BUMPED to note our host's hospitality.

The proprietor was very generous to our group with appetizers and shots, and deserves a hearty thank you and recognition. He also honored our reservation by having other customers removed from our Special Moron Area. I am not kidding.

The place offers a huge menu of great burgers and many exotic beers. If you're in New Haven, CT you should check out Prime 16 on Temple Street.

I would be remiss not to note that there were many attractive women gathered around the bar. Some were not wearing much, for a night with below-freezing temperature.

-------------------------------------

Interesting conversations this evening. Money. Media. Elections. Lefty academia. Work.

And: What's the best thing to vomit?

Milkshake.

This is what I've learned this evening.

If you have to vomit, you want to vomit a milkshake. My source tells me that nothing is as safe- and dare I say pleasantly refreshing- coming the wrong way up the alimentary canal as an icy milkshake from McDonald's.

The Connecticut AOSHQers toast each other with a round of 'Hobo Killers' (Hobo blood and Valu-Rite Vodka). No one remembers who bled the hobo, and they won't be able to recall it under police questioning, either. If they know what's good for them.

Photo thanks to the gorgeous, charming, and aptly-named Sassypants.

Many, many thanks to Daryl T. for setting us up with the venue. He put a nifty flaming skull above our area of the pub, too.

Booze everywhere and a smoldering skull up in the rafters. Felt just like Grandma's house.

It was all very pleasant. Everybody was great fun to meet. We will do this again.

Posted by: LauraW at 01:42 PM | Comments (73)
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Hillary for SecState, Emily's List for powerless comm director slot. I'm OK with that.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 08:53 PM | Comments (16)
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For the next 24 hours, get a coupon for a free bottle of Dr. Pepper. Yes, you have to fill out a form. Welcome to the 21st Century; hope you don't get a hand cramp while you're here, pops.

What's this all about? The soft-drink maker said in March that it would give a free soda to everyone in America if Guns N' Roses' new album dropped in 2008. "Chinese Democracy," infamously delayed since recording began in 1994, goes on sale Sunday. "We never thought this day would come," Tony Jacobs, Dr Pepper's vice president of marketing, said in a statement. "But now that it's here, all we can say is: The Dr Pepper's on us."

By the way, the album stinks. But you already knew that would be the case, right?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:27 PM | Comments (38)
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Blaster writes:

So the change.gov website is hosted by bluestatedigital.

From their website:

"We Are Your Online Partner. We'll help you use the BSD Online Tools to rally support for your cause, build a constituency, raise money online, or get your candidate elected."

This is a .gov website.

The Obama pre-administration is using this site to gather information for donors. These are the same guyswho would have turned off the credit card validation rules.

All a bunch of Howard Dean campaign alumni.

I asked Blaster if .gov can only be used by government entities, or if there are exceptions. He writes back:

GSA is the registrar for ,gov - here is the elgibility criteria:

"To preserve the integrity of the .gov name space, .gov domains are limited to United States government organizations at the federal, Native Sovereign Nation, state, and local level, and U.S. territories."

So, if change.gov is an offical government organization, we the taxpayers are paying Blue State Digital (which is explicitly partisan, and designed to raise funds and run campaigns) to run this site for us - was it sole sourced or competitlvely bid? I want to know, they are my tax dollars.

Alternatively, the campaign is paying for the site (this seems more likely to me) and thus they are misusing the .gov domain (of course, someone in government approved this), and they are using BSD to collect info - look all around the site, there are lots of "signup" forms all around. Lots of places where they are collecting addresses and demographic info - because that is what BSD is for.

As Instapundit might say, They told me if George Bush were elected the government would be turned into an expressly partisan campaigning organization to promote one party rule, and they were right!

Posted by: Ace at 03:59 PM | Comments (70)
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All this was of course known (and intended) during the campaign. Now that the campaign has been safely won by the press, it's time for the media to begin admitting the obvious and pretending it was all just sort of a mistake which will be remedied in the future.

