This guy has an imitation-Drudge news page, but it's all Louisiana news.

Please keep in mind, this is unconfirmed pending further evidence.

"It's pretty much always been known, but never openly acknowledged, that NOPD's actual numbers were far below the "official" figure of 1500 - 1700," said the source.

"To get that number over 1500, and thus qualify for federal funding, Compass and his predecessors counted reservists and certain retirees as active duty officers. The REAL number is, and has been for some time, a lot closer to 1000."

If this is true, I guess we all know that this goes on all over the place, not just in Louisiana.

A huge culprit is the stupid residency requirement that troubled cities enact for police officers. When I lived in a city, I thought it was great because the streets that cops lived on tended to be quieter.
But then I spoke to some city cops I knew, who told me that the requirement had put so much pressure on hiring from a small pool, that guys they had arrested years earlier were now their brothers in uniform, and they didn't like it one bit.

Posted by: LauraW. at 03:45 PM | Comments (11)
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And a bit of a tramp, too, from the looks of that big smile as she was being carried off by male strippers dressed as cops.

But seriously? Liar.

But Seriously? Tramp: Cindy Sheehan writes over at the Huffington Post that she was smiling as she was being carried away because "America might see [her] underwear and that tickled [her]."

Good Lord All Mighty. There are problems people have adjusting to fame, learning how to comport themselves in public, but this self-absorbed starfucker seems to be having a really bad case of it.

There are reality tv show "stars" who carry on with more dignity than Mother Peace.

It's simple: she intoxicated by the adulation paid to her, the feeling that she's sixteen years old again. And she's acting like a perfect idiot.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 AM | Comments (39)
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As they say, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich.

Unless that ham sandwich is named "William Jefferson Clinton," of course. Bill Clinton is the Rollo Tomase of American politics.

In better news, Bill Frist's statement about his sale of HCA stock noted that he had initiated the process of selling in April, before the July (I think) sale went through.

This distance between beginning the sale and the trustees' execution of it makes it seem less likely that he was acting on insider information of a very time-senstive nature. Apparently he wanted to sell long before that bad quarterly report; it just took a lot of time to have the sale cleared by the Senate Ethics Panel and such.

Posted by: Ace at 09:46 AM | Comments (25)
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Dick Meyer and Jeff Jarvis have been sparring over a statement (dumb, I think) of Jarvis', that it's "easy" to "get the facts."

Well, it's not. And the MSM will continue having a huge advantage over the Shadow Media in that regard.

But the Anchoress makes a great point. The press has such advantages over, say, bloggers -- like actually being able to get a high-ranking muckety-muck on the phone when trying to confirm a fact -- which makes their performance during Katrian all the more inexcusable.

If bloggers reported those sorts of absurd rumors of baby-rapin', we'd be excortiated as irresponsible. But, as a mitigation to our crime, we could say, quite correctly, that we're not professionals, we're not salaried, and we don't have big rolodex and a major media organization behind us to help us confirm such stuff.

But we don't need that excuse, as we didn't report these wild rumors as a general rule (and in the few instances we did... we were quoting the MSM).

The MSM, on the other hand, reported them with little care as to their accuracy.

So yes, the legacy media has a great advantage in this area. So what's their excuse for booting it so very badly?

The MSM continues to insist upon its pre-eminence in the field of gathering and disseminating information. We're professionals, they say. We're bound by a journalistic code which guarantees accuracy and truthfulness, at least to a high degree. "We get 90% of these things right," they always tell us after they make another big mistake.

Did they get 90% of this stuff right during Katrina? I think more like 40%, and most of that stuff was simply reporting what officials at NOLA and the like told them.

Which, yes, is an easy thing to do.

Where they weren't simply being spoon-fed reports from weather organizations -- where they were left to their own journalistic devices -- they irresponsibly reported insane rumors as fact.

If you guys are slow, irredeemably biased, arrogant, and out-of-touch, and now, as is apparent, you can't even do the job of basic fact-verification very well -- what the hell use are you?

As Kevin Pollack said in A Few Good Men, "Were you absent the day they tought journalism at journalism school?"

I'm Only Adding This Because of His Impeccable Use of the Word "Letimotif" Update: Steve From HB suggests...

Ace - I've told you before that the following should be the blogger vs MSM leitmotif.

"Release Yo' Delf"
Method Man
Sung to Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive"

When I first stepped on the scene, niggaz was petrified
Jet back to the lab like they were being chased by homicide
My rap flow does you like Tical, and it will never steer you wrong
And all you bitch-ass niggaz in the industry
your careers won't be lasting long

I really have no idea what any of that means, although this "Method Man" character seems to be a very potty-mouthed and borderline racist sort of fellow. If you're going to use racial slurs, can't you at least get the spelling correct?

Still: leitmotif. I like hearing words I learned in college. It makes those nine grueling years seem somehow worth it.

