Clinton: I want to lessen time served for non-violent drug offenders.

Richardson: Stats. People in jail, one of three black men spend time in jail. We need a reform.

Edwards: We need to make it easier for first-time offenders once they're out. I agree w/that.

22:06. Question: Should there be a right to return to New Orleans after Katrina.

Kucinich: People should have the right to return and be guaranteed a job.

22:08. It's all about Iraq. Okaaay.

22:08. I have proposed a 10-point agenda about Katrina. Take that biatches! more...

Posted by: MatthewSheffield at 06:07 PM | Comments (58)
Post contains 435 words, total size 3 kb.

So here I am in the press room at the Democrats debate. I'm hoping for Dennis Kucinich to pull out a death ray and vaporize everyone. In the event that doesn't happen, I will be liveblogging.

First bit of news: I spoke with Barack Obama's campaign manager, David Axelrod (whose brother Jim Axelrod is a national reporter for CBS) and he said Senator Demigod will not be coming over to the press room to spin his performance.

21:02. So the debate is getting started. Maureen Dowd has not shown up. I don't know what's wrong. more...

Posted by: MatthewSheffield at 05:42 PM | Comments (88)
Post contains 1282 words, total size 8 kb.

Oh, he was also an ironworker.

He had $300 in his pocket.

He continues to have $300 in his pocket.

Thanks to richard mcenroe.

Update: The WSJ just insinuated this video was "funded by a Re-reconqista White Spanish Supremacist group called 'The Sons of Cortez.'"

Posted by: Ace at 04:34 PM | Comments (16)
Post contains 71 words, total size 1 kb.

Meh. Mildly interesting.

Shep Smith is hyping this as somehow "about to break the case wide open," but 1), it's already wide open, Benoit killed his family then himself, and 2) given that only Benoit would have known about his intention to kill his family and then himself in advance, it's not much of a mystery who updated his Wikipedia entry.

Posted by: Ace at 04:21 PM | Comments (15)
Post contains 91 words, total size 1 kb.

Sweet.

Thanks to Jiggity.

Posted by: Ace at 04:07 PM | Comments (30)
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.

Jobs humans won't do.

They question the funding.

It wasnÂ’t just talk radio that stirred up opposition to the SenateÂ’s overhaul of immigration law. The Internet buzz also drove the hostility to President BushÂ’s effort to overhaul immigration laws and put millions of illegal immigrants on the path to legal status.

The Senate’s 46-53 roll call in favor of limiting debate and clearing the way to a final vote fell 14 votes short of the 60 needed. Activists who say the bill amounts to a grant of amnesty for those who entered the U.S. illegally had popped up all over the Internet, directing supporters to call their senators’ offices – or more.

Hot Air Network’s Web ad, viewable at left, urged “conservatives fed up with Republican scheming on this bill, [to] do something about it. If you gave to the party in the past year, you can demand your money back. Call the Republican National Committee today and demand a full refund. If you gave to any senator or congressman in the past year, call their office and demand a full refund.” Just who sponsors Hot Air’s ad, and other similar ads popping up across the Internet, is unclear.

Geraghty has a strange theory on this mysterious sponsorship of ads, which I have no doubt the crack staff of the WSJ will follow up on.

Funny Comments: in the thread. See-Dub makes an appearance, but it's Adrian who delivers the funny.

HotAir.com is a conservative political commentary website with an emphasis on video blogging. It was started by Michelle Malkin. No one “sponsors” the ads; their crack young staff does this kind of thing for fun.

Full disclosure: IÂ’m one of their occasional guest-bloggers.
Comment by See-Dubya - June 28, 2007 at 4:58 pm

...

“Just who sponsors Hot Air’s ad, and other similar ads popping up across the Internet, is unclear.”

Wow. Had to check the url there for a secÂ… thought I was at The OnionÂ’s site!

Please do a bit of research before you write next time.
Comment by Citizen Duck - June 28, 2007 at 5:42 pm

LOL! Who sponsors Hot Air? ItÂ’s a mystery cloaked in darkness! Get someone on it immediately, I smell a Pulitzer!
Comment by WisCon - June 28, 2007 at 5:48 pm

...

