I referred vaguely to his "obligations" the other day because I didn't know if I should disclose the nature of them.

But his father is ill:

Oh I am. My father is gravely ill but it's looking like he may pull through.
I'm just here procrastinating from the other stuff I should be doing. :-)

So it looks better now. When people start procrastinating again, it's a good sign.

But send him a prayer if you've got some to spare.

Posted by: Ace at 03:08 PM | Comments (78)
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Just came over The Five.

Gutfeld notes he dresses like an old hippie -- pony tail, beard, earring (though the last might have just been a joke) -- to convey harmlessness.

He slaughtered his entire family when he was 15, or, as Millikin University calls it, he performed a self-administered multiple-client post-natal reverse-abortion.

Posted by: Ace at 02:03 PM | Comments (325)
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Uh huh.

And Kate Upton gets tough, objective coverage on this site, too.

Is it a lie when the person speaking it knows it is too ridiculous to be believed? Interesting ethical question.

Both Matthews and Salon.com Editor at Large Joan Walsh agreed that, “if you’re really an honest person,” neither proposed docudramas are going to help shape Clinton’s image favorably ahead of a potential presidential campaign.

“By the way, those who talk about the tight relationship between MSNBC and Barack Obama, for example, count the number of times he’s been on this network,” Matthews insisted. “Zero.”

“He agrees with us and we agree with him sometimes,” Matthews added when lightly challenged by Steele. “I actually have my views and he tends to coincide with them.”

Sometimes this coincidence of views happens to result in a visible hard-on, but that doesn't prove anything, except that I have dreams.

Posted by: Ace at 01:23 PM | Comments (190)
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Fen's law: They believe none of the things they insist they believe.

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (213)
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Lisa DePasquale was a little hurt that Jane Pratt, who was a childhood hero of hers for editing teen girls' magazines that appealed to the "Smart Girls," is now peddling Sydney Leathers' Idiot's Guide to Getting Older Married Men to Masturbate for You Over the Internet how-to manual.

I linked this in the sidebar yesterday -- but I assumed she was self-publishing or maybe had some kind of deal via, I don't know, Vivid Entertainment's literary imprint, if you can imagine such a thing.

Nope! Teen Girl's Magazine. (Correction: I'm told it's a women's magazine for girls who used to read the teen magazine Sassy. But see my note at the end.) Click the link to the see the story and read what Jane Pratt thinks is important information for teen girls.

How sad is this?

Teen magazines used to peddle the fantasy of becoming a Fashion Model.

Now they peddle the fantasy of becoming a Vagina Model.

This really made me sad for the pathetic current state of the human condition in America in the Age of Obama. How low will we actually go? When teen magazines are celebrating a half-wit's skill at baiting men into 'batin', how far are we from Idiocracy?

[O]ur culture is increasingly dominated by a celebration of the cheap, base, and vulgar, taking Idiocracy not as a frighteningly plausible warning but rather as a fun model to emulate.

When even a teen girl's magazine is celebrating "'batin'" -- instructing teen girls how to masturbate for older married men -- then our society is now championing an essentially animal-level existence. Not just in terms of morality -- the bien pensants will always scoff at such a bourgeois construction -- but also in terms of intellect. Something the bien pensants once pretended to be interested in championing.

This is lower than moral nihilism -- at least nihilism requires some kind of conscious, intellectual determination at the outset.

This is simply a kind of willful devolution, the human animal deciding to give up the higher functions of its brain and go back to pack-feeding and rutting.
Thinking and standards are difficult and boring.

But Dumb is Easy and Easy is Holy.

It's become a kneejerk response to praise the awful, to binge on guilty pleasures, to feed upon little but the rankest crap.

Isn't this fun? Isn't this terribly naughty? Isn't this thrilling to the spirit, mind, and senses?

It's none of those things. I stand second to no man in appreciation of the erotic or comically transgressive but that's not what we're seeing here. And I'm a bit of a scholar and fan of the vulgar. But this is simply the crudest form of reality tv television, now spreading to print like genital crabs.

It occurred to me, long ago, that the transgressive is only interesting and naughty and daring if there is actually a line capable of being crossed; it is only having a gress to trans in the first place that gives the step a sense of danger and makes viewers, readers, or participants feel a frisson of "getting away with something naughty."

...

So what now, when there are no lines to cross anymore? When there is no boundary across which it may be unsafe to step? When there are no dark and silent woods at all for Red Riding Hood to venture into, but only a carnival landscape of garish neon lights and the unending carnival-barking come-ons of brothel wranglers?

Is there any bottom to be found here, or will we just continue devolving into actual animals?

It's a good piece, if I may so so myself, and if I may not say so myself, @NickKronos and @rdbrewer4 said so too.

A Commenter Says...

This whole thing is awful and tawdry, but XOJane isn't a teen girls magazine. It's a website for grownups who used to read Sassy.

Well, okay, but aren't these dumb magazines still really sold to girls?

But in any event, I lay the same charge at them: Dumbing Down The World.

My objection is really not moral here, per se. It's intellectual (which is actually a type of moral objection, in a way).

