It just comes and goes.

Posted by: Ace at 08:11 AM | Comments (20)
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I'm sorry, but this is just depressing. There's no nice way to put it. Detroit is bad and getting worse and it's hard to argue otherwise when homes are now selling for less than the average car.

With. No. Takers.

With bidding stalled on some of the least desirable residences in Detroit's collapsing housing market, even the fast-talking auctioneer was feeling the stress.

"Folks, the ground underneath the house goes with it. You do know that, right?" he offered.

After selling house after house in the Motor City for less than the $29,000 it costs to buy the average new car, the auctioneer tried a new line: "The lumber in the house is worth more than that!"

As Detroit reels from job losses in the U.S. auto industry, the depressed city has emerged as a boomtown in one area: foreclosed property.

It also stands as a case study in the economic pain from a housing bust as analysts consider whether a developing crisis in mortgages to high-risk borrowers will trigger a slowdown in the broader U.S. economy.

...

The city, which has lost more than half its population in the past 30 years and struggled with rising crime, failing schools and other social problems, largely missed out on the housing boom that swept much of the country in recent years.

Prices have gained less than 2 percent per year in the five years since 2001, when the auto industry entered a renewed slump.

Steve Izairi, 32, who re-financed his own house in suburban Dearborn and sold his restaurant to begin buying rental properties in Detroit two years, was concerned that houses he thought were bargains at $70,000 two years ago were now selling for just $35,000.

At least 16 Detroit houses up for sale on Sunday sold for $30,000 or less.

A boarded-up bungalow on the city's west side brought $1,300. A four-bedroom house near the original Motown recording studio sold for $7,000.

"You can't buy a used car for that," said Izairi. "It's a gamble, and you have to wonder how low it's going to get."

Detroit, where unemployment runs near 14 percent and a third of the population lives in poverty, leads the nation in new foreclosure filings, according to tracking service RealtyTrac.

With large swaths of the city now abandoned, banks are reclaiming and reselling Detroit homes from buyers who can no longer afford payments at seven times the national rate.

I blame that long string of Republican mayors of Detroit and governors of Michigan. They're ruining that place, I tell ya.

Posted by: Ace at 09:55 PM | Comments (49)
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Genghis tipped me to this a while ago. I didn't want to step on the sad news about Cathy Seipp, so I waited. LBM, RIP:

The balding, bespectacled nebbish who gained cult status as the oddball Larry "Bud" Melman on David Letterman's late night television shows has died after a long illness. The Brooklyn-born Calvert DeForest, who was 85, died Monday at a hospital on Long Island, the Letterman show announced Wednesday. He made dozens of appearances on Letterman's shows from 1982 through 2002, handling a variety of twisted duties: dueting with Sonny Bono on "I Got You, Babe," doing a Mary Tyler Moore impression during a visit to Minneapolis, handing out hot towels to arrivals at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

"Everyone always wondered if Calvert was an actor playing a character, but in reality he was just himself - a genuine, modest and nice man," Letterman said in a statement. "To our staff and to our viewers, he was a beloved and valued part of our show, and we will miss him."

The gnomish DeForest was working as a file clerk at a drug rehabilitation center when show producers, who had seen him in a New York University student's film, came calling. His was the first face to greet viewers when Letterman's NBC show debuted on Feb. 1, 1982, offering a parody of the prologue to the Boris Karloff film "Frankenstein."

"It was the greatest thing that had happened in my life," he once said of his first Letterman appearance.

Here's Calvert -- then known by his character name of Larry "Bud" Melman (NBC's forbiddding of Letterman to use any of his NBC "intellectual property" required calling DeForest by his real name when the show moved to CBS) -- introducing the very first late-night David Letterman show, doing that Karloff take-off mentioned above.

(Letterman had already had the short lived morning show, and Larry "Bud" Melman was used on that a lot. So this isn't his first actual appearance on any Letterman show.)

It's like time travelling, man.

Posted by: Ace at 09:39 PM | Comments (5)
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And a poster reads Fuck The Troops, in case Jane "I Just Got These Talking Points Five Minutes Ago" Fleming wants to claim this is their way of supporting the troops, by giving them a Johnny Storm-style "Flame On!" shout-out.

Fleming claims that this sentiment is not widespread at all on the liberal side of the aisle. Gary Kamiya, a writer at Salon, would beg to disagree.

He wrote this shortly after the Fall of Baghdad, heartbroken that Saddam's troops hadn't killed more Americans. I'm not exaggerating -- he actually says this.

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I'm not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.

Some of this is merely the result of pettiness--ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It's a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one's head and one's heart are at odds.

Many antiwar commentators have argued that once the war started, even those who oppose it must now wish for the quickest, least-bloody victory followed by the maximum possible liberation of the Iraqi people. But there is one argument against this: What if you are convinced that an easy victory will ultimately result in a larger moral negative--four more years of Bush, for example, with attendant disastrous policies, or the betrayal of the Palestinians to eternal occupation, or more imperialist meddling in the Middle East or elsewhere?

Wishing for things to go wrong is the logical corollary of the postulate that the better things go for Bush, the worse they will go for America and the rest of the world.

