Les Phillips snaps his glasses off mid-sentence there, like Clark Kent becoming Superman.

Who's he? He's running against Parker Griffith, Alabama Congressman, who switched from Democrat to Republican this past year. And we all praised him as a hero.

But guess what? Batman was my favorite hero until Spiderman came along. And then I ditched Spiderman for Wolverine (and then back to Batman).

So thank you, Parker Griffin, but now step aside and give a brother a chance.

Re: Deval Patrick -- What else is there to say, except for the 1000th notation that Democrats found a little bit of sedition politically useful from 2001-2009, but now, of course, are forming their own Loyalty Oath Brigades.

Let me just quote Gary Kamiya, mainstream lefty, writing for then-ascendant leftwing (and yet mainstream left) online mag Salon, for a truly "almost on the level of sedition" statement:

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

This, commemorating the Fall of Baghdad by wishing for increased US casualties in order to hurt Bush politically.

Wishing. For. More. US. Combat. Deaths.

To pick up a few points in polling.

I guess he got his f'n' wish, huh?

And the entire left rallied around Kamiya when his hateful, treasonous thoughts were picked up on by the right.

Posted by: Ace at 02:28 PM | Comments (78)
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She wears a racy, lacy dress to the French Open, appearing, in some shots, to not be wearing underwear beneath her frilly skirt.

Like (mild content warning) here.

Are you seeing what you think you're seeing? Not exactly; another picture shows her wearing shorts, and not truly "nude-colored" ones either.

But... I think they did become sort of transparent and/or match her skin tone when she sweated through them.

How can anyone top this? Three words: Maria. Sharapova. Anal.

It's going to be a good year.

Posted by: Ace at 01:36 PM | Comments (156)
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Actually, we don't know they're trying to renegotiate the terms of a loan via terrorizing a man's family. That is surmise on Nina Easton's part.

Not even surmise, really. Insinuation.

But it's a pretty good insinuation.

I think she's had enough and wants these thugs to go away. (They're right in front of her own house, as they're "protesting" her neighbor and his family.)

Last Sunday, on a peaceful, sun-crisp afternoon, our toddler finally napping upstairs, my front yard exploded with 500 screaming, placard-waving strangers on a mission to intimidate my neighbor, Greg Baer. Baer is deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), a senior executive based in Washington, D.C. And that -- in the minds of the organizers at the politically influential Service Employees International Union and a Chicago outfit called National Political Action -- makes his family fair game.

Waving signs denouncing bank "greed," hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer's steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer's teenage son Jack -- alone in the house -- locked himself in the bathroom. "When are they going to leave?" Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.

...

Now this event would accurately be called a "protest" if it were taking place at, say, a bank or the U.S. Capitol. But when hundreds of loud and angry strangers are descending on your family, your children, and your home, a more apt description of this assemblage would be "mob." Intimidation was the whole point of this exercise, and it worked-even on the police. A trio of officers who belatedly answered our calls confessed a fear that arrests might "incite" these trespassers.

...

In the business community... SEIU has a reputation for strong-arm tactics against management, prompting some companies to file suit.

Now those strong-arm tactics, stirred by supposedly free-floating (as opposed to organized) populist rage, have come to the neighborhood curb. Last year it was AIG executives -- with protestors met by security guard outside. Now it's any executive -- and they're on the front stoop. After Baer's house, the 14 buses left to descend on the nearby residence of Peter Scher, a government relations executive at JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500).

Targeting homes and families seems to put SEIU in the ranks of (now jailed) radical animal-rights activists and the Kansas anti-gay fundamentalists harassing the grieving parents of a dead 20-year-old soldier at his funeral (the Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on the latter). But that's not a conversation that SEIU officials want to have.

...

Lerner insists, "People in powerful corporations seem to think they can insulate themselves from the damage they are doing."

....

Complicating this picture is the fact that BofA is the union's lender of choice -- and SEIU, suffering financially, owes the bank nearly $4 million in interest and fees. Bank of America declined comment on the loans.

Powerline has more. Big Government suggests an alliance between Media Matters, the Huffington Post, and the SEIU -- as far-fetched as a Sunni-Shi'ite alliance, of course. Michael Barone thinks it's time for terrorizing protests of people's homes to stop.

Bear in mind, this isn't merely a protest. Three people with signs would be a protest-- that would communicate the message.

500 people is a mob, and it's inherently threatening. And it's meant to be. This is a case where the medium (an angry mob) is in fact the message.

Correction: I thought the loan was for $4 million -- nope, that's merely the interest and fees on a much bigger loan.

