This story, about Mitt Romney's unpopularity among his fellow candidates, is hilarious to me for some reason. Perhaps it's this line:

Mr. Schnur used a schoolyard analogy to compare Mr. Romney, the ever-proper Harvard Law School and Business School graduate, to Mr. McCain, the gregarious rebel who racked up demerits and friends at the Naval Academy.

“John McCain and his friends used to beat up Mitt Romney at recess,” Mr. Schnur said.

Posted by: Slublog at 08:41 AM | Comments (37)
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The Washington Times' Stacy McCain has an interview with Roger L. Simon today, which includes some general observations about the blogosphere, but also some discussion of Fred Thompson's relationship with the blogs. It's a bit disjointed, but Ace, Allah, Malkin and many other conservative blogs get mentioned, so you might click over to take a look. A taste:

While some conservative bloggers, among them Mrs. Malkin (whose syndicated columns appear in The Washington Times) and Mary Katherine Ham of Townhall.com, are well-known from their appearances as cable-TV news commentators, many of the most popular bloggers operate behind pseudonyms, including PJM affiliates Allahpundit (HotAir.com), Ace of Spades (Ace.mu.nu) and Rusty Shackleford (MyPetJawa.mu).

The revelation that Mr. Thompson was a blog reader attracted a lot of support from those excited to discover a Republican candidate who shared their interest.

"He was like us. He was up at night reading Ace or whatever," Mr. Simon said. "But then when you start running for president, you've got about six minutes of free time a day."

The interview took place last week.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:27 AM | Comments (25)
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I don't follow Greta's missing-person-of-the-week program, so I didn't really know the details of this case until today. The only reason it has come to my attention is because the alleged murderer, Drew Peterson, is a colossally stupid asshole. And his lawyer seems to be equally idiotic.

Apparently, they wanted him to do a radio competition where women try to win a date with him. It sounds like this never moved beyond the "hey, maybe we could" stage, as station officials stomped on it quick. Still, pretty creepy.

Hours after radio host Steve Dahl agreed to the suggestion by Joel Brodsky, the attorney for former Bolingbrook police Sgt. Drew Peterson, WJMK-FM officials said the game would not take place.

"Steve never intended on doing this promotion or any promotion that would put his listeners in harm's way," station vice president/general manager Peter Bowen said in a prepared statement.

Peterson is being investigated for the deaths of his third and fourth wives.

P.S. Sorry for all the entertainment-related posts this morning. I'm a bit politicked out at the moment. Ace and Slublog had some interesting and contentious late-night posts about the latest political news, so keep scrolling.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 01:22 AM | Comments (28)
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I have a confession to make: I've never seen a Rambo movie. I understand that there have been three of them and that they were pretty popular. Well, a new one, cleverly titled "Rambo", will be in theaters starting tomorrow, and the one review I could find gave it 9/10.

Apparently, the new film is dark and violent, without the cheesy action-hero elements that I would have expected. And it looks like there will be 236 times as many deaths as in the first movie. How do I know? The Sunday L.A. Times had this: more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 01:11 AM | Comments (48)
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The Beijing Olympics are going to be quite a spectacle, and not just because of the events. It sounds like Beijing's polluted air will be the athletes' greatest competitor. Many countries are setting up their training camps away from the enervating effects, some of them as far away as Japan and South Korea. The U.S. track and field teams will be based about 250 miles to the east in the peninsular city of Dalian.

"The magnitude of the pollution in Beijing is not something we know how to deal with. It's a foreign environment. It's like feeding an athlete poison," said David Martin, a respiratory expert who is helping train U.S. marathoners.

Frank Filiberto, a physician for the U.S. boxing team, thought concerns about Beijing's pollution were exaggerated -- until he came to visit.

In November, he accompanied 11 boxers to the Chinese capital for a competition. On their first morning there, Filiberto said, the men returned from their daily 20-minute training run complaining of burning eyes, coughing, congestion and breathing difficulties. Only six of the 11 boxers ended up feeling well enough to compete.

"In my opinion boxers are probably the finest athletes in the world," Filiberto said. "But they didn't think they could make it three rounds in Beijing." Filiberto and the coaches were so alarmed that they ordered the boxers to jog only in hotel hallways thereafter.

Randall L. Wilber, the U.S. Olympic Committee's senior sports physiologist, has come to Beijing a half-dozen times since March 2006 to study the effects of pollution on athletic performance. He concluded that it could be "huge."

I wouldn't want to run in that. When the wind blows the wrong way here in Los Angeles, I can feel it immediately in my lungs when I'm running (though not as badly as when I was in London). And I don't have the super-powered bellows of an Olympic competitor. The U.S. Track and Field team is looking at using face masks even though the protective gear will slow them down during events.

