Starting January 1, drivers in Arizona may be fined $135 if the name "Arizona" is obscured on their license plate. Many license-plate frames, say, for your favorite sports team, will have to come off. And why? Because the people are idiots:

Starting Jan. 1, police can stop you if "Arizona" isn't clearly visible at the top of the plate. Violators will be fined an average of $135, plus court fees, depending on the city where the violation is discovered.

Law-enforcement officials say the law will help officers differentiate between in-state and out-of-state vehicles, a difficult task given the state's profusion of specialty plates. Arizona issues license plates in more than 60 styles, from a plate honoring amateur radio operators to one that promotes wildlife conservation.

I can tell you with confidence that police officers' inability to identify their own state's license plates has never resulted in unrestrained crime (although some particular other inadequacies might). Other obvious solutions to this pressing problem--police officers could be required to memorize their state's plate designs or some novelty plates could be discontinued--do not appear to have been discussed. No, this is a revenue-generating regulation. Speed traps and stop-light cameras must not be bringing in enough dough.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:16 PM | Comments (52)
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Another Thursday night game tomorrow, so reminder tonight.

ALSO. I set up a College Bowl Picks group, just for you morons who might be interested, or you apes who never touched a real boobie in your life. Group ID# 35232, same password (as the NFL pick groups).

On that whole "touching a real boobie" thing. It's nice, isn't it?

Isn't it?

...

I bet it's awesome.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:15 PM | Comments (21)
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Eh, they frequently say that. Sometimes they're serious, sometimes they just mean it's not something they're considering. At the moment.

Seems to be the latter in this case.

Jindal said instead he has his sights set on seeking reelection to his current office in 2011.

But AP reports Jindal, whom many Republicans view as best positioned to transform the party's image, did not rule out the possibility he may change his mind about a White House run.

Jindal ventured to Iowa last month for a set of appearances and fundraisers — a move that fueled speculation he was begining to lay groundwork in the crucial early presidential voting state.

Posted by: Ace at 02:32 PM | Comments (46)
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"An emissary," Blagojevich notes, came to tell him that "Senate Candidate 5" would raise $1 million for him if Blago made Senate Candidate 5 Senator.

Senate Candidate 5 is suspected to be Jesse Jackson, Jr.

Jesse Jackson, Sr. just retained legal counsel.

Is he the "emissary"?

As Requested... The Mighty Slublog's Hairpiece Skull.

The Coming Spin... Anyone see it coming? Let's say this gets worse for Obama and the Jackson Two.

I foresee Chris Matthews informing us that Obama and the Jackson Two were forced to play the game by the rules imposed on them by the White Man's Power Structure in Chicago. Honestly, what else could they do? They had to take big donations and sweetheart sinecures and corporate board postings.

Posted by: Ace at 02:09 PM | Comments (111)
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Pakistan is pretty much determined to be the worst terrorist sponsoring state in the world, eclipsing even Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria.

A growing chorus of intelligence officials in the U.S. and in south Asia have pinned the Mumbai attacks on the Kashmir-based militants Lashkar-e-Taiba. But there's been hardly any mention of the extremist group's deep ties to American-based jihadists.

Since 2003, at least five U.S. citizens have been convicted in federal court of conspiring to provide material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba. At least nine more men, considered to be in the same larger circle, have been convicted of firearms violations and other felonies.... Several other cases are still making their way through the legal process.

Islamic extremists in America have used Lashkar-e-Taiba ("LeT") as a "stepping stone" into the broader world of global terror, says Evan Kohlmann, a senior investigator at the NEFA Foundation. With easy-to-access training facilities, English-speaking recruiters, and connections to militants around the world, a Lashkar camp is "the best way for emerging jihadist to get trained."
In April, 2000, for instance, Virginia native Randall Todd Royer (pictured) went to a LeT camp in Kashmir. The place wasn't hard to find, according to an opinion from U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema. Online newsletters gave out the group's phone number and e-mail address, with the assurance that "requests for information about the jihad in Kashmir are welcome." A recruiting center operated openly in Lahore, one of Pakistan's largest cities.

Royer spent a month at the LeT camp, firing AK-47s and other weapons, and going through endurance training. In August, Seifullah Chapman made a similar trip, arranged by Royer, who called it a "straight path" to global jihad. There, Chapman spent thirty days in "weapons training" and "performing military drills."

