Which makes it okay to view on the West Coast, but on the East Coast, it's not even an option for me. And I stay up too late.

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (23)
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...with the Yankees holding a one-year option beyond that.

According to the NJ Star-Ledger, via Fox, unconfirmed.

I don't really care.

I am now just typing what I hear on TV.

Slow news day.

Update: He turned it down. Apparently the new offer was not only insulting as far as its short duration, it also represented a bit of a pay cut.

So it seems to not have been a serious offer. I mean, you can't offer a guy like this a pay cut. He'd have to reject it just on grounds of pride.

Posted by: Ace at 12:01 PM | Comments (28)
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"Near the vehicle carrying the former Prime Minister." She was not hurt.

She's traveling to work out a power-sharing agreement with Pervez Musharraf.

More: "Dozens" killed. Seventy-five injured, about half of those critically.

Appears to be a suicide car bomb blast.

Question: Is it time to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan and what few of them are in NW Pakistan? It seems we're making more terrorists than we're killing.

I propose an over-the-horizon redeployment, focused on finally hunting down bin Ladin (who is dead, by the way), to neighboring Jamaica.

Jamaica's fun. Or so I've heard.

Posted by: Ace at 11:31 AM | Comments (9)
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Nice:

House Democrats were unable Thursday to override President Bush's veto of their pre-election year effort to expand a popular government health insurance program to cover 10 million children.

The bill had bipartisan support but the 273-156 roll call was 13 votes short of the two-thirds that majority supporters needed to enact the bill into law over Bush's objections. The bill had passed the Senate with a veto-proof margin.

The State Children's Health Insurance Program now subsidizes health care insurance coverage for about 6 million children at a cost of about $5 billion a year. The vetoed bill would have added 4 million more children, most of them from low-income families, to the program at an added cost of $7 billion annually.

To pay for the increase, the bill would have raised the federal tax on cigarettes from 39 cents to $1.00 a pack.

...

Bush, anticipating that his veto would stand, has assigned three top advisers to try to negotiate a new deal with Congress. One of them, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said: "It's now time for us to get to the hard work of finding a solution and get SCHIP reauthorized. We also have a larger task, to provide every American with the means of having an insurance policy."

Republican opponents said the bill would encourage too many middle-income families to substitute government-subsidized insurance for their private insurance. The bill gives states financial incentives to cover families with incomes up to three times the federal poverty level — $61,950 for a family of four.

"That's not low-income. That's a majority of households in America," said Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif.

The bill specifically states that illegal immigrants would remain ineligible for the children's program, but Republicans seized on a section that would allow families to provide a Social Security number to indicate citizenship. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said it's too easy to get a false number, which would give an opening for thousands of illegal immigrants to enroll.

Here's the obvious: Democrats don't want Republicans to vote for this bill. They want a wedge issue. So they deliberately lard it up with unacceptable provisions -- coverage for illegals, coverage of the doin'-okay middle class -- purposefully.

The media knows this. They are not naive enough to believe that bills are drafted with only policy matters in mind and no political posturing whatsoever. Furthermore, they know that the parts of the bill objected to are, in fact, dubious. Not necessarily wrong, especially from their liberal perspective, but dubious. Probably unnecessary and more costly than needed.

Do we get a full and fair debate on this issue transmitted to us? Does the media bother to acknowledge the obvious political positioning here? Do they turn their self-proclaimed virtues of cynicism, experience, and all-around know-it-all wise-guy wisdom to note the obvious flaws in the bill, put in their deliberately to force a Republican split on it?

Of course not. It's just a "popular" program which insures poor children and which Republicans are assholes to oppose.

I know I sound like Johnny One Note on the media sometimes. Allah thinks sometimes I sound like a maniac, and while I don't think I sound like a maniac, I do find myself becoming maniacally repetitive.

But we cannot have a true democratic debate on any issue if the people charged with reporting the debate to us consistently distort the facts and misrepresent the real difference of opinions about those facts.

They call themselves the Fourth Branch of Government, implying a public trust and duty greater than individual partisanship. Perhaps they should start acting as if they believed that.

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Comments (17)
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Check out this opening sentence:

Whether because of the news from Iraq, or the messages from the White House, Americans are less pessimistic than they were about the future prospects in Iraq.

Annoying. The writer seems to be alleging there are two reasons to be more optimistic about Iraq: Actual facts flowing from the country or happy spin from the White House. As it's mostly Republicans, of course, who have increased support for the war, it seems implicit that we're drooling imbeciles who are "poor, uneducated, and easily led" as the Washington Post once stated.

The opening seems to want to remain agnostic on whether there actually is verifiable good news coming from Iraq, something that even the Washington Post, again, had to admit was true. And yet so as not to discomfit liberal readers, the writer pretends he's not quite sure there is good news coming out of Iraq, and this might just be a PR surge in opinion.

