Now that we're producing "jobs" "hand" over "fist," Kerry now begins "squealing" that we're in a "wage recession."

Also known as a "low-inflation environment."

But seriously: Wages are picking up. The reason wages have been stagnant is that there has been little job growth until lately; employers don't have to increase wages to retain or attract workers when labor is a buyer's market.

Wages have, in fact, been increasing lately, and will increase further.

At that point, John Kerry will begin hissing that increasing wages are cutting into corporate profits.

Munching on crackers, he chatted about summer sports and other matters, and responded to a query about the economy and whether he would reframe his criticism because of recent favorable trends.

I'm not saying crackers are gay, but that's got to be one of the gayest-sounding sentences I've ever read.

Nicholas and Troi agree. Troi thinks that "crackers" might be a euphemism for "dirty man-ass."

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (5)
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Determined to one day be called "funny and sharp" by former Washington Post gossiper Lloyd Grove, we boldy follow Wonkette's lead and will begin trafficking in gay-rumors that I just made up.

Credit must be given to my male interens Nicholas and Troi, who assisted me in making up these gay rumors.

I'm hoping to win a Polk Award.

Occupation: Much-traveled NFL coach.

Why He Might Be Gay: He's currently the coach of the Dallas "Cowboys," which must be the gayest team-nickname in the NFL, and will remain so in the foreseeable future, at least until the P-town Public Rest-Room Gay Hustlers become a franchise in 2008.

Plus, New York Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey called him a "homo," and I'm inclined to believe pretty much anything Jeremy Shockey tells me.

Why He Might Not Be Gay: Just look at him.

Eleanor Clift

Occupation: Shrieking, caterwauling liberal crank known best for being ignored on The McLaughlin Group.

Why She Might Be Gay: Insist on pronouncing the word "against" in that faux-intellectual Robert-Frost New-England-Ivy-aristocrat "aGAYnst" way.

And I have it on good authority that she's actually from Plainfield, NJ.

That might not be evidence of homosexuality, but it's evidence of something.

Why She Might Not Be Gay: Give me a minute.

Rosie O'Donnell

Occupation: Unfunny spherical comedian who began her undeservedly well-compensated career simply reciting Jerry Seinfeld's act without attribution.

Why She Might Be Gay: I don't know. It's just a sort of vibe I get from her.

Why She Might Not Be Gay: She seems to really dig Tom Cruise. She's always calling him "cutie patootie" and stuff, so she seems to dig on the dorkmeat.

Plus, I hear she has a kid.

Joshua Micah Marshall

Occupation: Hyperpartisan hack; Impressario at his local Starbucks.

Why He Might Be Gay: Just look at him.

Plus, in my experience, the more insistent you are on being called by your full given name ("Michael," "Thomas," "Stephen," "Christopher," etc.), the more likely you are to occasionally enjoy the pleasures of the ol' trouser-safari.

Someone who announces at the top of his website that his name is not "Josh Marshall," but rather "Joshua Micah Marshall," would seem to be telling the world "I am proud, I am fabulous, and I don't much care who knows it."

Why He Might Not Be Gay: He's chubby.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are lots of fat gay men. But not a lot of chubby gay men. Seems to me that if you're gay, and you're just twenty or thirty pounds from being not-chubby, you expend the time and effort to drop that weight like a bad habit (such as vaginal sex).

Joshua Micah Marshall seems to be disinclined to do any crunches or spend any time at all working on his lats. The fact that his dumper is bigger than the average kindergarten-teacher's is strong evidence for his heterosexual credentials.

Wonkette

Occupation: Internet Skank; procuress.

Why She Might Be Gay: Posed for faux-lesbian shots with fellow cyberwhore Jennifer Cutler.

Why She Might Not Be Gay: The faux-lesbian thing is pretty common among marginally-attractive non-lesbians looking for attention to which their looks wouldn't otherwise entitle them.

There's a well-known rule that the minute two sixes start making out with each other, they become a pair of eights.

Plus, few lesbians are that into gay-male culture. That's definitely a straight white liberal woman thing.

Not even gay dudes are as into gay crap as straight white liberal women. Even gay dudes are like, "Hey, ix-ne on the ag-fay all the ime-tay, okay?"

Boba Fett

Occupation: Bounty Hunter

Why He Might Be Gay: Wears a cape; carries around a lot of futuristic BDS&M equipment; calls his ship, which is shaped like an iron, the Slave One; collects funky metal sculptures of handsome men; is known to be a "dedicated bachelor."

Why He Might Not Be Gay: If you watch the eyeslits of his helmet, he occasionally looks at Princess Leia's metal bikini on Jabba's pleasure-barge.