It is now almost four years since Gary Kamiya wrote that. The left has never condemned him for his remarks nor disavowed his hopes for an American defeat; indeed, shortly after he wrote this, dozens of letters were published by Salon praising him for his "courage" in admitting what so many secretly believed.

He has not been fired. He was never disciplined. He has never so much as faced any real criticism from anyone on the left for this hateful, anti-American, praying-for-troop-deaths sentiment.

So spare me the claim that just a "few bad apples" are actively supporting our enemies. It's more than a "few bad apples."

It's the majority of the Democratic base.

Posted by: Ace at 09:14 PM | Comments (27)
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I don't like the "rope, tree, some assembly required" joke, but then, I don't really mean it as a joke.

Neither does the prosecutor:

Glynn County District Attorney Stephen D. Kelley said he will seek the death penalty against 32-year-old George Edenfield, who has a prior child molestation conviction from 1997, and his parents, David and Peggy Edenfield. "This is one of the most horriffic crimes that I have seen in 21 years of prosecutions," Kelley said.

I like that: Kill them all. Wipe out this defective gene before it can propagate new evil.

The indictment does not say which of three caused the boy's death.

It also claims George Edenfield and his 58-year-old father sodomized the boy and forced him to perform oral sex while Peggy Edenfield watched and masturbated.

"They deserve the worst, for them to torture my son like that, every last one of them," said Mike Barrios, the slain boy's father.

I realize I may be jumping to conclusions here -- the McMartin Family "molestation" fiasco and all those -- but we know for a fact we're not merely dealing with a child's imaginations here. We have a corpse on our hands. At the very least we know we actually are dealing with a murder, not a preschoolers' fantasies about playing the "naked movie star game" with Chuck Norris.*

* If you've never seen the James Woods made-for-HBO movie Indictment, you should. Great, great movie. After seven years of prosecutorial abuse that would make even Mike Nifong blush, an entire family accused of molestation (from kids to grandma!) was finally cleared of wrongdoing.

All anyone had to do was look at what "abuse" the kids were alleging:

Some of the children's accusations were bizarre and, at times, defied the laws of physics. Some alleged that, in addition to having been sexually abused, they saw witches fly, traveled in a hot-air balloon, and were taken in one case through secret underground tunnels, which were sought by investigators but never found. Ray Buckey was described as having beaten a giraffe to death with a baseball bat in front of the children. When shown a series of photographs by police, one child identified actor Chuck Norris as one of the abusers.[1] There were claims of orgies at car washes and airports, and of children being flushed down toilets to secret rooms where they would be abused, then cleaned up and presented back to their unsuspecting parents. Some children said they were made to play a game called "Naked Movie Star" in which they were photographed nude.

Posted by: Ace at 07:51 PM | Comments (49)
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"The Lipstick Bandit," accused of lesbian sexual harrassment.

I don't know whether or not to be aroused or to wring my hands at how sick this country's becoming.

No, wait. I do seem to know. A familiar tingliness says it's the former, all the way home.

The lawsuit claims office manager Serena Reaves-Cain harassed three female workers under her supervision. CBS 2 News has learned this isn't the first time Reaves-Cain has been accused of inappropriate behavior.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims co-workers gave Reaves-Cain the nickname "Lipstick Bandit" because she allegedly "kissed them on the cheeks, foreheads, and necks, and sometimes left red lipstick marks on them."

The plaintiffs, Constance Trotman, Anitra Kincy and Clara Luz Badia, claimed Reaves-Cain "hugged the plaintiffs and pushed her breasts up against their breasts, and used the palm of her hand to spank them on the buttocks."

The women also claim Reaves-Cain referred to the spankings as "pow-pows," and sometimes told them "come to momma" before hugging, touching or spanking them.

...

"She would come by my desk and pull my hair," the female co-worker said. "Sometimes she would grab my cheeks, pinch my cheeks. It was a constant, touchy-touchy, tell me how beautiful I was. It made me very uncomfortable."

The former co-worker said she and Reaves-Cain started out as friends, and frequently ate lunch and took breaks together. Reaves-Cain is married and has children, according to the former co-worker.

Well, maybe it was all just good, innocent breast-mashing and spanking after all.

On the other hand, maybe it was long-awaited vindication for the programming director of Cinemax After Dark.

Thanks to dri.

PS: To those left-wing retard-sites that will now digest this post as (they do this all the time) "(splurt)":

Guys? You really can't make a masturbation joke about a guy who already made the masturbation joke himself.

There's this idiotic leftwing trashblog out there that does nothing but that. I'll write in a post about, say, Elisha Cuthbert "Number of ejaculations: 4," and then this Professor of Comedy mocks me by suggesting I'm knocking one out to her. Well, uh, dude? I just said as much myself.

Oh, and for all the teeth-gnashing about how sexual harrassment is an important topic that mustn't be joked about:

1, yeah, it's important, but 2, eat me, and 3, butch up, sissies.

Posted by: Ace at 07:30 PM | Comments (15)
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Dan's got the story. This cat was previously implicated in sock-puppetry in the Sherrod Brown/Paul Hackett primary.

