Porn Laws Around the Globe

So where can you enjoy the AoSHQ lifestyle at least pr0n-wise?

And which US states are the porniest? more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:54 PM | Comments (659)
Post contains 940 words, total size 8 kb.

Governor of Indiana or a run for President?

If Indiana Republican Rep. Mike Pence decides to run for president, heÂ’ll announce his candidacy before the end of January.

A source close to Pence told POLITICO that the conservative congressman still hasnÂ’t decided whether to run for president or if heÂ’ll opt instead for a gubernatorial bid. But sitting Republican Lt. Gov. Becky SkillmanÂ’s announcement Monday that she wonÂ’t run for governor appears to be pushing Pence toward Indianapolis.

“He will make a decision in the very near future,” the Pence ally said, within the “first couple weeks of January.”

Pence's decision is probably a pretty big domino in the race. He seems to be a candidate that fits Sarah Palin's criteria, so if he runs, she may not. Obviously, the reverse is true (unless another candidate steps up). Palin's decision probably has an impact on whether or not Mike Huckabee runs, since it seems there's a good bit of overlap in their voters. Of course all of that will have an impact on Mitt Romney's chances.

Personally, I really like everything I've seen from Pence thus far. Most importantly, he manages to straddle the fiscal/social-con line very well and that's going to be a big challenge in 2012.

Still, there's a reason no one has been elected directly from the House to the White House since James A. Garfield in 1881. Name recognition, resume and lack of experience running a campaign outside a fairly compact and homogeneous area are real limitations.

Obviously technology and the 24 hour news cycle changes the name recognition issue a bit and helps to quickly build a donor network but still, it's an up hill climb. If he's going to run, he's going to need to get in earlier than Palin or Huckabee will (Mitt already seems like he's in). So yeah Congressman, the sooner the better please.

As for the race itself, I asked this question on Twitter earlier: As painful as it is to consider, aside from Pence (and he's a long shot), is there anyone the GOP can nominate that has a better chance of knocking off Obama than....Mitt Romney?

Keep in mind I'm on record saying he must not be the nominee but at this early date, and it's subject to change often, I don't see a more likely winner for us.

Here's hoping a better plan comes along like say: Pence/Bolton: The Hair and The 'Stache in '12!

(I don't really think Pence would pick Boton but it would be fun)

Added thought/question: If Pence runs for governor of Indiana and not President, does that mean he judges Obama a likely winner in '12 and is positioning himself for '16?

Posted by: DrewM at 02:44 PM | Comments (423)
Post contains 468 words, total size 3 kb.

"The next twelve months" is the prognosis offered by one analyst here, quoted as dependable by 60 Minutes' Steve Krofft.

For those who like Christie, you get a quadruple dose here, as he is quoted numerous times and every time is presented as offering the real take on spending/debt.

Monty's been emailing me a lot about this problem. Unfunded liabilities to state and municipal pensions are over a trillion dollars -- promises unbacked by any real coin -- and both states and municipalities rely on issuing debt to fund their increasingly unsustainable spending. They're approaching junk status now on that front, and will soon approach "joke," so very soon the market is going to impose some extremely serious austerity measures on these bodies, as they simply will no longer be able to borrow at all.

Obama's failed state of Illinois is particularly highlighted here, as a well-known deadbeat state where even State Troopers can't use their state-issued credit cards to fill up their tanks -- gas stations won't accept them, as they know the state is simply not good for its debts.

This is a problem in which the government bears most of the responsibility, but also the government-employees unions, and also, notably, the public, which was supposed to be keeping an eye on their elected representatives, but didn't.

The problem (as I can guess) is that every year the state and muni employees demand more money in one form or another, whether straight salary, improved benefits, or contributions to pensions, or all three.

The only way to do this is to increase taxes, so that we reduce everyone else's net salary (salary after taxes) to increase government employees' salaries.

Obviously, the public won't go for that, so bargains are struck so that in the future there will be greater contributions to pensions and such. The employee unions get what they want, they think -- more money -- but this additional payment flies past the public because it's a hidden tax. It's a future tax, an inevitable one, but hidden because no one is paying it right now.

In 15 or 20 years, yeah. But right now? No. So this is used as a way to dodge public disapproval of the basic idea that everyone should have less so that government employees may have more.

The public employees unions should have known this, and known that if they wanted to take from others to give to themselves, they should have presented the issue squarely and straight-up, so that the public could approve it for real, rather than being tricked into it by Future Math and Inevitable Taxes.