I think the main question here is, will we ever really know whoÂ’s sponsoring the comments left by See-Dubya, Citizen Duck, and WisCon?
Comment by Adrian - June 28, 2007 at 5:56 pm

Does it take any education to become a reporter? Do you even have to know how to think?

WhoÂ’s behind HotAirÂ’s ads? I dunnoÂ… how about HotAir? Did it ever dawn on you to email them?
Comment by PRCalDude - June 28, 2007 at 5:56 pm

No, PRCalDude, it didn't. They're MSM. They just "know things" innately.

Responses... From Malkin and Allah.

Allah discloses their last two internet ads, cobbled together from video available on YouTube and voiced by non-professional actor Bryan Preston and edited via cheap software, cost $300,000 and $450,000 to make.

Shhh. Don't tell them that those numbers might be inflated for humorous effect. Let them now start demanding to know where Hot Air got that $750,000 from.

Boston Irish Just Emailed Me... calling bullshit on Allah's purported figures. There's no way such high-quality work could possibly cost less than one million dollars, he says.

This one-minute attack ad, against some guy he knows, for example, cost $5.8 million to produce.

WSJ Launches Major Investigation Into How Those Sixty-Nine Billion YouTube Videos Are Funded: They think this video -- with its blatant anti-Eastern-European subtext -- was most likely funded to the tune of $44 million by Richard Mellon Scaife.

I'm sweating bullets (ahem) that they won't find out Smith & Wesson paid me $143 million to appear in this brief advert for the S&W .50 Mag.

Who is this mysterious "Gene" we're all supposed to wait for?

Question:

Is the WSJ actually retarded?

Don't Even Get Me Started... on this incredibly costly CGI-heavy location-shot film, used by See-Dub to attack Lindsay Graham.

...suggested by PRCalGuy.

Heh... They corrected their "error," lamely. This isn't even correctable.

Hot Air is a conservative online broadcast site run by blogger Michelle Malkin.

...

Correction: An earlier version of this post said it wasnÂ’t clear who produced the Hot Air ads.

It's not correctable because

1) It wasn't a mistatement of fact, it was a slanderous insinuation

and

2) It was so fucking stupid in the first place that only deliberate malice combined with pure incompetence and disdain of fairness and accuracy can account for it. It was no "error."

Posted by: Ace at 02:07 PM | Comments (52)
Post contains 818 words, total size 7 kb.

From the must-read Geraghty, this Oh-My-God-You're-Not-Serious "explanation."

He did it on purpose. It was his strategy from the beginning. Because...

"I wanted to signal that I am supportive of comprehensive immigration reform, but that now is not the time and this is not the bill."

What a fucking joke. Having taken a close look at our Senators for maybe the first time in my life, I'm almost shocked at what I see. Corruption, arrogance, incompetence, disgusting mendacity, shameless pandering, near-diagnosable levels of mental retardation.... these are the men and women we have chosen to sit in the Senate.

Posted by: Ace at 01:04 PM | Comments (43)
Post contains 118 words, total size 1 kb.

Oh, dear. This guy says that to compensate for the lack of gore and brutality, Live Free or Die Hard resorts to physically-impossible CGI "stunt" sequences that, while satisfying in their own right, just ain't Die Hard.

I was sort of worried about this, based on the huge CGI car crashes and semi-trailer vs. F-35 jet sequences I saw in the commercials, but I consoled myself: Hey, Die Hard With A Vengeance had had that improbable winch-line-plummet-to-the-boat thing (where two humans fall about 150 feet on to a steel deck and get up with a bit of bruising). And the dump-truck surfing scene.

Still, I didn't really like those parts, as they were pretty far from the original Die Hard concept of really clever, really brutal, really exciting actions sequnces that kinda-sorta really could happen. They were fine for Lethal Weapon. For Die Hard? No.

It's sad that Live Free or Die Hard pushes this up to 11 to make up for the lack of blood.

Still, the review is fairly positive-- he just thinks you'll like it better if you pretend it's not a Die Hard movie at all.

But... 77% positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. Though, I have to say, I trust critics' positive reviews of films they plainly have no appreciation for about the same as their negative reviews. These are the sort of people who thought Eraser was kinda good.

TheEJS says it's good:

There's no lack of blood...

Live Free or Die Hard was better than the second and third (though I dare not compare it to the original because, simply, nothing can compare to the original).