But I don't know how to interpret that Is he thinking, "Tight little unit, there," or is he thinking, "She thinks she's all Little Miss Thing, but she ain't"?

It's a hard one to call.

Allah Update: Allah sends along this pic of Joshua Micah Christopher-Nicholas Stephan (prounouced "Steffan") Michael Pierre Tavington-Cavendish Marshall:

Okay, I admit it: Probably not gay. I'm the straightest, sloppiest, filthiest guy I know, and even I don't go out into public looking like that.

OTOH: Troi says the stubble might be a "beard." Troi is always making funny puns like that. He's incorrigible. .

He does this impersonation of Samantha from Sex & the City that is just absolutely precious... He keeps me in stitches. Stitches, I tell you.

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (37)
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Their drinking water was spiked with "powerful depressants" to lower their "performance."

Greeks?

Greek soccer-players?

Greek soccer-players drugged into a playful, pliant stupor?

The players union described the incident as "shameful and disgusting."

Yes yes yes. Shameful, disgusting, and very very hot.

We here at Wankette HQ (both myself and my intern "Nicholas") are beginning to swoon. I'm going to have to send Nicholas off to fetch me a Starbucks grande iced mochaccino just to cool myself off from all this sexiness.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (19)
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Well, there's another Kerry claim scuttled.

It seems that the new jobs being created by this boom tend to be in the higher-paying sectors of the economy. They're not all low-paying jobs, like Burger-Flipper, Cosmetic Saleswoman, or Internet Skanks.

I might just have to contribute to the economy by purchasing a new pair of pants, because all of this very-sexy economic news is making my pants tight, if you know what I mean.

Posted by: Ace at 10:48 AM | Comments (3)
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Tee hee hee. Aren't I cute?

Manufacturers can't "keep it up" when it comes to the dirty, filthy needs of "consumers":

U.S. April Wholesale Inventories Fall 0.1%; Sales Up (Update3)
June 9 (Bloomberg) -- Inventories at U.S. wholesalers unexpectedly fell 0.1 percent in April, the first decline in eight months, as demand for pharmaceuticals, imported automobiles and other goods outpaced supplies.

Sales at distribution centers, warehouses and terminals rose 0.8 percent in the month after a 2.9 percent gain that was the largest in more than nine years, the Commerce Department said in Washington. That brought wholesale supplies to a record low of 1.12 months' worth in April.

The dwindling stockpiles at wholesalers as well as factories suggest that companies may have to step up production and keep adding workers. Companies had been caught with too much inventory on their hands in the 2001 recession, leading them to be cautious about stockpiling during the current expansion.

``Any attempt to rebuild inventories should translate into increased production, which in turn can only help employment and weigh in on the plus side'' for gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the economy, said Dana Saporta, an economist at Stone & McCarthy Research Associates in Princeton, New Jersey.

...

The Institute for Supply Management's index of supplier deliveries, which gauges how long it takes manufacturers to get materials, was the highest in 25 years in May.

U.S. service companies added to inventories for three consecutive months through May, the institute said.

``Although inventories have been rising for the past two years, they continue to lag behind increases in sales,'' Steven A. Wood, president of Insight Economics LLC in Danville, California, said.

The Labor Department said Friday that U.S. employers added 248,000 workers to payrolls in May, helped by the biggest gain in manufacturing employment in almost six years.

The U.S. economy grew at a 4.4 percent annual pace in the first quarter, faster than initially estimated, and inventory building contributed three quarters of a percentage point to that number, the Commerce Department said last month.

Economists surveyed May 27 through June 7 by Bloomberg News forecast a 4.6 percent increase in gross domestic product this year, which would be the fastest annual growth since 1984.

Meanwhile, the price of oil is "flaccid."

Modest cowbell:

PS: This post was blogged as I watched the sodomy scene from Last Tango in Paris.

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (4)
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I wrongly attributed that cool Daleks pic to Geek Empire. Geek Empire is a cool site but, sadly, no Daleks to be found there.

The Dalek pic is actually from Daleks' Weblog (duh!).

Posted by: Ace at 07:17 PM | Comments (4)
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The liberal media says that Reagan's death will help Bush by driving Iraq off the front page.

That shows their bias. They just can't comprehend that there's actually good news concerning Iraq that Bush would like to see publicized.

Doesn't matter much, though. Whether Reagan died or not, the media wouldn't cover the good news.

France and Germany will support compromise resolution on Iraq which does not contain the absurd provision that the Iraqi government should have a veto over US troops. The resolution is expected to pass unanimously.

This is pretty big. This legitimizes the Iraqi government. When the pricks of Europe want to bash Iraq, they'll no longer be bashing America, but the Iraqis themselves. That should force a change in their behavior.

