Pretty neat.

Related: "bauercount.com", also called the "Jack Bauer Kill Count" site, which lists the means, method, and victim for each of Jack Bauer's six bazillion killings. Including photos and videos of each kill.

Bauer's only killed seven people so far this season? He's going to have to pick it up a bit.

Posted by: Ace at 09:27 AM | Comments (10)
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Is Rudy's gun-control stance rendered moot through jurisprudence?

To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad).

...

Despite the importance of the Second Amendment's civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.

Background, analysis, and more links at Hot Air.

Opinion here (PDF).

Posted by: Ace at 09:13 AM | Comments (53)
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Unemployment drops to 4.5%; previous monthly employment gains adjusted upwards (of course).

The nation's unemployment rate dipped to 4.5 percent in February even as big losses of construction and factory jobs restrained overall payroll growth. Wages grew briskly.

...

[J]ob gains in the previous two months turned out to be stronger than previously estimated. Employers added 226,000 new jobs in December, versus the 206,000 last estimated. Payrolls grew by 146,000 in January, up from a previous estimate of 111,000.

The new tally of jobs added to the economy in February was close to economists' forecast for a gain of around 100,000. They had predicted the unemployment rate would hold steady at 4.6 percent.

Workers' wages grew quickly last month.

Average hourly earnings rose to $17.16, a 0.4 percent increase from January. That was slightly faster than the 0.3 percent gain economists were expecting. Over the 12 months ending in February, wages grew by 4.1 percent.

Strong wage growth is welcome by workers and supports consumer spending, a key ingredient to the country's economic health. But a rapid pickup - if sustained and not blunted by other economic forces - can raise fears about inflation. Spiraling inflation would whittle away any wage gains, hurting workers' wallets, and isn't good for the overall economy, either.

Trade deficit shrinks due to "record-breaking" exports:

The US trade deficit narrowed 3.8 percent in January to 59.1 billion dollars thanks to record-breaking export growth, the Commerce Department said Friday.

It was a bigger drop than expected on Wall Street, where analysts saw a deficit of 60.0 billion dollars, and marked the steepest change in the trade figure since October.

An improving trade picture could be good for first-quarter US economic growth, as a higher deficit subtracts from gross domestic product.

US households' net worth "skyrockets:"

he net worth of U.S. households climbed to a record high in the final quarter of last year, boosted mostly by gains on stocks, the
Federal Reserve reported Thursday.

Net worth — the difference between households' total assets, such as houses and bank accounts, and their total liabilities, such as mortgages and credit card debt, totaled $55.6 trillion in the October-to-December quarter.

That marked a 2.5 percent growth rate from the third quarter, the previous quarterly record high. Stocks gains helped fuel the increase in net worth, although real-estate gains played a role, too.

For all of last year, households' net worth rose by 7.4 percent, a slower pace than the 7.9 percent increase registered in 2005.

...

Economists said Thursday's report suggest households' finances are holding up fairly well to any strains caused by the troubled housing market and well as some sluggishness in overall economic growth. Analysts said that's because the jobs climate remains in good shape and income growth has picked up.

A lot of jobs were cut in the construction sector, and some more in the factory sector, all due to the slow in home-building, but no one ever expected that to continue forever. Most worry that boom went on unsustainably long. In any event, those losses were offset by gains in other sectors.

I've been trying to find a forgotten hottie from the eighties. Alas, the internet, too, has forgotten them. This is the best I can do. Jennifer Runyon, the blonde chick who is clearly not really a blonde but somehow really makes that work to her advantage:

And a little beefcake:

"Hey, Brian Williams? Eat me. And David Gregory
can play with my pickle while you do."

Posted by: Ace at 08:45 AM | Comments (29)
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Lot of dirty laundry coming out. It's nice that he admitted it.

People may like Gingrich -- I do, mostly -- but be aware of his ginormous negatives.

Let's say he does run. Let's say he wins the nomination.

29-49 positive-negative, for net minus twenty negative.

For sake of comparison, Rudy's is 64-21 (net plus 43) and even Hillary!'s is 54-42 (net plus 12).

That's a hard row to hoe, my friends.

