Smoking, I mean.

I quit three years ago for a full year, and then, in a move I still can't explain, decided to start again. Just to do it.

I am totally wigged out right now with withdrawal. And I didn't even totally quit. But I've only had a couple of smokes, and then a lot of Nicorette.

Anyway... my patience for trolls is limited.

Where's that "mikie"? A banning might help settle the nerves.

Posted by: Ace at 02:37 PM | Comments (283)
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Did my last post about this have video? I don't think so.

The first third of the video (in Japanese) just shows the gun turning to face targets. The second third shows the computerized target identificatio and tracking system working. The last third shows the gun ordering a man to halt (in a woman's voice) and shootin'.

Cool stuff.

Via My Pet Jawa.

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Comments (48)
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Surprising precisely no one.

ABCNews could have contacted this source before the election. Or the source could have contacted ABCNews before.

Funny how that didn't happen.

As convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff reported to federal prison today, a source close to the investigation surrounding his activities told ABC News that Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was one of the members of Congress Abramoff had allegedly implicated in his cooperation with federal prosecutors.

A spokesperson for Reid, elected yesterday as the Senate Majority Leader, said the senator had done nothing illegal or unethical.

"We have no idea what Abramoff is telling prosecutors to save his skin, but I do know that these kind of old allegations are completely ridiculous and untrue," Sen. Reid's spokesman Jim Manley told ABC News.

A source close to the investigation says Abramoff told prosecutors that more than $30,000 in campaign contributions to Reid from Abramoff's clients "were no accident and were in fact requested by Reid."

Abramoff has reportedly claimed the Nevada senator agreed to help him on matters related to Indian gambling.

The Associated Press reported earlier this year that Reid wrote at least four letters helpful to the tribes that had contributed money to his campaign.

Reid has denied there was any connection between the letters and the contributions and has said he is a longtime opponent of certain kinds of Indian reservation gambling.

The AP reported that Reid acknowledged "routine contacts" with Abramoff's lobbying partners and intervening to block rival tribal casinos.

The AP also reported that Abramoff's billing records showed extensive contact with Reid's office over a three-year period in which Reid collected more than $68,000 from Abramoff's firm, partners and clients.

Just Noting... Nevada's incoming governor, Jim Gibbons, is a Republican.

Dare to dream. Dare to dream.

Posted by: Ace at 11:18 AM | Comments (50)
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I've been tossing out accusations about various Republican constituencies lately.

Here's another one.

The reaction to the poker bill, if my blog is any indication (and I think it's some indication), was overwhelmingly negative as far as actual vote-moving impact. I mean, while some may support it, or be willing to acquiesce in it, almost no votes were gained that way -- but many votes were lost.

Now, Allen lost by 7000 votes (out of two million cast) and Burns lost by 4000 or so (out of... I don't know how many votes. It's Montana. I'm guessing 5000 total votes in the state? Do they allow chickens to vote?)

The poker thing alone could have moved that many votes.

There's a reason to allow actual debate and voting on bills -- to find out if they're actually wanted by the public. You know -- democracy and all that.

I think Bill Frist's stealthy insertion of the provision into a national security bill prevented anyone from finding out just how unpopular this ban was.

And now we know we could not afford to lose a single Republican-leaning vote. Not a one.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (44)
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Classy.

Rapper and noted prose stylist Kevin Federline, 28, took up his Sharpie and left behind a love note* on the shower door of his dressing room at the House of Blues in Chicago, where he performed November 8. The message, written the day after wife Britney Spears, 24, filed for divorce, reads:

Today IÂ’m a free man
Ladies look out
F--k a wife
Give me my kids B-tch!
--Kevin Federline

Yeah, divorce is traumatic. Still.

The greatest divorce ever.

Not one of those amicable Cruise-Kidman breakups. But a real trailer-park tempest.

Thanks to The Political Pitbull.

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (35)
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The bills of indictment digested here are pretty damning.

Here's one:

Rep. Alan Mollohan (WV): He's set to take the chair of the very appropriations panel in whose purse strings he has already entangled himself. (He has helped steer nearly $500 million in taxpayer money to his rural district, half of which has gone to five organizations Mollohan created with friends.) As a result, he's under FBI investigation. Enough said.

Good thing the media was so very very quiet about this before the election.

Posted by: Ace at 10:55 AM | Comments (13)
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Oh, sure, it's a misdemeanor under sharia law, but only so long as there are four male witnesses to the rape willing to testify you weren't a whore who deserved everything you got.

There are never four male witnesses to a rape, however. There may be four good samaritans who stop the rape, or there may be four culprits who participate in the rape; it's hard to imagine there are many cases in which men just sit around watching a rape and take no action (either to stop it or to join in on the fun).

So, Pakistan's lower house moved to bring rape under the civil (i.e., not sharia-Islamic) penal code with modern standards of proof (i.e., non-retarded proof).

The Islamists walked out of the session in protest.

This is an attempt to create a free sex zone in Pakistan,” he said. “Existing laws are correct and should be maintained … The changes are not in line with Islamic teaching.”

Seems like Pakistan is already a free-sex zone, of the brutal, coerced sort.

But that's good Islamic teaching. Got to rape the whore out of these women.

Posted by: Ace at 10:50 AM | Comments (15)
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Surf's up, baby. This is a NYT link, but you might want to break your embargo, if such things interest you.