It's also annoying because the press has been doing its level-best not to report the news from Iraq, now that the news has turned hopeful. Do I detect a bit of resentment that the news managed to leak out at all?

The percentage of those who believe that things are getting better for U.S. troops has increased from 13 percent in March and 20 percent in August to 25 percent now.

Those who believe things are getting worse have fallen from 55 percent in January and 51 percent in March to only 32 percent in this new Harris Poll.

In May, only nine percent believed the surge of new troops was working; that has now almost doubled to a (still very modest) 17 percent . However, several other key indicators have not changed significantly. Two in five still believe that the surge is not working - 38 percent in May and 40 percent now.

These are some of the results of a Harris Poll of 2,565 adults surveyed online between Oct. 9 and 15, 2007 by Harris Interactive(R).

One thing that has not changed is the perception of President Bush's job performance on Iraq. Three in ten Americans (29 percent) give President's Bush positive ratings on his handling of Iraq while two-thirds (67 percent ) give him negative ratings. These numbers have been holding steady since the spring.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (17)
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Why? Well, because he prosecuted Muslims.

See, he "entrapped" them.

A Muslim cleric and a founder of his mosque pleaded not guilty at a detention hearing Tuesday to charges of conspiring to launder money and promote terrorism.

...

Law enforcement sources said the men are believed to be connected to Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist organization previously based in northern Iraq with links to Jordanian terrorism suspect Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who U.S. officials believe has links to al Qaeda.

Tiny minority of extremists, Religion of Peace, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Posted by: Ace at 09:49 AM | Comments (13)
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Forgive me for thinking the press might have a slight amount of interest in Sandy Berger's document-shredding had he been Reagan's NSA.

So, what does it say that Hillary Clinton chose Mr. Berger as one of her advisers, and that she will rely on the advice of a convicted criminal who is barred from access to the sort of national security information a party's candidate for President is routinely briefed on during a campaign?

Many politicians are loyal to their friends. Many Presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, have kept in place people who turn out to be engaged in activity that no one should endorse. And many politicians maintain friendships with associates who have fallen from grace, not condoning their misdeeds, but not abandoning personal ties.

Hillary has done something entirely different. She selected a key adviser she knows has scandalously flouted the law, lied to deflect blame onto others, and subverted the democratic processes that provide accountability for officials' conduct. She selected someone who has destroyed documents that could be crucial to America's security to be a trusted councilor on national security matters - documents that could have contained hand-written notes by her husband or information that would have called his judgment into question.

Hillary has had to renounce associates before. She's had numerous fund-raising scandals involving criminal wrong-doing by people she should have known to be criminals, Norman Hsu being the most recent and notorious. But in all of those instances, she has had the plausible excuse that she didn't know what they had done wrong.

In Sandy Berger's case, there is no excuse. Hillary's inclusion of Sandy Berger in her circle of advisers demonstrates that, notwithstanding her law license, she really doesn't care about the law. She doesn't care whether someone violates the law if they're on her team, if the violation in some way helps the Clintons. Hillary's indifference to criminal wrong-doing suggests that she sees herself as above the law, breezily ignoring law when it's an impediment to something she wants.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (11)
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Citizens and legal residents have become more and more irritated by the federal government's inability to curb illegal immigration. I doubt that the issue has become more pressing in the past three years, but we're certainly acting like it has. Now comes local action.

Prince William County has put in place new restrictions on illegal immigrants. The county supervisors approved a plan that will deny county services to illegal immigrants including drug counseling and some services for the elderly. It will also prevent illegals from receiving business licenses. Police officers are now instructed to inquire into the immigration status of crime suspects.

Like most local immigration actions, these are a mix of good and bad ideas. Regarding services provided by the county, Prince William County resident Robert Stephens has it partially right:

"Where do you get off demanding services, rights and mandatory citizenship?" said Manassas resident Robert Stephens, addressing the large crowd of Hispanic residents, reported the Post. "Who invited you? You cry for your rights? You have none."

County services are a benefit the county may bestow or deny as it wishes, so long as it does so without discriminating by race or gender (or disability, probably). Contrary to the assertions of immigrant groups who have already filed lawsuits against the county, illegal immigrants are not entitled to county benefits under the Equal Protection Clause.

Stephens hits very wide of the mark, however, when he says that illegals have no rights. We'll hope that his hyperbolic exclamation was prompted by high emotions during the 12 hour session. Illegals have rights, just not all the rights of citizens or even the rights of legal residents.

The one part of this plan that gives me pause is its direction that county police officers make inquiry into the immigration status of those they suspect of crimes. If that's as far as it goes then there is no problem. Criminal illegal immigrants should be deported as soon as they're discovered.

