nevada, too, which is in fact bluer than it used to be, but still is reddish-purple... on the other hand, President New Party won by 12.5% in 2008, so how reddish could it be?

This is not the good news I thought it was when I began writing this post.)

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (111)
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And there's no question that it's going to eventually. Technically it's already there since its debts exceed its assets and it's only able to keep going via constant infusions of credit. California's 2010-11 budget is $86 billion dollars and about 23% of that will have to be borrowed to make up for the budget deficit.

On top of that the state has an accumulated debt, pension and unemployment fund obligation of over $290 billion i.e. about four years worth of state tax revenue. The state machine keeps grinding on but as soon as there's a hiccup in the credit supply, you're going to start seeing missed paychecks within a few weeks.

However if the owners have been particularly profligate and irresponsible (which pretty much describes California's government to a tee), the the court can assign a trustee to run it until it gets back on its feet. A sort of benevolent fiscal dictator who would have the power to unilaterally make cuts and renegotiate state contracts. Which sounds just like what California needs.

There's just one catch - it may not be constitutional. more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 11:19 AM | Comments (191)
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The ET uses the N-word.

Dave @ Garfield Ridge notes that ALF couldn't have run for president, as he doesn't have a birth certificate noting his American citizenship.

Now who's being naive, Dave.

I guess puppets and racism are the day's themes.

Parody: The guy doing ALF was actually parodizing a then-current episode of LA Law, in which a witness says the N-word repeatedly on the stand. He had Tourette's syndrome, see.

Thanks to a commenter for that. You know who you are, even if I don't. (Okay, it's andycanuck.)

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 AM | Comments (28)
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1. I've never gotten how "Watermelon" and "friend chicken" began to get treated as high-level racial slurs. Yes, they are slurs, as they stereotype and demean (and that is the point, and why I discourage their use here), but come on, they're not big-time capital-R Racist slurs. I categorize them in the same class as calling an Italian a spaghetti-bender or ravioli roller, well, a bit higher in offense than that because Italians aren't discriminated against that much and there is a greater allowance for good-spirited racial/cultural joshing. We're not really there yet with blacks, or Hispanics.

Still, in the scheme of racial insults, stereotyping a group by the foods they prefer (or are thought to prefer) is pretty small potatoes.

1. a. I often employ the SNL standard as to what's permissible in edgy racial humor. SNL itself doesn't have a consistent standard here, and, like pornography, it's more of a know-it-when-I-see-it sort of thing, but it should be noted that while the SNL standard abhors watermelon and friend chicken jokes as retrograde, derisive, and, mostly, old and hack, it seems fine with fresher racial stereotypes along these lines. See Gangsta Bitch Barbie, for example, which stereotypes "Gangstas" (really urban blacks) as preferring Newport cigarettes.

That joke actually was common in the nineties, even among the enlightened urban liberal professional types that made up SNL's writers and performers. Grape soda, Kool cigarettes (any menthol brand, really) became fresh, and acceptable, replacements for "fried chicken" and "watermelon." more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:04 AM | Comments (277)
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Just a funny video of someone, as Monty Python said, who doesn't know when he's beaten, and also doesn't know when he's winning-- he has no functioning sensory aparatus whatsoever.

He's a hurdler who has apparently decided that actually "hurdling" is a sign of character weakness. I'm sure it's a metaphor for something or other.

Oh, and JibJab did one of their end-of-year reviews, this time with muppets. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 AM | Comments (64)
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I don't know if this was mentioned here. Readers tipped me by email, but I didn't write a post. Maybe it was sidebarred.

Basically a guy in New Jersey got a very long sentence for gun possession under very dubious circumstances. His mom had alerted police about him, as she was worried he might be suicidal. They stopped him, and found guns in his trunk, which they called illegal -- but they weren't necessarily illegal, as it's legal to transport guns when moving from one home to another, as he seems to have been doing. (Or, at least -- as he argues he was doing, and that seems plausible.)

Christie reduced his sentence to time served, so his nightmare is over. He'll be out of prison as soon as they get the paperwork squared away.

I was going to headline this "My Name is Chris Christie, and Despite My Protestations, I'm Running For Republican Candidate for President," but 1, that treats Aitken as if he's only a punchline to a joke about another man's political ambitions, and 2, thinking about it, I don't think this is evidence of that. It just seems like the right thing to do.

