Some will say the theatricality of it -- turning to the camera with a big honking cigar hanging out of his mouth -- is cheesy.

If that's cheese, it's my kind of cheese.

Quick Response Time and Theatricality Are Presidential-Skills: So notes Ed Driscoll, so notes Kaus, so notes Insta-man.

I think Republicans have gotten used to making excuses for Bush's piss-poor communication ability and rather low level of energy; in fact we've almost forgotten what it's like to have an energetic, persuasive leader at all. (Well, not completely. That's why the candidates keep talking about Ronald Reagan.)

This stuff matters. And Thompson's damn good at.

I should also say that Rudy's pretty good at it too. No one can have any doubt, for example, about his opinion on ferrets, Ron "Loose Change" Paul, or other such rodents and weasels.

Posted by: Ace at 07:03 PM | Comments (217)
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Fuck Ron Paul.

If I ever see this cocksucker in person, I'll take a swing at him.

Giuliani called him out and invited him to withdraw the remark. He refused.

Brave maverick?

It's pretty easy to vote against everything when you've decided to not actually be part of an actual working, governing majority.

The minority party always has the most fun because it gets to do nothing but posture. Ron Paul has made a career of being a minority party of one.

Fucking useless anti-American crank. He's a Truther and he belongs in his own circle of lunatic Hell with the rest of them.

Video Update: Ron Paul's sophisticated foreign policy analysis ("it's our fault"), Rudy's disgusted response, and Rudy pouring even more venom on him.

Time to dump this flake from the debates and let the adults talk a while.

Posted by: Ace at 06:32 PM | Comments (130)
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I guess it's no big deal. Not like it's a surprise they dive and swim. Still, I'm just not used to seeing tigers hanging out at the bottom of a swimming pool.

In other tiger news, a thirty-two year old woman was mauled to death by her fiance's pet tiger. The reason? Apparently the tiger grew angry that the woman was "copying its style."

That pic actually runs with the story, but, while the caption mentions the slain woman by name, it doesn't specify that that's actually her in the picture. It kinda suggests it's her, but never says so.

Thanks to dri, furiously running Google searches for "tigers" and, I understand, ""massage oil."

Giant Mutant Turtle, Decomposing Whale, or Photoshop?

Cryptomundo, a site for cryptozoology ("crypto" from the Greek for "completely made up fake shit"). The claim is that it's a giant turtle. I have no idea what the hell it is, and don't even think the picture is real.

I'm not sure why they're saying it's a turtle. It doesn't seem to have a shell and looks more like a giant crocodile if anything.

Via Boing Boing.

Posted by: Ace at 06:06 PM | Comments (33)
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It starts at 9:00 EST on FoxNews.

Got thoughts? Predictions? Drinking games? Put 'em on the glass.

I mean in the thread.

I'm already predicting the winner: anyone not named Ron Paul.

Posted by: Jack M. at 04:43 PM | Comments (219)
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I wasn't a real fan, and was often put off by his seemingly deliberately-crude illustrations. I couldn't tell a lot of the time if he was some kind of artsy-minded adherent of the naive school of art or just a bad illustrator.

His good pieces show he had talent, so I guess he had some kind of manifesto of the ugly and crude in art working. I mean, what the hell is this?

Is this supposed to be a worthy opponent in a dungeon or the world's least popular Muppet character?

But a lot of people loved him. He could do more conventional stuff when he wanted. Of course his best work was done in the Cthulhu chapter of Dieties & Demigods -- his weird, ugly style perfect for the weird, ugly things of Lovecraft's writing. Like this guy:

A little complaint from my 12-year-old self: Otus drew a lot of impossibly-erect nipples, but the effort was often ruined by the fact he drew them on some repulsively cartoonishly creature that only had a chance resemblance to a woman. I mean, come on. Help a brotha out, Erol.

Would I hit it? Yes. Would I brag about it? No.

For a lot of old-school Otus, check out the shrine. Damn, no psychadelic pic from the Top Secret module Rapidstrike. Would have liked to have seen that one again, just for shits and grins.

There's no James Holloway shrine on the web. There's stuff about David A. Trampier, mostly about his mysterious disappearance from the business and long-presumed death, at least until his mysterious reapperance as a taxi driver who attempts to keep his previous occupation of D&D illustrator a secret. Even when people are just asking to pay him to reprint old Wormy comics, he tells them to lose his phone number and never call again.

