At least according to the "reality based community" posting on Democratic Underground.

In related news, scientists have determined that the Tunguska Fireball was caused by Karl Rove fucking around with his chemistry set in a doomed effort to create a gas that causes black folks to vote conservative and buy John Tesh albums.

Misspelling: Tunguska is with a "k." Thanks, Dianna.

Quake Digest: Pundit Guy collects up the reports from the wires.

Of course, the SCLM ("So-Called Liberal Media") refuses to investigate the "Bush Did It" angle.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (20)
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Maybe they're just "intellectually incurious."

Posted by: Ace at 09:17 AM | Comments (3)
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As The New Editor further reports, Colorado University immediately offered all 80,000 alleged humans in the crowd tenured positions in the Department of Anti-American Studies (also known as the combined liberal arts faculty).

Posted by: Ace at 08:55 AM | Comments (9)
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From the NY Post's Page 6:

WHICH male contestant on the current season of "The Apprentice" nearly "blew" his chance for a $250,000-a-year job with The Donald? One of the show's producers walked in on him midsnort in a Trump Tower bathroom.

Too bad it's about the current season, because I would have loved to have found out it was Raj. Not that I supect Raj of being a druggie, and not that I don't like Raj; I just like seein' old Raj get into one crazy circumstance after another. He should have his own sitcom.

He can co-star with Oliver Willis as a pair of mismatched roommates. Raj would be the guy who's always hitting on women, most of them well out of his league, and Oliver Willis would be the guy sitting on the couch with a sack of White Castle attached to his snout like a feed-bag. Maybe Andrew Sullivan can appear in a "Very Special Episode" in which his beloved beagle is diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes. And of couse bronchitis.

Thanks to Chickpea.

Posted by: Ace at 08:45 AM | Comments (2)
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Not just the quote of the day, but the quote of my whole blog. Sort of an alternate "007 Theme" to go with the main James Bond Theme that is the Mencken quote.

Serious error would seem to require serious argument to refute it. While this may be true in the hard sciences which deal with material objects, it is
not true in the social sciences which deal with human affairs. Indeed, faced with the pretentious solemnity of official Nonsense, evidence and reason are
helpless. Our only effective weapon against it is laughter, especially the laughter of ridicule.

-- TS Szasz, in The Untamed Tongue

Is this blog too moronic, too profane, too irresponsible, too... much? Well, now I can offer the plainly-brilliant TS Szasz in my defense.

Thanks a bunch to M & R (never sure how closely I should protect reader's names).

Posted by: Ace at 08:41 AM | Comments (4)
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Posted late on a Friday, insuring that only half of the site's readers would see it. So I'm reposting. Sue me.

Okay, I don't know if this is Pat O'Brien at all. This site says it is, but who knows? I sure don't. Doesn't even really sound like him. (Ahem... am I covered?)

I don't know... phone sex via answering machine? Is this a wise idea?

Unfolding events would seem to indicate it's not, in fact, a wise idea.

It's also probably not a good idea to bring up hookers, drugs, and three-ways on a recorded message. For the love of everything holy-- even I know that.

And one more thing: At one point, in attempting to have phone sex with a cassette tape, he announces "I don't do this for a living."

He doesn't?

He doesn't have phone sex with women for a living? Shut up, really?

I didn't even know there was such a gig. What the hell am I still doing working at Orange Julius?

Major content warning. Whoever this is, he ain't quoting Shakespearean sonnets to his beloved, make no mistake about that.

Thanks to, ahem, "Lipstick Dynamite."

I wonder if Lipstick Dynamite sent this because it has something to do with the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgsztan.

I'll tell ya one thing-- this tape is going to make watching women's gymnastics a lot more interesting. Gotta wonder what the guy might be thinking he'd like to do to Kerri Strug.

This sort of calls for a top ten... but damnit, I don't know if I can. I would have to pick up stuff from the tape for the top ten, and even I haven't been that dirty.

Yet.

Welll... you've been warned.

Content Warning. Serious Content Warning. No kidding, what follows is really dirty and definitely not safe for work. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 PM | Comments (46)
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Churchill's got as much credibility as an "Indian" as Pat Boone had as heavy metal singer:

The future of a University of Colorado professor who likened some Sept. 11, 2001, victims to a notorious Nazi is now in the hands of nine colleagues who may be asked to decide whether he is American
Indian, as he claims...

The ethnicity issue, however, is far from concrete. Churchill insisted again last week that he is Indian, saying, "That's my family's understanding of itself."

Proving himself a master of Brit understatement, the writer adds:

...there is serious doubt about his Indian identity.

You know what? This scam is just too sweet; I want in too.

I'm a Native American, too. My Indian name is Heap Big Blog Money. Would you like to buy some of my Native American art?

I call this one The Swindling of My People's Land By Paleface Jackals:

Pretty good, right? I'll give that to you for... hmmm... 200 wampum.

Here's another one I'm proud of. I painted this bad-boy up when I was tripping my face off on mescaline on a sacred vision quest that landed me in Tijuana jail for three weeks on a trumped-up charge of light mayhem.*

I call it Brave Coyote Warrior Howls At the Hunter's Moon:

You see the detail-work on that belt-buckle? That's an old Indian technique.

Finally, my favorite. I call this one Pale Princess Charming White Snake :

To be honest, I didn't paint that, per se. I just got it off of a Yahoo images search for Tawny Kitaen. However, I have made it more "Indian" by pasting some colorful flowers around the borders (not depicted).

Dude, where's my tenure?

* Pop quiz. "Mayhem" actually was, and still is in some codes, an actual defined crime. Anyone know the approximate definition of the crime? Non-lawyers get double-points for this one; but it's sort of obscure, so most lawyers probably won't know it, either.