I have a theory about so many people don't like Gingrich: a certain anti-intellectual impulse that much of the American populace shares. (Including me.) Not a bias against intelligence per se, but intellectualism specifically, theorism, "book-larnin'," what have you. Clinton was whip-smart, but he was perceived, I think, as a political animal and a practically-minded one, and, thanks to his endless infidelities, definitely a man of the flesh rather than one of the mind.

And Gingrich just isn't a guy you can mistake for "just good folks." He's a brainy, smart-mouthed, silver-tongued Harvard-type who just happens to be a firebrand ideological conservative, laying claim to two archetypes the American people don't seem to like all that much.

When George W. Bush got defeated in his run for Congress, way back in the '70's, it was partly because his opponent painted him as a Yale-educated carpet-bagging fancypants braniac from up northaways. (No, really.)

He vowed he'd never get "out-Bubba'd" again.

Gingrich just has no Bubba in him, except for the somewhat ample waist and interest in the Civil War.

Could be that, or, you know, the relentless shellacking he took from the liberal media throughout his tenure. Yeah, that $450,000 advance for his book in a fair auction at which several mega-publishers were bidding... that sure looked crooked to the media.

Hillary!'s multimillion dollar advance as a just-elected Senator? Not so much. Not so much.

Posted by: Ace at 08:09 PM | Comments (118)
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Ah, the twitty little snots at Slate, all trying so hard to ape Michael Kinsley's snideness without having the deftness or talent to carry it off charmingly. Where every book, tv show, and movie is evaluated entirely according to how it flatters, or discomfits, their left-liberal mocha-marxist politics.

What's the matter, Dana? Did the big bad men scare you?

Please. Grow up, and stop being such an insipid, screechy girl for Christ's sakes.

If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.

Opening sentence and she's already calling the film Nazi propaganda. No need to run the scales for a bit first -- she starts belting out those high notes right away.

Since it's a product of the post-ideological, post-Xbox 21st century, 300 will instead be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games.

The left this idea that everyone thinks war is a "pushbutton" affair due to our decisive victory the Gulf War. Even though no one ever really thought that, and even though no one could possibly still harbor such delusions, she has to make that quick "dumb righties think war is just a videogame" connection right off.

Meanwhile, you know who it is who really knows what it's like in the suck? Why, amateur leftist webzine movie critics like Dana Stevens, that's who.

She saw The Thin Red Line.

She still has cold-sweat nightmares about that horror.

Actually, pretty much anyone who saw it does, too. But I digress.

...

The comic fanboys who make up 300's primary audience demographic aren't likely to get hung up on the movie's historical content, much less any parallels with present-day politics. But what's maddening about 300 (besides the paralyzing monotony of watching chiseled white guys make shish kebabs from swarthy Persians for 116 indistinguishable minutes) is that no one involved—not Miller, not Snyder, not one of the army of screenwriters, art directors, and tech wizards who mounted this empty, gorgeous spectacle—seems to have noticed that we're in the middle of an actual war. With actual Persians (or at least denizens of that vast swath of land once occupied by the Persian empire).

Ah, but maybe they did notice that, and that's what bothers our troubled young anti-war pamphleteer. Wait, I meant, "online movie critic."

What she means, of course, is not that this movie sends no message about war, but that it sends the wrong message, or at least refuses to adequately send the message she craves -- the bold message of a courageous artist willing to put his career on the line to challenge conventional opinion and explore forbidden ideas in ways hitherto unimagined.

You know what I mean -- the exact same message as in every other fucking movie ever made. Just as daring and fresh in every new movie as it was in the six bazillion movies that came before it.

In interviews, Snyder insists that he "really just wanted to make a movie that is a ride"—a perfectly fine ambition for any filmmaker, especially one inspired by the comics. And visually, 300 is thrilling, color-processed to a burnished, monochromatic copper, and packed with painterly, if static, tableaux vivants. But to cast 300 as a purely apolitical romp of an action film smacks of either disingenuousness or complete obliviousness. One of the few war movies I've seen in the past two decades that doesn't include at least some nod in the direction of antiwar sentiment, 300 is a mythic ode to righteous bellicosity. In at least one way, the film is true to the ethos of ancient Greece: It conflates moral excellence and physical beauty (which, in this movie, means being young, white, male, and fresh from the gyms of Brentwood).

