I dropped this link in the last post, but I'll quote a little bit of this article. The writer is black, not that that matters, because I'm sure he's not a "real" black, but some sort swarthy-complexioned white guy who's really into the J. Giles Band ("they're so funky") and Peter Cetera.

While race is an inseparable element in sports, thoughtful discussion of the topic makes some squeamish.

DeBerry [coach of the Air Force Academy football team] looked at black receivers running past his slow and usually white defensive backs and said he wants more fast black kids, so his team has a better chance to win.

...

[DeBerry] has received a reprimand from the academy, in fact, for saying it seemed to him that African American players run very, very well. DeBerry was quick to add, almost seamlessly, that he would be open to having players of any race who are faster than his kids, but that black kids appeared to be faster.

Then all hell broke loose, and by Wednesday the coach was fighting back tears and saying, "I want everyone to understand that I never intended to offend anyone."

DeBerry has nothing whatsoever to apologize for. I understand that any kind of categorization, especially along racial lines, can be risky. One of DeBerry's former black players (who loves his coach) e-mailed me this week to point out that any such comments put the speaker on a very slippery slope, and that's certainly true.

But our fear of any discussion involving race should not eliminate common-sense observations. Since Jason Sehorn retired from the NFL a season or so ago, how many white starting cornerbacks are there in the NFL? The answer, as far as I can find, is zero.

It's just so silly.

Posted by: Ace at 01:06 PM | Comments (16)
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112 employees over the years and only one of them was black?

And I bet he wasn't even a "real black," either, but some sort of step-n-fetchit Simple Sambo like Lieutenant Governor of Maryland Michael Steele.

So, really, that's about one quarter of a real black. Meaning that Al Franken's black-hire rate is 1 out of 448, or just above 0.02%. Jesus, I bet the Klan has a better black-outreach program than that. The Klan must hire a few blacks, at least for ringers for its touch-football games against the Aryan Nation. (Oh, wait, it's racist to note that lithe black guys make really fast cornerbacks.)

Oh, and here's the kicker: he's suing the author of a book for revealing this. He's not claiming it's false, mind you; he seems to be making some sort of invasion-of-privacy beef.

Al Franken

Black folks just don't have the "necessities" to serve as his employees.

Thanks to Right Wing Howler.

Speaking of Cornerbacks... I'm a big fan of football jokes. (Which is weird, because I hate jokes per se. I guess I mean I like football witicisms.)

My favorite is about Jerome Bettis: "When you need one yard, he'll get you three. And when you need five yards... he'll get you three."

No offense to the Bus, and yeah, I know he breaks it for 12 or 15 every once in a while. But the basics of the joke are true. He's a dependable three yards.

But I heard one a couple of weeks ago, after a cornerback let an easy interception go right through his hands. "Well," the color man noted, "like they say, 'If he could catch, he'd be a receiever.'"

Great Al Franken Joke: I mean, it's about Al Franken. Al Franken himself has precious few jokes.

At some roast, someone said: "Al Franken is to comedy what Albert Einstein... is to comedy."

Pretty much sums it up.

Posted by: Ace at 11:49 AM | Comments (17)
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Good enough for me:

He has certainly said the right things: “Judges should be judges. They shouldn’t be legislators, they shouldn’t be administrators.” That that should be refreshing, that it should even need saying, shows how far sunk in activism our courts, and particularly the Supreme Court, have become. Alito is a member of the Federalist Society, an indication that he is devoted to the rule of law rather than the rule of judges.

...

We may be confident, I think, that a Justice Alito, like Chief Justice John Roberts, will not vote to create new and hitherto unsuspected constitutional rights. He will not share the extreme liberationist philosophy, one of the hangovers from the 1960s, that characterizes the current Court majority. But, also like Roberts, we do not know whether he will vote to overturn the worst constitutional travesties of the past. And, if he is the superb lawyer he is reputed to be, we will not learn that at his hearings either.

Yet overturning Roe v. Wade should be the sine qua non of a respectable jurisprudence. ...