What got me is not so much that this is a magazine for girls -- a lot of magazines that are really for girls (Cosmo, etc.) are pretty filthy.

What gets me is that this is the magazine for smart girls. Apparently the smart girls are now Stupid Whores, too.

I actually don't mean that -- many of XOJane's readers objected to the article. But XOJane apparently decided that the whole "Smart Girl" act was getting to be a pain so perhaps just let's go the route of Dumpster Fire Barbeque.

The culture isn't just crude in terms of morality. It's even cruder in terms of intellectual aspiration. We glorify the stupid and unfortunate, or, at least, we pay them to degrade themselves for us so that we may feel superior.

But are we? I would say more but I'd be repeating the whole end of my article.

Posted by: Ace at 10:32 AM | Comments (357)
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Sure, why not.

We should have guessed this would be the next one. I mean the next two. Here are some quotes from the women.

We start with a voicemail:

“Hi, it’s your newly favorite congressman, Bob Filner. You know, the one who fell in love with you at your last speech. “I don’t want to wait ‘til you come back to have dinner with you.”

I don't know what her last speech was about but I assume it had something to do with being raped by higher-ranking men in the military.

Hey it was cool hearing about your rape, now how about some chicken and sex?

"He looks at my card. He looks at me. He says, 'Fernandez. Are you married? Do you have a husband?' Very quick, very direct. I said, 'No, I'm divorced.' 'Well, you're beautiful, and I can't take my eyes off you, and I want to take you to dinner.' I was really shocked and I was like, 'Uh, OK,'" Fernandez said.

"No, I'm not married. My marriage sort of collapsed after I was raped."

"Gee you're cute. Step into my Sketchy Looking Van."

After asking another woman about her rape...

"He got as close as he could to me. His jacket was touching my jacket," Tindley said. "I was bent down. He was bent down with me, rubbing like he cared, like he was consoling me."

Tindley said she felt uncomfortable as Filner moved closer and closer. So close, she said, that she nearly fell off the couch trying to move away from him.

"I felt very weird," she said.

...

When asked if she said anything, Tindley replied, "What am I gonna say? You're a congressman. What am I gonna say to you? What am I gonna say to his man? Can he destroy my life, can he stop me from moving forward?"

It gets worse. The National Women's Veteran's Association of America President says that Filner used her organization's pool of women who'd suffered rape and harassment as his own little date-rape pool.

She says there are "seven or eight" such victims.

"He went to dinners, asked women out to dinners, grabbed breasts, buttocks. The full gamut. Everything that is complete violation of what we stand for," Jones said. "He's a sexual predator. And he used this organization for his own personal agenda."

Oh, and here's a commercial by Bill Clinton endorsing then-United States Congressman Filner for mayor.

Of course.

Posted by: Ace at 09:36 AM | Comments (340)
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Because Ewoks are nocturnal.

Posted by: andy at 08:24 AM | Comments (262)
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• Perhaps We Should Start A List Of Women Filner Didn't Sexually Harass
  
• The Entire Obama-Leno Interview
  
• New Ender's Game Trailer Released (video)
  
• I Exploit You, But You Still Love Me, The Cult Of Personality
  
• Ugly Racial Incident Between Two ESPN Hosts
  
• The Front Man: Face Of A Lawless Bureaucracy
  
• Terrorist Enabling SPLC Defends Hate Map
  
• Obama's Watergates
  
• Spain Is Trying To Divert Attention Away From Its Failing Economy
  
• Official Trailer For Thor: The Dark World (video)
  
• Obama Cancels Summit Meeting With Putin
  
• China Propaganda Fail
  
• The Anti-Che
  
• Sun Set To Flip Magnetic Field Soon, Scientists Worry This Creates Perfect Environment For A Sharknado*
  
• Japan's Aircraft CarrierNew Ship Raising Eyebrows In China
  
• People Are Actually Applying To Be The Captain Of The Post-Iceberg Titanic
  
• Zero Dark Giggles
  
• Turkish Court Sentences Ex-Military Chief To Life In Prison
  
• Atheism To Replace Religion By 2041
  
• Instant Karma: Man Shoots Himself In The Groin While Making Threats
  

Follow me on twitter.

*Okay, I made that up.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:01 AM | Comments (444)
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Happy Wednesday.

About the Benghazi scandal . . . PowerLine has a congressional source that says the sources talking about CIA weapons transfers to Syria or a secret detention facility are untrue. The source also seems to dispute CNN's scoop that the CIA is trying to hush up Benghazi survivors.

RNC Chair Reince Priebus had more to say about standing up to CNN and NBC over the Hillary biodocs and getting better GOP primary debates: "I think it’s just about time our party stands up and protects the party and our candidates from networks that are not in the business of promoting our party – they’re not in the business of promoting our candidates, they’re not in the business of doing anything but promoting the Democratic party." He wants fewer debates and better-formatted debates, which, btw, were two of the conclusions of the 2012 autopsy. Consider this the opening salvo in that battle.

Heritage with the reminder: DOD is only 20 percent of federal spending, but is getting socked with 40 percent of the sequester cuts. This is still bad policy.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (189)
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Dog in shoes.

Dog singing: more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:54 PM | Comments (146)
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