And the burning question of the day: Are Eva Mendes' feet really that big, and more importantly, does it matter?

Jon Stewart: SuperSooper* Genius

*Correction courtesy of Bertram Cabot Jr.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:59 PM | Comments (42)
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I am doing double-duty as cook and nurse -- there is flu in Chez Dildo! (I rock the outfit however, so there is that silver lining. You know how much white stockings cost in my size?). But I haven't been able to poke around the cooking section of my local bookstore, looking for inspiration, or just something to plagiarize.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 01:00 PM | Comments (105)
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We are just two days away from the special election between Republican David Jolly and onetime Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink. Let's go through a quick breakdown of the district, past voting results, and how I see the race as it stands two days before the final decision.

First, C. W. Bill Young served as Congressman in this increasingly-Democratic swing district for decades, easily surviving redistricting with much of his original district well contained within CD8, then CD6, back to CD8, then CD10, and most recently CD13. While he carried the seat easily in 2012, Mitt Romney lost it to President Obama by about 1.4%. Two years prior, these same precincts voted for Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio in the senate race and Alex Sink over Rick Scott in the gubernatorial one. The district has voted for a Republican Presidential candidate three times in the last 30 years: 1984, 1988, and 2004. Casting “moderate” votes and pulling in the pork, Young built off of the slight Republican registration advantage in the district and kept the seat safe for the GOP, easily winning every single re-election.
With his passing in 2013, the seat instantly became a toss-up, and, with the entrance of well-known Democrat Alex Sink, lean Democratic per most analysts. As the weeks have passed and mail-in returns have rolled in, that analysis looked solid: Republicans enjoyed high single-to-double digit advantages in the mail-in returns for the 2012 and 2010 contests, but only a 2-point edge in this special election. Early in-person voting trends Democratic, and it has, giving the Democrats a current advantage (as of Saturday night) of about 230 votes.

The spending in the race has been astronomical: over $12 million has been devoted, mostly by outside groups. A grab bag of PACs have so far spent $4.9 million for Jolly, $3.7 million for Sink, while the candidates themselves have raised $1.2 million and $2.7 million respectively, giving Sink the slight edge in this metric. Ads have gone beyond the saturation point: the average resident of the district is being bombarded to the tune of over a hundred a day.

However, there has been a late “surge” in mail-in returns that have some Republicans hopeful of an upset: the mail-ins (again, as of Saturday night) now break five points in the Republicans' favor, spreading three points in a week. If that trend can continue, it may hit the magic number needed for Jolly to squeak out a win (I peg that number at 7%, since polling has shown an unfortunate number of Republicans (1 in 6) voting for Sink).

Any considerable edge in the mail-in vote will make a big difference, because a sizable majority of the total vote will have been cast before Tuesday: the current tally of mail-ins and early votes is now over 120,000 and we are forecasting a total vote of under 200,000 (special elections for Congress have exceeded that number only twice in the last decade). Assuming another 10,000 mail-ins and early ballots are cast, that means less than a third will be on Tuesday. If Republicans enter Tuesday with a net 5-6% edge in 2/3rds of the vote, you can see how it would be hard for Sink to finish the winner.

As we have seen in other close house races, a monkey wrench has been thrown in this one, hampering Republican efforts. Senator Rand Paul is reaching out to voters to help candidate Jolly neutralize a threat from Libertarian Lucas Overby, who has been polling between 4 and 7% of the vote. Overby has no conceivable shot at winning, so he has become a spoiler in Republican efforts to hold the seat: I project Sink with a 3-5 point lead as of today (barring, again, that “surge” sustaining through Tuesday), making his “small” share of the vote substantial.

So what should you take away from all of this? If you live in FL-13 and haven't already done so, MAIL IN YOUR RETURN if you have one. If you are an outside observer, understand the fundamentals of the race (party breakdown, past electoral preference, campaign spending) favor the Democrat, Alex Sink. Again, I see her winning by 3-5 points, but keep an eye on the early vote tallies by party from Pinellas County. Lastly, we will have live coverage of the returns on Tuesday night, the first crowd-sourced demonstration of AOSHQDD since 2012, so I encourage you all to tune in as we watch the first of many head-to-head contests in midterm 2014. JohnE, after being heavily medicated, is working furiously on the site and graphics. It should make for a fun night, regardless the result.

Posted by: CAC at 11:20 AM | Comments (45)
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This is all via @rdbrewer4.

An Interpol spokeswoman said a check of all documents used to board the plane had revealed more "suspect passports" that were being further investigated.

In addition to the two they've Reuters:

"The fact that we are unable to find any debris so far appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet," said the source, who is involved in the preliminary investigations in Malaysia.

More of the story (most of which you probably already know) here.

The state-run Thanh Nien newspaper cited Lt. Gen. Vo Van Tuan, deputy chief of staff of Vietnam's army, as saying searchers in a low-flying plane had spotted an object suspected of being a door from the missing jet. It was found in waters about 56 miles south of Tho Chu island, in the same area where oil slicks were spotted Saturday.

"From this object, hopefully (we) will find the missing plane," Tuan said. Thanh Nien said two ships from the maritime police were heading to the site.