The new Iraqi Prime Minister (how nice those three words sound together) disbanded all of illegal political militas. Al Sadr "rejects" the order to disband, but that just shows how marginalized he is; all the other militias agreed to disband.

This is big again. America doesn't relish the role of always playing the heavy in Iraqi internal security matters. It's important for Iraqis to understand that they just can't blame America for their ills. There is a problem in Iraq, and that problem has to be solved by Iraqis, with assistance from Americans. This move seems to signal a responsible politics emerging in Iraq.

And, for those who wanted a show of gratitude from the Iraqis, the Iraqi Prime Minister provided such a show, as did the Foreign Minister when addressing the UN.

Not that there's any chance you'll hear about that anywhere except the extremist rightwing media.

Posted by: Ace at 12:17 PM | Comments (9)
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This guy's name is "Mohammed the Egyptian."

Note to European Police: Anyone named "Mohammed the Egyptian" should've been arrested two years ago.

Posted by: Ace at 11:25 AM | Comments (4)
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It seems to me that double standards evolve in the following manner:

1) In the beginning, the double-standard exists, but those who practice it are not really aware of it. People are always much more sensitive to unfairness towards they themselves than unfairness to other people. Those who practice double-standards initially are unconscious of them, as the unfairness falls to groups they are unsympathetic to.

2) After some time, the existence of the double-standard is brought to their attention. They ignore the charge, chielfly because the beneficiaries of the double-standard are groups or people they're sympathetic to, and those injured by the double-standard are people or groups they're hostile to. In their minds, no harm, no foul.

3) At some point, the existence of the double-standard is well-documented enough, and complained about loudly enough, that they can no longer simply ignore it. At this point, the practitioners of the double-standards simply begin lying. They claim there is no double-standard at all.

This, of course, is where most of the liberal media is right now, and in fact has been for 20 or 30 years.

4) Finally, the existence of the double-standard can no longer be denied with a straight face. At this point, rather than strive for fairness and the abolition of the double-standard, the proponents of the double-standard simply begin inventing reasons as to why the double-standard is necessary and justified and right.

That's the classic trajectory we've seen in the academy. Academics spend long hours explaining why it's necessary to treat one group differently than another. Whether it's "white skin priviledge" or the "residual psychological effects of historical oppression" or the claim that "girls aren't as aggressive as boys in raising their hands in class," there always comes a point at which the defenders of the double-standard half-drop (but only half drop) their claim that there is no bias and simply begin explaining, with patient bemusement, why that bias is necessary and good.

The media is now beginning to enter stage four. Paul Krugman has been claiming for years that treating Republicans "fairly" is not really fair at all, since all we do is lie and cheat and con and kill. You wouldn't try to treat Hitler fairly, he notes.

The Post's ombudsman now finds Paul Krugman's theories about the need and justification for the pro-liberal, anti-conservative double-standard very "interesting" as well.

Pretty soon this will become conventional liberal wisdom, and the liberal media will begin arguing along two tracks: No, there is no bias and Whatever "bias" there is is perfectly justified, because conservatives are liars and, in the words of the Simpsons, "We Want What's Worst for Everyone."

Now, that's sort of bad, because people will commit crimes more frequently when they believe they have a philosophical justification for doing so. People may do bad things, but they do bad things less frequently, and less blatantly, when they believe these acts are indeed "bad things."

Once they're given a philosophical justification for engaging in bad acts, Katie bar the door.

And the left always gets around, eventually, to providing a faux-intellectual framework for justifying its bad acts.

But, in another way, all this is good, because

1) it's more honest

2) we can finally have a debate over bias when they begin admitting it actually exists (even if they do go on to justify it) and

3) the admission of bias will allow news-consumers to actually evaluate whether or not our unbiased media can be trusted.

So, cheers to Paul Krugman and the Post's ombudsmen. At least they have the honesty to admit what 90% of the media believes and acts upon.

The media knows it's biased. The media, however, believes that its bias is good for society. Let us get past these childish denials and have a discussion about what the media actually believes.

Something that may "interest" the Post's ombudsmen: CBS News recently reported that "Kerry says" we've lost 2.2 million jobs, whereas "Bush says" we've now only lost about 1.1 million.

CBS reported both claims uncritically. It was a He Said, He Said, situation, which CBSNews could not adjudicate.

Trouble is, of course, we have the numbers. They are not subject to debate. Kerry is wrong. Bush is right.

I'm sure the Post's ombudsman finds it equally "interesting" that, in a debate in which Kerry was clearly wrong and Bush clearly right, the reporter took a perfectly neutral stance between the competing claims.

