ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm retiring. This is it. This is the zenith. This is the last post ever on the Ace of Spades blog. Enjoy it.

I know I will.

Oh, and buy a friggin' t-shirt as a reminder of what once was.

Original Post:

Can't resist: Hot Presidential Kinchicks-- Lauren and Babs.

In a way, they are Protest Babes, kinda by blood.

Ummmm... Second photo on Say Anything's site.

Let's just say I think Kramer might have taken this one for a Christmas card.

Ummmmm.... Yeah... I uh, okay, see, I, uhhhmmm....

Words fail me. I think I need to quote a haiku by the dirty-talking Pat O'Brien:

Wind-Ghosts Tickle Chimes at Dusk

I'm so fuckin' into you.
I want to make you crazy.
Make. You. Fuckin'. Craaazy.

Ummmm... Another Update: Not quite as indiscreet and candid (wink wink, nudge nudge) as Say Anything's shot, but Allah suggests you also check out the last photo on the right in the second row, and I think you should heed his suggestion.

I voted for Bush to lower taxes to dangerously inadequate levels, pack the court with right-wing mental patients, personally strangle and rape every fuckin' caribou in ANWR, and generally go fuckin' crazy on the Islamofascists.

The hot niece with the dynamite rack is just a nice little bonus.

Retirement Sets You Free Update: Just felt like you should all know I just de-linked Protein Wisdom.

Not over Terri Schiavo. Just because... eh. Felt like doing it for a while, if you want to know the truth. Guy just rubs me the wrong fuckin' way. Always has.

I hate that "thinky" kind of comedy. It's like he thinks he's better than us or somethin'.

Your Funeral Is The Only Time Everyone Has Something Nice To Say About You Update:

Well, Instapundit just linked my farewell post, and, even better, the minxishly coquettish (if I may be so bold) Michelle Malkin just wrote:

TO: aceofspades@yahoo.com

FROM: malkin@comcast.net

RE: NO!!

Ace -

Are you really retiring, or just retiring in that Andrew Sullivan retiring kind of way?

Say it ain't so!

Michelle Malkin
Syndicated columnist/author
www.michellemalkin.com
malkin@comcast.net

And of course Allah asked too. And I asked him to prepare me a suitably-nostalgic theme for my retirement. He says he'll get to it... eventually.

Probably about the time I post the various Haiku Contest Results I owe you guys.

I don't know. I just think you should go out on top. And I don't think I'll be able to top this, The Greatest Thing I Have Ever Posted In My Whole Useless Life.

PS, Goldstein stays off the blogroll.

Posted by: Ace at 01:27 PM | Comments (171)
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Lesbien C'est Moi, who has the, ahem, high honor of being the first liberal added to my Bloggers In Arms blogroll, still has a lot of fight left in her.

And she's pretty pissed at Michael Schiavo's attorneys*:

... In order to win a large malpractice suit for his client, [Michael Schiavo's attorney at the time] stated Terri's life expectancy was approximately 50 years. This was one of his few true statements. But [a later Schiavo lawyer] then orchestrates (thru his influence on the Hospice Board) stowing Terri away in the Hospice system, stating her life expectancy at 6 months or less....

I don't know her use of the word "fraud," per se, but it does seem a little strange to claim a woman is going to live for 50 years when you want to get a big malpractice settlement, and then decide that she just has to be euthanized as quickly as possible.

I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have gotten that big malpractice award had he informed the jury his client intended to pull the plug shortly after the case was over.

And... Frequent commenter See-Dubya is guest-blogging at Patterico's Pontifications, and he too has some hypotheticals he'd like to see answered by libertarians.

Great post. "Great" in the sense that it proves the power of the blogosphere -- really, any retard with a keyboard and AOL can put his stupid moronthoughts out there for other cretins to drool over.

*Correction! Cal points out, correctly as it turns out (damn it all), that George Felos was not Michael Schiavo's attorney for the malpractice case; a lawyer named Daniel Grieco was.

I have edited Lesbien C'est Moi's post to preserve the basic point-- whoever Michael's attorneys were, it's still the case they were representing him, and argued one thing for the malpractice trial and another thing entirely when trying to get the tube yanked -- but Cal is quite right LCB and I both blew the facts.

She's annoying like that, with her "facts" and "citations" and shit, and I'm pretty much ready to ban her right now for embarassing me again.

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 AM | Comments (35)
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I don't suppose many of you are at home, but I was just tipped that Kim Richards -- yes, the Kim Richards -- is on a Magnum PI episode running on the "Superstation" right now (at least in Chicago, on WGN).

I guess that's either TNT or TBS, but I don't know.

I hope she really explores the studio space.

Posted by: Ace at 11:08 AM | Comments (5)
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Well, we keep hearing this argument, especially from our more libertarian brethren. We're told that the Republican Congress acted in an unprincipled or even lawless fashion in attempting to spare Terri Schiavo's life.

