I gotta run out. I hope Hot Air had something interesting here.

Added [rdbrewer]: Something to consider. Erick Erickson points out the poll was conducted by David Winston, a John Boehner adviser.

David Winston is rigging a poll to get some desired results.

Winston is a John Boehner adviser and his preferred pollster. In fact, internally, some Republicans grouse that Beohner uses Winston to direct his lead on issues instead of just . . . well, you know. . . leading.

Check out David WinstonÂ’s poll question.

In a national survey of 1,000 registered voters done July 31 and August 1, the question, from pollster David Winston, said, “Some members of Congress have proposed shutting down the government as a way to defund the president’s health care law” and asked respondents whether they favored or opposed that plan.

Yeah, it's a crap poll, designed to grab a few headlines.

Posted by: Ace at 02:00 PM | Comments (104)
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The porn post below was getting dirty. So, let's change things up and talk drain cleaning products. more...

Posted by: CAC at 01:48 PM | Comments (79)
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Content warning: The following link goes to the Daily Mail, but several of the pictures there are quite porny.

I say "whatever" because they now say a test says she doesn't have it, and because everything with this girl is self-promotion that I'm not sure I even believe this.

Although I want desperately to Hear No More About Sydney Leathers, it occurs to me that in a real way -- and I'm not being sarcastic -- what we know about Sydney Leathers is what we know about the age we're currently living in.

This is Sydney Leathers' America.

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (361)
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TBOTFGs.

France’s foreign minister said Thursday that “a reaction of force must be taken” if Syrian activists’ claims that the government has used chemical weapons outside the capital, Damascus, are confirmed.

France’s foreign minister said Thursday that force must be used reaction of force must be taken” if Syrian activists’ claims that the government has used chemical weapons outside the capital, Damascus, are confirmed. …

Is there anywhere France isn't commanding us to fight, apart from Iraq?

Meanwhile, our UN Ambassador, who claims to be steely-eyed on Fightin' Genocide, skipped out on an emergency UN Security Council meeting on, yes, the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria.

She sent a lower-ranking delegate.

The Best and The Brightest, kids. The best and the brightest.

A U.S. mission official told Fox News that Power was on a “pre-arranged trip” and maintained that she was focusing closely on the Syria attack.

Stolen from Hot Air, Richard Grenell hammers on Powers.

So the U.S. policy on Syria is to work thru the United Nations. Where was Samantha Power?

Earnest even emphasized the emergency meeting in his statement: “We have also called for urgent consultations in the UN Security Council to discuss these allegations”.

But while the White House was pretending to be in urgent mode, the new U.S. Ambassador didnÂ’t think the meeting was worth her time. Her office reportedly told Reuters that she was on a trip. But to where? What was more important?

Samantha Power has been on the job exactly 19 days. In that time, sheÂ’s already traveled from New York to Los Angeles to deliver a speech.

More at the link but it's a short post and I can't just lift it all.

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Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (304)
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Because he says so.

This morning, Wikipedia users changed Manning's entry on the site accordingly, such that it now reads, "Chelsea Manning (officially Bradley Edward Manning; born December 17, 1987)" and refers to Manning throughout as "she." And yet, from ABC News to CBS News to Reuters to The New York Times to Politico, much of the mainstream media insists on using the male pronoun. Even the "Today" article about Manning's statement defiantly refers to her as "he," most notably when quoting the very sentence in which Manning asks that she be referred to as "she."

...

[T]oday is hardly the last we'll hear from Manning, so reporters and editors alike ought to get in the habit of referring to Chelsea Manning in the way she prefers.

Aaron Blake of the Washington Post went the tedious route of only calling Bradley/Channing "Manning" and avoided any use of pronouns.

This is a power-trip thing. If you can compel people to say things which aren't true, why, then you have full power over them, don't you?

Below: What was once an absurdist parody is now the official position of the house organs of the New Class.

And below that: A prediction now almost arrived.
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Posted by: Ace at 11:44 AM | Comments (343)
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But he says he's a girl now and his name is Chelsea!

He also said he was innocent and I guess the media are ignoring his self-identification on that score, too.

Chelsea Manning, the whistle-blower sentenced to 35 years in military prison for leaking classified documents, released a statement on Thursday to announce that she identifies as female and intends to begin hormone therapy as part of her gender transition. Manning also requested that the public refer to her by her chosen name, Chelsea, and adopt feminine pronouns to describe her.

But the media isnÂ’t listening.

With a few notable exceptions — including MSNBC, Rolling Stone and The Guardian – reports from the mainstream press willfully misgendered Manning while reporting this news.

Hang on, it's about to go from silly to sublime:

(Full disclosure: In SalonÂ’s earliest report, I introduced the story by referring to Chelsea as Bradley Manning, believing it would be clarifying and help to set context. I have since edited the piece, referring to Chelsea by her chosen name while adding a parenthetical about her former name, to more accurately and respectfully reflect the content of the story and the truth of ManningÂ’s identity.)

OJ Simpson just emailed me to say he now identifies as The Guy Who Didn't Kill Niccole Brown and Ron Goldman "The Juice" Simpson.

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Posted by: Ace at 11:12 AM | Comments (310)
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He rose to the top of the New Class -- but he is most decidedly not of the New Class. He rejects their tribal signifiers and shibboleths, which are chiefly expressed through taste in politics, and thus rejects them.

By denying the thing that grants them worth -- their aristocratic tastes -- he denies their worth.

And they're rather pissy about it.

Henry Adams said that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds. For the left, over the past year it has seemed at times to be the systematic organization of hatred of Ted Cruz.

...

