In a comment posted this past Thursday, we opined:

I think maybe Andy is just setting this [his chicken-little-outrage about the prisoner abuse] up as yet another pretext for supporting Kerry. Anything to avoid stating the real reason, i.e., gay marriage.

It will go like this:

"Although I supported this war, President Bush has been too arrogant and too incompetent to any longer have any hope of bringing the Arab and Muslim worlds to peace with America. Our country needs a fresh break from the anger and tumult of the past, and that's why I reluctantly am throwing my support behind John Forbes Kerry..."

Compare to Sullivan today:

The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively.

I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong. ...

To have humiliated the United States by presenting false and misleading intelligence and then to have allowed something like Abu Ghraib to happen - after a year of other, compounded errors - is unforgivable. By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control. We are at war; and our war leaders have given the enemy their biggest propaganda coup imaginable, while refusing to acknowledge their own palpable errors and misjudgments. They have, alas, scant credibility left and must be called to account. Shock has now led - and should lead - to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it.

...

And then, when November comes around, we have to decide whether this president is now a liability in the war on terror or the asset he once was.

Not exactly the words we predicted -- yet! -- but you can see where this train is headed.

We correctly deemed Sullivan to have "flipped" politically months ago. We now begin the Sullivan Kerry-Endorsement Watch. He's laid the predicate -- or pretext -- for the endorsement; he's now laid down the law -- Sullivan Law! -- that Bush has one more chance to solve all of the world's problems. In a month or two, he will deem Bush to have failed -- failed even when Sullivan was generous enough to give him one last chance -- and he will officially endorse Kerry.

Andrew Sullivan Kerry-Endorsement Watch

At the tone, the Andrew Sullivan Kerry-Endorsement Watch displays a time of

(bong)

11:47 pm -- 13 minutes to midnight (the Kerry Endorsement)

Posted by: Ace at 11:30 PM | Comments (37)
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The American Public, of course:

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has selected the gadfly filmmaker as one of its “Flab Five” and is treating him to a Veg Eye for the Fat Guy makeover. “Looks like the ‘Downsize This’ author has been doing too much supersizing,” notes PETA.

Who's right here? Well, PETA is right that Michael Moore really is a big fat sack of fat.

OTOH, PETA are a bunch of nanny-douches who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. And we just can't wait for that.

Eh. Who cares about right and wrong. It's funny when retards fight. Because, you know, they're retards. They're not exactly possessed of cat-like agility.

Thanks to Michele at ASV.

Posted by: Ace at 03:32 PM | Comments (33)
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An unconfirmed charge by an Arab extremist is the Gold Standard as far as we're concerned.

No one who speaks Arabic could possibly spin absurd slanders for propaganda purposes!

We just can't wait to hear his opinions on the Jeddah "Massacre" and whether or not Rumsfeld should resign. Watch this space-- we'll be covering these important revelations 24/7, along with everyone else in the media.

Breaking News: Ted Koppel has just announced Nightline will begin featuring this guy

as a special correspondent offering expert opinion and analysis on "infidel outrages and massacres."

Related News-- Breaking! Just as predicted by the liberal media, Bush's apology has sparked a global outpouring of goodwill and support for US policies!

Posted by: Ace at 02:13 PM | Comments (8)
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And that's just in a two-candidate race!

The model is based on economic readings as well as determinations as to which quarters before an election are "good quarters." One quarter is almost a good quarter, just missing the cut-off, and hence is not counted as "good news." But the economist says it's on the line, and he could easily characterize it either way.

And if he were to make a more generous judgment call, Bush would take 60% of the vote in a two-candidate race.

Posted by: Ace at 12:53 PM | Comments (2)
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... in Germany.

Economic growth in the first quarter ``will be weaker than we had originally expected,'' said Holger Fahrinkrug, an economist at UBS AG in Frankfurt, the only one of the economists surveyed to predict a decline. ``In the U.S. and Asia, things are going really well and we're not getting our share in Germany.''

The production report is the third in as many days to confound economists' predictions. German factory orders unexpectedly fell for the second time in three months in March and joblessness rose for a fourth month in April.

Maybe John Kerry's running in the wrong country.

Meanwhile...

Back in the US, consumer confidence rises to a three-month high.

No, no cowbell! Goodness, it's just a three-month high; we have to have standards here. But the trend is up, and it will remain up.

Update: den Beste puts a little meat on the bones of our "Maybe John Kerry's running in the wrong country" remark.

We can taste John Kerry's pain. It's tenderlicious.

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (16)
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If you're not following it, there's a dust-up between Andrew "The Sage" Sullivan and NRO's Jonah Goldberg. Andrew "The Sage" Sullivan shrieks about that a Virginia law stating that contracts entered into which purport to "to bestow the privileges and obligations of marriage" between two people of the same sex are null and void. He claims that such a law would actually outlaw most private agreements between gays, stripping them of even the most basic capacity to make private contracts.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

If you are in a contract to rent an apartment, you are forbidden to enter into contracts of your own in which you purport to own the apartment; you are forbidden, in other words, to enter into contracts under the color of ownership. That doesn't mean you can't freely enter legal contracts to sub-let your apartment and the like. It means what it means: some contracts are forbidden, because you just don't have the right -- here, actual ownership -- to enter into them.

Gays can enter into all the private contracts they like, except that sort of contract which is forbidden: a marriage contract, or a contract purporting to bestow the incidents and obligations of marriage.

Obviously, we think.

Updated... on the jump.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:03 AM | Comments (6)
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Some people love potatoes. Some people could take them or leave them. Some people don't like potatoes much at all.