Commenter Lex Luthor guestimates the loan at $75 million. I don't know, so I went with "multimillion."

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (314)
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It's a three-act drama. Starts with a problem, the problem escalates, then the villain gets the shit beaten out of him by a girl and they have a happy ending.

Although I don't know about the last part, alas.

When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasnÂ’t expecting much opposition.

But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.

A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the HaiÂ’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.

For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.

According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.

“To see resistance from a woman means a lot,” Wajiha Al-Huwaidar, a Saudi women’s rights activist, told The Media Line news agency. “People are fed up with these religious police, and now they have to pay the price for the humiliation they put people through for years and years. This is just the beginning and there will be more resistance.”

CAIR put out a statement calling the Muslim woman a "deranged anti-Muslim whore."

And then, thinking about it, CAIR put out a statement denouncing itself as "blatantly anti-Muslim."

You know, I think, seriously, if you're pro-life and anti-murder, you're currently, in our non-elite elites' telling, "blatantly anti-Muslim."

Thanks to Kratos, picking his nose on Mount Olympus.

Related: Saudi Religious Police Arrest "Emo" Girls. And who says Saudi Religious Police are all bad?

Posted by: Ace at 12:01 PM | Comments (71)
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I made up that last part; it's a reference to the Sex and the City sequel.

First part's real, though.

Forget the [obviously-Muslim] names for a second, and look at the ages and the residences of the suspects. What are all three doing in Pittsburgh collaborating on a break-in at Heinz Field? They appear to be too old for a university prank (except perhaps Minocherhomjee), and since they all live hundreds of miles apart, it seems odd that the three of them would get together to do a search and rescue for Â… a wallet. ThatÂ’s what they told police they were doing by breaking into the SteelersÂ’ home field.

Unfortunately, the last time a game was played at the stadium was December, thanks to a mediocre Steelers season. That’s a long time to let a wallet sit in the stands. If they wanted to retrieve a wallet, wouldn’t they have called the stadium first to check with its lost and found department? The Pittsburgh police called the explanation “not credible,” which is a masterful understatement.

The police have turned the case over to the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, and the trio was released on $5000 bond pending a hearing on Thursday. The police have begun increasing patrols in the area, which is a jewel in PittsburghÂ’s urban renovation efforts. It will be interesting to see if they show up for their day in court, and to find out what exactly they wanted inside Heinz Field.

Oh, I think I could ballpark it for you.

Posted by: Ace at 11:33 AM | Comments (114)
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Video at the link. The problem is with sand-booms needed to protect Louisiana's shores from the invasion of oil.

The video is worth watching, but here's a transcript of some of his remarks.

Note his Tea Party-like vow.

"It is so much better for us. We don't want oil on one inch of Louisiana's coastline, but we'd much rather fight this oil off of a hard coast, off of an island, off of an island, off of a sandy beach on our coastal islands, rather than having to fight it inside in these wetlands," Gov. Jindal said, making the case for sand booms.

The governor said he has been forced to protect Louisiana without the approval of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is weighing the ecological impact of the construction of more sand booms.

"We are not waiting for them. We are going to build it," Jindal said.

"We can either fight battle -- we can fight this oil -- on the Barrier Islands 15 to 20 miles off of our coast, or we can face it in thousands of miles of fragmented wetlands," Gov. Jindal said, clearing favoring the first option. "Every day we're not given approval on this emergency permit to create more of these sand booms is another day when that choice is made for us, as more and more miles of our shore are hit by oil."

One federal official is kinda-sorta taking responsibility for the inadequate response, for once.

Somehow I don't think Obama will follow his lead.

The oil mass continues moving west, and as the toxic sludge begins to make landfall in Terrebonne, Capt. Edwin Stanton, who heads up the Coast GuardÂ’s response, is taking blame.

“The governor is right. It’s too slow, and if it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine, for not pushing (BP) hard enough perhaps,” Stanton said.“We did have a problem with getting boom down here to begin with, but there seems to be boom that is in the staging areas that needs to be put out.”

Then, in an exchange with a reporter, he went further.

Stanton: “It’s my job to direct this response in Louisiana.”

Reporter: “Why didn’t you do it?”

Stanton: “Well, the why — is that really important?”

Reporter: “Yes sir, we live here.”

Stanton: “Well, I guess I’m just slow and dumb.”

That answer is kind of dismissive -- I don't think he really believes that -- but at least he's acknowledging his responsibility.

Palin made a halfway similar criticism of Obama.