However, county officials must see to it that crime victims who are illegals have no fear of calling the police for help. The point of localities cracking down on illegals is to cut down crime rates (at least, according to the Prince William county supervisors), not create a category of residents among whom crime will go unchecked. That's a recipe for rampant expansion of crimes against persons and property and dangerous self-help justice.

UPDATE: There was a good article on states taking action on illegal immigration in Monday's Washington Post.

The number of states passing immigration-related bills has skyrocketed this year. No fewer than 1,404 pieces of immigration-related legislation were introduced in legislatures during the first half of 2007, with 182 bills becoming law in 43 states. That is more than double the number of immigration-related state laws enacted during all of 2006, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:08 AM | Comments (35)
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I think I've linked this before but everyone seems to be linking it again.

A pretty good hit on Hillary!'s lying on FEC disclosures regarding a 1999 fundraiser hosted by Peter Paul. You can skip to 5:45; before that it just establishes background.

This won't bring Hillary down. It's not big enough and it's just more of the same. She just lies about where her money is coming from, then Democratic-aligned prosecutors and judges run interference for her, and she claims she's been vindicated by the system. And of course the media refuses to take interest.

Here's A Digest: I'm less than interested in this because I know from past experience Hillary! is Untouchable. But here's the basics, for those of you who don't want to sit through a long video.

Peter Paul made tens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars worth of in-kind donations to Hillary in hosting a fundraiser for her; the fundraiser wound up netting her more than million dollars. Because Peter Paul had a previous conviction for something (not sure what), Hillary's chief fundraising director deliberately omitted his in-kind donations from required FEC disclosures. He was convicted on this charge. But the prosecution insisted Hillary had nothing to do with his actions, and since then the liberal/Hillary-camp talking point has been "she was out of the loop."

Peter Paul is suing her for damage to his business interests. He's a jilted would-be business partner of Bill Clinton, whom he was courting as a rainmaker for Stan Lee Media, a startup piece of crap business begun after Marvel fired Stan Lee. So his actual suit isn't really about the FEC filings per se, but he's pretty pissed off about everything so he's eager to allege wrongdoing by the Clintons.

The media has ignored the story entirely.

Here's my annoyance: the media constantly champions each and every proposed restriction on campaign donations in the interests, they claim, of good government, protection against corruption, and the public's right to know where a politician is getting her money from... and to whom they owe favors. And yet every time a Democrat breaks these rules (see Gore, Al, and Nuns, Buddhist), they take the position that all of these laws are ticky-tack and extremely minor and really, who cares?

If no one cares about these laws -- if they're so insignificant to enforce -- why are they on the books at all? How does the media consistently champion these laws as vital to democracy itself and then either explicitly or implicitly brand them as silly and unnecessary procedural hurdles whenever a Democrat breaks them?

Part of the reason I don't want further campaign finance laws is simply pragmatic and realistic -- I know they will only actually be enforced against Republicans. The only way to get enforcement on these in a politicized environment is to generate some amount of public anger at their being broken, and the media is only interested in stirring the pot of public resentment when a Republican is caught breaking them. Whatever Democrats do, from signing up millions of illegal voters through corrupt organizations like Acorn, abusing the "non-partisan" rules for tax-free contributions to plainly partisan creatures like Media Matters, lying about the source and extent of campaign contributions, accepting obviously illegal donations from hustlers like Norman Hsu, etc., is fair and proper in the media's eyes, and even if Democrats, um, bend the rules a bit, what's the harm? These are after all mere procedural sort of rules anyway, right?

The media likes to pretend that only Republicans take dirty money, and that's why they only report on such scandals -- they and they alone "fit the narrative." Even accepting that a story's newsworthiness should be determined by whether it fits a pre-existing "narrative," surely the media isn't so stupid -- and doesn't think we're so stupid -- as to be unaware that Hillary! has her own "narrative" of doing whatever is necessary to get her claws on dirty and sometimes illegal money, no matter what the source, and then simply lie about it when caught.

But apparently that narrative is too old and boring by now to justify any coverage.

Posted by: Ace at 08:34 AM | Comments (42)
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For those who care, Michael Fumento of Reason magazine attacked Gary Taubes for that anti-carb article he wrote for the NYT magazine.

Fumento's article is here; Taubes' reply is here.

Although both pieces are longish, especially Taubes' reply, it's a somewhat interesting debate on the subject, as well as a debate over writing a misleading polemic full of selectively chosen facts and quotes. Fumento seems pretty guilty of this himself in the percentage fat/total fat consumed exchange.

Thanks to praecisio.

Posted by: Ace at 08:15 AM | Comments (17)
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