And then some people despise potatoes so passionately they malign them in the most venomous, hateful terms. An entire "subculture of hate" has sprung up in opposition to the innocent, humble tater. Committed "tater-haters" spread their venom in order to undermine what they call "the Spud Agenda."

Top Ten Disparaging Terms for Potatoes, By People Who Really, Really Hate Potatoes

10. "The Irish Scourge"

9. "The Predatory Pedophiles of the Plant Kingdom"

8. "Idaho turdmuffins"

7. "Hitler-tubers" (archaic form: "Kaiser-tubers")

6. "Satan's Yams"

5. "Dirt-Testes"

4. "Insidious, Godless Commuspuds"

3. "Nature's Little Zionists"

2. "Dirtbacks" (considered a racial slur against potatoes)

Â…and the Number One Disparaging Term for Potatoes, by People Who Really, Really Hate PotatoesÂ…

1. "Retard-apples"

Update: For those who wanted a Top 10 Bush-Apology List, Protein Wisdom has stepped up and provided the leadership this country needs.

Unfortunately for us, he drops a Billy Squier reference, which really steams our beans because we now realize how desperately we wanted to make such a reference ourselves. On the plus side, he links Billy's site, and if you follow that link you get to hear some snippets of a couple of Billy Squier's songs. But not, alas, "In the Dark."

Damn. We forgot how much we love Billy Squier.

Posted by: Ace at 09:21 AM | Comments (85)
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Over One Million Jobs in Past 8 Months

Demand For Gold-Plated Diapers Surges, Sending Prices Skyrocketing

Sweet:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Employers added 288,000 jobs to their payrolls in April as the nation's unemployment rate slipped to 5.6 percent, reinforcing hopes for a sustained turnaround in the jobs market that had lagged for so long.

Payrolls have risen now for eight straight months, with 867,000 new jobs created so far this year, the Labor Department reported Friday. The strengthening jobs market comes just in time to aid President Bush's re-election efforts, which were in question a few months ago based on his economic record.

...

"I'm officially declaring the jobless recovery dead," said Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. "I think we are now on a path of what will be substantial job gains."

Bush is on track to be the first president since the Great Depression to have lost jobs under his watch. But the hiring gains in recent months have shrunk those losses to about 1.5 million. His administration was widely criticized for an overly optimistic forecast that 2.6 million new jobs would be created this year. Economists now say the chugging economy could get close to that mark.

"I don't think these two months of big increases are a flash in pan," Mayland said of April's job growth and the revised 337,000 new jobs in March.

In related news, John Kerry has stopped promsing people jobs, and has instead begun promising each and every American voter "a brand new car and a handjob from a cheerleader."

Update: For those of you who like charts (and really, who doesn't?), here's a chart sent along to us by deep-cover government mole "Deep Stoat." It's not our preferred kind of graph -- we prefer the sublime elegance of the pie-chart -- but it'll do.

And not only were March's numbers revised up by some 29,000 jobs, February's numbers were also revised up from 59,000 to 83,000, or 24,000 additional jobs. That means that next month we will undoubtedly be entitled to begin saying "Over a million new jobs since January." Much cleaner than this "last eight months" crap.

As Al Pacino said in Glengarry Glen Rose, "And that's the way we keep score, Bubby!"

Posted by: Ace at 08:37 AM | Comments (8)
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"Thanks to AoSHQ, everyone's suddenly treating us like rock stars," says senior CreditSuisse economist

Anxious Public Demands "More Cowbell!"

How much can we tease something so boring?:

[L]ast week's jobless claims won't impact the April employment report, which covers the last half of March and the first half of April. And economists are widely split on the key number in the report -- the number of new jobs added by employers. Reuters found a range of estimates from 60,000 to 250,00 new jobs among economists surveyed.

The unemployment rate is expected to stay unchanged at 5.7 percent, with a much tighter range of estimates -- the economists surveyed came in with either a 5.6 percent or 5.7 percent rate.

What they're looking for is a sign of whether the strong March employment report -- when 308,000 jobs were added -- was the start of something big or just a big tease.

Wachovia Securities economist Mark Vitner is in the start-of-something big camp. He believes we could see more than 280,000 jobs added virtually every month through the rest of this decade. He's forecasting an April report with 240,000 jobs added, and a significantly bigger number in the May or June report.

"The jobless recovery is well behind us," said Vitner. "The economy right now is not really in a recovery mode, it's in a boom mode. Companies are going to be hiring out of fear if they don't, they lose an opportunity to make more money."

Vitner said the relatively low number of jobless claims is one of the things giving him confidence that the employment picture is seeing significant, permanent improvement.

Other economists, most likely malcontents and subversives, expect much smaller jobs-growth, figuring March's number was an aberration.

Posted by: Ace at 09:04 PM | Comments (18)
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We mean "intellectually incurious" in the precise same way they mean it in reference to President Bush, i.e., as a passive-aggressive-pussy way of saying "stupid."

Larry Elder wants to know where the tons of chemical WMD's intended for the Jordan attack came from, and he asks former Justice Department prosecutor and Army intelligence officer John Loftus just that.

Elder: David Kay said, in an interim report, that there was a possibility that WMD components were shipped to Syria.

Loftus: A possibility? We had a Syrian journalist who defected to Paris in January. The guy is dying of cancer, and he said, "Look, my friends in Syrian intelligence told me exactly where the stuff is buried." He named three sites in Syria, and the Israelis have confirmed the three sites. They know where the stuff is, but the problem is that the United States can't just go around invading Arab countries. . . . We know from Israeli and defectors' intelligence that the son of the Syrian defense minister was paid 50 million bucks to bring the stuff across the border and bury it.

That's sort of interesting to us, because last year Mansoor Ijaz was telling a similar story, which we never heard from another source.

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 PM | Comments (16)
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