Thick deposits of what seem to be large swaths from the ocean's floor are scattered at various places on dry land. How did big parts of the sea-bed wind up on land?

At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each covers twice the area of Manhattan with sediment as deep as the Chrysler Building is high.

On close inspection, the chevron deposits contain deep ocean microfossils that are fused with a medley of metals typically formed by cosmic impacts. And all of them point in the same direction — toward the middle of the Indian Ocean where a newly discovered crater, 18 miles in diameter, lies 12,500 feet below the surface.

The explanation is obvious to some scientists. A large asteroid or comet, the kind that could kill a quarter of the worldÂ’s population, smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a tsunami at least 600 feet high, about 13 times as big as the one that inundated Indonesia nearly two years ago. The wave carried the huge deposits of sediment to land.

...

Deposits from mega-tsunamis contain unusual rocks with marine oyster shells, which cannot be explained by wind erosion, storm waves, volcanoes or other natural processes, Dr. Bryant said.

“We’re not talking about any tsunami you’re ever seen,” Dr. Bryant said. “Aceh was a dimple. No tsunami in the modern world could have made these features. End-of-the-world movies do not capture the size of these waves. Submarine landslides can cause major tsunamis, but they are localized. These are deposited along whole coastlines.”

And the great thing is that if they're right (which, by the way, other scientists doubt), it means that extinction-level cosmic impacts occur every several thousand years, rather than every half-millon to million years as most astronomers now believe.

A little perspective, then. Does it really matter if Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House when the human race will be either extinct or reduced to stone-age primativism in short order anyway?

Posted by: Ace at 10:29 AM | Comments (57)
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Isn't it funny that the media is just getting around to this sort of reportage after the elections have been won by the Democrats?

Seems like this would have been useful information to voters on November 7th, no?

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid vows to make reform of congressional earmarks a priority of his tenure, arguing that members need to be more transparent when they load pet projects for their districts into federal spending bills.

But last year's huge $286-billion federal transportation bill included a little-noticed slice of pork pushed by Reid that provided benefits not only for the casino town of Laughlin, Nev., but also, possibly, for the senator himself.

Reid called funding for construction of a bridge over the Colorado River, among other projects, "incredibly good news for Nevada" in a news release after passage of the 2005 transportation bill. He didn't mention, though, that just across the river in Arizona, he owns 160 acres of land several miles from proposed bridge sites and that the bridge could add value to his real estate investment.

Reid denies any personal financial interest in his efforts to secure $18 million for a new span connecting Laughlin with Bullhead City, Ariz.

"Sen. Reid's support for the bridge had absolutely nothing to do with property he owns," said Rebecca Kirszner, Reid's communications director. "Sen. Reid supported this project as part of his continuing efforts to move Nevada forward."

But some Bullhead City property owners and local officials say a new bridge will undoubtedly hike land values in an already-booming commuter town, where speculators are snapping up undeveloped land for housing developments and other projects. Experts on congressional spending say Reid's earmark provides yet another sign of the need for reform.

"It's a really bad idea for lawmakers to earmark projects when they have a financial interest that could in any way be affected by it," said Norman Ornstein, coauthor of "The Broken Branch" a recent book that examines earmarking and other practices.

Uh, yeah. What he said.

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (13)
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The voters hated the GOP's official amnesty policy.

So how do we get back into power? More of the same.

Americans aren't anti-immigrant; they are pro-assimilation.

In Arizona, more than 70 percent of people voted for four state ballot initiatives on immigration: English as the official language, stripping illegal aliens of the right to bail, denying illegal aliens state-subsidized benefits (adult education programs and child care, among others), and denying punitive damages in lawsuits. Yet according to exit polls, when asked how they prefer to treat illegal immigrants, Arizonans picked "a path to legal status" over "deport them" 57 percent to 38 percent.

But they hate it when people get away with breaking the rules. In the Weekly Standard, Frank Luntz reports: "Among the Americans who swung from the GOP to the Democrats (Republican Rejecters), 'unethical and illegal behavior going unpunished' was number two on the list (behind illegal immigration)." Let me rephrase what Luntz is saying here: Among voters who switched from the GOP to the Dems this election, illegal immigration was the No. 1 issue.

And yet the House Republicans were the only people standing in the way of amnesty.

The Dems are thinking very seriously about repealing the border fence -- and only a Senate filibuster or Bush's veto can stop them.

Don't count on the latter.

The incoming U.S. Congress will review the law mandating 700 miles of fence along the U.S.-Mexico border, and may seek to scrap the plan altogether.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told reporters this week that he expected to "re-visit" the issue when he becomes chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee in the 110th Congress, which has a Democratic Party majority.

He said that the high technology Secure Border Initiative, or SBI Net -- essentially a set of monitors, cameras and other integrated surveillance systems to monitor the border -- was a viable alternative.

"We might do away with it, or look at (integrating it into) SBI Net," he said, "A virtual fence rather than a real one."

The Secure Fence Act, one of the laws passed by the GOP-controlled Congress in a pre-election flurry of border security legislation, mandates 700 miles of fencing in five sections, and defines where on the 1,951-mile southern border they should go.

As a result, some administration officials view it as an example of congressional micro-management, and might welcome changes that gave them more flexibility.

Ummm, it's not an either/or situation, assholes. One can have an actual physical barrier supplemeted by this "seamless high-tech virtual fence" as well.

Posted by: Ace at 10:03 AM | Comments (20)
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