Thanks to RCL again for the tip.

Update: 72Virgins tips that the Chancellor's report already covered this, and declined to investigate:

The EEOC took the position that observation and self identification are the most reliable indicators of of ethnicity. The Chancellor declined to persue the matter. The question about Professor Churchill' employment must be considered closed as a result of this ten-year old review

-- from Page 7 of the Chancellor's report

However, the Concord Monitor article references that report, and his ethnicity -- and whether he lied about it -- seems to be under investigation by a "faculty committee," despite the older report's conclusions.

Posted by: Ace at 10:55 PM | Comments (18)
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The article teased this afternoon is now in print; better yet, it's in pixels:

By RICHARD MINITER Special to the Sun

WASHINGTON — A lone U.S. ambassador compromised America’s hunt for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan for more than two years,The New York Sun has learned.

Ambassador Nancy Powell, AmericaÂ’s representative in Pakistan, refused to allow the distribution in Pakistan of wanted posters, matchbooks, and other items advertising AmericaÂ’s $25 million reward for information leading to the capture of Mr. bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders.

Instead, thousands of matchbooks, posters, and other material — printed at taxpayer expense and translated into Urdu, Pashto, and other local languages —remained “impounded” on American Embassy grounds from 2002 to 2004, according to Rep. Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois.

While the American government was engaged in a number of “black” or covert intelligence activities to locate Al Qaeda leaders, Mr. Kirk said, the “white” or public efforts — which have succeeded in the past in leading to the capture of wanted terrorists — were effectively shut down in the months following the September 11 attacks.

Mr. Kirk discovered Ms. PowellÂ’s unusual order in January 2004 and, over the past year, launched a series of behind-the-scenes moves that culminated in a blunt conversation with President Bush aboard Air Force One, the removal of the ambassador, and congressional approval for reinvigorating the hunt for Mr. bin Laden.

And what was Ms. Powell before becoming a top diplomat to an incredibly important ally in the War on Terror?

The former schoolteacher was replaced by veteran diplomat Ryan Crocker in November 2004. The mood at the American Embassy lifted almost immediately.

Today's NEA

Either pay us more money to do crossword puzzles while your kids watch analingus videos, or else we'll fuck up every other goddamned institution in America.

We're not jerking around here, Chief.

Read the whole thing, as the man says. The elected representatives of the United States decided to make capturing OBL a top priority, but an idiot bureaucrat who thought she knew better queered the whole deal.

Thanks to "someone," whom I really wish would get hisself a proper handle, because it really looks dumb to thank "someone" all the time.

How about "Nick Valentine"? There's a name you could pick up chicks with, too.

Posted by: Ace at 10:52 PM | Comments (11)
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If not them, who?:

Former Manhattan judge Bruce Wright, who earned the enmity of the police union and others in the 1970s with his controversial bail policies for minority and low income defendants, has died. He was 86.

[H]e was perhaps best known for his policy on bail, which prompted the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association to dub Wright "Turn 'Em Loose Bruce." The judge was adamant that his imposition of low bail was simply upholding the Eighth Amendment, which states that "excessive bail shall not be required."

The native of Princeton, N.J., first created a furor in 1972 when he released a man charged with killing a police officer on $500 bail -- a figure another judge boosted to $25,000. Two years later, he released without bail another suspect accused of the attempted murder of a police officer.

That same year, Wright was transferred to Civil Court -- a move the judge fought, suing to return to Criminal Court. He was transferred back in 1978, and quickly created another controversy by releasing without bail a suspect accused of slashing a police officer's throat.

Tipster RCL has come to praise Wright, not to bury him:

We must always remember, whether aiding and abetting cop killers or starving disabled women to death, judges and their rulings are never wrong.

Judges: lawyers who couldn't hack long hours and competitive careerism and so joined the good-enough-for-government-work civil service.

Is there anything they can't do?

Posted by: Ace at 10:34 PM | Comments (11)
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Compare the quotes. And compare the dates.

Needless to say, I still read the news, much of it coming from the newspapers I used to religiously read. But I am not reading the "paper," either literally or figuratively, that the publishers want me to read. Throughout the day, I construct my own newspaper in cyberspace, a real-time assemblage of wire service stories, newspaper features, blogs, bulletin boards, columns, etc. I suspect most of you do, too.

In any other industry, a product that lost 1 percent of market share for two decades — only to then double or triple that rate of decline — would be declared dead. The manufacturer would discontinue it and rush out a replacement product more in line with the desires of the marketplace. So, let's finally come out and say: Newspapers are dead. They will never come back. By the end of this decade, the newspaper industry will suffer the same death rate — 90-plus percent — that every other industry experiences when run over by a technology revolution.

-- Michael S. Malone, ABCNews.com, March 24, 2005

The graph has two lines. The first line depicts traditional media (a combination of audience numbers for television and radio news and the circulation of newspapers and magazines). It is a line in decline. The second line depicts the use of the Internet to gather information, news and opinion. This line is ascending. At some point, perhaps not too distant, the two lines will cross. At that point the angles of decline and ascent will steepen until, at some other point, the line for traditional media will drop off the significant part of the chart forever.

For many of us, that time is now. For others it will come to them as inevitable as the force of gravity. If you are reading this, the odds are favorable that you now get your daily dose of news and opinion from a source I like to think of as "The Toolbar Times." If so, you're a charter member of the only newspaper that matters: yours. And you made it yourself. Why? Because you could.

I don't know if it's close enough to cry "swipe," but obviously Vanderluen covered this, better I think, almost a year ago.

Oddly enough, Vanderluen was more restrained in declaring the print media dead. But I suppose all of us bloggers have to check our impulses to say things like that.

Posted by: Ace at 10:27 PM | Comments (7)
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