The article notes that countries are also concerned that bad food, containing carcinogens, pesticides, and drugs could sideline the athletes. Perhaps the political nature of the city selection for the games needs to give greater weight to the environmental conditions of the candidate cities. How "huge" could the effect of pollution be?

Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski, a Boulder, Colo., bicyclist who competed in the 2004 Olympics in Athens and is a contender for a spot on this year's U.S. mountain biking team, said that when he arrived in the Chinese capital, the sky was a crystal-clear blue and he thought that concerns about pollution had been overblown. But on the day he was to race, he said, the smog was so thick "you could barely see a few city blocks" from his hotel window.

About 20 minutes into the race, Horgan-Kobelski started having trouble breathing.

"I struggled with it for a while," he said in a phone interview. "You're breathing as hard as you can but you feel like your muscles don't want to work. You're filling your lungs but you don't know what's going in there."

About halfway through the roughly 30-mile race, Horgan-Kobelski said, "my body sort of shut down." He pulled over and vomited.

It wasn't until he got to the athletes' lounge that he learned that he wasn't unique. Only eight of 47 contestants in the men's race finished; the others, including the Chinese riders, also suffered from breathing problems and dropped out.

Only eight of forty-seven finished? Yes, in mountain biking you usually have some guys drop out before the end. But not that many. I'm not surprised that the U.S. team considers a little lost speed a reasonable trade-off if it means actually finishing an event.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 12:42 AM | Comments (20)
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Iowahawk finagles official documents, somehow. I don't even think Canucks have a FOIA or whatever the hell we call it.

They probably do. But it's in French. It'd be like "fooowaaa" or something equally unpronouncable.

Iowahawk. Doing the job most Americans won't do, and that includes anything to do with hogs or Holley carbs.

thanks to commenter mare

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 09:45 PM | Comments (33)
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Straight talk?

I guess that's why there'll be no endorsement.

Thanks to Slublog.

I don't know if this is true, of course. I'm just happy that someone other than me is getting blamed for Fred's loss.

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 PM | Comments (26)
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How long is Mike Huckabee going to let this go on without strong condemnation?

I'm hearing from Florida readers the same kinds of push-polls, criticizing the non-Huckabee candidates, that we saw barraging South Carolina Republicans.

Did the push-polls really help Huckabee in South Carolina? They obviously didn't push him over the top. Maybe the complaints and bad publicity offset the benefit from spreading around derogatory (and in some cases, false) information about his opponents...

Why isn't Huckabee asking for the callers to be prosecuted, or filing complaints about these tactics? Why isn't he more harshly condemning these political smears? If I were running for president and someone were doing this nonsense using my name, I'd have much more to say than "I wish they would stop."

If these calls go on much longer without strong condemnation from the Huckabee campaign, one could reach the conclusion that he's not all that upset about the help.

Let's see some righteous indignation, Huckabee.

Posted by: Slublog at 06:32 PM | Comments (20)
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A real freak out by a standard Paulnut excitable type who gets very angry that other people don't understand "the Constitution" with the degree of precision afforded to him by the ten hours he spent reading Ron Paul's and various survivalist websites.

I love this radio host. He's so tauntingly calm. He knows that playing polite will send this guy into a rage, so he just gets more and more courteous and friendly.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 06:13 PM | Comments (60)
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I t seems possible, even likely.

Louisiana's social conservatives created the winning "Pro-life, Pro-family" slate in early January largely because we didn't know if Fred was still going to be a candidate at the time of our caucuses (turns out that he wasn't, by a few hours). Because we had almost all the state's social conservative leaders for Fred, we were also able to stave off Huckabee by use of this "pro-life, pro-family" slate. I was really pleased with the win last night, as it's not easy to beat McCain, Romney, and Paul without a candidate, but that's what we did.

About 90 percent of the pro-family slate was actually Thompson supporters. If Fred were to jump back into the race, he would almost certainly pick up all 47 of Louisiana's delegates (the whole point of LA's complicated system was to have an early vote while still not losing half our delegates like all the other early states have). That would put him AHEAD of McCain in the delegate count and only narrowly trailing Romney.

Is this proof Fred should have stayed in?

Well, with all due respect: Running an organization which was apparently clueless to this fact and thus dropping out hours before one's first actual win seems to indicate the opposite-- he made the right choice. I hate to be a dick about this, but a politician should have a basic competence at politics, for crying out loud.

From Hot Air, which has a fever, and the only cure is more Romney Florida surge!

Posted by: Ace at 04:03 PM | Comments (155)
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