That said, refusing to make this move, and thereby identifying himself as part of the general Gun Grabber movement, which will use any law or set of facts in as vindictively a manner as possible to punish people for exercising their right to bear arms, would have been as close to an automatic disqualifier for Christie as you can get, so he seems to at least remain viable.

(If we can get over his squishiness on amnesty and the Ground Zero mosque, which I don't know if we can. I don't know if I can, I should say. Hey, I may be a RINO, but even RINOs have their own do-not-cross lines.)

Posted by: Ace at 07:41 AM | Comments (118)
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I stood up for him yesterday but the feeding frenzy went into overdrive and someone sent Politico a quote from a 1982 NY Times story on Haley Barbour's run for Senate that year.

But the racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be ''coons'' at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.

Jim Geraghty seems to think it's a near fatal, if not actually fatal, blow.

A pattern of remarks is a different matter than one off-the-cuff anecdote that suggests a man remembers the elders of his youth through rose-colored glasses. Watermelon jokes are appalling. Perhaps in that time and place the comment was common, but to modern ears, across the country today, itÂ’s an unthinkably obnoxious and racially provocative remark.

I asked earlier, in reference to Barbour remembering his local Citizens Council as anti-Klan, “This comment outweighs everything else he’s done with his life?” Presuming the anecdote of Barbour’s watermelon joke is accurate, it will outweigh everything else he’s done in the eyes of millions upon millions of voters. There’s too much baggage to that remark to dismiss as a momentary stupid slip of the tongue. Even if a racially insensitive remark is said to rebuke another’s racially insensitive remark, with enough examples, the benefit of the doubt is eviscerated.

Read the whole piece. Geraghty isn't throwing Barbour under the bus. He defended him yesterday and doesn't conclude from this that Barbour is a racist but a pattern is emerging of Barbour's approach to race.

My one caveat in this (which Geraghty also seems to share) is the accuracy of the statement. The watermelon anecdote is not in quotes and Ben Smith, who published the tip, describes the original article in the NY Times as "almost sneering about Barbour". It's 28 years old, so I don't see how we are ever going to know the truth (a contemporaneous protest by Barbour to the Times would be nice) but it's politics, so truth is often irrelevant.

Barbour comes from a period of time where you could say the things he is accused of and still be considered a moderate in someways on race. But in 2010 it just sounds so jarring and is simply far beyond what is considered acceptable. A younger candidate could never get away with that today, it would be an automatic political death sentence.

When yesterday's liberal furor broke over the Standard piece, my initial interest in it was the double standard that is inevitably applied by the media when it comes to controversial remarks, especially about race, by Republicans and Democrats.

Yes, the case will be made that Democrats, including Barack ("typical white person") Obama, get away with murder on this score. But that doesn't mean Republicans should give a pass to people with views of race that are questionable at best. There's always a strong temptation to rally around and defend our own, especially when they are attacked in a way Democrats never are. However, it's simply bad politics to run out candidates that are less likely to win just to prove a point. And if the evidence is that they are racists, throwing them under the bus is just the right thing to do regardless of what Democrats get away with. To be clear, I'm not talking about Barbour personally here, just the principles involved.

That said, Barbour was always going to be a tough sell nationally. He's a big, gruff, heavily accented guy from a state that conjures certain images for a lot of people nationally (racism and poverty to put it bluntly). I'm not saying any of this is true or fair. I'm just saying it's the reality.

As I said yesterday, if Barbour wants to run for President, he's going to need to have a better spin on his recollections of what life was like in the south during his younger days (through his college and early adult years). Even before today's story, his remembrances of that time are too at odds with the experiences and beliefs of others.

I'll wait to hear what Barbour has to say on this watermelon thing but if it's true and/or there are more such quotes out there...he's done.

UPDATED: Barbour reacted to yesterday's story by firmly denouncing the Citizens Councils.

“When asked why my hometown in Mississippi did not suffer the same racial violence when I was a young man that accompanied other towns’ integration efforts, I accurately said the community leadership wouldn’t tolerate it and helped prevent violence there. My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the ‘Citizens Council,’ is totally indefensible, as is segregation. It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.”

As I said yesterday, he needed a better narrative. That's better.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:24 AM | Comments (187)
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The so called "experts" remain baffled as to how this can be happening in a depression.

...Some experts have been hard-pressed to explain the decreasing crime when a weak economy has put a continuing strain on local police budgets...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 06:33 AM | Comments (81)
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This is an outrage! You are a disgrace to your Phylum, Order, Class, Genus and Spe- You, sir, are an ASS!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:21 AM | Comments (194)
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