If judgments about the prudence of overruling are invoked, the justices should take note of the fact that Roe lies at the center of the bitter polarization of much of American society. In countries where the issue is decided democratically, no such intense animus exists. Compromises are worked out and each side knows that it is free to continue the public debate in hope of doing better next time. That was, and would be again, the case in America if the subject of abortion were returned to state legislatures and electorates. Overruling Roe would not, as some Democrats will claim, make abortion illegal, but merely the subject of democratic regulation. We have paid a high price for a ruling that rests upon nothing in the Constitution and was arrived at in an opinion of just over 51 pages that contains not a line of legal reasoning.

Posted by: Ace at 10:11 AM | Comments (10)
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On chicks, that is.

North Korea's communist government is urging women in the country to wear traditional Korean clothes instead of pants, according to a North Korean monthly magazine.

"Keeping alive our dress style is a very important political issue to adhere to specific national cultural traditions at a time when the U.S. imperialists are maneuvering to spread the rotten bourgeois lifestyle inside North Korea," the Joson Yeosung (Woman) magazine said, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.”

First of all, pants aside, IÂ’m intrigued North Korea has a WomansÂ’ mag. Makes you sort of wonder at the articles a genocidal, starve everybody regime, would stuff inside its version of Cosmo: "This fall, thin is in. Again!"Â… "Cholera is the new black!"... "Re-education Camp weekend getaways!"

And second, while you’re no doubt sitting there thinking “Good call, Dear Leader. Who doesn’t like dames in skirts?” - hold on. As the article notes, Kim’s demanding a return to the Hanbok, so North Korea won’t exactly become the workers'/leg man’s paradise you’re hoping.

And yes, while I of course appreciate a big F.U. in the direction of those shrill North Korean feminists, a return to “Three Kingdoms” era clothing doesn’t really speak well as their country’s inevitable march to the future, either.

Frankly, IÂ’m beginning to entertain some doubts about that countryÂ’s direction. Thought you should know.

Posted by: Dr. Reo Symes at 10:09 AM | Comments (11)
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No D&D or GURPS or CarWars or Tunnels and Trolls, except to make fun of people about.

Come on. Flames. Not memories about the first time you played module G1, The Steading of the Hill Giant Chief.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (146)
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This was the flame war thread. Now it's the dorkwad thread.

Stuff about VonKreedon's dorkiness after the jump. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:17 AM | Comments (37)
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I didn't want to comment on this, because, to me, the basics of the argument have been done to death. It's the old correct-for-party-affiliation versus let-the-numbers-stand argument.

Some pollsters correct for party affiliation; some people don't, on the theory that party affiliation is not set in stone and some people call themselves "democrats" when they like the democrats and "republicans" when they like the republicans and "independents" when they don't like either.

I think the latter phenomenon is real but fairly small and should be partially but not wholly corrected for, but... some pollsters disagree.

So I was kinda bored to see that the latest polls, showing bad news for Bush, had a lot more self-idenitifed Democratic respondants than Republicans.

But... the latest samplings do seem egregiously tilted to the left.

For example, the CBS News poll, which shows that Bush's approval rating is at 35%, reports that an unweighted sample shows that 34.8% of its respondents self-identified as Democrats, while 27.6% said they were Republicans. While the unweighted sample yielded a seven-point differential favoring the Dems, a weighted sample had the spread at 11% points in favor of the Dems. This represents at least a 10-11 point swing in the electorate since the 2004 election (and perhaps as much as 14 points), when Bush won by about three points and the Repubs won the aggregate House vote by about four points.

Wait a minute-- I'm not sure if I'm understanding this right, but it seems The New Editor is saying that the CBS poll's survey already had a +7 point Democratic oversampling (the parties are about at parity, so that number should be closer to +0) and then employed weighting techniques not to reduce that partisan differential but to increase it to +11?

What the hell?

In the Ipsos/Reed poll...

Only 80% of the respondents in this poll were registered voters, while 13% of the respondents reported that they were unemployed (the current unemployment rate is about 5%-6%)...

Actually, it's 5.0%, as of today.

