I haven't seen any new articles on the woes of the oh so woeful Air America, but I figure it explains this. Franken is realizing that the mirage of crazy liberal talk radio money is well, still a mirage.

Al, baby, just follow the patented Ace of Spades lifestyle, and soon the pain will go away, along with half your liver.

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 08:24 AM | Comments (22)
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Wisconsin, gateway to the stars?

Wisconsin legislators are promoting a plan to create a spaceport in the country's top cheese-making state.

The proposal would set up a nine-member Wisconsin Aerospace Authority to promote the state among private entrepreneurs planning to go extraterrestrial, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. Sheboygan would be the state's Houston, allowing failed rockets to fall into Lake Michigan.

Plan is not to use much state money, just serve as a lauchpad, as it were, for the growing, private-sector space-truckin industry. Godspeed, Cheeseheads.

Posted by: Dr. Reo Symes at 01:45 PM | Comments (41)
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That's right, the blasphemy continues. (Suck it, bridge Nazis.)

Last week we covered Bridges of the Future, ranking the modernistic spans without regard to what they think you should think.

This week, more in-their-face criticism and bridge-lovin, but on a different tip. Yes, this week we're kickin it old school with 'Bridges of the Past.' Hitting you with the best of those old timey, ornate, fancy-pants spans that deserve respek. Gothicy or Victorian. Statues. Curliques. Often made of stone. Detail we canÂ’t afford today.

Here we go:

Tower Bridge. London, England. The Grande Dame of the category. You can't do a list on old timey bridges and not include this lady. Fine, I'm bowing to convention right off. Screw you. The problem is, she's so well known, sheÂ’s become boring. Still though, a classy old broad that you can't properly leave off.

I also like this night shot. Has the very modern Swiss Re tower in the background as contrast (the Swiss Re is the one people say looks like a Conehead, though all twinkly like that, it really reminds me more of Lucifer from the original Battlestar).

Kintai Bridge. Iwakuni, Japan. One of the ‘3 bridges of Japan.’ Gorgeous and simple. Wood and old (1673). Yes, okay, another pedestrian bridge, and fine, not terribly ornate. But very pretty. (Five arches baby, five!)

A little more info on it here. A nice gallery here. more...

Posted by: Dr. Reo Symes at 10:58 AM | Comments (36)
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Make no mistake about it: Andrew Sullivan find menstrual blood, even of the fake, red-ink variety, gob-smackingly vile.

I won't join Tarranto in his suggestion that maybe Sullivan has a less-than-thorough appreciation for the female body and its reproductive cycle.

I'll just note this: Sullivan is on a big rant about "torture." And yet he, like others who claim to be against torture, tell us that we can obtain all the information we need from terrorists via psychological pressure and professional interrogations.

Well, smearing red ink on someone -- even under the guise of it being menstrual blood -- is obviously not physical torture. It is psychological torment for some; but this is precisely the sort of trickery/pressure which is yet not actually torture the anti-torture contingent claims should be used in lieu of actual arm-breaking.

Which is it, Andy?

As Private Frost wondered, "What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?"

All forms of psychological pressure are inherently coercive. That's the point. You're pushing cultural buttons, or buttons common to every human, like fear of being harmed or killed.

People like Sullivan assure us that, while they're against torture, they're certainly for psychological gambits and mind-games and the like. And yet, each particular instance of such a psychological game fails to meet their approval.

And they steadfastly refuse to announce precisely what they would allow-- the particular methods they'd be comfortable with. They won't give their blessing to anything that smacks of dirty pool or psychological coercion, but continue claiming they're reasonable on the point because they'd allow some unspecified hypothetical methods to be used.

Which ones? Red ink is apparently out. I have to figure that the old trick of pretending to torture or kill one "terrorist" -- actually a plant working with the interrogators -- in order to induce the others to talk would likewise be out, as it involves scaring the living shit out of the actual terrorists.

Please, Excitable Andy-- list the methods of which you would approve for tough interrogations in their specifics.

Because, at this point, it seems you're against "torture" as defined as "anything that causes someone emotional distress."

Thanks to See-Dubya and Mark in Mexico.

Posted by: Ace at 09:19 AM | Comments (109)
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The Times of London has a huge story today:

The United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday.

The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council.

The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes. Â…

The final, edited version quoted a witness as saying that the plot to kill Mr Hariri was hatched by unnamed “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials”. But the undoctored version named those officials as “Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamal al-Sayyed”.

The deleted names represent the inner core of the Syrian regime. ...