As the saying goes, it is easier to beg for forgiveness than to receive permission. They did what they, um, needed to do, but now they can pretend they'd have done things differently, if only they'd been aware of their errors as they were making them.

Media bias was more intense in the 2008 election than in any other national campaign in recent history, Time magazine's Mark Halperin said Friday at the Politico/USC conference on the 2008 election.

"It's the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war," Halperin said at a panel of media analysts. "It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama coverage."

Halperin, who maintains Time's political site "The Page," cited two New York Times articles as examples of the divergent coverage of the two candidates.

"The example that I use, at the end of the campaign, was the two profiles that The New York Times ran of the potential first ladies," Halperin said. "The story about Cindy McCain was vicious. It looked for every negative thing they could find about her and it case her in an extraordinarily negative light. It didn't talk about her work, for instance, as a mother for her children, and they cherry-picked every negative thing that's ever been written about her."

The story about Michelle Obama, by contrast, was "like a front-page endorsement of what a great person Michelle Obama is," according to Halperin.

The standard press apologetics are that 1) if you're winning you get better coverage, so the bias was "neutral" in the sense that McCain would have had the same bias if only he'd been winning and 2) Obama got better coverage only on the (again) "neutral" grounds he was "new," and of course McCain could have had the same biased coverage if only he'd been new.

Two words rebut both of these points utterly: Sarah Palin.

McCain was winning, quite nicely, for two weeks after he announced Palin as his VP. Who was, you know, new. The press did not respond by giving McCain and Palin positive press, but by indulging in a nasty feeding frenzy of dumpster-diving smear-peddling the likes of which we haven't before witnessed in the modern era.

If the bias was purely due to "neutral" non-political circumstances such as "being ahead in the polls" and the "newness" of a candidate, we should have expected to see McCain and Palin feted as the New Hotness Messiahs, replacing the press love for the Old and Busted Messiah Obama. Of course, no such alienation of affection took place among the press. They redoubled their efforts to elect Barack Obama.

Furthermore, of course, the supposedly-neutral bias in favor of the winner obscures the fact that Obama was winning precisely because the press refused to run negative stories about him. While we heard an awful lot about Sarah Palin's $150,000 wardrobe, we heard nothing about the $300,000 discount that convicted political fixer and bagman Tony Rezko got for his good buddy Obama. The press trumpeted every misstatement by McCain and Palin while ignoring every gaffe by Obama and Biden. Etc.

They have no defense. To ladle additional lies upon a breathtaking record of dishonesty adds insult to injury.

Thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 03:52 PM | Comments (105)
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I guess if this is true, we may be looking at more than two to four crummy years.

"We'll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels," Obama said. He also made a commitment to fuel-efficient cars and alternative energy technologies "that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead."

Obama pointed to the past, saying that Americans in this country's darkest hours have risen above their divisions to solve their problems, as a hope for the future.

One problem with The Messiah's reference to the past. FDR's policies extended the Great Depression by seven years. It took World War II to get us out of it. For those of you who don't know what the WPA was, here's the Wiki entry. Heavily laced with Socialist love, of course.

The other problem with Barry's reference to the past that I have is that he seems to want to revive Depression era policies when we're not in a depression.

Of course, his Chief of Staff Elect Rahm Emmanuel did instruct us recently that this crisis is an opportunity.

Posted by: Open Blog at 03:08 PM | Comments (76)
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Wow, having to come up with columns on a deadline is a bitch, huh?

Okay. Here's my column: Barack Obama should resign now. And all of the Democratic Senators and House members. Because they suck. No, wait: Because they're the SUXXOR.

Gail Collins is now cribbing "columns" from Facebook entries written by 14 year olds.

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (102)
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Big doings today. Ranked action, #16 BYU vs. de #8 Yoots. Surprising #20 Cincinnati and #19 Pitt in a Big East (oxymoron) showdown... and the thang tonight, #2 Texas Tech and #5 OU. That oughta be a pleaser to anyone watchin, without a vested interest even.