Hah. Yes, Dana, surely this is the first movie that makes its heroes more attractive than its villains.

What's the rule in a romantic comedy? Oh yes-- pick out the two least attractive actors, and they must, of course, be the stars of the film, destined to find true love by the picture's end. All the pretty people in the movie are minor characters or villainous obstacles for the plain-but-plucky pair to overcome.

More importantly, she flat out says: no anti-war sentiment = bad movie. It's that simple. She said it right there. A movie is required to flatter her cherished left-liberal beliefs or else it's a bad, mean, awful movie.

A movie that provokes interesting questions about the nature of sacrifice? Nah. Just a bad movie. Automatically.

Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the "bad" (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people.

I do believe the Persians were somewhat darker hued than Greeks, and furthermore, given that their Empire extended far into Asia and Africa, they would tend to have darker foreign conscripts as well.

Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.

"Disturbing prediliction for making people kneel before him" = "covert suggestion he's a predatory faggit looking to rape straight white men and who must therefore be beaten to death."

Or, you know-- maybe he's just a king. I sorta hear they were big on that whole "kneel before me" thing.

I already knew I would get racist caricatures of brown people. Now you're telling me I'm getting all this fag-bashing at no extra charge?

Are you sure you're not just a studio shill trying to trick me into seeing this movie like fifteen times?

Incidentally, you know what else the movie defines as "bad"? An invading force determined to conquer a free people. Now Dana would usually find "invaders" and "colonialists" rather objectionable, but given that these invaders and coloinalists have somewhat swarthier skin-tones than the people they would subjugate, she's suddenly conflicted -- hey, who's to say these damn Greeks shoud get to keep all that rich goat-land for themselves? Maybe they sort of brought it on themselves by not sharing the goat wealth, you know?

Hegemony-- the Greeks made up that word. You can look it up and everything.

...if Spartan law is defined by "whatever Leonidas wants," what are the 300 fighting for, anyway? And why does that sound depressingly familiar?

There, there, darling. Just close your eyes and think about Little Miss Sunshine.

She's a Super-Freak, a Super-Freak

Yahhh, she's Super-Freak-ey...

Remember how adorable Olive was? Rowrrrr. Just think of her. It will all be over soon.

Stupid bint can't go 120 minutes without falling into a waking nightmare about the Patriot Act.

...

Theron wants to persuade the Spartan council not to send reinforcements to the desperately outnumbered 300 (what is he, a Democrat?).

Probably, Dana. Just like 90% of the villains in all the movies you so adore are probably Republicans. Remember what you always tell conservatives who get pissed off by this: It's just a movie.

Or maybe he's just a cowardly or unpatriotic sort. Odd how you link that type with Democrats. But that's your baggage, honey, not mine.

...

In a classic example of the epic understatement known as litotes, Variety's reviewer observes that the picture's vision of the West as a heroic contingent of sculpted badasses and the East as a cauldron perversion and iniquity "might be greeted with muted enthusiasm in the Middle East." Replace the words "muted enthusiasm" with "a roadside bomb," and you've got yourself a tagline for the Baghdad premiere.

Ah. See, she supports the troops. She fears this movie will make trouble for them in Baghdad!

How noble of you, Dana. You support the troops so damn much you insist that every movie made conveys the relentless message that war is always unnecessary, always futile, and the men who sacrifice themselves to protect their homelands always do so in a vain gesture of "wasted lives."

Thanks to Allah. Sorry I just swiped your post, dude. You know how I feel about these screechy fourteen-year-old-girls Slate calls its movie and tv critics.

Monochromatic? She calls the movie "monochromatic." Is that the right word to use for a movie featuring, you know, more than one color?

Maybe it's a term of art in the film world for "dominated by one color," but the movie doesn't seem dominated by copper or any other color. What it seems like is that, depending on the scene, most color has either been desaturated or "pushed" to one color (like copper, or gray, or brown) while some color, such as the blood red of the Spartans' capes, has been super-saturated or pushed further to the red (or whatever color is being super-saturated).

