I don't know how many of you have been keeping up with those protestors who have been blockading military shipments at the Port of Olympia in Washington. Inevitably undermining their own cause and turning public sentiment against them, bless their hearts.

Sinistar blogged it on Monday.

On Friday, protesters, including several small children, were able to keep two trucks from leaving the port. Olympia police said the department did not have enough officers available to remove the protesters Friday, and that they were not prepared to physically remove children.

Nice...way to use young children as human shields, guys. If you're going to engage in civil disobedience, fine, but don't bring children into a function that has to potential to turn into riot or violence, its unnecessary, and reckless

Well, they're still doggedly at the task, of course.

Failure is the only possible outcome of this exercise, but the obvious futility of every friggin' thing they do never stopped a moonbat. For that dear friends let us rejoice.

Police wearing riot gear fired pepper spray bullets into a crowd of more than 150 protesters Tuesday night at the Port of Olympia and several military convoys eventually moved out.
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Initially, protesters seeking to block the truck convoys gathered at the main gate to the port, but the Army moved several convoys through another gate, the exit onto Marine Drive. The arrests began about 10 p.m. Tuesday as protesters ran to try to block traffic through the side gate.
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Ken Schwilk of Olympia said police removed protesters goggles and sprayed them in the eyes.

"These are nonviolent people. They are not attackers," Schwilk said.

They're so shocked, shocked, than police would dare touch their anti-pepperspray goggles in order to pepperspray them. How can you not be delighted with their childlike stupidity?

Below the jump is video of protestors making their big victory- stopping two measly trucks last Friday- and making public asses of themselves (Literally. Pause that baby at -3:31).

Big thanks to genghis. more...

Posted by: LauraW. at 10:46 AM | Comments (70)
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A new Facebook page documents college girls getting drunk.

It is not quite the sexyfun hijinks as I've seen in Girls Gone Wild. Mild Content Warning for drunkeness, partial exposure, and, um, a bucket full of vomit.

Posted by: Ace at 10:37 AM | Comments (21)
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Unlike his last empty angry populist bluster to unilaterally repeal congressional laws and take away congressmen's health coverage, I think this new threat is actually doable. He's off to a fair start, certainly.

Posted by: Ace at 10:33 AM | Comments (14)
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Community-based reality feveh!

IÂ’m a little bit tired of spending so much of my time defending the most basic principles of what I stand for. It serves to distract. What I need is a safer space where I donÂ’t lose so much energy justifying why social and environmental justice are worth spending a lot of societyÂ’s money on. What I want is a space where these ideas are a given and the debate is about how best to actualize themÂ…

And what space is that woman now writing in in which she does not feel "safe" and protected from factual and logical challenges to her claims?

The UK Guardian, which may in fact be at this point be more red than Pravda. It is in the UK Guardian, of all places, she feels not quite safe enough to explore her ideas about "actualizing" her political priorities.

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (68)
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John McCain appears to have decided to advance the idea that a Rudy Giuliani candidacy would split the Republican party. Patrick Ruffini has the details.

John McCain has a new quiz show-style game up on his Web site. It's very nicely produced.

It also makes news, showing how McCain is sharpening his attacks against Rudy Giuliani.

A user who answers "Rudy Giuliani" on question 7 of the game -- "Which candidate is the best general election candidate the Republican Party could nominate?" gets this answer.

The nomination of Rudy Giuliani would likely lead to the formation of a third party made up of social conservatives. He would also likely get "swift boated" by fireman (sic), police officers, and even victims of 9-11 who are upset with his performance. According to recent polls by Survey USA, Rudy Giuliani loses swing states such as Ohio, Kentucky and Washington against Senator Clinton and even loses Virginia -- a state that has not voted Democrat since 1972. Rudy Giuliani changes the electoral map in a way that makes it very difficult for the GOP nominee to win. The correct answer was John McCain.

We went round and round about this last month after a meeting of social cons threatened to throw the election to the Democrats. My conclusion then was that it was a bluff; it wouldn't really happen. Has anything changed since then?

Also, is John McCain really the best person to make an attack-from-the-right on Rudy Giuliani? I never really thought of him as socially conservative.

Point-Counterpoint [Ace]: I don't see anything wrong with McCain's ad. Reagan's 11th Commandment has always been more honored in the breach than in real life, and there is a plausible case that social cons would sit out the election in numbers high enough to guarantee GOP defeat were Giuliani the nominee.

McCain is, in fact, fairly social conservative, at least on paper. One senses from his answers about pro-life positions, for example, that it is neither a priority for him nor something he actually believes in in his bones, but on paper, he's solidly pro-life.

On gay marriage I don't know. On immigration-- which I suppose is a sort off social con issue at this point -- obviously he's not, um, a mainstream conservative.

