It was always a sort of goofy idea -- get lots of people to agree to leave their current homes to move to New Hampshire, where a sudden influx of 20,000 hard-core true believin' libertarians could impact a state's politics.

As of yet, though, only 7,500 have made the pledge (and of course only a fraction of that number would actually make such a huge move just for the sake of politics).

This is a goofy idea, but they're almost on to something. Libertarians may not be committed enough to follow through, but there is a group who most definitely are -- pot smokers/NORML mutants. I've never seen people so goddamned in love with plants.

Now, if these people -- who, I'm guessing, are largely unencumbered by children, mortgages, furniture, and jobs -- can rouse themselves up off their couches and make a move to a small, already-liberal state (Vermont is the obvious choice), they could make pot legal within a couple of years. And then even make hitting a high score on Super Mario Carts an acceptable alternative to welfare work requirements.

Libertarians are sometimes hard to tell from the NORML crowd anyway, so really, they just need to combine forces, embiggen their tent a bit, and they can have their own state within short order.

Thanks to Matthew Sheffield, who busts news so you don't have to.

Posted by: Ace at 02:21 PM | Comments (25)
Post contains 251 words, total size 2 kb.

Here's K-Fed's upcoming Super Bowl commercial for an insurance firm.

It depicts him daydreaming about being a rap superstar. When in reality he's a fry cook at burger joint.

The ad has caused "controversy." And a formal protest by an orgainzation.

Can you guess why? Think of the stupidest possible explanation you can -- and that's probably it.

Yes, indeed, the restaurant association is protesting the commercial for portraying burger-flipping as a dead-end job and demeaning the millions of American who ask you if you'd like to supersize and/or biggie-size.

This just in: We're all doomed.

Thanks to yls, who considers this yet another example of our increasingly stupid population's insistence on "protesting reality."

Posted by: Ace at 01:34 PM | Comments (25)
Post contains 120 words, total size 1 kb.

Well Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro has run his final lap.

I don't see what the big deal is, really. It's not like he won the Triple Crown or anything. The damn slacker couldn't even finish the Preakness.

On the plus side, though, I'm hoping that this frees up his medical team to go to Cuba.

After all, who doesnt want to see them replicate their efforts on Castro's behalf?

Posted by: Jack M. at 01:19 PM | Comments (32)
Post contains 81 words, total size 1 kb.

As this seems to have prompted debate in the threads, may as well give it its own dedicated post.

As a follow-up question (suggested by Warden), why are women so endlessly fascinated by watching other women do crap -- paint a wall, go shopping for hot new clothes, raise their kids, cook a tasty meal, sew a dress -- that they can, and by all means should, actually be doing themselves?

Men don't watch shows about dudes sitting on a couch watching football, do they? And yet if such a show existed for chicks, it would run on weekend marathons on VH-1 and get a 9-share.

The British version of What Not To Wear is okay, because every three episodes addresses the eternal quandry of how a very large-breasted woman can find the right bra and wear clothes that accentuate her rack. The American version used to have such Very Special Episodes once a month in the old days. Now every episode seems to be about dressing very unattractive women, most of whom are in their early-to-mid nineties, in more body-type and age-appropriate muumuus.

How the hell did they miss the point of the British show so badly? It was just an excuse to show knockers, just Benny Hill without the old bald guy.

Then again, the American show seems to be entirely for women. So, I guess, it's a question of knowing your audience.

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (95)
Post contains 245 words, total size 1 kb.

Including video of Tony Snow's speech. I've focused on the "We won in Vietnam" remark, but let me say, the man is a rock star. Relentlessly, contagiously optimistic, smart, trenchant, funny.

I didn't mention-- first questioner for Tony? Debra Burlingame. Quite a moment.

MKH also lets you know how the the other speakers fared.

Enviro-Bashing: Tony Snow claimed (I haven't vetted this; no idea if it's true) that the US is actually beating Europe -- land of the Kyoto Protocols -- when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions reductions. I don't think I care either way; I'm a fan of CO2. I say let it build up to dangerous levels, so long as I get some SoCal style whether in the Northeast. If it ever gets to be a real problem, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton can rig some CO2 scrubbers out of giant tube-socks and gargantuan notebook covers.

He also coined the phrase "sado-environmentalism," a environmentalism fixated, somewhat sexually, on the virtue of human suffering.

Newt had earlier tossed off a good quip about this. When a questioner -- one of the minority of questioners that kept it brief and actually, you know, had ap oint -- claimed to be an expert in water desalinization and claimed further that the cost per gallon of desalinization would permit us to turn the world's deserts into habitable, arable lands within ten years (!!!), Gingrich scoffed that you'd never be able to get that plan past the EPA, due to the danger of disrupting the environmentally-sensitive drylands of the Saharan sand flea.

Yeah, I know-- the "Sahran sand-flea" quip is old. Still, it says something that he has such a great catalogue of previous hits he can just trot them out whenever needed.

I'm not sure what it says. But it says something.

Posted by: Ace at 12:08 PM | Comments (12)
Post contains 313 words, total size 2 kb.

Reposting in honor of Sullivan's new claim that mortar-toting terrorists are "civilians," in as much as they're not wearing uniforms.