Cruz is different — a Princeton and Harvard man who not only matriculated at those fine institutions but excelled at them. Champion debater at Princeton. Magna cum laude graduate at Harvard. Supreme Court clerkship, on the way to Texas solicitor general and dozens of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Cruz is from the intellectual elite, but not of it, a tea party conservative whose politics are considered gauche at best at the storied universities where he studied. He is, to borrow the words of the 2009 H.W. Brands biography of FDR, a traitor to his class.

...

Democrats and liberal pundits would surely dislike Cruz no matter where he went to school, but his pedigree adds an extra element of shocked disbelief to the disdain. “Princeton and Harvard should be disgraced,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell exclaimed on MSNBC, as if graduating a constitutionalist conservative who rises to national prominence is a violation of the schools’ mission statements.

It almost is. Princeton and Harvard aren’t quite the École Nationale d’Administration, the French school that trains that country’s political class, but they are close.

In a Washington Post column a year ago, Dana Milbank noted Cruz’s schooling and concluded almost entirely on that basis that his tea party politics must be a put-on, that he is, underneath it all, an “intellectually curious, liberal-arts conservative.” Note the insulting assumption that an interest in books and ideas automatically immunizes someone from a certain kind of conservative politics.

You know, this style of analysis -- through the prism of class, class loyalty, class privilege -- is rising and yet it still isn't quite risen. It has two advantages: It is populist in spirit, and thus helps animate voters to take their country back from the Institutional Class which believes in its own Right to Rule, and, if that's not enough, it's also True.

I'm not quite sure why this isn't catching on more.

Oh right, because the GOP is fundamentally dumb.

For more on this, Andrew Stiles of NRO runs down the Cruz hysteria on the left.

After quoting a series of shrieks, he notes that Ted Cruz, oddly enough, enjoys no force field of protection due to his race.

It’s worth noting that people launching these attacks on Ted Cruz are the same people who instantly impute malign or racist motives to almost any criticism of President Obama. (In the world of MSNBC, for example, it is apparently racist to point out that the president plays a lot of golf, or even to refer to him as “Obama.”)

Cruz, on the other hand, is fair game.

I'm scratching my head at that. Why, it just makes no sense. I just can't figure out why this should be the case.

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Posted by: Ace at 10:08 AM | Comments (493)
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The City of the Future brought to you by the ideology of the past.

The slideshow ends on a somewhat upbeat note, as the photographer turns to snapping pictures of citizens who have rescued/adopted some of the city's wild dogs.

#WarOnCivilization more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:38 AM | Comments (235)
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In the end, it was mostly about money.

But San Diego has decided they'd rather pay lots of money to Filner's victims than put up with the stench in the mayor's office any longer.

Oh, and two things: First, Victim 18 came forward. Second, he's now being investigated for old-school corruption, too.

A voice message left at a city office appears to suggest a direct link between a $100,000 payment to the city and approval of changes to a Kearny Mesa project.

Mayor Bob Filner vetoed changes to the Sunroad Centrum Partners mixed-use project on May 16, then withdrew his veto the next month.

“I’d like the the council member to know that we have reached an agreement with the mayor’s office,” says the June 7 message to Councilman Kevin Faulconer from a man identifying himself as Sunroad Centrum Partners executive Tom Story. “We have paid him the money that was requested and I was told that the mayor would support the (veto) override.”

Now back to the resignation news:

Under investigation for alleged “pay to play” schemes with developers, Filner disappeared from public view for three weeks and surfaced Monday in time for a mediation session with city officials.

Over three days of negotiations in the downtown San Diego high-rise located just blocks from City Hall, officials reached a deal.

A couple of days ago various union stooges and Democratic hacks and apparatchiks staged what might have been the saddest rally in the world in support of Filner. I wouldn't usually link Buzzfeed, but the rally is so sad and lame and weird that it's worth a watch. (Short video, too.)

Their rallying cry was "due process." But they didn't cry it. They sort of mumbled it in embarrassment.

One speaker seemed to be chagrined that she had not received "sloppy kisses" from Filner.

All in all, it was another banner day for the Party of Shamelessness.

More: Filner Seen Moving Boxes Into SUV: Awesomesauce.

Video at the link. Yup, Chester the Molester is packin' up and headin' out.

Posted by: Ace at 08:44 AM | Comments (243)
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Shaking my head.

The military -- I don't jump at the chance of faulting the military, but, like any operation, it's filled with incompetence -- decided this guy was a Solid Citizen posing little-to-no security risk and could and should be trusted with our top secret military and diplomatic communications.

So this is Chelsea, lately.

One day after being sentenced to 35 years in prison for the largest leak of classified documents in U.S. history, the Army private the world knows as Bradley Manning issued a statement about who she really is. "As I transition into this next phase of my life, I want everyone to know the real me. I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female," Manning wrote in a statement read on the Today show. "Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the feminine pronoun (except in official mail to the confinement facility)."

The letter is signed Chelsea E. Manning, and thanks supporters for raising awareness of her case.

Manning is likely to serve her time at Fort Leavenworth, which doesn't offer hormone therapy or sex-reassignment surgery to prisoners, as reported by Courthouse News. David Coombs, Manning's lawyer, was not sure if Fort Leavenworth would offer Manning hormone therapy, though he said on Today that he was "hoping" the prison "would do the right thing."

"If Fort Leavenworth does not, then I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure they are forced to do so," Coombs said, according to the Today website. It's not clear whether Manning will be imprisoned in the male or female population. In U.S. prisons in general, transgender inmates are typically classified by their officially assigned gender, rather than the gender with which they identify.

Below, a picture that's either of Chelsea Manning or Claire Danes in the upcoming season of Homeland.

[Update - Andy] Via @CuffyMeh

Posted by: Ace at 07:56 AM | Comments (309)
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