This is awesome! Boxer beat Kaus!

Did you hear me? Boxer beat Mickey Kaus, internet gadfly and Democrat In Name Only.

A key victory! A breakthrough!

And then a little snag -- a gray lining in an otherwise silver cloud.

CBS 5 Poll: Fiorina Widens Lead Over Boxer

California Republican U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina has increased her lead over Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer to five percentage points according to a new CBS 5 KPIX-TV poll released Thursday, which also shows gubernatorial candidates Democrat Jerry Brown and Republican Meg Whitman in a dead heat.

The CBS 5 poll, conducted by the research firm SurveyUSA, showed Fiorina edging Boxer 47 percent to 42 percent, compared to a CBS 5 poll one month ago showing Fiorina over Boxer 47 to 45 percent.

But don't let that trouble you. The real news, the key takeaway, is that last month, Barbara Boxer won a "breakthrough" victory over underfunded protest candidate Mickey Kaus.

Oh, and in Related News: YEAHH!!

Thanks to rdbrewer for that, which I can't really figure out a good reason to post, so I'll just post it for no reason at all.

Posted by: Ace at 11:36 AM | Comments (61)
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Dear Lord. They are desperate for good news, aren't they?

A Democrat wins a Democratic primary, and they're walking on air.

This is courtesy of Mickey Kaus, bringing the snark (and making this exact joke -- it's his).

Check the LAT's headline:

Democrats hail election results as breakthrough

A key primary win in Colorado and victories by 'tea party'-backed GOP candidates amount to 'nothing but good news' for the party, the White House says.

Wow! A key primary win won by a Democrat in a Democratic primary... I bet mostly Democrats turned out to vote in the Democrat primary, too!

The White House and national Democrats were quick to celebrate Wednesday what they saw as a breakthrough in an otherwise bleak political year, with President Obama's preferred candidate winning a key primary test in Colorado and Republican voters choosing "tea party"-backed insurgents over the GOP's recruited candidates.

"Last night's elections Â… were nothing but good news for the Democratic Party," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.

Incidentally, the candidate backed by Bill Clinton and other prominent Democrats lost, so how this is a victory for Democrats, rather than the leftist wing of the party and Organizing for America, escapes me. I trust that Bill Clinton wasn't backing a fringe or bizarre candidate.

But they'll take their victories where they can find them, I guess.

Top Ten Other "Breakthroughs" In Democratic Primary Victory

10. Sarah Palin didn't endorse the winner, thus proving her irrelevancy

9. Democratic primary winner was favored by just slightly more than 50% of primary voters

8. Exit polls indicate primary was heavily voted in by "explosively growing demographic groups" such as union members, people who wear "O" buttons, hacky-sack enthusiasts, and the dead

7. Democrats gushing that their primary fight was finally comprised of a "civil discussion" between one candidate pushing liberal solutions and another candidate pushing slightly different liberal solutions

6. Many Democrats found voting easier than usual due to fact they had become unemployed during the Summer of Recovery, presaging high turnout in November

5. Both candidates in bellwether election fully agree we "can't afford to go back to same failed policies of Bush Administration"

4. Democrats taking comfort in old political truism, "As go the affluent liberal suburbs northeast of Boulder, Colorado, so goes the nation"

3. Some party officials are taking a "closer look" at a previously unheard-of write-in candidate who received 8,334 votes, a Mr. You All Suck

2. Democrats "extremely pleased" that all voter intimidation and voter fraud was conducted by Democrats, for Democrats

...and the Number One Other "Breakthrough" In Democrats' Incredible Victory In Their Own Primary...

1. 75% of all voters casting votes in Democratic primary "pretty sure" Obama born in United States

Posted by: Ace at 10:52 AM | Comments (113)
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I don't think the odds of ending birth right citizenship via constitutional amendment are very high but stories like this certainly add fuel to the fire.

"Unauthorized immigrants are younger than the rest of the population, are more likely to be married and have higher fertility rates than the rest of the population," said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew in Washington, D.C.

