Ashley Judd's face is puffy.

Did you know that? I did not. This is an important point. I did not know her face was puffy, and if you are a straight man, I'm betting you did not either.

As a member of The Patriarchy in good standing, I did not know this. I did not know about her puffy face. Even if I had known about her puffy face, I would not have remarked on it, as Ashley Judd is not relevant enough for a guy to discuss.

But she is relevant enough for the gossip blogs to discuss.

And who writes and reads the gossip blogs? Pardon me for indulging in stereotype, but it's not "The Patriarchy." It is women and gay men, well-nigh exclusively.

I've actually been meaning to ask about the gossip blogs -- like, why? I know a lot of women read them, women who consider themselves cultured and above tawdry nonsense in The Star or whatever.

Gossip blogs transmit the exact same crap in The Star and the rest of them, but they package it in a "Gee We're So Above this Silly Shit" and add a bit of ironic distance via snark.

And this serves as an adequate bit of self-deception for the consumers of these sites. They want to read this trivial nonsense; they just want someone to pretend they're all Above It, so they can enjoy it.

Look, if you're reading this trivial stuff, that's fine and all. I read about embarrassing stuff at night too (like, what's the design philosophy behind the new D&D? No seriously, that's not a joke, it's a confession-- many people have a soft spot for silly crap.)

But own it, damnit. If you're reading crap culled from The Star, even if some idiot blogger with the screenname Napoleon Cellulite is digesting it for you with some add-on f-bombs and insults, you're actually reading The Star.

Anyway, this is a bit of a tangent, but I note it to reinforce my point: Straight men do not read this crap and further are actively hostile to it. Even if "Napoleon Cellulite" does add so much lovely snark to an article on Beach Body Bombs culled from The Globe.

And right now, I guess, they're talking about the Mystery of the Puffy Face.

And why would someone be talked about simply because we know, vaguely, who they are? Well, I think it's just the childhood urge to pick out the One Who's Different and say mean things about her, to create a bond among the people saying cruel things, and to "lift" them while putting the object of their Two Minute Hate down.

It's playground baiting and social dominance bullying, adapted for adults, and adapted for adults who are strangers to each other and who thus do not know the same "normal people." As they don't know the same "normal people" to gossip about and be cruel to, they need to find some people who are constructively part of their Social Group; and celebrities fit the bill.

No, we don't really know them per se, but we've seen them, we know their names, and we know a bit of their work. So they will serve the purpose of the Ugly Girl/The Girl With Braces who Gleeps When She Talks/The Slut/The Girl Whose Boobs Grew Too Early/The Girl Whose Boobs Are Growing Too Late.

And the point is that this is not really a trait of "The Patriarchy." Men do this, yes, but not as much. We don't need to seek out the Girl Bullying-Session Playground in our adult lives. Oh sure we'll do it on occasion, but we don't really seek it out.

We are cruel as it comes to us.

So that's my thought on the curious need for otherwise smart, mature, cultured women to seek out material that seems to me to be absolutely trivial dreck and cruelty for the sake of cruelty alone.
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Posted by: Ace at 10:48 AM | Comments (624)
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Video of the now-concluded press conference is here.

Bella is apparently okay.

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Rumors on Twitter, but not confirmed, Ed says, by Fox and CBS.

A "senior adviser" confirms it.

epublican presidential candidate Rick Santorum will announce he will suspend his campaign on Tuesday at an event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a senior adviser to the campaign told CNN.

He's going to have a conference call with supporters telling them not to get "discouraged" and promising he'll stay "active."

But obviously once you take a big step like this, it's very difficult to un-take it.

The Big Feminism Post: I put it into draft. I like it, but it can't compete with a big breaking news thing. I'll put it back up later.

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (443)
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This is real. I have to note that because it's going to look like a sarcastic parody I did. But the quoted material is real.

The Washington Post fact-checks the RNC's claim:

“For far too long women have been left behind in Obama’s job market. Of the 740,000 jobs lost since Obama took office, 683,000 of them were held by women. That is truly unsustainable.”

