Better than who expected? All the utopian liberal idealists who think the Palestinians really want "peace"?

A Palestinian youth supports "peace" organization Hamas.

H/t to Allah and yls.

Posted by: Ace at 01:21 PM | Comments (22)
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And left-wing bloggers are going bananas.

Scott Lemieux heads a post, "Casey: Anything Santorum Can Do I Can Do Too!" and writes: "I am on the record of being highly skeptical of Robert Casey Jr.'s claims to be a staunch progressive who happens to be extremely reactionary on women's rights, but I was also open-minded. ... That's enough; Casey should not be the Democratic nominee."

Booman Tribune: "We are under no obligation to take this shit ... The Republicans are bad enough. Lieberman is bad enough. We need Bob Casey, Jr. like we need a hole in our collective heads."

I guess I understand this reaction, as I'm not happy with Republicans who vote against conservative judicial nominees. Still... I don't know. Seems to me you don't vent against a strong challenger to a sitting Republican Senator you so despise (Santorum, of course).

New York State isn't, on the whole, super-liberal. Liberal, yes. Super lefty-blogger-liberal, no. Even New York isn't ready for the lefty bloggers' brand of all-liberal, all-the-time-ism.

Do they not understand that maybe Pennsylvania -- a swing state, unlike New York -- is not the battlefield to make a stand for super lefty-blogger liberalism? As has been observed, Pennsylvania is Pittsburgh and Philadelphia surrounded by miles and miles of Alabama. (Not true and kind of demeaning, but I always thought that was kind of funny.)

Eh. Is it just me or is the entire sinestrosphere just goofy? They're in a perpetual contest to out-lefty each other, and, as far as I can tell, it's a forty-thousand-way tie.

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (62)
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Great work, all. Everyone went bananas, throwing up content left and right, which is always great.

Again, thanks to LauraW (great Osama transcript), Tanker, and Harry for stepping it up while I was busy.

And thanks to Slublog, Wunder Kraut, Feisty Republican Whore, and of course the other feisty Republican whore, Dave From At Garfield Ridge.

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (34)
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I hate posting "studies" of the soft-science sort, because they're always such nonsense, but I can't help myself:

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

Shut up, really?

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that's contrary to their point of view.

I'd like to see the Republican/Democratic split on this one.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

I could have told them that for six fifty.

Thanks to Right Side Redux.

Posted by: Ace at 10:54 AM | Comments (66)
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Hard to disagree with, really:

To the likes of Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) et al., the Supreme Court is a kind of super-Congress — nine special Senate seats — and the criterion for confirmation is agreement with the nominee on the key issues likely to come before the court. But to the American voters, the Supreme Court is above politics and ideology and confirmation should be awarded based on personal attributes such as integrity, intelligence, judgment, compassion, wisdom, maturity, fairness and temperament.

We usually call that a "superlegislature," and that's the most elemental difference between how conservatives and liberals view the Court. Conservatives view the court's mission as interpreting and applying law and clear textual mandates found in the Constitution (the real Constitution, not the "penumbras and emanations" version). Liberals view it as simply a third, superior -- supreme, really -- house of Congress, one that actually ultimately controls all government. Liberals see the Court as the ultimate arbiter of all political questions, not just constitutional ones.

Simple question: If there's a bad law that's not actually unconstitutional, should the Supreme Court strike it down? Liberals don't think too long before saying "Yes." Conservatives almost as quickly say "No." Democracy allows for -- and must allow for -- the people to occasionally, and stupidly, pass bad laws. If they're not allowed to pass bad laws -- if their democratic decisions, even the dumb ones, are subject to review by an unelected superlegislature -- then that's not really a democracy, is it? It's more like a magistrarchy which occasionally deigns to take suggestions from the voting public.

Realizing this difference in perspective between the Democratic base and the public at large, President Bush has done very well with both the John Roberts and the Alito appointments. When his people forgot about the dichotomy — and nominated Harriet Miers who was seen as a poorly qualified if conservative candidate — they got their heads handed to them.

I think that's a pretty good point. If Dick Morris is right, and the public basically agrees that the Court should be staffed with the best and the brightest, regardless of judicial theory, then Harriet Miers, I'm sorry to say, fails the public's test. If qualifications and not ideology are most important -- as Republicans have argued in trying to get Roberts and now Alito confirmed -- what the hell were we doing nominating an ideologically sound (maybe...) but not especially qualified woman to the court?

He also thinks Roe is not all that crucial in the public's mind:

...voters are not deluded; they simply do not see Roe v. Wade in quite the apocalyptic terms that both the left and the right do. To the vast middle of the American political spectrum, it is more important that a Supreme Court nominee be a good person with sterling credentials than be predictably for or against Roe v. Wade.

