An investigation into possible diversions of funds intended for inner-city kids and seniors into Air America's coffers.

What?

Are you kidding me?

Update: The Radio Equalizer is all over this story.

He wants to know why this story hasn't been picked up by the AP wire or any major news service.

He also wants to know why hot chicks have an easier time getting hired for service-industry type jobs.

Posted by: Ace at 08:34 AM | Comments (8)
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Idiot, why are you trying to alienate the hipster crowd that's sort of willing to give you a chance?

Once again: You'd almost think we were all in this together or somethin'.

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (42)
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Confederate Yankee writes "Jihad for Dummies," and tries to explain why, as tragically as it turned out, the London cops made the right decision to shoot the (incorrectly identified terrorist suspect) under very difficult circumstances.

And, of course, having only a second or two at most to make this decision.

You can criticize cops, but you can't knock them for failing to be omniscent.

Only one person who ever walked the earth was omniscent and all wise, and of course that person was Hillary! Rodham.

She makes the sun rise and the flowers bloom. She also, in her infinite wisdom, created pantsuits, and gave this gift, Prometheus-like, to the races of man.

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 AM | Comments (19)
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It's so cute.

Okay... here's the difference between liberal and conservative bloggers in a nutshell: we're don't arrogantly believe we're some sorts of internet Sherlock Holmes able to get to the "real truth" about America and our political opponents through Google searches.

Well... let me refine that: We do do Google searches, as Scott Burgess at the Daily Ablution did, digging up the fact that Jihadi Journalist Dilpazier Aslam was a member in good standing of a radical, universal-caliphate-championing, anti-semitic Islamist hate group and had penned hateful articles for a terrorist-sympathizing website.

And of course we did some research on stuff like the Burkett/Rather forgeries. But almost all of that stuff panned out.

I guess the difference is we restrict our net-based research to finding out stuff about a particular someone, finding out stuff that can be directly attributed to that someone, whereas the left... well, much of it looks for "deep connections" between apparently unrelated incidents.

Conspiracy-mongering is alive and well in the sinistrosphere. It's regarded as pure crank by the right side of the blogosphere.

Anyway, over at the Daily Kos, a "diarist" (i.e., some idiot not named Kos who posts there) has "discovered" the hidden connections between the Plame Affair and the Burkett forgeries and, the Holiest of Holy Grails, Jeff Gannon!

It is of course all ludicrous, and the product of a deeply troubled mind.

I have a friend who is fond of this sort of "deeper truth" conspiracy-theorizing. I keep warning him: You are succumbing to an intellectual vanity, and a very foolish one at that. You wish to believe you "know more" than the average citizen. You're better informed, more enlightened, more clever, and more open-minded about the "real truths" of the events of the world.

And you demonstrate this supposed intellectual superiority by postulating "secret knowledge" the public is either too stupid or too cowardly to see with their own eyes.

That's what drives these sorts of krazy konspiratorial konfabulations. For every behavior there is a psychological need or drive. In this case, it's the desire to differentiate oneself from the "sheep" that make up the vast majority of the American population, through the demonstrated possession of hidden, secret, or, dare I say, occult knowledge, known only by an elite few.

And this is what drives people, too, to create or join cults.

And I'm afraid what we have on our hands is basically a political cult, a cult of the perpetual enemy of many tentacles, Cthuluesque in shape and power.

Please, guys: Stop "researching." Stop "making connections." You sound freaking bananas. Rather than proving your intellectual superiority, you're proving only your intellectual insecurity. Your need to demonstrate yourself to be smart makes you lool like perfect fools.

Thanks to Jay Tea at Wizbang, by way of the Blogometer.

The Devil And The Democratic Party: People have a natural preference for unity. They like singulars. Physicists continue chasing the One Big Theory that will unite all the elementary forces of the universe into One Big Force.

They're stuck on misbehaving, antisocial gravity, which just can't be forced to join with the other three forces (or one force, depending on your preference), but they keep trying.

It's a natural human urge to simplify, simplify, simplify.

But mature thinkers also realize the limits of simplification and unification into One Big Thing.

The Krazy Konspiracy Kabballists don't respect these limits. They are driven to unify everything into One Great Big Theory of Evil, fronted, preferably, by 30th Level Evil Archmage Karl Rove.

Not to knock religion, or suggest that the devil isn't real, but let's say he isn't. Let's just assume, for the sake of this analogy, that he is a fictional construct created by the human imagination.

At one point there were lots of evil spirits and evil gods. There was also human evil in all its varieties.

Humanity's natural preference for One Big Narrative eventually collapsed these pesky multiplicitous evils into One Big Boss Villain, known as Satan/Lucifer/Elvis' manager "Colonel" Tom Parker.

What causes crops to fail? Satan. What causes lust and greed? Satan's whispering in the ears of the succeptible. What causes madness? Little demons in the mind of the lunatic, put there, of course, by Satan.

Not much different, really, than the various political crankeries one reads from the unhinged left.

The so-called reality-based community, for all its vitriol against the religious, sure does seem to be following the age-old pattern of classic religious/cultish thinking.