I don't know. Maybe she's right. I sure hope she is. I sure the hell hope the amateur leftist webzine Slate has a movie critic who actually knows more about color processing that an internet jackoff like me who's never developed a photo in his life.

Posted by: Ace at 06:53 PM | Comments (163)
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Not by a whole bunch, but it wins.

The participants were 311 fat women aged 25 to 50, randomly assigned to one diet or another. According to the Wall Street Journal, women on Atkins "lost the most weight. But there's one catch—the women didn't really stick to the diet." The study's lead author, Christopher Gardner of Stanford University, concludes: "Is this a vindication of Atkins? No, because they weren't really following Atkins."

Now, wait a muffin-pickin' minute. There are plenty of caveats worth noting about this study. But the fact that participants didn't stick to their regimens, as the diet gurus who lost to Atkins are pointing out in every available forum, isn't one of them. Unless you plan on jailing people and sliding food under the door, their ability and willingness to adhere to your diet are crucial factors in its effectiveness. If they're too weak or stupid to follow the formula, stop telling them to buy it.

According to the study, "Weight loss was greater for women in the Atkins diet group compared with the other diet groups at 12 months, and mean 12-month weight loss was significantly different between the Atkins and Zone diets." Furthermore, "At 12 months, secondary outcomes for the Atkins group were comparable with or more favorable than the other diet groups." In short, Atkins did no harm and slightly more good.

Diet gurus similarly criticize the study as subjects seem to have cheated on their diets, too, and thus didn't really follow "their diets." But the piece notes that, in practical terms, a diet is not merely a plan, but rather a plan plus the most likely realistic implementation of that plan. And in that sense, Atkins seems to win -- it's simple, it's more livable than other plans (though pretty damn annoying), and easier to avoid cheating on.

Just saying.

I have a vested interests in pimping this. A year ago there were Atkins friendly products everywhere. Now the craze is over and all those tasty low-carb snacks are gone. Low-carb ice cream? Yeah, you can get it, if you're happy with the wide selection of vanilla, chocloate, or strawberry.

Damn. I used to be able to get cookies & cream. Good times.

Posted by: Ace at 05:22 PM | Comments (251)
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Hmmm... I do believe that Congo was one of the countries British intelligence named as a possible supplier to Iraq, and checking my world map... yes, yes, indeed, it does seem to be located in Africa.

Funny how this comes out after the Libby trial:

An international network set up to illegally use uranium mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has reportedly been dismantled.

Scientific Research Minister Sylvanus Mushi said DRC's top nuclear official and a colleague were being questioned in connection with the case.

The official, Fortunat Lumu, and the colleague were arrested on Tuesday.

The move comes amid reports that a large quantity of uranium has gone missing in recent years in DRC.

State prosecutor Tshimanga Mukeba earlier told the BBC that an "important quantity" of uranium was taken from the atomic energy centre in the capital, Kinshasa, without revealing any figures.

DRC's daily newspaper Le Phare on Wednesday reported that more than 100 bars of uranium, as well as an unknown quantity of uranium contained in helmet-shaped cases, had disappeared from the centre as part of a vast trafficking of the material going back years.

Going back years, huh? How fuckin' 'bout that.

Bonus: A British paper charges the ring sold uranium to Iran.

Posted by: Ace at 04:30 PM | Comments (63)
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Actually, this isn't the sort of article I thought it was going to be, but it's very good.

SINCE 9/11, these two lines of thinking should compete for attention in your brain each time you're faced with a potential crisis. Should you do nothing and be cool? Or take action, and look stupid? If you don't wrestle with those two thoughts when you're on a bus, subway, or plane, then you are a liar. Or a coward.

...

These two lines of thinking reveal the key differences between the left and everyone else on earth. Normal folks are willing to take the risk and appear stupid. The left cannot fathom why anyone would do such a thing.

Why? Because it's uncool. And that's the only thing that matters to the left. They claim to be concerned about tolerance, but really they are concerned about how cool they appear to others. They need to be admired. The left will never stand up for anything, because doing so undermines the protection necessary for their fragile egos. And it also requires balls, which they sorely lack.