I think he's right here too. Although there are committed single-issue voters on both sides, I think most people are conflicted about abortion, and neither want it banned nor immune to any restrictions whatsoever. Further, they're not even strongly passionate about that middle-of-the-road take.

I do think this country is basically pro-choice. Just not passionately so. And I think the public realizes the same judges likely to protect Roe v. Wade against even minor limitations are the same judges likely to invent new rights for criminals. They're softly in favor of the former, and strongly against the latter. Leaving the Abortion Card as a rather weak one.

Posted by: Ace at 10:43 AM | Comments (27)
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Well, not steals per se. But the Radio Equalizer wants to know if Franken's exhorbitant salary demands kept Air America from repaying the illegal "loan" from the Gloria Wise charity.

Bill O'Reilly's apparently going to do a segment on it tonight,

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (14)
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What's it take to kill this maniac?

The first bomb went off at 9:30 a.m. at Saman Bank and the second 30 minutes later at the government office for natural resources.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had been expected to meet his cabinet in the city, but the trip was canceled Monday evening. His office said the four-day trip was canceled because of bad weather, the IRNA news agency reported Monday. The explosions occurred at the time he had been expected to make a speech in Ahwaz.

...

Mostafa Pourmohammadi, the interior minister, said the bombings on Tuesday were motivated by foreigners. Mr. Ahmadinejad ordered the Intelligence and Foreign Ministries to investigate "the role of foreign hands" in the bombings, the ISNA student news agency reported.

"The president has ordered a prompt and firm probe into today's blast and the terrorists who executed it," a government spokesman, Gholam Hossein Elham, was quoted as saying.

"Iran has always been victimized by terrorism, and these blind blasts show the continuity of brutal acts against Iran by international terrorists," he added.

Uh-huh.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 AM | Comments (23)
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A writer named John Birmingham thinks so, and and Tim Blair piles on.

Thanks to spongeworthy.

Posted by: Ace at 08:52 AM | Comments (36)
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I was just talking about this with Boston Irish. And yet we're both straight. Go figure.

Also in Chicago, a man with a high-pitched voice got Cowell's brutal career advice: Shave your beard and try wearing a dress.

In the Denver audition, Randy Jackson couldn't hide his surprise that a slightly built, long-haired contestant was male, not female.

"Wow," Jackson said. When the young man said he intended to sing Whitney Houston's "Queen of the Night," Jackson responded with a second "wow."

"Atrocious. Confused," was Cowell's post-performance comment.

...

Cowell and host Ryan Seacrest are known for their faintly gay-mocking banter, but the limits have become so stretched that the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation contacted Fox to voice concerns over the show's treatment of "sexual orientation and gender expression."

"The real offense here was in the producer's decision to add insult to injury by turning a contestant's gender expression into the butt of a joke," spokesman Damon Romine said in a statement posted on the group's Web site.

On Tuesday, GLAAD said it has started what it hopes will be a productive, ongoing conversation with Fox. The network declined comment.

Jackson and especially Cowell really seem to have stepped up the venom, to the point, I think, where it's just not funny sometimes. Some people deserve it, some people can take it, and when they cut on such people, it's funny. But other people are so obviously... damaged and fragile that the insults just seem cruel and nasty.

The low point was the gender-confused boy-girl mentioned above. As a genuine reaction, sure, it's excusable to be a little surprised. Most people couldn't figure out the gender of the contestant. He was pretty much a true hermaphrodite. But for Cowell to pile on with his "Confused" line -- with the double-meaning not even subtly smuggled in there -- just was vicious.

A lot of this stuff can just be handled with a blank look or a quick eye-slide over to the camera. Message sent, and no one has to be told to shave his beard and wear a dress.

Idol has always drawn its share of painfully gay contestants (or at least the producers make sure to serve them up for the judges and, of course, America). I'm not sure if they just like the show, or are appearing as a goof, or what. But by this point I'd imagine that gay men who can't hide it like, um, some previous contestants "just aren't right for the competition."

(It doesn't help, of course, that homosexualtiy causes one to greatly overestimate one's talents as a singer. At least this is what I have learned from American Idol.)

Not to be a liberal or anything, but I always thought the show was borderline homophobic, and it seems to be getting worse. It's almost like Seacrest and Cowell know everyone thinks they're gay, so they're doing their damnedest to announce, "Nope, we hate homos."

Then again, last night's show was hilarious, so I'm not boycotting anytime soon.

Posted by: Ace at 08:43 AM | Comments (53)
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D&D Dork Documentary. Fake but funny.

A rap about Boba Fett. Check out "Fett's Vette" on the right sidebar.

Thanks to Walter and steve_in_hb, respectively.

So Old Even I Think It's Old: Nevertheless, it's funny. Monty links another D&D parody.

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (6)
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