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (11)
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Before you get excited, this "specifically named individual" is not being named as part of a crime. Well, not a chargeable crime, anyway. The gist here, according to No Quarter's interpretation of Blagojevich's statements, is that Michelle Obama profited from the same sort of legal political back-scratching that Blagojevich sought for his own wife.

Before you dismiss No Quarter -- well, you have to admit, this makes perfect sense in context.

Starting with the indictment:

ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to “suck it up” for two years and do nothing and give this “motherfucker [the President-elect] his senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH states that he will put “[Senate Candidate 4]” in the Senate “before I just give fucking [Senate Candidate 1] a fucking Senate seat and I don’t get anything.” (Senate Candidate 4 is a Deputy Governor of the State of Illinois).

ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that he needs to find a way to take the “financial stress” off of his family and that his wife is as qualified or more qualified than another specifically named individual to sit on corporate boards.

Okay, so if Blago's complaining that his wife should get appointed to sit on a corporate board, and she's more qualified to do so than another "specifically named individual," and he's pissed off at Obama for not giving him something for the seat -- who could he have in mind as the unqualified "specifically named individual" sitting on corporate boards?

The “specifically named individual” is Michelle Obama, who was appointed to the Board of TreeHouse Foods, a WAL-MART vendor, on June 25, 2005, even though she did not have experience in the private sector previous to the appointment. Here are the benefits the Obama family received as a result of Michelle Obama’s stint with the WAL-MART vendor:

According to the couple’s tax returns, Mrs Obama earned $51,200 (£25,700) for her work as a non-executive director on Treehouse’s board last year, on top of the $271,618 salary she was paid as a vice-president of the University of Chicago Hospitals.

She also received 7,500 Treehouse stock options, worth a further $72,375, as she did the previous year, when she banked a $45,000 salary from the company.

Is Obama directly linked to Blago's corruption? Well, in the sense that Obama's corruption created a sense of entitlement in the Blago family for similar sweetheart deals. If the Obama's are getting filthy rich through politically-motivated appointments to corporate boards, why not the Blagojevich clan?

Michelle Obama, Blagojevich implies, received an appointment to a Board for which she was not qualified as a result of a “pay to play” scheme. What about his wife? After all, Obama ally Valerie Jarrett wants the Senate seat. What about Blagojevich’s wife? What about Blagojevich’s “financial stress?”

Note No Quarter states this a fact, when it actually seems like speculation. Pretty solid speculation, but it's not as if they have a source confirming this (AFAIK).

I'm going with "True" on this, though.

Thanks to Tversky.

Hmmm... Taken from Hot Air, this NBC Chicago article names and/or speculates who each of the unnamed persons in the indictment actually are -- but curiously forgets to mention the "Specifically Named Individual."

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (55)
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I've been sitting on Snapped Shot's tip because I couldn't tell if this was real or a CGI thing.

Allah, ever skeptical, dubs it legit. It's a module intended for orbital attacks on ICBM's in flight, although one is free to dream up more awesomer applications.

From the caption of the vid at YouTube:

LOCKHEED MARTIN TEAM CONDUCTS FREE-FLIGHT HOVER TEST OF MDA'S MULTIPLE KILL VEHICLE-L, Wall Street Journal (Market Watch), Dec 4, 2008.

Lockheed Martin Corporation announced today that its team successfully conducted a free-flight hover test of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency's Multiple Kill Vehicle-L.

Conducted Dec. 2 at the National Hover Test Facility at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., the test met all objectivesThe full-scale prototype flew at an altitude of approximately 23 feet (7 meters) for 20 seconds, maneuvering while simultaneously tracking a target. "This test demonstrated the integrated operation of the MKV-L in near-earth flight," said Rick Reginato, Multiple Kill Vehicle program director, Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company. "This represents a major step forward for the earliest operational payload designed to destroy multiple threat objects with a single missile defense interceptor."

Already Posted: DrewM tells me Dave in Texas posted this last week. Damn, missed it. I really should read this blog more often.

Posted by: Ace at 12:58 PM | Comments (43)
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Some killer quotes here. These quotes are not, if I'm understanding it right, quotes from the report they're set to report, but previous quotes from the skeptics which preview their upcoming report.

“I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion.” - Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

...

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologits,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

...

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” - U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

...

“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" - Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

This whole scam got started in the late eighties and went viral in 1998, the hottest recent year. But since 1998, the earth has been cooling. Not warming. Defying their predictions.

The scammers like to claim (to the extent they address this fact at all) that 10 years is far too short an interval to make projections by. And yet their evidence for worldwide, inevitable, increasing warming is based on the records from 1980-1998, an interval of all of twenty eight eighteen years.*

* As usual, I was informed there would be no math on this blog.