Posted by: Ace at 12:57 PM | Comments (31)
Post contains 314 words, total size 2 kb.

Kill amnesty; check.

Kill the single-minded fixation on killing amnesty. I don't know about you, but I'm looking forward to being able to write about anything else.

Here's one on the Global Warming Cult.

Here's a shock: The New York Times is now in the business of flat-out lying. Praytell, will the "Fairness" Doctrine extend to the New York Times? First read the Times piece about the documentary Indoctrinate U., and the "nuanced" (yes, it's in the headline) view schools take towards suppressing speech.

Then read Mahoney's response. It's pretty devastating. It's not that Mahoney has the better of the argument; that's almost a given. It's that the Times flagrantly misreported key facts to even have an argument at all.

Video of Iranian gas "protests."

Fired Durham investigator Linwood Wilson turns on Nifong, apparently seeking to forestall any criminal charges against himself by ratting out Nifong:

In an interview with the H-S, Wilson claims that shortly after the interview, he told Nifong, "You need to get rid of this piece of crap [the lacrosse case] as fast as you can. [Mangum] has told me an unbelievable story. She is not credible. She is volunteering for a polygraph, and we need to do it." In his Bar deposition, Wilson also claimed to have asked Nifong to give Mangum a lie detector test, but Nifong refused, remarking, "I don't polygraph victims, especially sexual assault victims . . . and make those victims think that I don't trust them or believe them."

Via Newsbusters, Instapundit on the emerging power of the blogosphere in politics. One word executive summary: Money. Something we on the right haven't been as diligent about. Every week Harry Reid sets aside an hour to let Markos dip his sac in his gob, but we on the right had to engage in a month-long primal scream to be heard at all. Reason? They raise money proficiently, we don't. Yet.

As I've remarked before, the dextrosphere has always had a core mission of influencing, or even somewhat displacing, the media. Turns out this is a very difficult thing to do. You know what's apparently far easier? Hijacking a political party.

I'm all about the path of least resistance.

I haven't bothered following the Cheney thing. I was suprised to find out he was a member of the legislative branch, I admit, but then, Cheney contains Great Mysteries unfathomable to mortal minds. From the Corner, this Beldar piece defending Cheney's legal position better than Cheney's legal team does.

The shocks continue as the MSM gives biased headlines to a SC decision striking down an entirely race-based forced-busing plan, and the LAT goes AP one better by deliberately omitting a key finding of Roberts from the AP story they ran in order to hide from its readers that Roberts' opinion was actually far more reasonable than they wished it to seem. Yup-- ran an already slanted AP story, edited the story to make it more biased. Your LAT in action.

Posted by: Ace at 12:13 PM | Comments (52)
Post contains 507 words, total size 4 kb.

So as the designated driver blogger for Ace at tonight's Democratic presidential debate, I've been looking forward to an hour or two of non-stop GOP hatred.

Little did I know the lefty bloggers would get it started even before the debate in an attack mounted on pollster Frank Luntz. It's all so typical. The blog left's puppet master, David Brock, sends out an "alert" informing them that someone who might possibly be conservative is going to be allowed to report as a "mainstream" journalist.

Horrors!!!

How dare PBS allow a Republican to infiltrate the left-wing sanctorum that is the mainstream media!!!

Predictably, Brock's dittoheads went into action, denouncing PBS for their temerity.

Thankfully, PBS has not backed down. Luntz, who is a respected pollster and is often quoted in liberal publications is not getting the shaft, making him one of the very few Republicans that has (so far) managed to escape the assault of the conservaphobic left.

That is truly the right word, too, since Luntz's small analyst role is quite minor compared to Democrat loyalists like Chris Cuomo, Mika Brzezinski, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, George Stephanopolous, all of whom have their own shows.

It ought to scare more sane liberals out there just how eager their ideological compatriots are to stifle any sort of dissenting or diverse viewpoint. Sadly, it doesn't.

Censorious libs reading this might retort that "well we're just opposed to Luntz's shoddy polling methodology" which is BS since the same people did not complain about Dan Rather's forged documents or Jayson Blair's fabrications. No, it's all about the politics.

Posted by: MatthewSheffield at 11:25 AM | Comments (15)
Post contains 275 words, total size 2 kb.