I guess all of us reformed, recovering, or even unregenerate geeks know that feeling... but most of us don't take it to that kind of Eddie & The Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! extreme.

Then again -- do we dare dream? -- perhaps he's plotting his back-from-the-dead comeback with the RPG illustration equivalent of Eddie's Fire Suite, or whatever the hell Eddie's "groundbreaking" album was called.

Thanks to Asher.

Posted by: Ace at 02:37 PM | Comments (28)
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Nice.

By the way, he proved he was commenting on the AICN site by posting a webcam picture of himself typing at the keypoard.

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (22)
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"The de facto director for domestic and global policy," the newstwit burbles.

Later she comes on to make it clear she was not quoting the actual White House site, pretending she knew that from the get-go, but was just quoting a rather stupid cybersquating dope-site for some sort of "context."

Right.

What does this prove? It proves the liberal MSM is prepared to believe -- without any sketpicism whatsoever -- the most over-the-top charges leveled at Republicans.

Neither the newsbint reporting this exclusive, nor the idiot producer who handed it to her, had any sketpicism whatsoever that the White House would claim, basically, that Jerry Falwell was the government's unofficial Minister Without Portfolio directing all domestic and foreign policy. It just seemed to confirm everything they'd already believed, so they were wholly credulous. (Matthews, it should be noted, expresses skepticism about this rather, um, surprising confession from the White House.)

But they're perfectly capable of putting their biases aside to report the news fairly and accurate, right?

I think they call this "confirmation bias." Anything that casts liberals in a bad light is checked and re-checked and verified and re-verified before ultimately being spiked anyway -- liberals simply aren't willing to believe, or report, bad news about fellow liberals, so the amount of confirmation needed before such a story can run is nearly insurrmountable.

On the other hand, liberals believe a whole raft of unhinged nonsense about conservatives, so absurdly ham-handed parodies like this get reported as straight news by the MSM -- hey, it sure does seem to fit with the known facts, so it's "auto-confirming." A second source is hardly needed when one source so perfectly validates everything liberals know is true already.

Posted by: Ace at 01:41 PM | Comments (19)
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Guy discharges live rounds with a vise, a screwdriver, and a hammer. What could possibly go wrong?

First of all, the why: A company pays the rather tiny amount of $1.70 per pound of spent casings. So this guy was shooting off bullets with a hammer to get the casings.

Question: Why didn't he just fire them from a gun? All right, let's assume he didn't have a gun, or at least not guns of each caliber he needed to fire the ammo. Couldn't he have used pliers to pull out the round first, then attempted to detonate the powder? Still dangerous, but at least there's not a lead projectile flying out.

Anyway:

-- A man was hospitalized Saturday after he accidentally discharged a round of ammunition into his abdomen using a screwdriver and a hammer, police said.

The Warren County Sheriff's Office was called to 2073 Call St. at 5:05 p.m. Saturday, where they determined that Damion M. Mosher, 18, had been discharging .223-caliber rounds by placing them in a steel vice, putting a screwdriver on the primer, and striking the screwdriver with a hammer, police said.

The round went about a half-inch into his abdomen, police said. Mosher was treated at Glens Falls Hospital and was released, police said.
...

No charges were filed in the case.

It's very hard to prove aggravated stupidity.

Cleveland said he recalled a similar case years ago where a man in West Glens Falls who kept a .22-caliber round in the brim of his hat discharged the round when trying to swat a bug with the hat. The slug grazed his head and slightly injured him.

Talk about using a howitzer to kill a mosquito.

Then there's this guy -- jumping 29 feet into a kiddie pool.

He's a bit smarter about it. Popular Science notes his form helps break his fall, as does a bit of cushioning at the bottom of the pool.

And this guy chose not to kill himself, but rather destroy his life.

There was soft music playing in the loft when the 17-year-old track athlete arrived at her coach's home after school.

Tom Porras, 49, a former professional football player and substitute teacher and track coach at Saguaro High School, had asked the girl to come to his house to watch videos of other athletes doing the long jump.

He also asked if he could give her an "athletic massage."

...

