Roger Simon says he doesn't mind it, on the theory that it's good "for all of us." If a corporation wants to sponsor one blogger group, of course we can just wait our turn for the crazy corporate blog-money.

Does Simon believe a word of this? It is beyond dispute that, owing to the fact our major insitutions are largely controlled by liberals, vicious sites like the DailyKos ("Screw 'em," he said of murdered civilian contractors, "I feel nothing") are given a pass because there are no enemies to the left. Meanwhile, the slightest bit of "controversial rhetoric" from a rightwing site makes it radioactive for most corporations.

Let's just say that if the right of the blogosphere got together to organize a big multiblog convention (we'd have to multiblog, to even approach Kos' numbers), I don't think JetBlue would be quite as willing to toss us some corporate sponsorship to subsidize the soiree.

Posted by: Ace at 12:28 PM | Comments (35)
Post contains 166 words, total size 1 kb.

Jon Fuckin' Lovitz. God Bless him.

The whole thing is worth reading but I can't swipe it all.

IT was fight night at an L.A. comedy club last week when Jon Lovitz roughed up Andy Dick over the murder of their "Saturday Night Live" colleague, Phil Hartman.

Laugh Factory owner Jamie Masada, who witnessed the assault, said, "Jon picked Andy up by the head and smashed him into the bar four or five times, and blood started pouring out of his nose."

Lovitz told Page Six, "All the comedians are glad I did it because this guy is an asshole." [censored word uncensored by me]

Lovitz and Dick have been at loggerheads since a 1997 Christmas party at Hartman's house, five months before his troubled wife Brynn flipped out, fatally shooting Hartman, then killing herself. "Andy was doing cocaine, and he gave Brynn some after she had been sober for 10 years. Phil was furious about it - and then five months later he's dead," said Lovitz, adding that when he filled in on Hartman's "Newsradio" sitcom, "I told Andy, 'I wouldn't be here now if you hadn't given Brynn that cocaine.' "

Last year, Lovitz related, a drunken Dick strolled up to his table at Ago in West Hollywood, rudely downed his guests' peach liqueur drinks, and "looked at me and said, 'I put the "Phil Hartman hex" on you - you're the next one to die.' I said, 'What did you say?' and he repeated it. I wanted to punch his face in, but I don't hit women."

Apparently, though, he does slam their heads repeatedly into a bar.

Nice one. I haven't enjoyed Jon Lovitz' work this much since... well, I think I'm going to have to go back to the Harvey Firestein impersonation on this one.

Thanks to lauraw.

Dick Being A Dick On NewsRadio: Cuffy finds this "chilling." I don't know about that, but it is kinda funny.

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (112)
Post contains 342 words, total size 2 kb.

This is the woman who was terribly concerned about Coulter's crack about her husband being gay, remember.

When I was a lawyer, I was the first female lawyer many people had ever seen. I had an obligation to my client to do the work right, but I thought constantly about my obligation to the women who came after me. If I didn't do a good job, they wouldn't get a chance to sit where I'm sitting. I think one of the things that make me so completely comfortable with this is that keeping that door open to women is actually more a policy of John's than Hillary's.

On the issues that are important to women, she has not ... well, healthcare, that's enormously important to women, all the polls say, and what she says now is, we're going to have a national conversation about healthcare. And then she describes some cost-saving things, which John also supports, but she acts like that's going to make healthcare affordable to everyone. And she knows it won't. She's not really talking about poverty, when the face of poverty is a woman's face, often a single mother. She gave that speech on abortion a few years ago [saying abortion should be "safe, legal and rare"].

Look, I'm sympathetic, because when I worked as a lawyer, I was the only woman in these rooms, too, and you want to reassure them you're as good as a man. And sometimes you feel you have to behave as a man and not talk about women's issues. I'm sympathetic -- she wants to be commander in chief. But she's just not as vocal a women's advocate as I want to see. John is.

...