Here's their conclusion:

The Pinocchio Test

We cannot fault the RNC’s math, as the numbers add up. But at this point this figure doesn’t mean very much. It may simply a function of a coincidence of timing — a brief blip that could have little to do with “Obama’s job market.”

If trends hold up over the next few months, then the RNC might have a better case. But at this point we will give this statistic our rarely used label:

TRUE BUT FALSE

Posted by: Ace at 08:50 AM | Comments (444)
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NBC is now editing its use of the "He looks black" edit in a series of stories that employed it, without noting it is making a correction.

NBC is busy taking down the evidence of its repeated usage of its bogus edit of the George Zimmerman 911 call. This follows the firing of a producer for the use of the same bad edit on the March 27 Today Show. Left unanswered - what about the March 22 use on the Today Show? [LATE ADD: a third usage of "He looks black" has been found and edited out of existence (but not Google Cache!) at NBC 6 Miami, as described below. When will the Elite Media sniff a cover-up?]

Twelve days ago Dan Riehl found this at MSNBC:

“This guy looks like he’s up to no good … he looks black,” Zimmerman told a police dispatcher from his car. His father has said that Zimmerman is Hispanic, grew up in a multiracial family, and is not racist.

The use of ellipsis clearly indicate that the conversation was clipped. This version has since been re-edited (without any explanation) to include the complete exchange.

Yesterday the discovery by Les Jones of two similar bad edits at NBC 6 Miami for stories from March 19 and March 20 was widely broadcast by the InstaPundit. As of this writing, those stories have been "fixed" by the web editors to eliminate the troublesome passages (and are marked as updated April 9; the specific update is unexplained)...

And on Monday Jeralyn Merritt discovered, with Lexis, this Today Show transcript from March 22 with the same bad edit. So far that is still online, but a screenshot is [at the link -- ace].

[And let me add - in the updates I discover at least one, possibly two new NBC 6 Miami stories from Mar 17 and Mar 19 that were re-edited on April 9 and *may have* contained the bad edit]

So, it seems to be a bit of a race - can NBC sweep this down the memory hole before the crowd notices?

Not when the crowd is studiously ignoring it.

Posted by: Ace at 08:31 AM | Comments (89)
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From here.

Posted by: Ace at 08:19 AM | Comments (156)
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Happy Tuesday.

The White House, on the defensive now that the CBO has said the Buffett Rule would only reduce the deficit a teeny-tiny, trivial bit, now says the Buffett Rule isn't intended for deficit reduction. FLASHBACK to the State of the Union: "That's how weÂ’ll reduce our deficit."

Zimbabwe officials are denying reports that thug-in-chief Mugabe is on his deathbed. "A lot of hogwash," says the information minister.

The American Library Association has released a list of the ten most frequently challenged books of 2011. Challengers intend to have access to the challenged books restricted for a variety of reasons. Number 3 on the list is 'the Hunger Games', for being anti-ethnic, anti-family, occult/satanic, and violent. Also on the list are 'Brave New World' and 'To Kill A Mockingbird', both cited for racism.

There's a fascinating anatomy of a false news story up at NYTimes, tracking the spread of the inaccurate story last week that Gov. Haley was about to be indicted.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (756)
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Exhausted and kinda sick tonight. So refunds will be given out even without the usual completed forms received via registered mail.

News You Can Use: So Who's That Hawt Ad Girl?

Thanks to the internet you need never again go through life wondering who that hot girl in the ad you watched repeatedly is. Or where she does her laundry.

Because these days there's a blog for every possible niche, kink, and quirky interest. And no matter how freaky you are, there's still a group of like-minded freaks out on the web who manage to take it all a little too far.

And don't thank me - thank DrewM.

Q: Who is High Maintenance Girl in this AXE Snake Peel commercial?