Moron meetups happening too. Hoist one for me. I'm watching my brother in law eat turkey and it's a little unsettling. Many thanks.

Also, Michigan sucks.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 12:01 PM | Comments (73)
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The sea was angry that day.

Lulled into a false sense of safety by global warming alarmists, over 200 narwhal whales were smugly lounging in the Jacuzzi-like waters of the remote Canadian Arctic. Vanquished by the carbon habits of man, the Arctic ice made an unfortunately ill-timed return:

"A couple of weeks ago, when the ice was still moving, there were quite a few narwhal seen out there in the open water," Jayko Allooloo, chairman of the Pond Inlet hunters and trappers organisation, told public broadcaster CBC.

"About a week later, they're stuck."

Community elders and officials feared the whales would die from a lack of oxygen as the ice grew thicker around them, Pelley explained.

As the narwhals gasped for oxygen like Vilos Cohaagen's goldfish, NASA's Dr. James E. Hansen swooped in with a new spreadsheet on Arctic ice thickness. Copy-pasting cell E13 to E12, Hansen replaced the current month's ice thickness with last month's --- and the narwhals swam to safety!

Or not:

But department spokesman Keith Pelley said: "It's unlikely the animals are going to survive the winter, so the hunters have been given authorisation to cull them."

The hunters have been on the ice slaughtering the whales since Thursday and are likely to accomplish their task over the coming days, he said.

Hansen was last seen frantically editing a zooligical classification spreadsheet, changing the narwhals' genus and species from"Monodon monoceros" to "Yersinia pestis infected Rattus norvegicus"...

Posted by: Open Blog at 07:50 AM | Comments (65)
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Update: Company-wide memo: We're only up to #35 at Google on Project "Cockholster?"

Tomorrow, we enter into talks with an Indonesian-based firm to discuss outsourcing comments as a cost-saving measure. Granted, the spelling and dictation will be a bit awkward at first, but short of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, there's little else we can do. It doesn't appear that we can expect any kind of federal remedy since the proposed "Blogger Bailout Act of 2008" is stalled in committee and likely to be vetoed, should it ever pass.

Our CEO, Mr. O' Spades, has led a valiant effort to get this bailout package passed (I think he sent an e-mail or perhaps threw up on a sidewalk within view of a U.S. Senator), but his efforts were in vain, I'm sorry to say.

But we still need to finish off Project "Cockholster" whether or not we survive as an independent blog. In addition to the outsourcing talks, it's possible we may be aquired by a bigger blog, such as "Hot Air" or "The Daily Dish." So there's always hope.

Finally, Ragjeesh, from HR, will be coming around to each of your comment boxes today delivering you a small cardboard box. We would like you to keep this item handy in case it's needed in the near future.

In the meantime, please keep working on Project "Cockholster," as it's our only current active/income receivable account.

Also: Free leftover donuts in conference room 47-C, while they last!

End of Update.

And overnight thread I guess...everyone else seems to be passed out. You should be too, cockholsters.

After all, if this story from the notoriously balanced NYT via the equally balanced MSNBC is trueÂ…who are we to doubt? Haters.

”WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination with the enthusiastic support of the left wing of his party, fueled by his vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq and by one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate. “

“Now, his reported selections for two of the major positions in his cabinet — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Timothy J. Geithner as secretary of the Treasury — suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues. “

“He clicked with Obama,” one outside adviser said. “If you think about it, their sort of cool, distant styles are alike.”

No word yet on whether theyÂ’ll also go out on lunchtime shopping trips to peruse cool, distant clothing options while discussing economic matters. Like when we all shopped at Jeans West (or longed to), back in the '80s. Personally, I thought Oak Tree had cooler stuff, though pricier on a bus-boy's budget. What was it that Teddy R. used to say: Walk hiply and carry a big man-purse? (like those they have in Europe and certain parts of Texas).

Posted by: Open Blog at 11:05 PM | Comments (118)
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