Fideltity to federalism, we are lectured, demanded that we let the Florida courts decide the case, with no outside intervention at all.

Federalism is important, of course. But there are other parts of the Constitution which are equally important -- for example, that state law will be made by elected state legislators, not the courts. And the Florida Supreme Court is a very liberal and activist one. They invalidated a lawful act of the Florida Legislature -- Terri's law -- on a typically extraconstitutional basis.

So my question to the Federalism Federation is this-- do you really mean to claim that, in all circumstances, Congress should never act to check a state court?

Certainly Congress should respect federalism when laws are being made by those whom the Constitution authorizes to make them-- by a state's elected, democratic legislators. New Jersey passed a Civil Unions law, the right way-- by, you know, passing it through normal legislative processes. I might quibble here and there with the substance of the law, but I have full respect for the procedure by which the law was passed. And if Congress attempted to undo the law, I would, too, cry "Violation of the principle of federalism!"

But the situation in Florida is a little different. There was a legitimate legislative effort -- a successful one -- to change the law to help protect Terri Schiavo's life. The Florida Supreme Court voided that law on a whim.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the disingenuous strong-form proceduralist argument. Don't get me wrong; I'm big on procedure myself. I think procedure is vitally important to protect the rule of law. But sometimes people will make strong-form proceduralist arguments, claiming that procedure mandates a certain outcome, without admitting that when there is a substantive question that is personally important to them, they're willing to, let us say, bend their beloved procedures just a tad in order to get the substantive outcome they want.

So, a hypothetical: Let us say that a state legislature passes laws that are very pro-stem-cell research. The law allows such research; indeed, it even provides funding for it. And now let us imagine that a right-wing activist court decides to invalidate that law on the thinnest possible of pretexts, that, say, the preamble of the state constitution contains a rote guarantee of "life," and that that vague guarantee trumps the act of the legislature.

Would Reynolds, Sager, Leo, and other strong-form federalists say, in that instance, where federalism actually cuts against their preferred substantive outcome, that an overreaching rightwing state court should have the last word, and that a more-liberal Congress would have no authority whatsoever to check the overreaching court?

This isn't intended as a baiting question. And it's not rhetorical question. It's a straight question, though a hypothetical one. I really am curious if Reynolds, Sager, et al. would champion federalism so strongly were the facts pretty much the reverse of the facts in the Schiavo case, where the state courts they currently champion were acting contrary to their preferred substantive outcome.

So: Answers? How far do you take the principle of federalism? It's no difficult trick to champion abstract proceduralism when that proceduralism results in an outcome you favor, or at least don't care about much either way. It's a bit more difficult to champion proceduralism when it cuts against a substantive outcome you strongly favor.

I'm genuinely curious.

As the libertarian right and conservative right seem to be the only ones hashing these issues out, I'd like to have some sort of actual question-and-answer on them, rather than these unchallenged assertions from either wing.

Ann Coulter's Lovely Legs Update: Well, this has nothing to do with her legs. But she does have them. They go all the way up.

bbeck notes that Ann Coulter makes similar points, albeit, of course, sarcastically and not with the gentle spirit of civil intellectual inquiry I'm so famous for, in her latest column.

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (73)
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It chagrins me to no end, but apparently you morons would rather chat amongst yourselves and engage in lesbian pick-ups than comment on my gallant efforts to de-retaridfy you cretins.

That Ice-T thread is now too damn long, so if you want to continue to treat this stately blog as if it were an AOL chatroom filled with horny 13-year-old boys, have at it.

PS, if you've got a juicy tip for Ace, start your comment with "TIP" to catch my attention, if you'd be so kind. As Mr. Anka says, I always appreciate having informative feedback. (That's an audio clip of Mr. Anka, by the way, so you may want to avoid clicking while at work.)

PPS, under no circumstances will I permit horny guys to pretend to be lesbians, posting under fake names like "Sassy Susan" and "Wild Wendy," unless you're really funny about it.

Posted by: Ace at 09:24 AM | Comments (69)
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Who's laughing now!? Who's laughing now?!*

* Easy one. Where?

Posted by: Ace at 09:21 AM | Comments (13)
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How do you turn a dorky and embarassing pasttime into something really cool? Make it dangerous... and have the state attempt to outlaw it.

Thanks for making this fun again, you socialist retards:

Just when you thought the Federal Election Commission had it out for the blogosphere, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors took it up a notch and announced yesterday that it will soon vote on a city ordinance that would require local bloggers to register with the city Ethics Commission and report all blog-related costs that exceed $1,000 in the aggregate.

Blogs that mention candidates for local office that receive more than 500 hits will be forced to pay a registration fee and will be subject to website traffic audits, according to Chad Jacobs, a San Francisco City Attorney.