Got news for ya kids. Karl Rove is not Satan, the Prince of Darkness attempting to establish a tenth Province of Hell on Earth.

Satan wouldn't be so chubby. He'd look more like, I don't know, Iggy Pop or something.

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 AM | Comments (42)
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Peaktalk has a nice reminder that Van Gogh wasn't just a victim of Islamist lunacy, but a passionate and interesting person.

His killer -- the guy who told his grieving family he had no remorse whatsoever, nor any sympathy for them -- was sentenced to life without parole, which is a difficult trick. Hard to get that kind of sentence in Holland.

Roger L. Simon notes that Hollywood still is entirely ignoring the butchering of one of their own. Not even a mention of the killer's sentencing in the town's industry-paper, Variety.

But I'm sure everyone is talking about Jane Fonda's Peace Bus, fueled by vegetable oil.

I don't think these are bad people. Terrorists and terroristy-sympathizers are of course monsters; but terrorist-deniers are just... well, addled.

There is simply no room in their worldview for vicious terrorists that must be hunted down and killed like the animals they are. They oppose violence, particularly violence committed "in their name," and so they must deny the existence of any evil that would make that brutish step necessary.

As they say, when the only tool you have is a hammer, all the world looks like the nail.

And on the other hand: when you have expressly denied the need for hammers, and when you sing Kumbaya songs all day about how great it would be if all hammers were beaten into plowshares, then nothing in the world looks like a nail, and anything displaying nail-like qualities must be studiously ignored and driven out of your mind as quickly as possible.

Thanks for the links to Traffic Non-Santa.

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Comments (13)
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As I'm sure you know, one thing that really sticks in the conservative craw is the MSM's habit of labeling conservative or libertarian-conservative think tanks, sources, etc., as such, while calling their liberal opposites "non-partisan" or simply eschewing any label at all.

Over at NRO, Mark Krikorian notes the Washington Post correctly identifies not one but two liberal sources as what they are, i.e., liberal.

The Washington Post is making a lot of smart moves lately. The New York Times is eagerly destroying its own (rather exaggerated) legacy. There is an opportunity for a more honest, less ideologically obsessive paper to displace it as the nation's (I hate this phrase) paper of record.

Romneymania: Unrelated, but over at the Corner, there seems to be a big Romney-for-President boomlet. Not really sure why.

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (8)
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101 Ways of Dealing With The Loss Of Your Balls.

I'd get JeffB. a subscription, but I don't know if you can be pussywhipped by your collection of vintage Swedish nudist magazines. I think you need an actual girl or something.

Posted by: Ace at 06:44 PM | Comments (29)
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Would annul grant of citizenship, arguing it was obtained through fraud.

Sounds good to me. Not sure it would fly here where the Constitution is inviolable (except where liberal judges decide it isn't).

AllahPundit's Legal Brief: Citizenship isn't inviolable, Allah says:

Check Title 8 of the U.S. Code. There are grounds in there for denaturalizing U.S. citizens that have withstood constitutional scrutiny. E.g., one statute in there empowers the DOJ to strip Nazi war criminals of their citizenship and deport them to their country of origin.

Hmmm... I wonder if that's based on nondisclosure of past crimes and associations, though. It might be harder to deport someone who wasn't clearly a member of a terrorist group before applying for citizenship.

Damnit! Muliple instances loose shit in the same post. The "Liberal Party" in Australia is the conservative party (Labor are the lefties). So that blows my whole liberals-are-coming-around sentence.

I could use multiple layers of painstaking fact checking myself. About eight or nine layers should do the trick, working 'round the clock to keep these embarrassing gaffes off this dumb blog.

Posted by: Ace at 06:24 PM | Comments (21)
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Payola never went away. Sony's been buying "spins" of their various lame acts, including J-Lo, and NY AG Elliott Spitzer's got the memos disclosing the payouts.

I don't know if this should necessarily be a crime. I'm not sure the musical taste of a mornonic DJ allowed to pick his own music, or a bunch of 13 year old girls dialing furiously on the request lines, is that much better than a corporate A&R executive. Just make them disclose they're engaged in pay-for-play and let them do whatever the hell they want.

Still, I can't say it bothers me that the little bastards responsible for inflicting a decade of sickeningly syrupy insipid pop ballads on us might be facing big fines.

Thanks to the Fat Kid.

Posted by: Ace at 04:15 PM | Comments (13)
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(Audio clip from NPR.) I suppose some will claim there's a distinction between "supporting" terrorism and "merely believing terrorism to be justified," but that seems to be slicing the baloney pretty thin to me.

Thanks to American Barbarian.

Update: A poll of British Muslims indicates that 17% (admit that they) think the bombings were either completely (6%) partially (11%) justified.

24% express sympathy for the bombers, splitting about equally between a lot and a little bit of sympathy.

I'm sorry, but that's just a little bit more "sass" from the British Muslim community than I believe acceptable.

Thanks for the poll to The Warden.

Posted by: Ace at 02:45 PM | Comments (15)
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