Posted by: Ace at 08:53 AM | Comments (27)
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Dems want him to run for senator in Virginia. And he's looking to buy property there.

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 AM | Comments (43)
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I like the Patriots, but I sure do understand why some people despise them. People from the Oakland area, for example. Cheated out of a playoffs win by some strange and dubious "tuck" rule that turned what looked like a clear Tom Brady fumble into an incomplete pass.

And now Pittsburgh feels the pain-- 52 seconds were added to the Pitt-NE gameclock, allowing the Patriots to win the game (as usual) on a one-second-left Adam Vinitieri field goal.

Tom Brady, among the league's best in late-game drives, led the Patriots down field for the winning score against the Steelers in 1:21 on Sunday.

But could he have done it in 29 seconds?

The NFL confirmed Monday that the game clock was improperly set early in the fourth quarter, adding 52 seconds to the game.

The error occurred at the beginning of the fourth quarter. With 14:51 remaining, Steelers receiver Cedric Wilson ran a reverse and was held to no gain; the play ran the clock down to 13:59.

A false start was called on Steelers guard Kendall Simmons on the next play, but instead of resetting the clock to 13:59, the clock operator set it back to 14:51 -- the time before Wilson's running play began. No one noticed the error, including the officiating crew.

I think the Giants were playing the Patriots, back in '94 or thereabouts, when a strange officiating mistake helped the Pats. The Giants were driving to the endzone, when the ref flipping the down-indicator incorrectly flipped the down from second to fourth. The Giants argued about it -- where did third down go? -- but the refs insisted it was now fourth down, and the Giants had to settle for a field goal.

It's better to be lucky than good, they say. But it's better to be the Patriots, who are both.

Meanwhile... the NFL is considering adding more games played in foreign countries.

Thanks to Chickpea.

I Guess... that Pittsburgh also would have had 52 less seconds for their game-tying drive. Still enough time to score, but having less time might have made their offense more one-dimensional -- less chance of a run, less chance of a pass to the middle of the field -- and the Patriots would have had a defensive advantage as they adjusted to that fact. So, with 52 less seconds on the clock, who knows, maybe the Pats would have stopped them from scoring at all.

But I don't think that's going to cut much ice with Pittsburgh fans.

One More: Testaverde called out of mothballs to be Jets' number two quarterback.

Posted by: Ace at 08:10 AM | Comments (26)
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Stop the ACLU wants to begin a Carnival of True Civil Liberties, an anti-ACLU thingee, and he wants your best posts on the subject.

Posted by: Ace at 07:54 AM | Comments (4)
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Astonishingly enough, it seems that the country is not quite ready to simply begin paying billions of dollars to folks who have -- in some cases corruptly, in other cases merely negligently -- misspent billions in the past.

Louisiana pols thought this was a golden moment to begin demanding ludicrous sums from the rest of the nation -- $50,000 per resident of Louisiana! -- and further demanding little or no oversight regarding how Louisiana's famously-incorruptible bureaucratic Untouchables would spend it.

I thought they'd get away with it -- heartstrings, all those raped babies, etc. -- but there does seem to be a growing backlash:

Exhibit A is the Louisiana congressional delegation's new request for $250 billion in hurricane reconstruction funds. As a Post editorial pointed out yesterday, this money -- more than $50,000 per Louisiana resident -- would come on top of the $62.3 billion Congress has already appropriated, on top of the charitable donations, on top of the insurance payouts. Among other things, the proposal demands $40 billion of new Army Corps of Engineers spending, 16 times more than the Corps says it needs to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane. Despite the fact that previous Corps projects drained Louisiana's coastal wetlands, thereby destroying what could have been a natural buffer against at least some of the Rita and Katrina storm surges, the proposal calls for a suspension of environmental reviews. Despite the fact that Louisiana spent hundreds of millions of dollars on water projects that turned out to be unnecessary, or even damaging, the proposal makes it possible to suspend cost-benefit analyses.

Anne Applebaum -- whose poltics I can't easily reduce to a label; she's a kind of liberal/libertarian centrist or something -- then goes on a jihad against porkbarrel spending as a general proposition.

There may be something to this porkbustin' movement yet.

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 AM | Comments (8)
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Not only do the academic pinheads think religious folks are wrong and stupid, now we're dangerous as well.

Soon to be followed by studies that prove that conservative political beliefs cause cancer, fluoridation of the water, food poisoning, and Paul Krugman, that marriage causes the War in Iraq, illegal immigration, and tornadoes, and that reducing government spending causes reality shows to gain popularity, hay fever, and prevent the Cubs from winning the World Series.

Anyone want to place some bets?

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 06:42 PM | Comments (199)
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Upcoming National Academy of Sciences article: Scientists grow hair on bald mice.

Course, by the time it's synthesized for humans, a proper delivery vehicle found and it clears the FDA, you'll be dead. But still.

Posted by: Dr. Reo Symes at 05:32 PM | Comments (21)
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