The question is not so much how she campaigns -- that's theater. The question is, what does her campaign tell you about how she'll govern? And I'm not convinced she'd be as good an advocate for women. She needs a rationale greater for her campaign than I've heard. When she announced her candidacy she said, "I'm in it to win it." What is that? That's not a rationale. Same with Senator Obama -- I've yet to hear a rationale. John is extremely clear about what he can accomplish and why he's the one to do it.

Incidentally, this deranged hag admits to sockpuppeting on various blogs.

[Q.] ...people always said you were a Daily Kos diarist under another name.

I wasn't. But I have blogged using other screen names before. Before the Whole Foods guy got in trouble [the Wall Street Journal revealed last week that CEO John Mackey used pseudonyms to deride competitors online] I decided that that wasn't such a good idea.

Speaking of sockpuppets: Glenn Greenwald has been shrieking for months about claims that this or that Democrat isn't acting like a man, and this or that Republican is manly. (Classical Values recently mocked and baited him for this idee fixe.)

What will Greenwald have to say about Elizabeth Edwards implication that Hillary! isn't behaving as a woman?

Posted by: Ace at 10:51 AM | Comments (58)
Post contains 499 words, total size 3 kb.

So surprising she didn't get the gig. She's now contradicting her previous claim that she was offered the job but turned it down:

Taking away her seat on "The view" can't shut up Rosie O'Donnell, as she loves the attention way to much. She s again trying to push up the banter and hyperbole and now claims that CBS rejected her because she wanted to take "The Price is Right" and turn it gay.

...

She tries the woes is me angle again. She says, "In the end, they turned me down because CBS thought I was too controversial. Which wouldn’t have been the case — I just wanted to ‘gay it up.’ I wasn’t going to give away a TV set and rant, 'So you can watch George Bush and Dick Cheney lie to America on it!'"

...

More: What did OÂ’Donnell propose? For starters, she wanted to eliminate Bob BarkerÂ’s beauties in favour of Broadway chorus men, confetti, musical bumpers and a much-needed set makeover.

No doubt that's what millions of retirees and housewives are clamoring for: in your face gay camp.*

* Admittedly, they do seem to like Richard Simmons.

Posted by: Ace at 10:36 AM | Comments (14)
Post contains 215 words, total size 1 kb.

Don't worry; even with the smoking-gun evidence of cellphone video, you don't have to worry about the media overplaying this latest example of a culture of lawless, oppressive entitlement on the part of this nation's college athletes.

You know why.

Thanks to Niner.

Update: Amanda Marcotte just wrote me an email to say:

(nervous whistle)

Yeah, seems strange to write an email consisting of nothing more than a stage direction, but maybe that's something superfeminists do.

Posted by: Ace at 09:59 AM | Comments (39)
Post contains 112 words, total size 1 kb.

It's already hit it, retreated from it, and hit it again, establishing a new intraday record and blowing past a resistance point/psychological hurdle. The only question is whether it can finish at 14,000+ and then build from there to the big one (15,000).

I'm sure everyone will be shocked to learn that when the Dow established its new (now old) record a few days ago, the media played up the negative, once again forcing the country to pay the media-imposed "Republican tax."

ItÂ’s good news when stocks soar to new records. That means the economy is showing signs of strength and a stronger economy means a better standard of living for Americans, right?

You wouldn’t know that from watching the July 12 evening news, especially CBS “Evening News” and ABC “World News with Charles Gibson.” Instead, the networks served up “some dark clouds” and “some worries.”

“But, and there’s always a ‘but’ with the stock market,” said ABC correspondent Dan Harris. “If say gas goes to $4 a gallon or interest rates spike unexpectedly, all bets are off. As one investor today, the market is a lot like the weather in New England – if you don’t like it, just wait a day.”

On July 12, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at record highs. The stock market saw its largest gain in nearly four years. But ABC and CBS placed the emphasis on negative symptoms of the economy, a “slumping” housing market and high gas prices.

“There are still some dark clouds looming over this market,” said Harris. “The housing market is in a slump, interest rates are rising and gas prices are ticking back up.”

