They're all pretty bad. But Number 3, which I don't remember (though I'm sure I saw the game), sounds horrific.

Posted by: Ace at 11:52 AM | Comments (9)
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Boiled down to its basics:

1. [Engage him, to the extent you feel you need to, with nothing but] Merciless, funny mocking, or no mention [at all].

2. [Retain a] Blissful ignorance of his [moronically hack] agenda.*

3. Most importantly: [Give him] No links, no traffic.

Ummm.... Bill?

What the hell took you so long?

I have to give myself a hat-tip, here. I'm not the most insightful writer, but damnit if my invective towards Willis and Sullivan and Wonkette and Marshall -- considered rude or unecessary just six months ago -- hasn't become the new conventional wisdom.

Posted by: Ace at 11:25 AM | Comments (21)
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Umm, has anyone else noticed the Ukraine's new Prime Minister is, like, really hot?

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (12)
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Despite the fact that Mickey Kaus, Michelle Malkin, I, and others promoted Howie Kurtz's web-chat today, and we all suggested that readers write questions having to do with Eason Jordan, it turns out that Howie Kurtz just didn't notice a single question about Jordangate.

He instead decided to answer nine -- count 'em, nine -- questions about the thirty-plus year old Watergate/Deep Throat story.

Way to stay on top of current media criticism, Howie! Nice job!

Posted by: Ace at 10:39 AM | Comments (3)
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As well as the tactics?:

In the week since national elections, police and Iraqi National Guardsmen say that they have received more tips from the public, resulting in more arrests and greater effectiveness in their efforts to weaken the violent insurgency rocking the country.
...
But officials in Baghdad said a relative lull in violence in the capital has fueled the sense that something has fundamentally changed since the vote. A change of attitudes in Baghdad could make a crucial difference in the battle against the insurgency, and a buoyed sense of civic pride is already beginning to change the way the public treats the police, authorities say.

And there's more:

In the first week after the elections, the Iraqi Interior Ministry and the Mosul police chief are turning the tables on the insurgency here in the north by using a tactic - videotaped messages - that the insurgents have used time and again as they have terrorized the region with kidnappings and executions.

But this time the videos, which are being broadcast on a local station, carry an altogether different message, juxtaposing images of the masked killers with the cowed men they become once captured.

Great finds, Bill.

Via Florida Cracker, again.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (2)
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Well, not quite Valentine's Day gifts; the feminists now call it "V-Day," with the "V" standing, depending on what insipid point they're making, for "Violence" (you know, like when you beat the stuffings out of your wife when Tom Brady fumbled that play-action fake) or "Vagina."

It takes a guy with a real set of balls -- or a real pussy -- to wear a hat proclaiming "Vagina Warrior."

Really, you can go either way on this one. You've got to ask yourself, "Can I really pull this off?" It's a bigger gamble than growing that Van Dyke you've always wanted since sophomore year at Swarthmore.

Thanks to Florida Cracker.

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 AM | Comments (9)
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Via Instapundit, the MSM and its Arts and Crafts Auxilliaries in the academy (to use a Pat Buchanan laugh-line) are pretty angry about being challenged by lowly bloggers, and they're fighting back:

....Newcomer, a Microsoft programming teacher who has studied typesetting for decades, suspected the hubbub was about his recent assertions that CBS's 1972-73 memos on President Bush's National Guard service were fakes.

Sure enough, "Blog-Gate," by Corey Pein, a CJR assistant editor, said Newcomer was a "self-proclaimed" expert whose resume "seemed" impressive. His conclusions were "bold bordering on hyperbolic." Newcomer's font analysis, posted on his Web site, www.flounder. com., was "long and technical, discouraging close examination."

Then, without asking Newcomer for help on those long, technical parts, Pein concluded that Newcomer's ability to replicate the CBS memos with Microsoft Word (not available in 1972) proved nothing. Blogs had not been instrumental in exposing CBS and, through it all, "liberals and their fellow travelers were outed like witches in Salem, while Bush's defenders forged ahead, their affinities and possible motives largely unexamined."

Newcomer, who voted for Sen. John Kerry in November, was baffled. When I spoke with him recently, he told me that The New Yorker once called his wife, a botanical illustration expert, to ask whether a certain plant could grow in a certain area, because a fiction writer had mentioned it in a piece. That was fact-checking. CJR "did not do any fact-checking," he says.

...

Criticism of CJR and the "MSM" (mainstream media) for leftward bias is nothing new. "If you polled our office -- I'm sure most news organizations -- you'll find more Democrats than Republicans," Pein says. Many of CJR's employees and contributors, for instance, have worked and/or written for left-leaning magazines or causes (see sidebar).

But look a little deeper and you start to wonder if, perhaps, CJR's decision to attack blogs wasn't just a knee-jerk liberal defense of Bush critics but jealousy. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that blog readership rose 58 percent in 2004. Editor & Publisher reported in May 2004 that veteran newsman Eugene Roberts was leading a consortium to shore up the CJR's (and the American Journalism Review's) weakening finances and readership.

Blogs these days are holding the MSM's feet to the fire, forcing newspapers and TV news shows to reflect the country's politics more accurately. CJR, "America's Premier Media Monitor," on the other hand, has been nudging the media leftward for four decades. Now it has to compete -- and it's not happy about it at all.

