San Fransisco values, indeed. Standing up for the flag so many noble men have died for.

Little catch: The student isn't being accused of creating a hostile environment and inciting violence for burning the American flag.

Guess whose flag?

No, guess again -- it's a little worse than your first guess.

Posted by: Ace at 04:06 PM | Comments (85)
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Panty hose for men. From... guess.

DIJON, France (AFP) - One of France's leading hosiery makers is launching a new line for men next month -- pantyhose with a welcome front opening and big feet, available in thick mannish knit but also as sheer tights.

Gerbe, which is based in eastern France, said this week that the country's first hosiery line for men would go on sale in March "due to increasing demand from male clients."

The pantyhose comes with a larger belt than for women as well as an opening, with "Men opaque", "sheer" or "satin" available in four models of tights, with and without feet, and three models of feel-good knee-high hosiery made to help drain toxins and massage tired limbs.

Jim Treacher's new site (content warning) -- Hot Chicks With Total Douchebags. Just what it promises -- pictures of hot chicks escorted by total friggin' douchebags. Sort of a running pictorial essay on social injustice.

Thanks to Locusts & Honey and The Apologist, respectively.

Posted by: Ace at 03:59 PM | Comments (28)
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An updated classic by Iowahawk.

SENATOR JOHN EDWARDS
I tell you why there are two Americas, my dear Dr. Dean. Man is a product of his environment.

HOWARD DEAN
Balderdash! "So bententh the tree," say I. Take the insane Bush cabal that plotted 9-11, for instance, genetically rotted from root to branch.

EDWARDS
This is where you are wrong my friend, and I shall prove you so. Take the young woman over there, banging on the keyboard.

HOWARD DEAN (sniffing)
The one who reeks of cat urine? Ghastly! What of her?

EDWARDS
I am prepared to wager my indoor squash court that I can train her to be a proper presidential campaign representative.

AMANDA MARCOTTE
Fucking suckwad cocksuck fundy fuckwit godbag cunt!

Posted by: LauraW. at 07:57 AM | Comments (15)
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Long headline, but for one of the most egregious "twisted intelligence" debacles of all time.

The correction, of course, does not quite capture the enormity of this error -- breathlessly labeling a partisan liberal Democrats' "conclusions" as if they were the indpendent, nonpartisan official conclusions of the Bush-run Pentagon. How could they really convey how massively they fucked up here? This is, in journalistic terms, simply catastrophic.

"Confirmation bias," they call it-- the press simply will run anti-Republican stories that ought to sound a little implausible or sketchy because, to them, they sound pretty darn reasonable. Such "facts" are "self-checking" -- they just prove themselves by how wonderfully they fit in with the liberal worldview.

Meanwhile, anything that shows the Democrats in a bad light is vetted, checked, confirmed, re-confirmed, and subject to a complete full-office rewrite to insure all appropriate mitigating "context" was included before ultimately being buried on page A37 beneath a short blurb on Icelandic geese migration.

Carl Levin Wouldn't Lie To You: Consider how astoundingly easily it was for Levin to get this false report on page one of the Washington Post. He just had to claim what he was reading was from the IG report. (Or be unclear about which report he was quoting.)

No need to see the actual document. Nope -- if Carl Levin tells you something, that itself is auto-confirming. Liberal Democrats don't lie to other liberal Democrats, and they never make errors. So really, who needs to see the actual document?

The standard "two sources" verification rule is apparently suspended if a liberal Democrat is your source.

Better Headline For the Washington Post:

So their front page story wasn't merely based upon a partisan document written by Carl Levin, misattributed to the Pentagon IG -- it was based on a 2004 partisan document written by Carl Levin.

I think this is where Dave from Garfield Ridge is supposed to step out from behind a wall and say, "It's old."

The first-to-market effect should be fun to watch-- the media just got a late Christmas present in a report confirming everything they believe (which is, of course, also everything Carl Levin believes).

One problem: None of it is true.

But they don't want to give back their Christmas present. Who would?

So it will be enjoyable to watch the media spin the actual report as "substantially" confirming Carl Levin's various charges even though, you know, it actually doesn't.

But they now have that idea in their little pointy immune-to-contrary-facts heads: Report proves Bush twisted intelligence. That idea is in there (as it always has been) and they'll be damned if stupid little facts get in the way of "The Truth."

BREAKING NEWS FROM THE WASHINGTON POST: DUKE LACROSSE PLAYERS FOUND GUILTY!!!!

Oh, wait -- they are "guilty" according to charges filed by DA Mike Nifong.

Sorry, minor mistake of attribution there. Could happen to anyone, really.

See, Mike Nifong was reading his indictment to us over the phone, and he sort of gave the impression that he was reading from the jury's verdict, and, see... well, who has time to check on these things.

It sounded pretty good when he was reading it to us.

Reporting is hard, man.

The Washington Post

Where Our Motto Has Always Been, "Oh well! That's why God gave pencils erasers!"

Posted by: Ace at 04:43 PM | Comments (62)
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Third item at Kaus: McCain shows how gosh-darn financially conservative he is by embracing the Democratic position that estate taxes should be reduced (rather than embracing the actual Republican position that they should be eliminated).

Plus, he's not for raising social security taxes on the wealthy -- at this time.

To be honest, I'm not super-duper hardcore on either of these points, so I don't really care what McCain's position is on them. Still, it's funny to see St. John's apostles turning his Democratic water into Reaganite wine.

Posted by: Ace at 02:43 PM | Comments (48)
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Good Lord. The attack that actually occurred wasn't so bad: Eric Hunt, Nazi, seems to have "merely" grabbed him and attempted to pull him out of an elevator for an "interview."