Thanks to Arthur.

Posted by: Ace at 12:52 PM | Comments (82)
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At Michelle Malkin's:

You want an expose, look into the links between the banks owned by Amrish Mahajan (Mutual Bank) and the Giannoulias family (Broadway Bank) and all the state business and real estate deals (including ObamaÂ’s) and that ran through those banks. Alexi Giannoulias is the Illinois State Treasurer, who, you might recall, came out of nowhere when he was endorsed by Obama.
Conveniently, Patty Blagojevich is a realtor who has made thousands of dollars in commissions from Hot RodÂ’s cronies. The Chicago Tribune has detailed the commissions-as-politcal-donations policy of the BlagojevichÂ’s many times.
Basically, the only way to make it big in Chicago politics is to pay to play, and this is an environment in which Obama not only existed but thrived.
To say that corruption in Chicago and Cook County is pervasive would be an understatement. Unfortunately America will now have to live with the decision of chosing a Chicago politician as president and what that means for the nation as favors are repaid over the next four years...

She also writes of the Democratic Party's culture of corruption.

itzgerald says President-elect Obama was not implicated in the plethora of charges against Democrats Blago and Harris. The national media went out of their way to absolve him, too. But declaring Team Obama’s hands clean — especially with Blago crony and indicted Obama donor Tony Rezko in the middle of it all — is premature. (And if you’re wondering why I keep putting “Democrat” in front of the accused corruptocrats, it’s because the mainstream newspapers can’t seem to remember to identify their party prominently the way they do when Republicans are nabbed.)

...

Democrats and the media can no longer rest on the old rationalization that Blago is an exception to the “we’re cleaner than thou” rule. 2008 was the year of Democratic Reps. William “Cold Cash” Jefferson, Charlie “Sweetheart Deals” Rangel, and former Detroit Mayor Kwame “Text Me” Kilpatrick. It was the year Democratic Massachusetts State Senator Dianne Wilkerson got caught stuffing bribes from an FBI informant down her shirt. It was the year 12 Democratic leaders and staffers in Pennsylvania’s state Capitol were stung in a massive corruption scandal involving cash, sex and abuse of public office. And it was the year of multimillion-dollar embezzlement scandals at Democratic satellite offices of ACORN and the SEIU.

Wouldn't Some Vetting of The Chicago Way Have Been Helpful Before the Election? Actually, I'll take some vetting of Obama's political culture after the election. Won't get that either, of course.

Geraghty writes:

In light of allegations that the governor of Illinois was ready to auction off Barack Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder, does any major media organization feel like they examined the political culture that Obama came from sufficiently? Do the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major networks, the newsweeklies, the cable networks, etc. — do they feel that they really gave their readers and viewers a good sense of how Chicago politics works, and how that place shaped Obama?

The MSM seems to be taking the position that in a city in which most politicians are extraordinarily corrupt, Obama is to be praised for being merely ordinarily corrupt.

Thanks to CJ for that.

And Yeah... Obama did in fact meet Blago on November 5th.

It is unlikely in the extreme that Obama plotted corruptly with Blago shortly after having been elected president. That's not the way the favor bank works, after all. The guy with more power doesn't need the guy with less power very much.

It does however underscore Obama's breathless dishonesty on his contacts with his various criminal associates -- he simply makes shit up out of whole cloth. He just doesn't care that there is a factual record to rebut his lies-- he knows the Obamamedia won't call him out.

Thanks to Intaglio.

Misprison of a Felony? Unlikely that Obama's mere failure to report a Blago shakedown would itself be criminal -- the case law requires an active, culpable step such as concealment, not mere inaction. Obama might want to take a bit more care, though, in lying about the meeting now.

Doubt on November 5 Meeting: Tom Maguire notes that Blago didn't seem to say they'd met on November 5 contemporaneously, making him wonder about this single report claiming a meeting.

Still, as he also notes, Axelrod previously said they'd had discussions about the Senate seat.

Yet More: KHQA Yanks Their Articles Stating There Was a Meeting: Are they hiding the truth? Or stealth-correcting an error by simply yanking the articles without admitting they got the story about the meeting wrong?

Thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (65)
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Only a few days left. The 400,000th care package will go out this weekend.

Thanks to Richard McE, who's been reminding about this for a week now but I've kept spacing on it.

Posted by: Ace at 11:17 AM | Comments (13)
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