Bugs

Bugs! Bugs! Bugsbugsbugs! Bugs! Shitbastard!

The View From Your Window

Thanks to Nii'ainy'glathh'hurk, from Yoggoth.

Painting Your Walls With Your Own Feces

Eh, why not? On Trading Spaces they're always saying rooms need a "pop" of color.

Bush: Satan

VOICES IN MY HEAD TELLING ME KILL KILL KILL BUT I IGNORE THEM I TRY TO IGNORE THEM GOD GIVE ME STRENGTH PLEASE PLEASE I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS WHAT IS THAT SMELL COMING FROM MY REFRIGERATOR OH GOD NO WHAT HAVE I DONE

Email of the Day

Andrew, I just wanted to compliment your bravery on your post "Bugs." You captured a feeling deep in the heart of this country, but which too many are afraid to express. When you write "Bugs! Bugs! Bugs!," you sum up the frustration of millions of Americans who are tired of seeing Bush/Cheney transdimensional parasitic beetles burrowing into their skulls and devouring their cortex fluid.

And when you write "BugsBugsBugs! Shitbastard!," you give me hope that the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld will one day come to an end, and that the nine foot tall centipede who has taken the place of my wife will finally be exposed as the Infiltrator Insect it is.

Thank you for your courage and independence, and keep on bugsbugsbugsbubsbugs! Dirty ratwhore soup! Bugs!

Thanks to reader "Good Andrew" for that, who is the "Other Andrew" who hides in my left eyeball when "Bad Andrew" is looking for him. "Bad Andrew" does... things to "Good Andrew." Terrible things.

We must talk of this no more. He's coming.

Oh, hi, Bad Andrew! I was thinking of you! I bought you some pants at the Gap!

Why... why are you holding that meat-cleaver, Bad Andrew? Talk to me... I don't like it when you stare like that...

Don't you want to try on your new khakis? They're pleated.

Was I... not supposed to buy... pleats?

Please answer me. Please answer me.

Bugs!

...

Cognitive dissonance. It's not just a river in Egypt.

Again... Mad-props to McGurk for that fantastic graphic.

Posted by: Ace at 11:37 AM | Comments (17)
Post contains 364 words, total size 3 kb.

Reposting in honor of Sullivan's new claim that mortar-toting terrorists are "civilians," in as much as they're not wearing uniforms.

Bugs

Bugs! Bugs! Bugsbugsbugs! Bugs! Shitbastard!

The View From Your Window

Thanks to Nii'ainy'glathh'hurk, from Yoggoth.

Painting Your Walls With Your Own Feces

Eh, why not? On Trading Spaces they're always saying rooms need a "pop" of color.

Bush: Satan

VOICES IN MY HEAD TELLING ME KILL KILL KILL BUT I IGNORE THEM I TRY TO IGNORE THEM GOD GIVE ME STRENGTH PLEASE PLEASE I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS WHAT IS THAT SMELL COMING FROM MY REFRIGERATOR OH GOD NO WHAT HAVE I DONE

Email of the Day

Andrew, I just wanted to compliment your bravery on your post "Bugs." You captured a feeling deep in the heart of this country, but which too many are afraid to express. When you write "Bugs! Bugs! Bugs!," you sum up the frustration of millions of Americans who are tired of seeing Bush/Cheney transdimensional parasitic beetles burrowing into their skulls and devouring their cortex fluid.

And when you write "BugsBugsBugs! Shitbastard!," you give me hope that the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld will one day come to an end, and that the nine foot tall centipede who has taken the place of my wife will finally be exposed as the Infiltrator Insect it is.

Thank you for your courage and independence, and keep on bugsbugsbugsbubsbugs! Dirty ratwhore soup! Bugs!

Thanks to reader "Good Andrew" for that, who is the "Other Andrew" who hides in my left eyeball when "Bad Andrew" is looking for him. "Bad Andrew" does... things to "Good Andrew." Terrible things.

We must talk of this no more. He's coming.

Oh, hi, Bad Andrew! I was thinking of you! I bought you some pants at the Gap!

Why... why are you holding that meat-cleaver, Bad Andrew? Talk to me... I don't like it when you stare like that...

Don't you want to try on your new khakis? They're pleated.

Was I... not supposed to buy... pleats?

Please answer me. Please answer me.

Bugs!

...

Cognitive dissonance. It's not just a river in Egypt.

Again... Mad-props to McGurk for that fantastic graphic.

Posted by: Ace at 11:37 AM | Comments (135)
Post contains 368 words, total size 3 kb.

CONTENT WARNING, especially for St. Andrew of the Sacred Heart-Ache. Video contains girls gone wild with a stungun, tasering each other's bikini-bound boobies.

Also contains a dude throwing a Ninja star right into another guy's naked ass, but the video, sadly, cuts out before we get to see how many points of damage he inflicted.

Much better than Jackass. Would you rather see boobies or Wee-Man's man-sac? That's what I thought.

Thanks to the Tantalus of Blog-Hades.

Interesting Sense of Decorum: The whole video is chicks in undies and bikinis being tasered, and guys throwing ninja stars at each other.