More at Daily Pudit's link, including a link to the proposed city ordinance.

San Fransisco and Canada are both doing their part to accomplish what I once thought impossible-- making blogging cool.

Morons. Jackasses. Useless retard-brained fuckweasels. Or, as the man himself said, "Fools... bureaucratic fools."*

Take a stand against The Man and buy a t-shirt.

It's not just a handsome garment which will delight and amaze your friends. It's a brave symbolic stance against government corruption and overreaching and, if I may be so bold, against tyranny itself.

You guys don't... like tyranny, now do you?

Thanks to LastTango. His tip was like butter.

* Which man? Probably too easy for you geeks.

I'm So Brilliant I Just Stumble Into Further Brilliance Accidentally Update:

Well, it turns out my Indiana Jones reference was even more f'n' hammer-slicin' than I imagined:

On your Indiana Jones reference: is this what Indy says at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? When he's walking down the marble staircase at the very end of the movie? If so, your reference is even better -- because that scene was shot in San Francisco City Hall. Those stairs lead directly up to the Board of Supervisors chamber. I lived in SF for 9 years and was in there many, many times.

Thanks to sissoed to pointing out how freakin' amazing I really am sometimes.

It's such a joy to be perpetually surprised by one's own omnicompetence.

Posted by: Ace at 09:05 AM | Comments (18)
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Bear with me, because I haven't followed this story much, and I'm putting up these links half-read. But it seems interesting and important. (Not interesting enough for me to really read, however, as it deals with Canada, which is just a snoozer of a topic.)

Captain's Quarters defied the "Publication Ban" imposed by Canada on a corruption inquiry and posted transcripts and other banned information.

Then he got linked by a Canadian newssite. And now the Canadian government is warning about possible prosecutions for even mentioning the name "Captain's Quarters."

Right Thinking People ponders the implications of all this:

What does a publication ban mean when anyone with internet access can click on a hotlink or perform a Google search, and find the information they want in a heartbeat? If Justice Gomery – or Paul Martin – have to start plugging holes in the infodike they’ve built, they’re going to find themselves running out of fingers faster than a guild-scale extra in a Tarantino flick.

The best paradigm I can come up with here is to posit a form of “energy” of information. Kinetic energy is the product of one-half the mass of a moving object times the square of its velocity; the equation reflects the fact that the speed of an object is far more important to its impact than its absolute mass. So it is with the blogosphere – it wasn’t the fact that the Rathergate memos were faked that took the story down, it was how fast the facts could be marshaled and distributed that overwhelmed the MSM’s ability to respond.

...

If the bloggers overwhelm the ramparts of the publication ban, and Martin et al. canÂ’t stem the tide, could the result be a snap election? People seem to think so. This could be the first time that bloggers, by feeding the insatiable demand for information of an outraged polity, contributed to actually bringing down a government.

Read it all. As I'm about to myself.

Thanks to NickS for all of this.

Posted by: Ace at 08:56 AM | Comments (3)
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Well, the t-shirts aren't selling as well as I'd hoped. RockNClothing doesn't think it will be profitable to make any just for inventory, so when the pre-order is over, that's the end of the shirts.

On the other hand, this embarassingly tiny exclusive and select run of quality Ace of Spades Lifestyle Wear means that the t-shirts just might appreciate in value over the coming years... who knows, in just a year or two, a single $15.00 t-shirt might be worth, oh, who knows, $16.25 or something.

(Click on the pic.)

We'll hold the pre-order open for a couple of more days for anyone who might be interested. And then, alas, the guys will no longer get shirts.

Thanks for pointing out I'd screwed the pooch on the link. It should work now.

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 PM | Comments (22)
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Yes, the goalie who hates Israel and followed French tradition by declaring his pre-emptive surrender to his enemy decided to play after all.

And one crafty, scheming Jew-ball got past him to knot up the score late in the game and force a 1-1 tie.

On one hand, it's good to see an anti-Semite get drubbed by a Jew.* [Correction: Not a Jew, as it turns out. See below.]

On the other hand, it's still fucking soccer, so who gives a shit either way?

In related news, the United Nations just declared Israeli's entire offensive line "barbaric," "racist," and "contrary to the basic laws of humanity." Al Jazeera claims that six children were killed as "deliberate collateral damage" from the scoring shot.

*Correction/Loose Shit That Really Undermines The Joke I'm Making: The man who scored the goal turns out to be an Israeli Arab, and a Muslim, too.

Still, he didn't dribble that ball downfield by himself, so we can say this goal occurred due to a Zionist Conspiracy employing a Jew-Loving Collaborator.

Whew. Saved it. Damn I'm good.

Thanks for the corrections, guys.

Posted by: Ace at 07:20 PM | Comments (12)
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