An authority told Reuters that it was too dark to be certain the object was part of the missing plane, and that more aircraft would be dispatched to investigate the site in waters off southern Vietnam in the morning.

Possibly a terrorist attack, though so little is known now this is speculation:

[A] former intelligence official told Fox News that the information about stolen passports from two adjacent European countries, combined with recent warnings for flights to the United States about the risk of possible shoe bomb attacks, is concerning

Those passports were from Italy and Austria, and were stolen in Thailand.

As you know, as of this moment, the plane is flat-out vanished. As remarkable as it seems, there is a precedent for that:

There is a precedent for a modern jetliner to fall from the sky while "in the cruise" and lie hidden for months, according to CNN aviation correspondent Richard Quest.

On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 was en route from Rio De Janeiro to Paris when communications ended suddenly from the Airbus A330, another state-of-the-art aircraft.

It took four searches over the course of nearly two years to locate the bulk of flight 447's wreckage and the majority of the 228 bodies in a mountain range deep under the ocean. It took even longer to find the cause of the disaster.

A plane is at its safest point when it is cruising.

Posted by: Ace at 01:58 PM | Comments (185)
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Via the Jawa Report,

Tragedy: Iranian Grad Student at Georgia Tech Dies

Nothing to see here folks. He was just making Molotov Cocktails in his apartment. You know, normal stuff at Georgia Tech:

Go over to the Jawa Report to read the whole thing.

**UPDATE**
Commenter JPS cautions that the news reporting may be way off in saying that the student was making molotov cocktails. Unfortunately, nothing very definitive seems to have been published to counter the media reports, but I did find this statement:

"We have worked closely with other law enforcement agencies during the investigation of this tragic incident," Robert Connolly, interim police chief for Georgia Tech, said in an emailed statement. "The FBI has relayed that, to date, they have not developed any information or evidence indicating criminal intent in this investigation."

Also, per the AP:

Vietnamese authorities searching waters for the missing Boeing 777 jetliner spotted an object Sunday that they suspected was one of the plane's doors, as international intelligence agencies joined the investigation into two passengers who boarded the aircraft with stolen passports.

It's still early days. Keep praying for survivors.

**UPDATE**
Commenter Ricardo Kill provides this update, suggesting that the wreckage is not from the missing Malaysian Air flight:

SEPANG - The Department of Civil Aviation (DCA) has denied that the debris found near Vietnam's Tho Chu Island was from of the missing Malaysia Airlines MH370 airplane.

DCA director-general Datuk Azharuddin Abdul Rahman said authorities have confirmed that the objects spotted floating in the sea about 100km south-southwest off the island did not match the body of the missing aircraft.

Let's hope that the subsequent investigation is thorough and not hampered by political correctness.

Open thread.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 09:13 AM | Comments (270)
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Good evening, Traveling morons! For those of you not in Arizona, Hawaii, or the Navajo Nation -- did you remember to set your clock forward for daylight savings time? Inspired by this horrible event, today’s theme is “G-D It I’m TIRED So This Is What You’ll Get And LIKE It!”

Seriously, though, I am really wiped out after a couple of late evenings last week and spending most of yesterday afternoon in the garden. So I apologize, but the thread will be a little bare bones today.
more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:51 PM | Comments (100)
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Chronicles from a Beerslinger

The next installment of that beer odyssey thing...

"64oz. to Freedom"

Okay so it's a rip from Sublime's '40oz. to Freedom' album, but that doesn't fill my growler, so 64oz. it'll have to be. Feel free to play the album along with the writings herein. It was, after all, my muse.

Can there be a better way to enjoy this first balmy weekend in what seems like millennia to many of us, than with some far from serious beer banter?

I'm not bragging when I state I am an epicure, just sayin'. That now said, I do not in any way proclaim to be a connoisseur, and without fault in my beer tastes. Tastes, after all are subjective; and sometimes mostly, arbitrary. That's where your comments come in. I'll insert a fancy science video to embolden my claim, (and make me feel a little scientific on a Sunday morning), that all tastes are unique and singularly subjective. 'Cause I ain't got no time for conflicting points of view.....I step into the great unknown...

Sex, Smell And Science – The Genetics Of Olfactions

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:30 AM | Comments (133)
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Facebook, Instagram & Guns

Moms Demand Action!!11! and receive ... this? OK. Whatever.

Facebook and its photo-sharing subsidiary Instagram Wednesday announced new policies aimed at stemming online sales of illegal guns.

The social media platforms have agreed to remove reported posts that evade gun laws, restrict minors under the age of 18 from viewing posts about firearm sales and provide education to better inform law-abiding sellers of guns.

Here's NRA-ILA's response.

Dana Loesch's thoughts on a Ben Carson POTUS candidacy

A position I endorse:

Yeah, there are lots of policy issues we can discuss and debate the details of, but Carson's statement that people's second amendment rights should be conditional based on where they live is a deal breaker.

Gun Of The Week

(answer below) more...

Posted by: andy at 10:48 AM | Comments (120)
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... "less is more" edition.

Posted by: andy at 02:56 AM | Comments (215)
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This mirrors the poll that is running on Drudge right now. It might be interesting to see how the Horde differs.....

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:39 PM | Comments (287)
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