The report, based on Pew's analysis of the Census Bureau's March 2009 Current Population Survey, also found that the lion's share, or 79%, of the 5.1 million children of illegal immigrants residing in the U.S. in 2009 were born in the country and are therefore citizens.

In total, about 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. Latinos account for 75% of undocumented U.S. immigrants and about 85% of the births among that population.

There's always a lot of debate about whether or not illegal immigrants are an economic net plus or negative but given that they account for about 4% of the population but double that in terms of percentage of children born and that illegals tend to work in low paying jobs, it's hard to imagine they are anything but an overall drain on the economy.

Added: I've been meaning to find a place to link this and this seems as good a place as any. Supporters of birthright citizenship often attack opponents as xenophobic and racist. If the US eliminated birthright citizenship, we'd join such pariah nations as, um, the UK, Sweden, Ireland, Spain, Japan and South Korea to name just a few. That would leave Canada as the only developed country to offer automatic citizenship to children born there, regardless of their parent's legal status.

Now you can make a case that birthright citizenship is part of American exceptionalism but that's something most liberals generally are embarrassed by. Funny how they are willing to wrap themselves in the flag when it suits their political aims.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:06 AM | Comments (118)
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Several months ago I wrote one of my better-received pieces. If you've read that you can skim and get to the new stuff; if not, I think (IMHO) it's worth reading. Excerpts below:
more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:23 AM | Comments (181)
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Keyser Sosa said the greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn't exist.

The greatest trick the MFM plays is convincing the world that corrupt Democrats don't exist. For if they are Democrats, they are not corrupt; and if they are corrupt, then, in the media's telling at least, they are not Democrats.

In the greatest party-affiliation cover-up since the media tried to portray Gary Condit as a Republican, the media are refusing to mention the party affiliation of the thieving government officials in Bell, Calif.

There have been hundreds of news stories about Bell city officials' jaw-dropping salaries. In this poor city on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where the per capita annual income is $24,800 a year, the city manager, Robert Rizzo, had a salary of $787,637.

...

The police chief, Randy Adams, was making $457,000 -- $770,046 including benefits. The assistant city manager, Angela Spaccia, had a $376,288 salary, with a total compensation package of $845,960. Being just an assistant city manager, Angela had to pay for her own yacht.

...

According to Nexis, there have been more than 300 news stories reporting on the Bell scandal. Guess how many mentioned the party affiliation of the corrupt government bureaucrats?

One. Yes, just one. Now guess if the government officials were Democrats or Republicans? Yes, that is correct.

Congratulations -- you've qualified for our bonus round!

The one newspaper to cough up party affiliations, The Orange County Register, admitted that the corrupt officials were all Democrats only in response to reader complaints about the peculiar omission.

Lots of news stories on the scandal in Bell used the word "Democrat" or "Democratic." But that was only to say that the DEMOCRATIC attorney general of California, Jerry Brown, who is running on the DEMOCRATIC ticket for governor, is investigating the Bell officials' salaries.

So we know the media are aware of party affiliations. They just chose not to mention it when it would require them to identify shockingly corrupt government officials as Democrats.

Unbelievable.

As I have said a thousand times before, this is the clearest, most inarguable example of media bias there is. There should be a simple rule -- a stylebook rule -- dictating that a politician caught in corruption should have his party affiliation noted in the first paragraph. Or by the second.

But the MFM refuses to impose such a stringent rule. They want to keep the freedom to only note the party affiliation of corrupt Republicans while not mentioning it at all with regard to corrupt Democrats.

They want, as they call it, the freedom to apply their judgment and examine context. In their judgment and in context, they always find that the party affiliation of corrupt Republicans is relevant, but the party affiliation of corrupt Democrats never is.

Without such a rule dictating evenhandedness and similar treatment of similar situations, they are allowed to use "context" and "judgment" to make decisions case-by-case, and, surprise, that judgment always runs the exact same way.

This is the simplest and easiest thing to fix. It requires nothing but a one sentence addition to the style guide. It would go a long way to restraining the impulse for bias by adhering to an external rule, no "judgment" required.