“If there's any connection there to President Obama taking so doggone long to get in there, to dive in there, and grasp the complexity and the potential tragedy that we are seeing here in the Gulf of Mexico -- now, if this was President Bush or if this were a Republican in office who hadn't received as much support even as President Obama has from B.P. and other oil companies, you know the mainstream media would be all over his case," she said.

Gibbs fired back that the former Alaska governor needs a lesson in how the oil industry works.

"Sarah Palin was involved in that election but, I don't think she was paying a whole lot of attention," Gibbs said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"I'm almost sure that the oil companies don't consider the Obama administration a huge ally," he said, adding, "My suggestion to Sarah Palin would be to get slightly more informed as to what's going on in and around oil drilling in this country."

Palin used Twitter shortly thereafter to respond to Gibbs.

"Obama is the top recipient of BP PAC & individual money over the past 20 years. Dispute these facts," she wrote, linking to a Politico article citing campaign finance reporting showing more than $3.5 million given to candidates by BP since 1990.

The largest single donation by BP -- $77,051 -- went to Obama.

A big question I have is why wasn't there, already present in the Gulf, the equipment needed to contain or plug a leaking well? Why are we so far behind, scrambling, after the disaster has been ongoing for 33 days?

Please don't call me a socialist when I say that if a company is engaging in an inherently dangerous activity, there should be laws requiring them to have the equipment necessary to contain a disaster. Sure, you can demolish a building through explosive force if needed -- but you have to pay the Fire Department and EMTs to have personnel on site. You can't just trust that you placed you charges properly.

A disaster will happen; they always do. This is just a fact of life.

What makes it criminal is that there was no back-up plan ready to roll.

Apparently Plan A for this was "the well will not explode." Period. End of sentence, end of file. There was no Plan B in case it did explode because... see Plan A: The well will not explode. How many times do I have to tell you? There will not be a disaster -- that's our plan for containing a disaster.

Was there really no law requiring a ready-to-be-deployed cap to be present in the theater, in case a well exploded?

I'm assuming there was supposed to be some kind of disaster-preparedness going on here, required by law -- but there wasn't.

And who, exactly, is chargable for that? Bush?

Bush hasn't been president for more than a year. Who was responsible for enforcing the nation's law the past fifteen months? Am I dreaming, or was that President Peter Perfect?

BTW: I think Rand Paul's response to this -- whining about the "boot on the neck" of BP -- is both horrible policy and even worse politics.

Wretched politics. Only Rand Paul feels sympathy for poor, put-upon BP.

The American people are not really in the mood to cut BP a break on this. Yes, understand disasters happen. I cannot fathom why there is no plan already being deployed.

That is, in fact, criminal.

Like I said: If you have to demolish a building with explosives, fine, the government shouldn't prohibit that, exactly. But it should be enforcing reasonable safety measures for inherently dangerous activities.

And if the guy blowing up a building doesn't have fire extinguishers handy when he pushes the button -- Yes, he's to blame. (And so is the government, for not having inspected to make sure those extinguishers were present.)

It's not "boot on the neck." It's common sense.

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (280)
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I'm just pointing this out because I saw the trailers -- showing the film's setting as some unspecified, but Middle Ages Glamorous, Arab nation.

My thought, immediately, was that a Sheikh had come in as a financial backer for the movie and had asked, in exchange for his money, a script that portrayed his country in a positive light.

I still suppose that something like that might be true. But, on the other hand, maybe not.

Samantha is approached by an Arab sheik to devise a PR campaign for his business enterprises, and he offers to fly her and her three gal pals on an all-expenses-paid luxury vacation to Abu Dhabi. (These scenes were filmed in Morocco.) Even in an escapist fantasy, the spectacle of women sinking into this billionaire's paradise at a time of widespread economic hardship initially seems creepy and off-putting. Soon, however, their Arab sojourn takes unexpected turns. First of all, Carrie encounters her old flame, Aidan (John Corbett), at the spice market, but even more importantly, she and her friends run up against the puritanical and misogynistic culture of the Middle East. The rather scathing portrayal of Muslim society no doubt will stir controversy, especially in a frothy summer entertainment, but there's something bracing about the film's saucy political incorrectness. Or is it politically correct? "SATC 2" is at once proudly feminist and blatantly anti-Muslim, which means that it might confound liberal viewers.

Note the easy characterization, by this reviewer, of a critique of a repressive, backwards, anti-female culture -- a critique he'd usually applaud -- as "blatantly anti-Muslim."

