Cornhole begins at 2:30 pm sharp!

It actually says that.

Okay, admittedly, he's kinda cute. But... I don't know. I'm not saying I'm not curious, I'm just saying, I don't know, maybe I'm not ready to jump feet first into it. Maybe some light petting before the cornhole, classic or otherwise.

Carson has combined his passion for helping children with his love for one of Cincinnati’s favorite past times – cornhole – to create a unique and exciting event perfect for a corporate outing, entertaining clients or family fun.

Family fun? Granted, Thanksgiving with the parents is always kind of boring, but...

In addition to a cornhole tournament with members of the Cincinnati Bengals and many of CarsonÂ’s other NFL friends...

A tournament, now? With other NFL players? Egads.

I'll go, but I hope I don't get any big burly linemen. I'll try my luck with the place-kickers, and that's as far as I'll go.

Thanks an awful lot to Jack Straw, for making a boy's dreams come true.

No More Blegging... A couple of people sent me the shopped jpg.

Posted by: Ace at 09:26 AM | Comments (20)
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Yup. Not only was Armstrong completely innocent of doping violations, but the French lab has been found to have been malicious and unprofessional in attempting to get the American disqualified from his victory.

You want to talk about jingoism? Let's talk about the French. At least Americans have good reason to be nationalistic.

Posted by: Ace at 09:17 AM | Comments (15)
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...using that forged discharge sheet. And Q&O says that the feds will prosecute.

It's now officially sad.

Posted by: Ace at 09:13 AM | Comments (18)
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Ummm, gee, that's a tough one.

Gas prices, ABCNews' expert suggests.

Here's another theory: everyone's perception of the economy is made up of two inputs: 1, how I'm doing, and 2, how other people are doing.

People get almost all of their information about 2 from the media. Sure, people know a few dozen people, but their overal take on how the other three hundred million Americans are doing comes from the media.

And the media keeps telling them everyone else is out of work.

The media considers it one of its most important jobs to correct public misimpressions as regards matters of political import. They made sure everyone knew Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11; they even made sure every knew the "fact" that Saddam had "nothing" to do with Al Qaeda. Which wasn't true, but they felt the public wasn't well-enough informed on the issue, so they had to "over-represent the truth" on the question, as Al Gore might say.

So-- why no media effort to educate the public on how the economy's actually doing? No teachable moment here, huh?

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 08:06 AM | Comments (45)
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Several people have written to ask if they have been banned.

Apart from the weekend where I was banning people, no. If you survived that purge, you weren't intentionally banned.

However, it is possible that you're trying to use an IP that was banned. Some companies assign different IP's at different times. Also, I tried to ban some spam IP's; I imagine that many of these are actually spoof IP's, and so I might have inadvertantly banned someone while trying to stop spam.

If you still can't post, please send your IP address to me at aceofspadeshq. That's at gmail.com. I'll check it against the banned list and see if it matches up.

Otherwise I'll talk to Pixy Misa. This may be some kind of giitch.

Posted by: Ace at 07:43 PM | Comments (42)
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Another big disappointment from a franchise that started off so beautifully. more...

Posted by: Ace at 04:39 PM | Comments (67)
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And he says it is amnesty, which it is, of course.

Although reasonable people may disagree on this, I think the main problem with the immigration plans offered by Bush and the Senate is this:

Most Americans saw the words "immigration reform" as meaning enforcing border security and allowing some legal guest-worker immigration. The idea, we thought, was no to increase the numbers of immigrants working in America, nor to increase the numbers of legal immigrants, but to regularize, legalize, and recognize some fraction of the immigrants working here already.

I didn't think "immigration reform" was going to be an amnesty, or a bonanza of new legal immigrant citizens, or a huge new number of legalized immigrant workers.

Bush and the Senate seem to think the only problem with illegal immigrants is that they're 1) illegal and 2) immigrants. So they have a solution-- we'll just make them all immediately legal, and in a couple of years, non-immigrant citizens.

Well, that does solve the problem, in the sense you won't have illegal immigrants anymore. You'll have legal citizen workers.