The government bears primary responsibility here, especially all those Democrats relying on the public employee unions for donations and get out the vote troops, as they've passed stealth future tax after stealth future tax on the public, never actually securing the consent of the governed for this arrangement.

But the public bears a great deal of responsibility too -- they let this happen. A democracy only works if the electorate is engaged and vigilant, and the American public hasn't been, for decades. Maybe a century. By telling ourselves "oh we'll work out the details later" or "I'm sure we'll figure a way to do this in the future," we've created a problem that we won't be solving, and the hour of reckoning is almost at hand.

People have got to stop telling themselves that it's not "nice" to refuse salary increases and huge pension plans for government workers -- the public does in fact stand in the shoes of The Boss in these situations, and like any Boss, the public has to bear in mind that pleasing everyone isn't always possible or desirable, and could in fact lead to bankruptcy.

It's everyone's fault, but the public isn't going to pay huge new taxes so that someone else can have a nice pension while they have little or none at all. The public employees are going to have to take a massive haircut, and they bear as much blame as anyone: If they really thought it was a great idea to lower everyone else's salaries to increase their own, they should have followed the proper democratic method for doing so, and put it to an honest vote, with the public adequately appraised as precisely what the game was.

By the way: Media Matters and AFSCME are pretty sure that CBS is now officially a right-wing hate site or something.

More: JackStraw sends this Reason piece with the greeting:

I hate to be the bringer of bad tidings but this is going to happen, not a matter of if, just when.

It sounds like Illinois is going to be the first to collapse but when California goes it's going to be epic.

Obama definitely contributed to this mess. One of his early acts was to subsidize bonds to make them more attractive -- when they should have been less attractive, as they were more risky.

Consider what happened in 2008. Government revenues started to fall, signaling to investors that bonds might be riskier than they thought. At the same time, several insurers that typically backed municipal bonds went bankrupt or exited the market, meaning that buyers were left unprotected against the risk of default. Instead of seeing this downturn as an incentive for states and cities to change their behavior, Washington stepped in with a new municipal offering.

The Build America Bonds program, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, was aimed at subsidizing bonds for infrastructure projects. Under this program, the Treasury Department pays 35 percent of bond interest to the issuing government. If a state or local government issued a bond at a high rate to make it appealing to investors—10 percent, say—the Treasury would make a 3.5 percent direct payment to the issuer. In exchange, the federal government gets to tax the returns on the bonds. It’s no surprise that, starting in 2008, states and cities increased their debt dramatically, while investors enabled this overspending.

Investors = you and me, to the tune of 35% of the subsidy on these bonds.

The parallels with the housing bubble are worrisome. Prior to the meltdown, mortgages were perceived as very low-risk investments. Banks were encouraged through government policies to lend large amounts to people, whether they could afford it or not, and borrowers were encouraged to spend more than they should. Both lenders and borrowers had faith that nothing would go wrong—and that if anything did go wrong, Washington would save the day.

But Washington has no money, either, and the public is laudably now pushing back on bailouts and ever-increasing obligations (which are just disguised future taxes).

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (210)
Post contains 1167 words, total size 8 kb.

The Weekly Standard has a lengthy and positive profile of Mississippi Governor and possible GOP presidential candidate Haley Barbour. It seems some on the left, led by Matt Yglesias and followed by the usual suspects at TPM, The Atlantic and Politico, Time and MSNBC, are outrageously outraged by this passage dealing with Barbour's recollection of his hometown's integration efforts.

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

“Because the business community wouldn’t stand for it,” he said. “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

In interviews Barbour doesn’t have much to say about growing up in the midst of the civil rights revolution. “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” he said. “I remember Martin Luther King came to town, in ’62. He spoke out at the old fairground and it was full of people, black and white.”

Yglesias points out that in 1955 (when Barbour was this committee was staunchly opposed to school integration and the Yazoo Chapter was always fully on board with the most despicable racism imaginable.

There are a couple of things to chew on here.

First, both Barbour and Yglesias can be right. Based on the profile it's clear that many people in Barbour's home town (including his brother Jeppie, the then Mayor) held beliefs that simply were reprehensible about blacks but none the less managed to take a relatively benign course of action in integrating the community.