And the WashPost/ABC poll had a 52% sampling of Democrats and Dem-leaners, an absolute majority (versus 41% Republican/Rep-leaners). Does anyone believe that there is such an absolute majority of Democratic voters? If so, why can't any Democrat garner more than 49% of the vote?

The WashPost/ABCNews guys think this country is majority Dem, 7% independent, and 41% Republican/Republican-leaner?

The party affiliation of the nation has changed that much since the elections a year ago? Really?

One fudge-factor that I usually applied to polls was that Republicans vote in greater numbers than Democrats, so a poll of citizens -- not actual voters -- would tend to skew towards the Democrats, at least as compared to voting records.

But I'm not sure if that fudge-factor should apply anymore. For years we all assumed that there were greater numbers of non-voting Democrats than non-voting Republicans. When both parties made unprecedented get-out-the-vote efforts in 2004, however, the GOP churned out more formerly-non-voting Republicans than the Dems churned out formerly-non-voting Dems.

Without doubt, Bush's popularity is down. But this far down? Well, sure, if your poll is 52% Democrats.

Why don't they just poll 100% committed liberal Democratic partisans and see i they can get Bush's approval down to where they think it should be-- at zero percent?

On the other hand, all the polls show a higher number of Democrats than we might expect. That doesn't quite prove that the nation has, within a short year, moved 10-14 points in favor of the Democrats, but it is I guess a cause for worry.

Posted by: Ace at 09:11 AM | Comments (16)
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In the comments section to this post at Desolation Row about the racism of Maryland Democrats, commenter Jayne made some astonishing remarks:

We are having the same thing right now in our Mayor election of Detroit. Both candidates are black but one calls the other not Black enough. Not to worry though. It came out two days ago that the one who is Black enough has been found to be having the City Clerk send out absentee ballots to over 41% of the residents of Detroit-dead or alive-ALREADY FILLED IN as votes for himself and the City Clerk.

Among findings by News reporters were ballots cast by people registered to vote at abandoned and long-demolished buildings; a master voter list with 380,000 incorrect names and addresses, including people who have died or moved out of the city; and a practice of hand-delivering ballots from senior citizens and disabled voters that were filled out in private meetings with Currie's paid election workers.

In addition, reporters found that city residents diagnosed with Alzheimer's and dementia who could not name the mayor of Detroit or know if they had voted in the primary had completed absentee ballots with the help of Currie's election workers.

Jayne again:

The clerk-Jackie Currie- says they are only trying to sell papers. Her husband was the city clerk in 1963. He was convicted of doing the same vote tampering that she is now doing.

Remember, its not about the smooth and capable governance of a city; its about retaining power and the gravy train at all costs. Oh, and its about blackness, which apparently comes in different strengths, like Tylenol. It would seem the sitting mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, is a Maximum-Extra-Strength Black Man, while the challenger, Freman Hendrix, is a chewable cherry-flavored baby aspirin.
I'm hopeful that at some point within my lifetime, people of all races will look around themselves and realize that a little civic duty goes a long way toward easing urban issues. And on that day, I hope Jesse Jackson finally finds the church he's supposedly the Reverend of, and settles down into a quiet retirement.

Please check out Desolation Row's post and read all of Jayne's comments. The Rosa Parks angle in there is very interesting too.

NRO's Henry Payne has a superb and detailed article on this very subject.

Posted by: LauraW. at 07:01 AM | Comments (25)
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A couple of weeks ago I read for the first time that Joe Wilson had not been signed to a confidentiality agreement when he was sent on his Niger mission.

Why was that, I wondered? I speculated on this site and on the webcast show that he wasn't asked to sign a routine confidentiality agreement because the little cabal of domestic black-baggers who put him up to the frame-job intended from the beginning for him to take his predetermined, agreed-in-advance "findings" public, with the imprimatur of the CIA.

Maybe obvious, but I did say this a while ago.