And that makes them all cowards. Because, in order to prevent evil, you have to take a risk-not of death, but of embarrassment.

The bravest response for all of us? To have the balls to appear stupid -- at any and all times. We need to stand up and demand to see what's in a fidgety man's back pack, even if it turns out its nothing more than back issues of the Utne Reader and a "neck massager."

We need to be willing to face the mobs in the street and the mobs online. We need to punch a coward in the face when it's called for, and do so in front of his friends. We need to be the scary ones, for once.

Incidentally, I linked a video of his friend, Neil Hamburger, a while ago. A lot of people didn't find him funny, but I didn't want to argue with them. (A rule I haven't observed lately.)

Still, I think he's pretty good. His schtick is the anti-joke -- the joke so unfunny or obvious it's actually kinda funny, or just ugly statements so cringe-inducing they're nervously funny.

Like I said then, this is the guy who watched Rupert Pupkin's pathetic, wince-inducing act in The King of Comedy and thought to himself, "Needs a little polish... but that guy is on to something, baby!"

Posted by: Ace at 03:47 PM | Comments (32)
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Okay...

Toni Morrison famously dubbed President Clinton America's "first black president." With that barrier broken, the comments of a prominent feminist are provoking debate about who may lay a similar claim to the title of America's first woman president.

The candidate being touted as a torchbearer for women is not Senator Clinton, but one of her former colleagues, John Edwards....

"I've gotten to know a lot of political leaders over the years that I've been an advocate for women's rights. I know the difference between those who advocate as a political position and those who understand the reality of women's lives."

Compared to Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Edwards is short an ‘X' chromosome, but listening to Ms. Michelman, that is easy to forget.

Hell, listening to John Edwards, that's easy to forget.

Do I have to go to rehab now?

"As a lawyer, as a senator, as a husband, as a father of two daughters, he understands the reality of women's lives. He understands the centrality of women's lives and experience to the health and well-being of society as a whole. Â… He understands that on an extremely personal level," she said.

In related news, Ann Coulter just wrote to say, "Hey, I was just trying to help John Edwards firm up his base."

Okay, one can understand the fix Edwards is in: Let's see, first woman president, first black president, or... first Shaun Cassidy President.

I mean, I liked his work in the Hardy Boys, and sure, he's gone on to be a producer of well-liked if ratings-poor female-skewing TV science-fiction shows, but is that enough to recommend him as commander in chief?

Apparently it's not. So his supporters think it's best to emasculate him to make him more appealling to women voters.

Bill Clinton: I feel your pain.

John Edwards: I feel your menstrual pain.

Hillary! thought she had to vote for the war to prove she could match her possible rivals in terms of balls.

If only she had known.

Posted by: Ace at 03:25 PM | Comments (24)
Post contains 354 words, total size 2 kb.

It's actually not, superficially, some sort of anti-blogger law.

Supposedly this law is being passed to stop the growth in popularity of teenaged thugs taping their own acts of random violence for entertainment purposes -- such as "happy-slapping," just walking up to a stranger and punching or slapping him while the cell-phone camera takes it all in.

And yet, France being France, I'm sure the law is 90% there to appease a union. In this case, of "professional journalists" feeling a bit threatened.

Good Thing France Is So Cavalier About Its Own Crimes: Former French FM accuses "the Jewish Lobby" of scapegoating a poor, put-upon Vichycollaborator for effecting signing the death-orders of hundreds of Jews.

Former French Prime Minister Raymon Barre has sparked an uproar within the Jewish community after accusing “the Jewish lobby” of making “a scapegoat” of Maurice Papon, a French senior official who signed deportation orders for hundreds of Jews in the Bordeaux region during WWII.

In an interview last week with France Culture, a state-run radio station, Barre also said that “opposing the deportation of Jews had not been a matter of “major national interest.”

...

A senior official under the wartime Vichy government, Papon was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1998 for his role in organising the deportation of hundreds to Nazi extermination camps.

During his six-month trial, the longest in French history, Papon came to symbolize FranceÂ’s collaboration with the Nazis.

Posted by: Ace at 02:43 PM | Comments (21)
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