Ah. I see. Not satisfied with merely being incompetent. Need to pad the old resume out with "paranoid lunatic," too.

F'n' grandstander.

Last night he told a reporter for the Associated Press: "If the CIA slips me something and next week you don't see me, you'll all know what happened."

Today he told interviewers for CNN on a live broadcast he feared the "CIA might take me out."

Nagin resorted to vulgarity and profanity yesterday in his pleas for help.

Mayor Ray Nagin

Apart from the crack and hookers, was Marion Barry really all that bad?

PS: If I should happen to "unexpectedly" stop blogging, y'll know who got to me.

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 PM | Comments (46)
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Are we sure this is actually Sean Penn? Couldn't it easily be Edward Norton, wearing that sleazy moustache he wears in every other movie?

Do we have evidence that these are two separate people?

And, assuming, arguendo, that there are in fact two distinct people, one named "Sean Penn" and the other "Edward Norton," do we really need both such people? Wouldn't one of them suffice?

I'm not saying that I hope any harm should come to either of these thespianic giants. I'm just saying that, you know, if a truck falls on one of them, we've got a spare.

Critical redundancy-- that's the American way. Maybe that's why half of Gulf refineries are getting ready to start pumping out gasoline again, we've avoided the worst-case disruptions in supplying the nation, and oil prices are falling back to pre-Katrina levels.

And maybe that's why I just cribbed three Drudge links in a row.

Hey-- if he goes down, I stand willing and able to churn out dumb headlines about six-legged frogs.

Posted by: Ace at 07:38 PM | Comments (25)
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The disaster-plan was to have no plan at all.

You must rely upon yourselves, the plan went, 'cause we're not doin' nothin'. I'm not kidding; that's what they said.

NEXT UP: Joshua Micah Ezekiah Taffington Boutros-Boutros Marshall explains how Karl Rove secretly backed Nagin as a "stealth neocon candidate" for mayor.

Posted by: Ace at 07:31 PM | Comments (20)
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No, I'm not talking about New Orleans. I'm talking about how Ace is letting yet another yahoo sully the pristine good name of Ace of Spades HQ.

Your first question ought to be: who the hell is this guy? That's a very good question. I'm just a guy that has pelted Ace with many links over a long period of time, to the point where Ace figured he'd be better off without me clogging his inbox.

A few more tidbits? Sure. Out here in flyover country, I like my politics conservative and my food hot & spicy. I've been role playing since before this newfangled AD&D thing came around. I'm a home theater geek, with several hundred DVDs lining my shelves, an XBOX and a PS2, and lotsa loose paint from blasting movies (gotta love a subwoofer!). I'm hiding behind a pseudonym because I work as a judicial officer in a court system, and I'd prefer to avoid the possibility of any litigant or attorney causing trouble for me.

So, from here on out, when the mood strikes me (or I just have a juicy link to share), I'll be here to climb up on a virtual soapbox. Hopefully, I'll have a blast, and Ace won't be sorry for letting me have this fabulous opportunity.

Weclome: Nice to have you aboard, Harry Callahan, if that is your real name. [Ace]

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 06:27 PM | Comments (17)
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Just a few points:

--“The mayor and the governor are negligent and incompetent. The administration has tried to smooth out the chain of command, but she won't do it. The constitution says that the governor is in charge of the Guard.” ...

--“None of those poor people were moved prior to the storm. They were told to go to the Superdome, but they had to walk there. Whose responsibility is that?”

-- “General Honore in one day got 20,000 people evacuated from the convention center with a ground and air evacuation. Have you heard about that in the media?”

...

--“There will be 50k troops there by mid-week, a combination of active duty and National Guard. Including elements of 82nd Airborne Division, First Cavalry Division, and two Marine brigades. That's in just over a week. That's amazing. But no one realizes it. They had to trot General Honore out this morning to try to explain to the media how you move troops. There were National Guard pre-positioned in the north part of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana two days the storm, watching the storm, seeing which way it was going to go, and once the storm hit, moving troops in immediately. There was a flow-plan that's been working since.”