Now other people are saying it as well. Victoria Toensing writes about this in the WSJ. Subscription is required, but Powerlineblog seems to have quoted most of the good bits:

• First: The CIA sent her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger on a sensitive mission regarding WMD. He was to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake, an essential ingredient for nonconventional weapons. However, it was Ms. Plame, not Mr. Wilson, who was the WMD expert. Moreover, Mr. Wilson had no intelligence background, was never a senior person in Niger when he was in the State Department, and was opposed to the administration's Iraq policy. The assignment was given, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at Ms. Plame's suggestion.

• Second: Mr. Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement, a mandatory act for the rest of us who either carry out any similar CIA assignment or who represent CIA clients.

• Third: When he returned from Niger, Mr. Wilson was not required to write a report, but rather merely to provide an oral briefing. That information was not sent to the White House. If this mission to Niger were so important, wouldn't a competent intelligence agency want a thoughtful written assessment from the "missionary," if for no other reason than to establish a record to refute any subsequent misrepresentation of that assessment? Because it was the vice president who initially inquired about Niger and the yellowcake (although he had nothing to do with Mr. Wilson being sent), it is curious that neither his office nor the president's were privy to the fruits of Mr. Wilson's oral report.

• Fourth: Although Mr. Wilson did not have to write even one word for the agency that sent him on the mission at taxpayer's expense, over a year later he was permitted to tell all about this sensitive assignment in the New York Times. For the rest of us, writing about such an assignment would mean we'd have to bring our proposed op-ed before the CIA's Prepublication Review Board and spend countless hours arguing over every word to be published. Congressional oversight committees should want to know who at the CIA permitted the publication of the article, which, it has been reported, did not jibe with the thrust of Mr. Wilson's oral briefing. For starters, if the piece had been properly vetted at the CIA, someone should have known that the agency never briefed the vice president on the trip, as claimed by Mr. Wilson in his op-ed.

It's illegal to reveal the name of a CIA agent?

You know what else is illegal?

For a group of CIA agents to run a covert operation against any government without the express authorization of the President... especially the government of the United States itself.

Zell Miller notes that the Wilsons found a little subversive loophole: what would have been blatantly illegal for Valerie Plame to do was kinda-sorta legal for Joe Wilson to do (with his SuperSpy Wife's connivance and assistance, of course).

Why wasn't a trained and competent CIA weapons expert sent on this mission?

Because such an agent wouldn't have been allowed to write his "findings" up for the New York Times.

And such an agent would have been vetted and wouldn't have been a political partisan whose "findings" could be predicted (as they were pre-determined).

No-- for this job, they needed someone outside the CIA. And they needed a crony for the operation, because they had to know his thinking, his politics. They had to know they could rely on him to knock down this "crazy little theory."

Enter liberal Democrat Valerie Plame's liberal Democratic hack husband.

And Rush Limbaugh's talking about it too. But, you know-- debuted on Hoist the Black Flag.

Posted by: Ace at 09:30 PM | Comments (220)
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As predicted: the leaks by CIA personnel (sworn to secrecy) about the CIA's secret prison system have begun the detective-work and the accusations.

The prisons will be shut down soon. If Poland and Rumania host them, they'll ask the CIA to move them. Even if they don't host them, it won't be long until the next round of accusations; there are only so many countries in "Eastern Europe," after all. It's just a process of elimination.

Note that this chain of events -- this decision -- was not made by the duly elected government of the United States but by bureaucrats who have arrogated to themselves the power to direct America's foreign and military policy.

So: given that this leak has already caused great embarassment to the US and two of her allies, and the CIA's Al Qaeda prisons are about to be shut down there -- is this a leak of classified information worth investigating?

Or is this one of those "good leaks" the liberal media and liberal bureaucratic establishment in Washington -- our nation's "permanent government" -- approve of?

If the CIA is allowed to leak classified information to jeopardize an entire program of which some of its bureaucrats disapprove, why can't Scooter Libby leak the name of a single DC-based soccer-mom of whom he doesn't approve?

The incompetent CIA seems to employ a highly selective reading of our nation's secrecy laws.

Posted by: Ace at 09:18 PM | Comments (47)
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