Apparently liberal reporters are required to aggressively debunk "misleading" conservative claims -- because reporting such claims strictly neutrally might be "fair" to the claim but would be "unfair" to the truth -- but are not similarly obligated to debunk flat-out dishonest claims from John Kerry.

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (2)
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Some time ago, DNC staffer/Washington Post employee Dana Milbank penned a delightfully unhinged piece claiming that "scholars" (guess what kind) deemed Bush to be "unprecented" in his negativity as regards his political advertisements.

Milbank determined that Bush had spent much more than Kerry on negative ads, conveniently excluding the primary season from the calculus (why? because that's where Kerry did most of his negative Bush ads) and "forgetting," as Paul Krugman might say, to tally up all the negative ads run by Kerry-supporting surrogate groups like MoveOn.org.

But he wasn't done yet! Oh, no. One nice thing about liberal reporters is that there's really no exhausting their partisan loyalty to the Democratic Party.

He went on to "determine" (scholars say!) that many of Bush's claims about Kerry were "misleading" or "false." In fact, of course, they're all either true or true depending on how you look at it, which has historically been the bar for truthfulness as regards political ads.

Well! After such a performance, you could well expect the Washington Post's ombudsmen to weigh in as to whether the "news article" was too transparently a Kerry '04 press release.

The Post's ombudsman does just that-- and spends the bulk of his piece defending the article from criticism that it was too unfair to Kerry [!!!] and not stridently enough anti-Bush:

Also among the letters prompted by this story were some from readers who felt that The Post, in perhaps striving for balance by also reporting details of Kerry's "own misleading statements and exaggerations" in the same article, had diminished the impact of the story, which was focused on the Bush campaign. At issue for these readers, clearly not Bush supporters, is whether some standard journalistic conventions are obscuring what is happening.

Here is what some of them said on this point.

...

Another said: "One of the reasons the administration has been able, for example, to convince the American public of a causal link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, while maintaining that they did not lie, has been the press's tendency to try and always present two sides to each issue, regardless of how false one of the two points of view is. The press often adopts a credulous 'he said, she said' approach rather than investigating the truth of assertions and placing them in context when they present them in print.

"This is not fairness," this reader continued, "but rather an abdication of the responsibility to make an honest assessment of the facts. Journalism should strive to be unbiased, but it should not simply parrot what it hears, and it should not be afraid to delineate between what it believes to be the truth and what it is told. The tendency to do this has led to the expectation among both readers and journalists that articles critical of one side or another will always have statements that provide balance. While this is generally good, if the truth makes one side look particularly bad it can lead to the journalist putting his thumb on the lightweight side of the scale in order to avoid the accusation that he or she is biased."

I don't feel as though The Post put its thumb on the scale in this case. Reporting on Kerry's "misleading statements and exaggerations" was proper in a story whose main focus was on Bush's campaign advertisements. Yet the readers quoted above make interesting points.

Indeed they do! But more interesting is how interesting you find it! In a piece which is quite obviously a Kerry talking points memo printed up as a Washington Post news article, you're quite sympathetic to the idea that the writers, if they had any bias at all, were too biased in favor of Bush.

Let's extend the thoughts you find so "interesting."

You find it "interesting" that, in the interest of "fairness," a liberal reporter includes some very slight criticism of Kerry. You are worried that this nominal fairness is in fact not "fairness" at all, because Bush is so clearly wrong and Kerry so clearly right that any effort to "balance" the two is, de facto, unfair to Kerry.

And when it comes to charges of media bias-- the Washington Post, obviously a liberal newspaper, attempts to "balance" its media-bias analysis by suggesting that a piece written by a known anti-Bush partisan which bashes Bush might have one flaw, and that flaw is that it is skewed too favorably towards Bush.

Hmmmmm...

I find it very "interesting" that, when it comes to evaluating its own success at achieving fairness, the Washington Post gives equal credence to two different claims, one obviously correct, the other transparently looney, and then claims "balance." The Post's ombudsman thinks that Dana Milbank is "equally" guilty of liberal and conservative bias, or at least can't decide between the two.

Isn't that an example of the very "false fairness" -- giving equal credence to two claims which are wildly divergent in plausibility -- that the writer finds so "interesting," at least when the theory can be used to defend liberal bias?

In related news, Washington Post editors defended their policy of paying their ombudsmen half in cash and half in pharmaceutical-quality LSD.

Update! I'd originally wanted to link this piece by Byron York debunking Milbank's tendentious debunking, but I'd forgotten where I'd seen it and couldn't find it.

Thanks to Geek Empire for pointing the way.

Posted by: Ace at 10:10 AM | Comments (4)
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