--“The constitution says the governor is in charge of the Guard. The president would have to invoke the Insurrection Act to over-ride that. No president has done that since the Civil War. And he would have to do it over the head of the governor. Bush is not there yet.”

...

--“The New Orleans police disintegrated. The national response plan calls for state and local to be the first on the scene. But the catastrophe wiped out the whole local infrastructure and the emergency communications. 80% of the police disintegrated and they are just not beginning to re-constitute.”

The bulk of the NO police force abandoned their posts and fled (and, btw, engaged in looting themselves!), and that's whose fault?

Who hired NO's "finest"? Who put together a police force that fled or looted rather than serve the public trust?

Posted by: Ace at 05:08 PM | Comments (60)
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Galactic erosion:

New observations by the international Cassini spacecraft reveal that Saturn's trademark shimmering rings, which have dazzled astronomers since Galileo's time, have dramatically changed over just the past 25 years.

Among the most surprising findings is that parts of Saturn's innermost ring — the D ring — have grown dimmer since the Voyager spacecraft flew by the planet in 1981, and a piece of the D ring has moved 125 miles inward toward Saturn.

"NOW WILL YOU SIGN KYOTO, BUSH!!!!," snarks Mike.

Senator Mary Landrieu (D-La.) also wants to know why FEMA isn't delivering sandbags to Saturn to halt the damage.

Posted by: Ace at 03:41 PM | Comments (16)
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Boy, is that Execution-class Star Destroyer huuuuuuge.

Via Jonah Goldberg, of course.

Posted by: Ace at 01:53 PM | Comments (29)
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Well, someone had to do it.

Still too early for that kind of joke? If so, I apologize.

Conspiracy-theorizing is a low-level, livable form of paranoid schizophrenia. Paranoid schizophrenics see "patterns" and "connections" everywhere; doing so helps them maintain a useful illusion in their own minds about an orderly universe, with Prime Actors so limited in number to be easily kept track of. True, it's a malign vision of the world, but they'd prefer their vision to be orderly, neat, and manageable than chaotic and messy (though more hopeful).

Conspiracy-theorizing is also a passive-aggressive form of self-aggrandisement bordering on narcissism or megalomania. With few exceptions, such as Noam Chomsky and Bobby Fischer, conspiracy theorists tend to be middling intellects whose fragile egos require the reassurance that they "know" things the general public doesn't, thus proving they're not so average-minded at all.

So, conspiracy-theorists, there you go: You are both borderline insane and borderline stupid. Enjoy.

There's a bit of arcane and occult truth that you might not enjoy so much.

PS: The crack about JFK Jr. was just black humor. I had nothing against the man, and I certainly feel the Kennedys have endured enough tragedy, whatever the sins of Teddy might be.

There Are Conservative Conspiracy Theorists Too, Of Course: I seem to remember some dark musings by goofball conservatives that Hillary somehow got into JFK Jr.'s plane with a wrench.

I think the best and purest conspiracy-theorists are the equal opportunity ones, though, like the guy linked above, who blames the Bushes and Clintons. They're the ones who "know" the real truth, that all the political jockeying between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, is just an elaborate deception, designed to obscure the true loci and foci of power in the world, which is of course, depending on your theory, the Jews, the Merovignian Restorationists, the Knights Templar, the Trilateral Commissioners, the Free Masons, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Vatican Papists, AT&T, or some mix of of all of them.

Posted by: Ace at 12:24 PM | Comments (24)
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Enough is Enough, by In the Bullpen.

KEY QUOTE:

Behind the scenes, a power struggle emerged, as federal officials tried to wrest authority from Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D). Shortly before midnight Friday, the Bush administration sent her a proposed legal memorandum asking her to request a federal takeover of the evacuation of New Orleans, a source within the stateÂ’s emergency operations center said Saturday.