According to a Maricopa County Superior Court document, the student told police that she trusted Porras, her track coach, and believed that going to his home would make her "a better athlete."

...

He fondled her buttocks beneath her bathing suit.

Porras kissed her neck, cheeks and buttocks, and told her that if she had questions about sex, he would answer them.

She declined.

...

She became alarmed when he ejaculated on her. He told her it was massage oil.

Look, I don't care who you are, that right there is just plain hot.

(Um: Lefty blogs note: irony, black humor. You know, all the stuff you give yourselves passes on for employing.)

She became alarmed only after he'd ejaculated on her? I'd say that her danger sense kicked in a bit too late; I think I'd have been worried when he was fondling my buttocks while beating himself off like a priapic gibbon hopped up on meth and Mexican knock-off Viagra.

You can't put the toothpaste back into the tube, alas.

As she was leaving his house, her coach had one last piece of advice for her.

If she saw his son outside, she should tell him they were just "watching sports videos."

Such as ESPN's popular documentary, The NFL's Twenty Greatest Surreptitious Ejaculations On To An Underage Girl. They're still talking about Brett Favre 1997 twenty-five-foot from-across-the-room rebounding-off-a-Hummel-gnome stealth ejaculation on to 19 year old psychology major Stella McGinty. That's what makes him great -- it may be sloppy, it may be ugly, but he always finds a way to "deliver the package" in a clutch situation.

Also fun to watch is Garo Yapremian's infamous "wounded duck," in which he attempted to covertly ejaculate on to a Dolphin cheerleader but wound up parking a warm one on Jim Brown's earlobe.

He was never seen or heard from again.

Thanks to Sinistar, Karol, Instapundit, and Blacksheep.

No dri links were harmed in this post.

Posted by: Ace at 01:27 PM | Comments (17)
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It's a couple of days old, but I just read it for the first time. Treacher writes the post I've been wanting to write but haven't because I'm lazy (Warning: this link is about as NSFW as it gets; it's a transcript from the show).

Takeaway quote:

Now, is any of that stuff nice? Is any of it polite? No. Is any of it funny? That's a matter of personal preference, and I didn't like the Condi Rice thing, but I thought he had a couple of good lines, especially "I got six years!" Is any of it worth trying to get somebody fired from a pay service that is not on the public airwaves? If you say yes, you're no better than Tipper Gore or Al Sharpton or Media Matters or News Hounds or any of these other people who've ever tried to decide for you what you should be able to watch or read or listen to.

I concur.

Posted by: AndrewR at 01:13 PM | Comments (41)
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I'm lovin' it.

Check out the powerful evidence of Bush's predisposition to live in delusionary fantasy (bolded text):

Psychology researchers, including some who advise politicians, have reached the same conclusion. "I do think there is denial on Bush's part in his running of the war," says Kerry Sulkowicz, clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University Medical Center. "He seems unmoved by the extent of the evidence that things are far worse than he believes. The tip-off for denial is perpetual optimism, a pathological certainty that things are going well."

Bush could, of course, know full well that the United States cannot achieve its goals in Iraq. If so, then he is lying not to himself but to us (for reasons scientists would have a field day with, but that's another story). But while it's always risky to psychoanalyze a politician from afar, a few things in his past are consistent with the capacity for denial. When he was 7, his baby sister died of leukemia. Bush, while certainly not denying her death, tried to cheer up his grieving mother, saying everything would be OK.

What a monster. And how bizarre it is to reassure one's mother after the death of a child.

Also, those who abuse alcohol, as Bush has admitted doing, typically need to see the world in black and white in order to stay on the wagon. "It's how they control their addiction," says Sulkowicz. "It reflects an inability or refusal to see shades of gray."

As long as we're doing armchair psychological diagnosis, let me direct the MSM's attention to the well-known mechanism called projection and also the recently-acknowleged condition called Bush Derangement Syndrome, or BDS.

It's pretty amazing to me that the left-liberal media continues insisting upon its own capacity to see things "in shades of gray" while simultaneoulsy making the most categorical, absolutist statements about war, terror, and Republicans imaginable.

So let me point the MSM to another couple of terms: cognitive dissonance and self-awareness, lack of .

Posted by: Ace at 12:39 PM | Comments (39)
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