Not only do they refuse to add such a rule, they refuse to even explain why they refuse to add it. They will not dignify that question with a response. They will not lower themselves to answering it.

Howie Kurtz writes a column a week on media behavior -- and sometimes touches the subject of bias. (Generally to provide "context" justifying biased media decisions.)

Has he ever addressed this question? About the media's refusal to identify corrupt Democrats as Democrats? Not even a refusal, actually -- they won't even address the question at all.

It has become a running joke that whenever the party affiliation isn't mentioned, you know god-damn well it's a Democrat.

But the media is content to be a running joke.

Thanks to, ahem, "Just the Tip."

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (103)
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Really, really fantastic.

From Douglas Murray, a British conservative think-tank sort.

“Islam is a religion of peace.” That is what every Western leader says every time a Muslim sets something off.

They never tell us which ones they think are the violent religions. But for Islam itÂ’s a win-win. Knock down a tower and everyone in government says how terrific Islam is. Build a tower and everyone in government says how terrific Islam is. Either way itÂ’s a gain for Islam.

...

Subway bombs? “Peace.” Airline plots? “Peace.” Car bombs? “Peace.” It must be hard these days being a violent jihadi. No one in power believes what you say. It’s just impossible to get your message across.

The U.S. authorities are making the same mistakes, and in exactly the same order, as those that the British government has made. Violent Islam is the problem and therefore some other form of yet to be decided upon peaceful Islam is the solution. Either way, win for Islam. Whatever the question, the answer is “Islam.”

In my experience this is a terrible mistake. The answer to violent Islam is not Islam. And contra every liberal pundit practicing their religion of peace and acceptance speech, building a mosque by ground zero is not a counter-argument to violent Islam. It is an apology, and an offering, to it.

If the people who are building the ground zero mosque cared about improving IslamÂ’s image they would have taken their mosque elsewhere.

...

I regard myself as pretty much color blind and religion blind. And I expect the favor to be returned. When I go into a mosque, I take my shoes off. When I go to Muslim countries, I behave in the manner they expect. But religious toleration is a two-way street. America is not a Muslim country.

Islam however has never been historically very good at understanding this. For all leading Islamic scholars the whole world belongs to Islam. Non-Muslims donÂ’t have a say in it.

Except we do.

It's a read the whole thing thing. Seriously. I've cut out a lot of the good parts because they're all good parts.

Via Hot Air, which is really showing me something for an upstart blog.

Posted by: Ace at 08:14 AM | Comments (119)
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The Department of Labor released the weekly unemployment claims report. Not only did they revise last week's awful report up (from 479K to 482K), but this week's report is even worse. 484,000 people filed initial unemployment claims last week [click to embiggen]:

1st Prize: A Recovery Summer!! 2nd Prize: 2 Recovery Summers!!

UPDATE: Morrissey notes that the prediction was for 465K, and only has to look as far as Reuters to find that 484K was 'unexpected.'

[A leetle more technical discussion below the fold. There is math in this post.] more...

Posted by: Geoff at 05:32 AM | Comments (238)
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The spice must flow.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:22 AM | Comments (111)
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Good evening and happy Hump Day all

Blast From The Past: Letterman Interviews Howard Stern in 1984

Here's Dave Letterman back when he was funny interviewing Howard Stern during his dorky Weird Al period. It must have been a few years before Stern finally went national because I remember around 1988 a friend of mine from NJ handing me a tape of Stern and telling me he was the craziest radio guy ever allowed on the air. I'd never heard of him but I listened and yep, he was.

And thanks to him the word 'orgasm' can now be used on network television by non-medical professionals.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:02 PM | Comments (731)
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No friend's father had died so he wasn't required to mourn in Spain. (Per the old tourism slogan, Spain: Where Bereavement Meets Excitement.)

This morning, the former Commander Guy turned up at DFW Airport to surprise about 150 troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. They definitely looked surprised.

Via Greg Pollowitz's feed.

Posted by: Ace at 02:45 PM | Comments (339)
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