I don't mind the candidates attacking each other -- after all, each candidate himself isn't going to lay out all of his negatives for you. And the idea that this weakens candidates in the general election... well, I'm pretty sure that Hillary! is ready to unload on any one of them when the time is right. I don't find it plausible that she might learn something about a candidate through such attacks that her own opposition research team didn't have three years ago.

They're going to be hit eventually. Might as well make it early. Get it all out there.

PS, Gabe is of course free to respond to this. Didn't mean to just grab the last word and call neener-neener on him.

Counter-counterpoint [Gabe]: I think Ace is right about getting this stuff out in the open as early as possible. Allah says this is about going negative. But let's be clear, it's not "going negative" to talk about the electability of oneself and one's opponents.

As far as McCain's socially conservative stances, I skimmed his positions over at On the Issues and must admit, he does look pretty conservative on paper. I simply may not have noticed it because the man completely turns me off for reasons having nothing to do with being conservative.

I'd hold my nose and vote for him if I had no other choice (or maybe a gun to my head), but I'm not looking forward to another four years of amnesty battles. I say four years, because I can't imagine that he'll make it to two terms.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 10:26 AM | Comments (41)
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And Drudge's header claims she has "damning audiotapes," too.

Bullshit? Trumped up to get a bigger settlement? Or does this damage NewsCorp?

And does it damage Giuliani? I don't see any firm allegation that Giuliani had anything to do with this or even knew of NewsCorp's alleged efforts to "protect" him, but obviously he stood to benefit from this, if true.

Judith Regan, the former book publisher, says in a lawsuit filed yesterday protesting her dismissal by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate, that a senior executive there encouraged her to lie to federal investigators about her past affair with Bernard B. Kerik after he had been nominated to become homeland security secretary in late 2004.

Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, after a court appearance in White Plains last week.

The lawsuit asserts that the News Corporation executive wanted to protect the presidential aspirations of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. KerikÂ’s mentor, who had appointed him New York City police commissioner and had recommended him for the federal post.

Ms. Regan makes the charge at the start of a 70-page filing that seeks $100 million in damages for what she says was a campaign to smear and discredit her by her bosses at HarperCollins and its parent company, News Corporation, after her project to publish a book with O. J. Simpson was abandoned amid a storm of protest.

In the civil complaint filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Ms. Regan says the company has long sought to promote Mr. GiulianiÂ’s ambitions. But the lawsuit does not elaborate on that charge, identify the executive who she says pressured her to mislead investigators, or offer details to support her claim.

In fact, the allegation about the executive makes up a small part of a much broader array of claims about what she says was her improper removal from a job atop one of the more commercially successful book publishing operations.
...

“Defendants were well aware that Regan had a personal relationship with Kerik,” the complaint says. “In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.”

...

Ms. Regan was fired on Dec. 15, 2006, after a month of withering publicity surrounding her plan to publish a hypothetical confession of O. J. Simpson to the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald L. Goldman. The release of the book, “If I Did It,” was to be tied to the broadcasting of Ms. Regan’s interview of Mr. Simpson on Fox.

A second book, a novel that imagined drunken and lascivious escapades by Mickey Mantle, drew another round of outrage.

At the time, Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corporation, called the Simpson book “ill considered.” Ms. Regan was fired and her imprint shut down after a HarperCollins lawyer, Mark Jackson, claimed she had used an anti-Semitic remark in describing the internal campaign to fire her as a “Jewish cabal.”

It seems like some bullshit to me for a simple reason: The gravamen of her charge is that she was improperly fired. Fine. But this whole business of firing her and discrediting her in order to protect Giuliani seems unlikely -- didn't they have more plausible reasons for all this? She seems to want to pretend the whole OJ book thing was really no big deal and just a pretext to can her -- and it seems to me she's only bringing up a tangential issue to put the screws to Murdoch.

Was she pressured? Possibly. But possibly just by a Giuliani supporting executive acting on his own -- organizations have within them strong partisans that don't reflect any sort of company line.

I also note the deadliness of the charge made against her, of her supposedly blaming her woes on a "Jewish cabal." Such talk can be a career ender, and of course it sure would be helpful to her future career opportunities to allege some large political conspiracy to frame her for a bit of casual anti-semitic animus.

Eh. Let's hear these daming tapes, Ms. Regan.

Oh: I'm having trouble buying the allegation that she was "pressured" by an executive at NewsCorp, given the likelihood that Regan, no matter what her formal rank in the corporate order, was probably more powerful and rich than most of the company executives nominally superior to her.

She was a superstar editor, getting some of the biggest catches in the industry -- Limbaugh and Howard Stern, for two. She was a celebrity and had her own talk show (I think on Fox) for a while; she had a high profile and, unlike most executives, could easily arrange television interviews to fight back against anyone wronging her.