There are always dark clouds on the economic horizon -- hell, we've had a growing trade deficit for six thousand years, just for one -- and yet the media always seemed able to look past such downers when reporting on the Clinton economy, every single report featuring the "Prosperity Montage" -- printing presses spitting out crisp new $100 bills, cash registers chirping as the rack up sales, cries of victory from the trading-pits and the NYSE clanged its closing bell. Powerful visual and auditory messaging that the economy was going gangbusters.

We, uh, haven't seen the Prosperity Montage in quite a while, have we?

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (30)
Post contains 396 words, total size 3 kb.

If there's hard evidence supporting this, the NIE (of course) doesn't say. So it's not clear if this is just speculation and guesswork -- which, frankly, anyone could have told them -- or if there's something a bit more substantial undergirding it.

We assess that al-QaÂ’ida will continue to enhance its capabilities to attack the Homeland through greater cooperation with regional terrorist groups. Of note, we assess that al-QaÂ’ida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-QaÂ’ida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland.

...

We assess Lebanese Hizballah, which has conducted anti-US attacks outside the United States in the past, may be more likely to consider attacking the Homeland over the next three years if it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or Iran.

Since the left just mentioned the politicization of intelligence (no cite; they mention this every three seconds), let's discuss that. Once could have a number of reactions to this news, including 1) we must fight Al Qaeda in Iraq and dismantle that network or even, if you're bent that way, 2) we must withdraw from Iraq because we're what's sustaining Al Qaeda in Iraq and in fact it's our whole Iraq mission that's putting us in this new danger.

2 seems a bit absurd to me, but I suppose it is a plausible (barely) response.

But the left won't go with 2, for fears that they can't make a persuasive enough case for that proposition. Instead, they'll do what they always do -- deny inconvenient facts and simply claim Bush is lying to them and "cooking the intelligence."

Isn't that the very definition of politicizing intelligence -- deciding whether to credit a report as accurate or false (even concocted) based upon nothing except which stance advances one's pre-existing political agenda? As they say, you can have your own opinions, but not your own facts. One can have various opinions on what this report means -- one can even argue that the report actually argues in favor of expedited withdrawal -- but simply dismissing it as inconvenient to one's policy preferences is precisely what the left contends Bush, Wolfowitz, Feith, etc., have been doing for five years. And yet when the left selectively "cherry-picks" and "twists the intelligence," they clap themselves on the back for being skeptical and "reality-based."

In this particular situation, it is, admittedly, unclear if there's much backing this report up besides common sense. (Of course AQI would like to kill American civilians; they've come to Iraq in the first place simply for the opportunity to kill Americans. Why would anyone doubt they have desires to kill softer targets than our well-armed and well-trained troops?) So there is more rroom here to be legitimately skeptical, or at least not entirely convinced.

But this is how the left views every report coming out of Iraq. Does the report tend to suggest the surge is working or the war can be won, or must be won? Then it's false. It's "twisted," it's "spin," it's fabricated. Does the information tend to suggest victory is impossible or at least very unlikely? Then, of course, the information is true.

One would think the self-proclaimed "reality-based community" would do a better job of even pretending to have a more rigorous framework for analyzing information than whether it advances their political position or not, but then, they're too insular to be moved by criticism from outsiders, too convinced of their own holy righteousness to engage in any internal criticism, and of course too shameless to be embarrassed in any event.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (72)
Post contains 635 words, total size 4 kb.

Heh.

Yes, I know it's old.

Thanks to Kevin.

Posted by: Ace at 06:03 PM | Comments (41)
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.

"Mildly profane." Nice.

Posted by: Ace at 04:37 PM | Comments (25)
Post contains 23 words, total size 1 kb.

I think a lot of you could probably use these (really NSFW).

Teaser:

"My wife read one page, screamed, and grew a cock"

Posted by: AndrewR at 03:58 PM | Comments (12)
Post contains 31 words, total size 1 kb.