This guy knew it was someone connected with Obama. Maybe that sounds obvious; but this guy had very good evidence supporting the obvious suspicion:

o far most of the discussion of the ad has put up a picture of an independent video person working at home on their Mac in their spare time. But that's just not plausible. Such a character would be claiming his or her reward right now, boosting his or her career and having a great time doing the media rounds. And, also telling: the ad maker knew exactly what election law lines not to cross, stopping just short of express advocacy. Why didn't the ad say, "Vote Obama"? So, when did independent YouTube video hackers get access to their own election law attorneys?

This was a funded project, involving lawyers and an ad agency or at the very least a professional video person who's time is worth hundreds of dollars an hour.

Incidentally, this ad has garnered over a million views so far.

I don't know. Cute, yeah, but what's the big deal?

I never really got why this ad was supposedly so effective. I also didn't get what was so slickly-produced about it, but as Allah knows about video mash-ups, and he says it was slick, I guess I believe him.

The MSM: ...of course wasted few minutes in claiming it was a GOP "attack."

Thanks to Dr. Remulak.

Posted by: Ace at 07:02 PM | Comments (16)
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At 2:05 PM Pacific Time, I think, an hour or two ago.

Lewis Fein writes:

We lost Cathy at 2:05 PM today. May her memory last, her family persevere and her friends endure this terrible loss. We'll all have more to write shortly, but for now I'd like to truly praise Susan Estrich. She has the classiest column out there about Cathy. A real letter of love and admiration. Read it. Goodbye, Cathy.

Susan Estrich's remembrance is here. She quotes Cathy on lung cancer:

IÂ’m beginning to feel a responsibility to point out that lung cancer, which kills more people annually (about 163,000) than the next four most common cancers (colon, breast, pancreatic and prostate) combined, is terribly underfunded compared to other diseases: $950 in research money per lung cancer death, compared to $8800 for breast cancer and $34,000 for AIDS.

"ThatÂ’s because the vast majority of lung cancer (about 85 percent) is still caused by smoking, even though the rate for lifelong nonsmoking women like me (and Christopher ReeveÂ’s widow) has been going up for some mysterious reason, and the general attitude is that smokers deserve whatever they get.

"But half of all lung cancer patients have been nonsmokers by the time of diagnosis, sometimes for decades, like Warren Zevon. If they deserve to get sick, then I suppose so do people who are overweight or don’t exercise or who have promiscuous sex with strangers, all of which are contributing factors for various illnesses that get much more sympathy in the form of research dollars. Maybe the amount of attention we pay to a disease should have less to do with how many celebrities, magazine editors and junk bond kings carry its banner, and more with how many people actually die of it.”

A prayer for her and her daughter Maia as well.

Posted by: Ace at 02:50 PM | Comments (27)
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The flight was cut short by a suspected fuel delivery malfunction.

Commercial rocket Falcon 1 briefly entered space Tuesday, before a mishap cut its test launch short of orbiting Earth.

Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), a 5-year-old company created by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, said Falcon 1 started to spin during the second stage of its trajectory through space. As a result, the company suspects it will find that no fuel was able to reach the engine, said Gwynne Shotwell, vice president of business development for SpaceX.

Falcon 1 reached an altitude of approximately 200 miles into space, but failed to achieve its goal of orbiting the Earth.

That marks the second time within the past 12 months that SpaceX fell short of orbiting Earth post launch. The company also aborted two attempts at launching during this most recent effort--one within an hour of blasting into space and another on Monday.

Still pretty cool.

Posted by: Ace at 02:15 PM | Comments (30)
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Treatment? Treatment? Why it's almost worth it to have sex with a dead deer!

A 20-year-old Superior man received probation after he was convicted of having sexual contact with a dead deer.

The sentence also requires Bryan James Hathaway to be evaluated as a sex offender and treated at the Institute for Psychological and Sexual Health in Duluth, Minn.

...

He was found guilty in April 2005 of felony mistreatment of an animal after he killed a horse with the intention of having sex with it. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail and two years of extended supervision on that charge as well as six years of probation for taking and driving a vehicle without the owner's consent.

Hathaway pleaded no contest earlier this month to misdemeanor mistreatment of an animal for the incident involving the deer. He was sentenced Tuesday in Douglas County Circuit Court.

"The type of behavior is disturbing," Judge Michael Lucci said. "It's disturbing to the public. It's disturbing to the court."

"Good," said Horatio Caine as he snapped his sunglasses off. "Because having sex with a dead deer is something that should disturb us all."

Incidentally, I kinda feel bad about this, but whatever: The last episode of CSI: Miami featured, if I counted right, zero sunglasses off/sunglasses on moments.

The mockery got to him. Not mine, of course. But Jim Carrey's.

I'm not sure why I feel bad. David Milch (producer of Deadwood, former producer for NYPD Blue) says he's a huge asshole, but how do I know he's not an asshole himself?

Anyway, for some reason, I just felt bad when David Caruso abandoned his favorite bit of business last Monday. He just seemed like a puppy that had its favorite bone taken away.

Posted by: Ace at 02:05 PM | Comments (44)
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