But he seems have had more in mind, had he been successful in dragging Wiesel off: He wanted to kidnap him back to his hotel room to demand that Wiesel answer questions about the Holocaust, "truthfully." Read your own grim imaginings into what that would have included.

I'm guessing that Wiesel is anti-violence and so forth, but I hope he starts packing a gun.

In a bizarre attack, a well-known author and Holocaust scholar was dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator by an apparent Holocaust denier who reportedly had been trailing him for weeks.

Police escorted Elie Wiesel to San Francisco International Airport on Feb. 1 after a man accosted Wiesel in the elevator at the Argent Hotel, at 50 Third St., after Wiesel participated in a panel discussion at a peace conference and before Wiesel was scheduled to catch a flight back to New York.

...

Police confirmed this week that the attack took place and that officers escorted Wiesel to the airport following the attack. According to police, the suspect accosted Wiesel in the hotel elevator at around 6:30 p.m., saying he wanted to interview him. Wiesel said he would do the interview in the lobby. ThatÂ’s when the attacker pulled him out of the elevator, police reported.

In a posting Tuesday on the anti-Zionist Web site ZioPedia, a writer using the name Eric Hunt takes credit for the attack: “After ensuring no women would be traumatized by what I had to do (I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks), I stopped the elevator at the sixth floor. I pulled Wiesel out of the elevator. I said I wanted to interview him.”

Wiesel grabbed at his chest and yelled for help, according to the posting. “I told him, ‘Why don’t you want people to know the truth?’ His expression changed, and he began screaming again. …” the posting reads. Police reported that the suspect tried to force Wiesel into one of the rooms, but ran away when Wiesel started yelling.

The online posting states that the writer intended to “bring Wiesel to my hotel room where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, Night, is almost entirely fictitious.” Later in the posting, the Holocaust is portrayed as a “myth.”

Attempted kidnapping. Charge the shit out of him. Lock him away in prison forever where he can face his own shower-room "interviews."

Still Evil, But Now With 50% More Stupidity: Our built-in advantage against Neo-Nazis: They're so fucking submoronic they confess to kidnappings on their blogs.

Posted by: Ace at 02:05 PM | Comments (32)
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Pretty easy for Jim Lindgren of the Volokh Conspiracy to find many contemporaneous print reports of Vets being spat on.

One of Lembcke's claims to support his no-one-spat-upon-Vets thesis: Girls don't spit. Ergo, any story involving a female spitter is, ipso facto, false.

Obviously this scumbag had an agenda.

But the amateur leftist webzine Slate is supposed to be accurate, even if it is transparently left-leaning. What is their excuse?

And where is their retraction?

Here's Jack Schafer endorsing the no-spitting story as true. Presumably he's implicitly claiming to have fact-checked it for accuracy. There is, as you see, no retraction -- and Slate's (commendable) practice is to include all corrections at the bottom of the articles they correct.

And here's Jack Schafer insisting that none of the evidence offered to him disproves Lembcke's, or his own, claim.

Although he seems to admit, implicitly, that contrary to his and Lembcke's claims, there are in fact contemporaneous reports documenting spitting incidents, he now moves the goalposts -- no longer does he want what he previously did not exist (i.e., contemporaneous published reports), he now wants proof the charges made in those reports were not fabricated:

Alas, none of the leads provided to me by readers contains anything that confirms that the incidents took place: I've yet to locate a news account that documents a specific spit altercation or a police or court paper trail that would back the accusations.

Original Claim: There are no contemporaneous journalistic reports backing up the "urban legend" of Vets being spat upon

Revised Claim, now that such contemporaneous reports have been produced: There are no court documents proving the Vets who made these charges were not simply flat-out lying

Nice, Schafer. Always remember-- no matter what, no matter what information is offered to you, never confess error. You're a journalistic "expert," after all -- you decide what reality is on behalf of your readers.

I look forward to his next response to Jim Lindgren.

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (24)
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24 vs. Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Two pop-culture phenoms I just don't get.

I didn't want to start the argument again, but hipster douchebags who planted those things videotaped the cops and bomb squad personnel disabling their prank devices -- and said absolutely nothing, allowing millions of dollars in direct and indirect costs (time lost due to traffic jams, etc.) to be incurred by Bostonians.

Just so they could have their little Happening.

Posted by: Ace at 01:12 PM | Comments (24)
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A pretty vicious rant:

The Society for Ethnomusicology condemns the use of torture in any form. An international scholarly society founded in 1955, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and its members are devoted to the research, study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts. The SEM is committed to the ethical uses of music to further human understanding and to uphold the highest standards of human rights. The Society is equally committed to drawing critical attention to the abuse of such standards through the unethical uses of music to harm individuals and the societies in which they live. The U.S. government and its military and diplomatic agencies has used music as an instrument of abuse since 2001, particularly through the implementation of programs of torture in both covert and overt detention centers as part of the war on terror.

The Society for Ethnomusicology

* calls for full disclosure of U.S. government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means of delivering music as torture;

* condemns the use of music as an instrument of torture; and

* demands that the United States government and its agencies cease using music as an instrument of physical and psychological torture

Finally we have a recourse for this outrage:

Thanks to File It Under.

Posted by: Ace at 12:51 PM | Comments (40)
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This is kind of interesting. Some guys did their own voice-over for the X-Man cartoon, featuring -- in addition to lots of cursing, pimp-talk, the n-word, etc. -- the Juggernaut just saying, over and over, "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch." Really funny -- but stronger than usual content warning. (It's also pretty racist, except it sounds like black guys doing it, so, you know, it's not racist.)

Everytime he says "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch" it gets funnier. And he says it a lot.

Anyway, apparently the producers of X-Men 3 liked the parody so much they inserted that line -- "I'm the Juggernaut, bitch" -- into the movie. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:23 PM | Comments (13)
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