Redonculous.

New York on Monday became the latest US state to bring forward its 2008 presidential primary elections, joining nine other states in a vote on "Super Duper Tuesday" next February 5.

The move is aimed at giving the state more influence in choosing which candidates will run in the election -- a process that has traditionally been dominated by the states of New Hampshire and Iowa.

The change, which was approved by the State Senate and Assembly and signed into law by Governor Eliot Spitzer on Monday, means New York now will hold its primary one month earlier than usual.
...

California last month decided to bring forward its primary to the March 5 prompting a stampede of states seeking to do the same, in a move seen likely to fundamentally alter the dynamics of the race for the White House.

Tuesday is the traditional balloting day in the United States and in the past votes occassionally have been held on "Super Tuesdays," when two or or more states have held primary elections.

But the unprecedented number of simultaneous primary elections scheduled for February 5th have prompted political scientists to dub that day's balloting "Super Duper Tuesday."

Pundits said it is not surprising that so many states are rushing to move up their voting dates.

...

According to the National Association of Secretaries of State, 14 other states are also mulling February 5 for their primaries or caucuses, creating what Brams described as a "crowding effect."

It was too early to be discussing the 2008 elelction. It's not anymore. the nominees for both parties will almost certainly be determined less than ten months from now.

Posted by: Ace at 02:56 PM | Comments (29)
Post contains 292 words, total size 2 kb.

Breaking news. Not important news, but breaking news.

Here's video of Al Sharpton taking Imus to task on Sharpton's radio show. Sharpton babbles on for a while before getting to any question.

I kind of understand what Imus was doing. He was making such an unwarranted, unprovoked, and inappropriate attack on the Rutgers women's basketball team that everyone would get he didn't mean a word of it. At least I think that's what he was doing. It was a random over-the-top put-down that made no sense, and hence would be taken, he thought (to the extent he thought about it all), as just a bit of silliness.

The trouble is, that often still pisses people off, and most aren't willing to excuse a racist remark just because it was so inappropriate and racist that it couldn't possibly have been seriously intended.

That's why I don't ever touch the third rail of racial humor. I deal with it the way I deal with brown peoplel generally -- I just smile politely, keep my eyes averted, and dutifully hand over my wallet while praying for a quick death.

PS: I don't like Imus, so I'm not being a fanboy defending him.

It's just odd -- many comedians get away with racial humor all the time. They have a kind of comic exception to the rule against it. Why only professional comedians should be assumed to be just joking around, whereas everyone else in the world is assumed to mean this sort of joke cruelly and with racist intent, I don't really know.

Posted by: Ace at 02:50 PM | Comments (56)
Post contains 274 words, total size 2 kb.

Interesting set of blog posts about blue-staters' demeaning stereotypes about red-staters, with blue-staters arguing back they carry no stereotypes about rural folk at all.

Except, of course, that in the course of arguing they do not trade in demeaning stereotypes about rural folk, they of course argue almost exclusively via demeaning stereotypes about rural folk.

Posted by: Ace at 01:01 PM | Comments (41)
Post contains 57 words, total size 1 kb.

Bryan lists some reasons why Australia might not be as happy with Islam as it once was. He fails to mention the vicious Bali bombing, which killed scores of Australians.

Occasionally it takes a comic to point out the blatantly obvious.

Islamophobic, Not Homphobic: Sorry, I brainglitched on my phobias. Pupster pointed my mistake out to me.

Posted by: Ace at 12:54 PM | Comments (8)
Post contains 79 words, total size 1 kb.

A majority also considers Islamic fundamentalism a threat. Here's the non-shocker: they don't favor the sort of military spending that would make it possible for Europeans themselves to counter such a threat.

Hmmm... I wonder who they might be thinking of to do the job?

Over half of Europeans would support a preemptive military strike to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, a poll released last week by a London think-tank reports.

A survey commissioned by the pro-business think tank, Open Europe, found that a majority of those surveyed in 18 EU member states including France and Britain, backed military action as an option in dealing with the threat of Iranian nuclear proliferation, while majorities in 9 nations including Germany and Spain were opposed.

However, the April 4 survey of more than 17,000 Europeans in March conducted by the French polling firm TNS-Sofres found little support for increasing military expenditures to counter or contain the threat.

In response to the statement, "We must stop countries like Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, even if that means taking military action", 52 percent of Europeans agreed, 40 percent disagreed and 8 percent stated they were undecided.

Support for the military option varied widely, with Danes giving the greatest support at 68 percent and Slovaks the least at 37 percent. Support for military action amongst the great powers was closely divided; France 53 percent, Britain 51 percent, Italy 49 percent, and Germany 45 percent.

Questioned as to the threat their countries faced from "Islamic fundamentalism", European opinion was more diverse. While 58 percent over all agreed militant Islam was a serious threat, the national responses ranged from 71 percent in Britain, 66 percent in Germany, 64 percent in France, to 24 percent in Latvia.