Mr Annan had pledged repeatedly through his chief spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, that he would not change a word of the report by Detlev Mehlis, a German prosecutor. But computer tracking showed that the final edit began at about 11.38am on Thursday — a minute after Herr Mehlis began a meeting with Mr Annan to present his report. The names of Maher al-Assad, General Shawkat and the others were apparently removed at 11.55am, after the meeting ended.

At a press conference yesterday Herr Mehlis insisted that Mr Annan had not pressurised him into making changes. “No one outside of the report team influenced these changes and no changes whatsoever were suggested by the Secretary-General,” he said.

There's a lot about this story that isn't known. How independent was this reporting team? If no one inside the UN not on the team influenced the changes, why were they made only after the report was handed in? And why so quickly afterward?

Even if the reporting team wanted to make those changes all along, leaving out the names of the assassins as perhaps too politically explosive, what does that say about the UN's ability to serve as an independent "chips fall where they may" investigator (stop laughing). Why would anyone trust them again? Why did anyone trust them in the first place?

Wouldn't everyone be screaming their heads off if any other investigative agency on a homicide refused, for polical reasons, to name the actual killer? Doesn't it make you quesition the institution itself?

Okay, maybe they had good reasons. Maybe the proof just wasn't there. But the last moment editing really makes this whole thing stink.

Update: Kofi Responsible for Changes?

The Jerusalem Post has more:
more...

Posted by: Dr. Reo Symes at 07:52 AM | Comments (17)
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If we allow Cubans who make it to land to live here, why do we blast to shit those who are trying to get here?

This is a friggin idiotic practice Clinton put into place. Either we allow illegals, or we don't.
People are putting water reservoirs in the fucking desert so that Mexicans who violate our borders won't die on the way.
But our government actively tries to destroy those from Cuba.
What is the difference between Mexican Illegals and Cubans?

I want you to say what it is.

Posted by: LauraW. at 05:58 PM | Comments (30)
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One of these things is not like the others.

Posted by: LauraW. at 04:41 PM | Comments (21)
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DA's and defense attorneys had agreed to thirty years; he asked for 33.

In related news, he's scheduled to be forcibly sodomized one time for each of Dan Marino's 43,781 career passing yards.

"Bonus!" the convict was quoted as saying.

Thanks to Matthew.

Mark in Mexico had the story earlier, with comments.

Posted by: Ace at 04:35 PM | Comments (2)
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The guy who put pictures of his dorkfish under the wiper-blades of women's cars explained his motivation thus:

"He had done it to make them happy, to make them giggle. He thought it was funny as a practical joke," Hartford Police Lt. Thomas Horvath said.

But he's just following a tradition of howlingly funny dick humor. I've dabbled in the field myself, and here are some of my favorite penile pracitcal jokes. Guar-an-teed laughs.

Strong Content Warning. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (39)
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The story is that the WH wanted to just ignore Joe Wilson, but Scooter Libby was "passionate" about taking him on.

I could care less if this is true or not. The whole story is a joke. The CIA leaked sensitive information for years and the only one leak being investigated involves Soccer Mom 007, the Non-Covert Non-Agent With a License To Bake?

Give me a break.

Let's recap:

* Joe Wilson's wife got him the job.

* Joe Wilson's report was considered to add nothing to the investigation of Iraqis seeking uranium. His big reveal was that Niger officials denied committing crimes. What a shock.

* Joe Wilson lied on multiple occasions about what his report said, what it proved, and who had ordered it. He claimed that he was sent to Niger by Dick Cheney himself, to add credibility to his claims.

* He wasn't asked to sign a confidentiality agreement... Gee, it's almost as if his wife and her friends got him the job and didn't sign him to confidentiality because they wanted him to meet with a few Nigerian officials, get their perfectly predictable denials, and then go public with the explosive revelations that Iraq intelligence had been "twisted." Almost.

Once Joe Wilson enters the public debate -- as had been planned all along -- how does one refute his lie about how he came to have his job without introducing the truth?

Truth is a defense in libel. It should also be a defense against violating security protocols, especially in cases like this, where a determined cadre of anti-war CIA liberals leaks like sieves, create false reports and misattribute their creation to high administration officials, and then seek to hide behind their non-covert non-agent status to pin an espionage rap on anyone willing to stand up to them.

Is that how it works? Valerie Plame gets to indulge in a little domestic black-bag ops and then hides behind her supposed status as a CIA operative?

Interesting Sidenote... This comes from someone in the LATimes, who's now circulating LAT political stories and editorials to bloggers.

Posted by: Ace at 01:02 PM | Comments (103)
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