"They are, to some extent, just another blog, except they have the brand," says Graham.

...

"We still don't know what blogging is going to do to journalism over all," says Phil Meyer, professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, "but it's certainly upsetting it."

Upsetting them is good enough for now.

Commenting on the Jordangate post below, Shannon Love of the ChicagoBoyz site noted:

Major media, as collective brand, depends on an industry consensus view for each story to protect the value of the brands. People trust a major media sources because none of the other major media ever questions them. Until recently, all the major media all told the same story. It creates the illusion of an omniscient industry.

When major media questions major media then it shatters the illusion. Consumers don't know which version to trust. The major media, as an industry wide brand, loses values.

They have a intense interest in not questioning each other to closely.

And defending each other to the hilt, too. The illusion of objectivity is maintained by them all saying about the same thing about the same topics. When discordant voices sound off, it breaks that illusion, and suggests that perhaps there isn't merely one "objective" way to cover the news.

Posted by: Ace at 10:25 AM | Comments (1)
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The MSM is firing reporters or employees who blog.

It's happened to someone I know. You think the NY Post is actually conservative? Well, not really. They play that angle because that's their niche market, but most of the reporters and editors there are as liberal as those at the New York Times.

Not only did the fire Dawn Eden for what seems to have been a very minor transgression -- their real beef seeming to be her blog -- but they couldn't even let it go at that. Now unknown parties (although we might guess at a few of them) are smearing her in Women's Wear Daily.

Posted by: Ace at 09:39 AM | Comments (11)
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They still claim they want to leave the US, but they seem to be using Alec Baldwin's rather slow-moving travel-agent to arrange things:

Christopher Key knows exactly what he would be giving up if he left Bellingham, Washington.

...

But leave it he intends to do, and as soon as he can. His house is on the market, and he is busily seeking work across the border in Canada. For him, the re-election of George W. Bush was the last straw.

"I love the United States," he said as he stood on the Vancouver waterfront, staring toward the Coastal Range, which was lost in a gray shroud. "I fought for it in Vietnam. It's a wrenching decision to think about leaving. But America is turning into a country very different from the one I grew up believing in."

In the Niagara of liberal angst just after Bush's victory on Nov. 2, the Canadian government's immigration Web site reported a surge in inquiries from the United States, to about 115,000 a day from 20,000.

After three months, memories of the election have begun to recede. There has been an inauguration, even a State of the Union address.

Yet immigration lawyers say that Americans are not just making inquiries and that more are pursuing a move above the 49th parallel, fed up with a country they see drifting persistently to the right and abandoning the principles of tolerance, compassion and peaceful idealism they felt once defined the nation.

...

Melanie Redman, 30, assistant director of the Epilepsy Foundation in Seattle, said she had put her Volvo up for sale and hopes to be living in Toronto by the summer. She and her Canadian boyfriend, a Web site designer for Canadian nonprofit companies, had been planning to move to New York, but after Nov.2, they decided on Canada instead.

"I'm doing it," she said. "I don't want to participate in what this administration is doing here and around the world. Under Bush, the U.S. seems to be leading the pack as the world spirals down."

...

"I'm originally from a poor, lead-mining town in Missouri, and I know a lot of the people there don't understand why I'm doing this," she said. "Even my family is pretty disappointed. And the fact is, it makes me pretty sad, too. But I just can't bear to pay taxes in the United States right now."

Finally! Join the club, Sister. What took you so long?

I question the timing.

But I guess I do respect those who not only despise America (or "what America is becoming," at least), but are prepared to act on that conviction, rather than remaining affiliated with a nation they so plainly hate.

The pursuit of happiness is a cherished American ideal. And if that ideal compels you to pursue happiness in Canada-- well, that's just fine with me. No one, apart from jailed criminals, is a captive of this nation.

We seem to be witnessing an accelerating trend of migrations based on political ideology-- the libertarians, for instance, have long talked about invading New Hampshire to make it a bastion of Ayn Rand-type freedom not unlike Colorado in Atlas Shrugged. And now the left, long ago having invaded Vermont, now seems to be moving to its own Colorado of the North.

I don't know that there's anything wrong or dangerous about this. I think perhaps that a friendly local ideology is being elevated much higher on the list of sanguinary attributes of a locale that it had been previously. But if that's what people want -- well, we're all free to choose our own bliss.

Vaya con Dios. Seriously-- I hope it works out for them. Better they be happy in Canada than resentful, miserable, and angry in America.

I do think this sort of undermines the left's dedication to strong-form diversity. It's about time they admitted the obvious-- there may be some benefits to diveristy, to being forced to deal with people much different than you (including with respect to ideology), but let's face it, most people seek out the company of like-minded individuals.

Opposites attract, but those of like minds tend to stick together for longer.

Thanks for the title to NickS.

Posted by: Ace at 09:26 AM | Comments (12)
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Unlike the rest of the under-30 population of America, I'm sure.

I think the MSM owes it to all of us to get the bottom of this outrage. Female soldiers engaging in-- mudwrestling? Horrible, horrible, horrible.

I fully expect Frank Rich to step up to the plate and defend their rights to engage in a little raunchy play-sexuality.

Yawn. The left only seems shocked by the occasional excesses of the human sex drive when it can use such to attack conservatives or the military.

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 AM | Comments (14)
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