But that's not the way most of us were looking at the problem. We sort of thought the main problem was that we had too many low-skilled workers coming into America, displacing Americans who would otherwise be doing those low-skill jobs (as they historically have), and furthermore creating problems with public services, as they simply don't pay nearly enough in taxes to reach the break-even point as far as public services. I trust most conservatives understand that it's the rich who pay the lion's share of the taxes, federal and property and so forth; importing millions of people who pay little to no taxes, while having a great need of public services, just means that everyone else has to pay more.

I don't understand Bush's and the Senate Amnestyites' driving ambition to subsidize Mexico and Latin America by forcing the American taxpayer to pick up the tab.

Bush promised to reform Social Security and Medicare. His amnesty plan would make it worse. If legal immigration increases, that's just that much more of a drain on the already soon-to-be-bankrupt system. Young workers will pay into the system, and get paid out a bit more than they put in; you'll be paying the difference. That's bad enough, but the law generally allows every citizen to bring over his family members and then they, too, can become citizens, with all the rights of citizens. So grandfathers and grandmothers can be brought over, made citizens, and begin drawing expensive medical benefits for the elderly without having ever donated a dime to the system. Fathers and mothers can be brought over just before they reach retirement and similarly begin drawing benefits within a few years.

Furthermore, of course, Hispanics vote 60-40 Democratic. And that includes longtime Americans in the mix, who vote more Republicans. Among recent Hispanic immigrants, the numbers are probably 80-20 Democrats, at least for the first two or three generations. So, for every 1,000,000 new Hispanic immigrant citizens, we generate 600,000 or so net Democratic votes.

And don't give me that jazz about Hispanics being more "socially conservative." Fine. They're also more economically liberal, coming from nations with a socialist tradition. Anyway you slice it, they break heavily in favor of Democrats.

This is Bush's plan for a permanent Republican majority? Simply importing in millions of fresh Democratic voters every year?

Pretty soon the votes of current Americans won't count for all that much.

Posted by: Ace at 03:12 PM | Comments (55)
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Their title: "Greenhouse gas breeds venomous vines"

I detect no alarmism in this study whatsoever.

In the study, Mohan and her co-workers pumped extra CO2 over three large circular plots of North Carolina pine forest. For six years, the plants inside were exposed to an extra 200 parts per million of CO2 over today's atmospheric concentration of about 380 parts per million, roughly what we might expect from pollution by the middle of this century.

I hope they bought credits for all that carbon.

Mohan's experiment sought to check whether the plants shoot up in the wild, as they do in greenhouse experiments. "Yes, dramatically," was the answer. The poisonous ivies grew at double the rate of plants grown under regular CO2 levels, whereas woody species on average tend to grow around 31% faster. The elevated CO2 also created a nastier version of urushiol poison, the team showed.

Its still poison ivy, though, right? It doesn't become invisible or diguise itself as some other plant or trick me into making a big salad out of it?

As long as it still just hangs out on trees and looks like Poison Ivy and doesn't become ambulatory, I'm thinking not much has changed in my life.

I'm curious if they've tried this experiment with wine grapes yet.

UPDATE: From the comments to this post, Dave in Texas:

They pumped more of what a plant uses in photosynthesis to generate plant material and oxygen, and they GREW FASTER?
Well knock me over with a feather.

Posted by: LauraW. at 11:14 AM | Comments (62)
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Quagmire One;

Quagmire Two.

And Interested Participant notes that these are only the two latest in a recent string of high-profile AQ captures.

I didn't bother posting on this, of course, because I didn't see the point. The MSM is providing virtually wall-to-wall coverage of Al Qaeda's very bad two weeks; what's the point of bloggers merely echoing what the MSM is shouting from the rooftops?

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (83)
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Jim Geraghty on why you shouldn't just stay home this November, no matter how displeased you are with the GOP.

Professor Rusty Shackleford returns to discuss another one the MSM got horribly wrong.

At Rightalk.com at 4:05 ET.

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (52)
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