We're always lectured that the left's scathing critiques of America are not, in fact, anti-American at all, but pro-American, in that they're brave enough to point out America's shortcomings in order to make it a better place. ("I pledge allegiance to the America that can be," Hillary Clinton once said.)

No similar wiggle-room here for a critique of Muslim culture? If you point out the obvious, you're blatantly anti-Muslim?

This isn't really an indictment of this reviewer -- it's not like he's offended by the message. I'm just pointing out how totally, completely that CAIR's messaging has become hegemonic in people's mind-space.

Even this guy, who seems mildly (with reservations) in favor of the film's messaging can't help himself but to call a well-deserved and important critique of dominant Muslim culture (the general critique is important, I mean, not necessary Sex and the City 2's particular critique) as "blatantly anti-Muslim."

Posted by: Ace at 10:20 AM | Comments (168)
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Metallica covering "Whiskey in the Jar" live in Dublin, and Pecker Dunne doing the same song in the traditional fashion. A peace offering to the tipplers among us.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 10:01 AM | Comments (28)
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Finally!

Well, now that he's had time for a week of polling and several days of numbers-crunching and analysis, he's really very sorry about the lies.

I'm going to assemble a focus group to find out if I forgive him.

The Washington Post headline says he apologizes -- "(Again)." Really, again? The first time 'round people characterized his statement as "defiant," and I seem to remember him copping an FYNQ tone when he stated he would not abide anyone "impugning" his service.

That's an apology? I've heard more contrition from "Macho Man" Randy Savage calling out the Undertaker in a psych-out promotion for Wrestlemania 25.

But anyway -- Here's your heartfelt apology, Wingnuts.

A week after initially expressing "regret" for exaggerations about his Vietnam service, Connecticut state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D) issued another apology for his past statements.

"I have made mistakes and I am sorry," Blumenthal said in a statement released Sunday night to the Hartford Courant. "I truly regret offending anyone,'' Blumenthal said. "I will always champion the cause of Connecticut's and our nation's veterans."

I am sorry if you were so thin-skinned as to take offense, Wingnuts.

Blumenthal's second bite at the apology apple seems to be an acknowledgment that his press conference last Tuesday did not -- as many Democrats insisted it had -- put the issue of his service, which was first raised in a New York Times story, to rest.

(His campaign said that Blumenthal's statement was a response to a question from the Courant seeking comment on an editorial that ran in the paper on Sunday.)

So he didn't actually offer this of his own volition.

Over the last week there have been reports on both sides of the Vietnam question.

A Stamford Advocate story noted that one of the speeches the Times used as evidence that Blumenthal had exaggerated his service (he was in the Marine reserves and never served time in country) also showed the Attorney General speaking truthfully about his time in the military.

But, other news reports have revealed other incidents of misstatements -- his critics would say lies -- by Blumenthal about his Vietnam record.

As many have noted, Blumenthal's spin sounds like "Your Honor, I was faithful to my wife on literally dozens of occasions."

So, is this poll-tested? Of course. Outwardly, the campaign is claiming everything's jake, but...

Internally, however, there is an acknowledgment that Blumenthal has taken a hit from the allegations -- though Democratic sources insist he had such a large lead prior to the Vietnam issue surfacing that he remain a steady favorite in the fall.

A poll released by Blumenthal's campaign today makes that very point; he leads former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon (R) 55 percent to 40 percent -- even with more than nine in ten (91 percent) of likely voters aware of the Vietnam story.

That is, indeed, a sizable lead, if true.

Here's a longer cut of the "apology:"

"At times when I have sought to honor veterans, I have not been as clear or precise as I should have been about my service in the Marine Corps Reserves,'' Blumenthal said in a statement emailed to the Courant late Sunday by his spokeswoman, Maura Downes. "I have firmly and clearly expressed regret and taken responsibility for my words.

"I have made mistakes and I am sorry. I truly regret offending anyone,'' Blumenthal said. "I will always champion the cause of Connecticut's and our nation's veterans."

So: He's saying he already apologized adequately.

Blumenthal is telling the truth, mostly, when he says he didn't mean to directly lie.

He didn't. Mostly.

But what he's not mentioning is that while he didn't mean to directly, unambiguously lie, he sure the hell intended to mislead people into thinking he was in Vietnam by implication -- implication that could never be pinned on him.

And his screw-up was failing to merely mislead and falling into full-on, provable lies.

So, his apology is basically Sorry I wasn't crafty enough to deceive you without any fallout.

Posted by: Ace at 09:54 AM | Comments (105)
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(REALLY?)

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:50 AM | Comments (356)
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