Willie Morris was in Yazoo City for deadline day too, like Haley a son of the segregated South, though unlike Haley a racial liberal. “By the middle of the day,” Morris wrote in Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town, “it was quite apparent that Yazoo City had indeed integrated its schools calmly and deliberately.” The national reporters presented the city to the world as a model of how integration at its best could work. The new school system was roughly 55 percent black, and as the deadline passed few whites withdrew for the handful of private schools that had hurriedly opened not long before.

Jeppie Barbour is one of the protagonists of Morris’s book. He is portrayed as a racial moderate, despite his boasts about the Mace canisters that local police had taken to wearing on their belts. “You get a drunk,” Morris quotes Jeppie saying, “you either get him to come with you or you have to manhandle him. You give him Mace and he’ll want to go anywhere with you. It keeps that nigger’s head in good shape.”

Jeppie saw the policy of the city’s white leaders not as capitulation to the federal government but as resignation to the inevitable. “We’re gonna make the most of this,” he told Morris. “It won’t be any fun. We don’t have many newcomers, and it’s hard to leave here no matter what happens. We’re not gonna have any mass exodus, black or white. We don’t have much other choice.”

Both Mr. Mott and Mr. Kelly had told me that Yazoo City was perhaps the only municipality in Mississippi that managed to integrate the schools without violence. I asked Haley Barbour why he thought that was so.

Were members of the Yazoo Citizens Council less than the shining examples Barbour holds them up as? Based on the examples Yglesias digs up, yeah. That's not exactly a surprise given the time we're talking about.

Does Barbour's romanticized version of events fail to convey the whole picture and give some people more credit than they deserve? I'd say so. But that's not exactly news either. The profile makes it clear these are people Barbour grew up around and admired. The fact that he cuts them slack the rest of us wouldn't does not exactly shock me. It's a pretty human reaction. Does this mean Barbour is a racist? Of course not. Does it mean Barbour supported segregation then or supports it now? Of course not.

So what does it prove? Nothing much as far as I can see. What it does is confirm something we already know...Democrats get a pass for their past and Republicans get nailed for the slightest variation from liberal dogma. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 11:24 AM | Comments (269)
Post contains 1527 words, total size 10 kb.

She actually felt the need to literally apologize for using this foul expression.

Does anyone think that Nina Totenberg, or anyone in the media or government or academy, would ever say, "I was -- forgive the expression -- at a gay wedding"? No, of course not; they would never give that such a slight, classifying it as an actual vulgarity.

But Christmas? To Nina Totenberg and the alien creatures who have, V-like, infiltrated and captured our key institutions, the word "Christmas" is now on par with a lower-grade racial slur.

The media continues insisting that there is no "War on Christmas," and that the whole idea is a paranoid confabulation of the right to gin up our anger and also gin up fundraising for conservative groups.

Doesn't Nina Totenberg's statement put lie to that spin? Doesn't that reveal that among the self-selecting Culture Leader Class, even the most inoffensive (and secularized) demonstration of de minimus Christian celebration of faith is now an actual social faux pas bordering on insult?

There is no other faith in America suffering from such obvious semi-official discrimination from institutions as the Christian one. Okay, admittedly: Satanists are officially held in the same low regard. But they, you know, worship Satan.

Meanwhile, in England, which is a mere twenty years further down this lunatic road than we, the Red Cross has canceled any sort of overt references to Christmas during the Christmas season. No Nativity scenes, not even Christmas trees, which really don't have anything in particular to do with Christ. It's not as if people have Christmas crucifixes in their homes.

Christmas has been banned by the Red Cross from its 430 fund-raising shops.

Staff have been ordered to take down decorations and to remove any other signs of the Christian festival because they could offend Moslems.

The charity's politically-correct move triggered an avalanche of criticism and mockery last night - from Christians and Moslems.

Christine Banks, a volunteer at a Red Cross shop in New Romney, Kent, said: 'We put up a nativity scene in the window and were told to take it out. It seems we can't have anything that means Christmas. We're allowed to have some tinsel but that's it.

'When we send cards they have to say season's greetings or best wishes. They must not be linked directly to Christmas.

'When we asked we were told it is because we must not upset Moslems.'

Mrs Banks added: ' We have been instructed that we can't say anything about Christmas and we certainly can't have a Christmas tree.

' I think the policy is offensive to Moslems as well as to us. No reasonable person can object to Christians celebrating Christmas. But we are not supposed to show any sign of Christianity at all.'

But there is no War on Christmas, nor any escalating semi-official discrimination against the Christian faith. It's all in your imaginations, Wingnuts.