However, few voters in the EU would be prepared to see cuts in domestic spending to finance higher defense outlays to counter the threat. Only 37 percent of British voters and 23 percent of all EU voters agreed with the statement that, "Our country should spend more on defense and less on other things."

Via the Farkies. Thanks to DaveS.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (24)
Post contains 376 words, total size 3 kb.

I'm getting a lot of people asking why they were banned. For almost everyone who's been "banned," it's a glitch in the software. Pixy's banning software is automated and looks for patterns and links favored by comment-spammers and bans them. This means that if you accidentally use the word patterns and links (like, I think, to wordpress) the software has designated as likely spam, you'll be automatically banned.

As I don't know precisely what patterns it's looking for, I can't warn you as to what not to say. All I can do is say send me your IP, I'll forward it to Pixy, and I'll get you unbanned as soon as I can.

Frankly has had a difficult run -- banned twice in the past few days. Not sure what he's doing to trip the software's ban list.

I apologize for that-- but comment spam is such a ferocious problem that Pixy's got the system running at various levels of aggressiveness depending on the size of the spam attack, so sometimes there are going to be these inadvertant bannings.

On the other hand, there's fancy, who I just banned intentionally for 1) spamming multiple threads with off-topic baiting and 2) libel. He claims that I wrote this supposedly anti-gay-ish post over at PoliPundit, a rather stupid assumption to make. (I say "supposedly" because I haven't read it; fancy at least deams it anti-gay.)

"The Ace" at PoliPundit wrote that. I am not "The Ace" at PoliPundit; I'm Ace at Ace of Spades HQ. Apparently fancy thinks that only one person on the internet has ever thought to give himself a monicker involving the word "Ace." He didn't bother to ask if I was Polipundit's "The Ace;" he just assumed, like an asshole.

By the way, fancy: I'm also not "Ace" from American Idol a couple of seasons ago. Nor am I Ace Hamblin from The Quick and the Dead or Ace Face from Quadrophenia nor Stoker Ace from Burt Reynolds' six thousandth race car movie. Shocking, I know.

Anyway, see you later, jagoff. If you attempt to evade the ban and post here I'll rewrite your posts attributing the worst sort of hate-speech to you. Like you tried to do to me.

Important! Slublog says that posts containing nothing but a hyperlink are viewed by the system as spam. So, you know, maybe add a couple of non-linked sentences to avoid this particular tripwire.

Posted by: Ace at 12:13 PM | Comments (31)
Post contains 412 words, total size 2 kb.

A dramatization of the famous Paul Anka dress-down of his band, from Paul Anka's POV. Alas, it's not the full version of the clip.

Language Warning. Sorry to be late on including this. I sort of just assumed everyone would know that Anka's rant is rife with profanity.

Thanks to Influence Peddler.

Posted by: Ace at 12:01 PM | Comments (7)
Post contains 64 words, total size 1 kb.

you will read all day.

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

Seriously, read the whole thing.

Then throw a dollar in the coffer in recognition of MY talents. You never know how famous I might be.

UPDATE: Link is now fixed. Sorry for the mistake.

Posted by: Jack M. at 11:49 AM | Comments (26)
Post contains 413 words, total size 3 kb.

"We're not going to cut off funding for the troops. We shouldn't cut off funding for the troops…”

Turns out he was the only Democrat to attend Gen. Petraeus' video-briefing on progress in Iraq.

The lefties are, of course, seething. MyDD is on the verge of issuing an Important Action Alert and also, sources say, possibly a Pretty Vicious Rant.

Posted by: Ace at 11:48 AM | Comments (11)
Post contains 84 words, total size 1 kb.

Princeton can use a woman like Kimberly.

A teenager once arrested alongside her mother in a prostitution case has been accused of running an escort service out of her suburban Chicago home using the popular website Craigslist.

Kimberly Petersen, 17, was arrested after detectives doing a routine search of the site's classified boards found one that included an offer to "enjoy a beautiful blonde" for $250 an hour and pictures of a smiling woman in lingerie.

An undercover detective who called the number in the ad and arrived at Peterson's home was quoted a $300 rate for a 27-year-old woman to perform a sex act, Hillside Police Chief Joseph Lukaszek said.

Petersen was released on bond late last week after being arrested and charged with a misdemeanor, police said. Heidi Mudge, 27, was charged with prostitution.

A 48-year-old man who came to the house while police were investigating also was arrested.

Blaming the victim, as usual.

It's a mother-daughter prostittution ring:

Petersen's mother, Kimberly Miniea, faced a similar charge last April after police said she told them she ran an escort service to "entertain married men." The charge was dropped.

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 AM | Comments (19)
Post contains 211 words, total size 1 kb.