But -- being sensitive to traditional values -- they edit out the cursing caused by the taserings/ninja star hits.

Which is the way TV does it, isn't it? Paula Poundstone noted that when they show The Godfather on TV, they show the horse-head in the bed and Jimmy Caan getting whacked, but they delete out Jack Woltz calling a former starlet/lover a "sweet piece of ass."

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (39)
Post contains 176 words, total size 1 kb.

Ace wrote a post a little earlier about how Hillary! addressed a question posed to her about how she handles evil men.

Short answer? She marries them.

Just a joke. Maybe. Read Ace's post below for more details about Hillary!'s answer.

This post is coming from the flip side of that coin. Specifically, how do "evil" men deal with Hillary!?

The answer...by relentlessly mocking her.

As we all know by now, few men in Washington D.C. are as "evil" as Sen. Trent Lott. After all, he said some nice things to Strom Thurmond at a birthday party! It just doesn't get more "evil" than that.

Anyway, Sen. Lott carried out one of the greatest "punkings" I ever saw in my days on Capitol Hill. The victim? One Hillary! Rodham Clinton.

The story is long, so the rest will be posted after the jump. Read on, and find out the rest of the story. more...

Posted by: Jack M. at 10:45 AM | Comments (16)
Post contains 591 words, total size 3 kb.

I had planned a longer, more reflective post about this, but as Bryan at HotAir is posting about "Heading for the Exits In Iraq," my hand is forced.

One of the most provocative statements Tony Snow made was that President Bush, looking at the bustling capitalism and emulation of America in Saigon (I won't call it by its other name), stated: "We didn't lose in Vietnam. We won."

Thirty years later, of course. (I depart now from his actual statements to relay my own impressions of the statement.) We lost the war, which was really just the battle, but in the bigger war of ideas and systems and institutions, we "won." Vietnam is on its way, the story went, to becoming a pro-American Pacific Tiger. We left Vietnam in ignominius defeat, but, in the long view, we actually won. We did just enough to create the circumstances under which Vietnam would one day prosper and embrace America-style values.

Snow mentioned this anecdote at length, and then later again alluded to our "victory" in Vietnam.

I was struck by this, because it seemed to me -- and I hope I'm not playing the role of clumsy Kremlinologist here -- to suggest that the Bush administration has reduced its definition of "victory" in Iraq to an almost comically-low level. (It would be comical, but for the tragedy.) And that perhaps the Administration now believes that a helicopters-leaving-from-the-embassy-rooftop defeat is all but inevitable, and that their hopes are now pinned on the long view of history -- sure, just like in Vietnam, we'll have "lost," but in the fullness of time, we'll actually win.

I don't say this is necessarily a sell-out position; if defeat is an inevitablility, then it's an inevitablility, and one is left to grasp for straws of hope. A clean win, in the conventional sense, in Iraq is just about almost outside the realm of possibility, barring a nearly miraculous rescue of the situation by the surge, David Petraeus, and the Iraqis themselves. And thus Bush might be now seriously thinking about an alternate definition for "victory." Perhaps Iraq will descend into a truly barbaric maelstrom of civil war, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism, and perhaps, in the near term (10-15 years) the country will be dominated by pro-Iranian mullahs (resisted by Al Qaeda-backed wahhabists), but, having removed a tyrant from power, they'll make their own mistakes, fight their own wars, before ultimately settling on a more decent, peaceful, and America-friendly political model.

And thus vindicating the war, and Bush, in 2037, give or take five years.

Was Tony Snow offering up a trial balloon for a new, and vastly diminished, definition of victory? Was the Symposium the preview of the Administration's Plan B spin for defeat?

Perhaps I'm reading too much into the statement, but he spoke at some length on the "We won Vietnam" notion, and later mentioned it again, all in a speech that (of course) concluded with a long passage about Iraq.

Mickey Kaus wrote about the much less abitious terminology about "victory" Bush employed in the State of the Union:

"It is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle." Modest! Yes, the President also said "let us... turn events toward victory." But turning things toward victory isn't the same as .. victory. Rhetorically, was Bush setting the stage for a sloppy outcome--with the "surge" only making that outcome a bit better than it otherwise would be? Just asking! ...

It may very well be that Bush views his capacity to "shape" the "victory" in Iraq in even more modest terms than we had previously imagined.

It goes without saying, incidentally, that this argument is self-defeating as spin. If it is true that we cannot really shape the evolution of a country's politics, and that such growth will be largely organic and resist outside efforts at cultivation, then we could have saved 2600 American lives and departed from Iraq a few months after the invasion. (And such an argument, of course, buttresses Democrats' calls for an immediate bug-out -- if we can't really change anything, and we're going to "win" anyway, what exactly are we doing there losing Marines and soldiers to snipers and IEDs?)

While it may not work as spin, it might actually be true that we could lose the war in Iraq and yet, ultimately, see the peaceful, prosperous Muslim nation there we'd always hoped for.

Though, of course, one usually doesn't wait 30 years to find out if a country has won a war or not.

More Background... including some interesting points raised by Andrew Sullivan, here.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (212)
Post contains 779 words, total size 5 kb.