That Red Cross Christmas Story... is, alas, an evergreen -- the story is actually from 2002 but it winds up being currently dated when you access it in the archives. A lot of people took it to be new; I was one of them. (Someone sent it to me as new, too.)

The Red Cross sorta denies the story in this recent (three day old) statement, but winds up confirming it. They explain that they haven't banned Christmas -- what nonsense! -- bu of course they avoid Nativities and such to avoid offending those easily offended.

Posted by: Ace at 10:06 AM | Comments (219)
Post contains 622 words, total size 4 kb.

At Watts Up With That, correlating solar cycles with global temperatures. The two are oddly congruent, which we know must be a complete coincidence.

One of my favorite commenter quotes ever. Forget who said it, but I don't forget the line:

If... only there were some natural mechanism for explaining the warming and cooling of the earth.

It would have to be unreasonably large, however -- on the scale of our own sun.

One thing I notice in this post (which, frankly, mostly escapes me) is that the scientist writing it makes actual predictions by which his theory can be judged correct, incorrect, or correct but incomplete.

Remember when scientists used to do that? When they used to bother with the third and fourth step of the scientific method? Good times, good times.

Thanks to SJ.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (61)
Post contains 146 words, total size 1 kb.

Oh dear.

In a move that surprised many of Mr Assange's closest supporters on Saturday, The Guardian newspaper published previously unseen police documents that accused Mr Assange in graphic detail of sexually assaulting two Swedish women. One witness is said to have stated: "Not only had it been the world's worst screw, it had also been violent."

Bjorn Hurtig, Mr Assange's Swedish lawyer, said he would lodge a formal complaint to the authorities and ask them to investigate how such sensitive police material leaked into the public domain. "It is with great concern that I hear about this because it puts Julian and his defence in a bad position," he told a colleague.

"I do not like the idea that Julian may be forced into a trial in the media.["]

The leaked information makes this seem less like "sex by surprise" and closer to rape, or even, as Whoopi Goldberg might say, rape-rape.

Four acts of sexual assault were outlined in the hearings against Assange:

That Assange "unlawfully coerced" Miss A by using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner.

That he "sexually molested" Miss A by having sex with her without a condom when it was her "express wish" one should be used.

That he "deliberately molested" Miss A "in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity".

That he had sex with a second woman, Miss W, without a condom while she was asleep.

Both Miss A and Miss W say that originally, they did not report him to the police for him to be arrested but only to require him to have an STD test.

Click the link to read on. It appears that rape is in fact being alleged, although the prosecutors seem to be pressing for this lesser charge of "sex by surprise" as some sort of compromise.

As to why the women didn't seek his outright arrest initially --Sweden seems to have a bona-fide rape problem. Not only does it occur at high rates there, but it's largely unprosecuted. It could be that Swedish women have internalized that rape is just something that happens sometimes, and there's no reason to seek police action most of the time over it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:41 AM | Comments (74)
Post contains 399 words, total size 3 kb.

Are you or are you not hip to my jive?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:55 AM | Comments (383)
Post contains 18 words, total size 1 kb.

Finally the ONT is here - your last chance to make the weekend count for something.

RUN-DMC Wishing You a Merry "Christmas in Hollis"

I remember seeing this on MTV back when it first came out. Back in a kinder, gentler time when MTV actually showed music videos, rap wasn't all angry and gangsta, and Ronnie was in the White House.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:15 PM | Comments (509)
Post contains 496 words, total size 7 kb.

Hope I'm not stepping on Gabe's toes here, but Christmas is just a week off.

It's important to get your meal prepped pretty far in advance. You may even have to drive around with it in your car for a while to tenderize it properly.

The animal was found in a liquid mixture of oil, crushed pepper, salt and other ingredients, and Korkuc told police it was in preparation for a meal.

The cat, a male, survived. Several baths cleaned him of the concoction, and he seemed to be in good health otherwise, said Erie County SPCA spokeswoman Gina Browning.

The image of police opening a car trunk to find 'Mr. Puffy' mewing, hogtied, in a roasting pan surrounded with peeled carrots and onions, springs unbidden to mind.

Is this fellow being psychologically evaluated? I wish the writer would have mentioned that. Soaking a cat in oil and salt seems just slightly crazy. You're supposed to use fruit juice and inject it.

In yet another journalistic lapse, the article says that several people volunteered to take the cat, but fails to mention what the sides were.

Posted by: LauraW at 11:18 AM | Comments (425)
Post contains 194 words, total size 1 kb.