And she had what Howard Stern used to term "fuck you money" -- enough in the bank that one could, if one's bosses became unbearable, tell one's employers to go fuck themselves sideways and take an unscheduled, but fairly comfortable, early retirement.

How exactly does one pressure a rich, famous superstar, exactly? By threatening to fire her? Hah. She would have had a big contract somewhere else before the week was out.

That's why, I suppose, her lawsuit alleges this stuff about destroying her career through lies and such. Because otherwise what the hell kind of case does she have?

It seems she's basically alleging that, in order to discredit her and thus protect Giuliani, Rupert Murdoch somehow Jedi Mind Tricked her into inking a deal with OJ Simpson which would ultimately cause a firestorm of revulsion and providing the perfect pretext for her firing and her becoming persona non grata among publishing houses.

Really? He can do that? He's a Sith now, Judith?

Posted by: Ace at 09:53 AM | Comments (14)
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And he's threatening to privatize nationalize Spanish interests in Venezuela unless he gets it. Chavez is angry because King Juan Carlos told him to shut up when he was interrupting Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and calling him a fascist.

Chavez, who railed against imperialism and capitalism, named banks Santander and BBVA as possible targets, saying the OPEC nation did not need Spanish business.

"The king lost it," Chavez said at a late-night political rally. "He should say, '... I, the king, confess, I was beside myself, I made a mistake.'"

[...]

"Whatever has been privatized can be taken back, we can take it back," Chavez said earlier at a news conference. "If the government of Spain or the state of Spain ... start to generate a conflict, things are not going to go well."

Of course I'm opposed to Chavez's fondness for nationalizing industries, and I applaud the King's in-your-face moment. On the other hand, how smart is it to invest in Venezuela? It's not like Chavez is coming out of nowhere. Spain is now trying to smooth this over (read: placate) through "diplomatic channels."

UPDATE: Switched "privatize" above to "nationalize." 'Cause I was dumb.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:42 AM | Comments (37)
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We are having some site loading issues that are making it difficult to reach the blog or update content.

Now is your opportunity to free yourself of your Ace addiction and get a life.

UPDATE: Pixy sez: "FIXED!"

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:54 AM | Comments (14)
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The genocide and extinction of an entire species, all due to females not knowing their proper place in the cave, slaving over a hot firepit.

The Neanderthal extinction some 30,000 years ago remains one of the great riddles of evolution, with rival theories blaming everything from genocide committed by "real" humans to prehistoric climate change.

But a recent study introduces another explanation: Stone Age feminism.

...

The University of Arizona's Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, use archeological evidence to argue that Neanderthal females - unlike Homo sapien women of the Upper Paleolithic period - joined men in hunts at a time when stabbing giant beasts with a sharpish stone affixed to a stick represented the cutting edge of technology.

That's courageous, but probably bad practice for a population that never numbered much more than 10,000 individuals. The loss of a few males to a flailing hoof or slashing antler is no big deal, in the long run. But losing females of child-bearing age could bring doom to a hard-pressed species.

"All elements of [Neanderthal] society appear to have been involved in the main subsistence pursuit" of hunting large animals, Kuhn said. "There's not much evidence of classic female roles.

"Putting the reproductive core of the population - pregnant women, mothers of infants, children themselves - at such danger could have put Neanderthals as a whole at serious demographic disadvantage," he said.

Not only would women suffer casualties, Kuhn said, their full participation in the hunt would mean they were not harvesting wild grains and other foods that could sustain their roving bands when game was scarce.

Sexism: Nature's Little Darwinian Advantage.

Ladies, when we tell you to shut up and make us a roasted auroch sandwich, we've got the very survival of the species foremost in mind.

Seriously, we tried all this before, and it wiped us out. Let's go back to what works.

PS, I don't believe a word of this. These guys have such limited fact-sets but spin out such large speculations based on them it's absurd.

Thanks to someone.

Posted by: Ace at 08:43 AM | Comments (32)
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The self proclaimed steamroller got rolled by a tidal wave of public outrage.

Struggling with widespread opposition to his driver's licensing policy, Gov. Eliot Spitzer is scheduled to huddle with New York's congressional delegation today in Washington and disclose that he is ditching the controversial plan.

"I am not willing to fight to the bitter end on something that will not ultimately be implemented," the governor told The New York Times, "and we also have an enormous agenda on other issues of great importance to New York state that was being stymied by the constant and almost singular focus on this issue."

Thanks Eliot!

WouldnÂ’t you love to be a fly on the wall the next time Spitzer and Hillary! get together in private?

Posted by: DrewM. at 06:26 AM | Comments (43)
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