The administration sought unified control over all local police and state National Guard units reporting to the governor. Louisiana officials rejected the request after talks throughout the night, concerned that such a move would be comparable to a federal declaration of martial law. Some officials in the state suspected a political motive behind the request. “Quite frankly, if they’d been able to pull off taking it away from the locals, they then could have blamed everything on the locals,” said the source, who does not have the authority to speak publicly.

Okay, now I'm getting goddamned angry.

A Republican President tried to wrest power from a lackadaisical and incompetenent Democratic governor. The Democratic governor refused to allow this -- her right under the Constitution.

But goddamnit, how the fuck is that Bush's fault then?

The Blame Game: Reasonable voices are suggesting we not play the blame game. There are, after all, more important matters to attend to at the moment.

Well, that's a nice sentiment, but Mayor Nagin, Governor Blanco, Jesse Jackson and Michael Moore started the blame game within hours of the storm's landfall, and they, along with their cheerleaders in the liberal spirit squad in the mainstream media, have run up the score in this game 37-0 before conservatives even had their helmets on.

The blame game is already in the third quarter. If we're going to correct the lies and distortions of the liberal legacy media, we'd better start playing too.

More important though is the relief and life saving game, of course. Contribute.

Posted by: Ace at 11:58 AM | Comments (41)
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I sure seem to remember national guard mobilizations being ordered by state governors.

I began to imagine myself crazy, because the MSM keeps telling me it's the President who has this power.

But I don't think I'm crazy now.

I guess the MSM forgot all those stories they've done previously about governors mobilizing the national guard in emergency situations.

Must have just f'n' slipped their minds.

Without doubt, Bush deserves some blame for this. He could have gone on national tv and addressed the country about the coming severity of the storm-- a presidential address underscores the gravity of the situation.

Still, many would have remained behind voluntarily. But some might have fled.

The Bush Administration also might have stepped in and removed authority from a clearly lackadaisical and incomptent state and local government. Sure, they would have caught heat for doing so ("Are you implying the black mayor of New Orleans is incompetent? Are you a racist?"), but people's lives have to be put ahead of politics. The mayor of New Orleans is an incompetent.

Hey, that may have even have been unconstitutional (I think there's a gray area in emergency situations), and I'm sure that Frank Rich and Paul Krugman would have had conniptions about the Tyrant in Washington.

But again, it's more important to save people than to avoid the typical girlish hyperventilating from Krugman and Rich.

Prudent disaster-preparation demands you hope for the best but plan for the worst. It seems that most government officials -- city, state, and federal -- got the first part right but the latter part wrong. They hoped for the best and also, it seems, planned for the best.

The best did not unfold.

I'm an admitted political hack. I have an agenda here-- yes, I do want to report the truth and express my true opinions, but I also do seek to deflect some (though not all) criticism from Bush.

I admit that.

But the MSM is supposedly a straight-shooter, ONLY interested in the truth.

I don't understand how they continue to embargo the story of the 600+ school and mass-transit buses the mayor of New Orleans allowed to remain idle. Buses which could have been, and should have been, making stops throughout all of New Orleans, especially the poorest areas, to ferry them (for free!) to a central terminal, and from there make the twenty mile (forty minute) drive to perfect safety.

I don't understand how the governor of Louisiana is excused for not mobilizing the national guard in advance of the storm so that they could assist in an evactuation -- and a forced evacuation at that, not a recommendeed one.

Of course, "I don't understand" is completely rhetorical. I do understand. I understand that the Governor of Louisiana and the Mayor of New Orleans are Democrats, and that the President of the United States is a Republican.

Hence the MSM's interest in only examining mistakes and negligence on the federal level.

The mayor of New Orleans is black.

If this is a question of race, why didn't this black mayor care more about his black citizens? Why the hell weren't those buses running constantly in the 24 to 48 hours before the storm's landfall?

Unfortunately, we'll never know the answer to that question, because the only people with access to him -- our straight-down-the-middle completely-neutral-and-impartial press -- will never ask him.

Posted by: Ace at 11:32 AM | Comments (16)
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