A: Sophie Lovell Anderson
Sophie is an actress from the UK and has been appeared on TV shows (most notably Secret Diary of a Call Girl) and movie roles such as Stag Night of the Dead. She has also starred in a few UK commercials solidifying her WITHAG credentials.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:03 PM | Comments (771)
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I'll do the Michael Tomasky thing tomorrow.

Posted by: Ace at 04:12 PM | Comments (322)
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That's enough of a lie right there. The Today show is not a 22 minute nightly broadcast. It's a 3 hour waste of viewers time in which wasting time is feature, not a bug.

That's like me saying that I completely mistated the plot of a movie in an 1800 word review because I just didn't have the pixels to spare.

But this lie is also disproven by the fact that the exact same edit, in print form, ran on an NBC Website before it aired on Today.

Les Jones shows us that on March 19 an NBC team in Miami ran the same problematic edit in the print version of their Trayvon Martin coverage:

On his call to police, Zimmerman called Martin, a junior at Krop Senior High School in Miami, “a real suspicious guy.”

“This guy looks like he’s up to no good … he looks black,” Zimmerman said, while calling police from his car. He said Martin was wearing a gray hoodie and had “his hand in his waistband.”

The bylines for that story are Christina Hernandez, Jeff Burnside and Edward B. Colby. And don't be fooled by the April 2 dateline at the top - the dateline at the bottom is Mar 19 and the Jay Carney "we here in the White House are aware of the incident" quote is from Mar 19.

Um, were they trying to save precious pixel space on a website?

What was the excuse for this first deceptive edit?

Can't be the same excuse Today offers.

Here's the NYT's media reporter, Brian Stetler, offering his Skeptical, Cynical, Hard-Charging, Dig Up Every Juicy Story reporter's intuition on the matter:

‏to me, the simplest explanation is a time-pressed producer cut the audio to save precious seconds in the segment.

This sums up media bias in a nutshell.

If you assume that liberals are Good, then you assume there's no point digging into a story where liberals are accused of malfeasance because you have already decided it's very unlikely there's a story there.

You'd be wasting your time. Liberals are Good. There is no point questioning their motives-- its just a great big waste of your time to do so.

On the other hand, you know where the juicy stories are likely to be -- that's right, those damned conservatives.

So "flood the zone" on that type of story, because you'll probably find something, right? And if that results in flood the zone coverage of conservatives and airy dismissals of any suggested malfeasance by a liberal, Oh well!

And also -- if you spend weeks and weeks investigating conservative malfeasance you were pretty sure was there, but it turns up a dry hole -- oh well, publish it anyway. Like the NYT's attempt to smear John McCain with an affair. Nothing there, but print anyway; just insinuate what you can't report.

Or Bush's TANG records. Nothing there, but this shifty, oddball character says he just came across "TANG records from 1971" via a secret unnamed source. Print it!

Hey, you've worked two hours a day, four days a week on this for the past five weeks! you're not going to squander this actual 40-hour workweek just because the story came up bust-o!

More NBC won't even say that anyone's been fired.

So why do we think he was? That Mark Stetler guy says so, but he also believes in leprechauns and faeries, so.

Posted by: Ace at 02:14 PM | Comments (358)
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Oops!

NBC had to isolate the two fragments of 911 tape they wanted and then delete the middle section. Then they had to crossfade (or something) to clean up the edit.

Yet NBC claims it was "a mistake."

According to Breitbart's John Nolte, this is the third time in 30 months NBC has maliciously edited to create the appearance of racism:

So over the course of about 30 months and under the watchful eye of Steve Capus, three times now NBC News has used deceptive editing in order to intentionally gin up racial division, all in an effort to aid Barack Obama by targeting his political critics (Tea Party, Perry) or to further the President's cynical reelection campaign to divide all Americans along racial lines (George Zimmerman).

Somehow they always make the same mistake.

Added: TheDC's Jim Treacher points out NBC made the same whoopsie! in print.

The PJTV video is embedded below the fold.
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Posted by: rdbrewer at 01:35 PM | Comments (142)
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