Irony much? Oh yes, very much.

This is the clip where Clinton supposedly becomes "red-faced" in anger at a reporter asking a question. I'd suggest skipping it, actually, because while he's clearly annoyed, he's not visibly angry. He doesn't lose his composure. Given a tough charge is being leveled against him, he has leeway to get angry, but he really doesn't.

However.... about halfway through his story about overhearing a conversation in a casino about pro-Hillary union workers not being allowed to caucus for her (see the Jon Stewart clip below) transforms into something quite a bit more extravagant: Now he's no longer "overhearing" any such conversation, but escorting six Hispanic women somewhere where they each tell him they were prevented from signing up to attend the caucus. And he adds he's heard "hundreds" of similar stories.

Well! That little fib seems to have grown into a Paul Bunyan-style tall tale in just a couple of days.

Posted by: Ace at 03:24 PM | Comments (25)
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Some people want to be teachers. They like the feeling of authority and superiority.

Some of these same people, alas, don't know jackshit about any conventionally-taught subject.

Solution? Talk to a bunch of teenagers about sex and get the thrill of knowing more than your audience.

Posted by: Ace at 03:13 PM | Comments (16)
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John Ellis' answer is yes, and while all this is interesting, the whole piece seems to be speculation. If there's any factual hook to this -- like an actual rumor of Google interest in the Dying Lady -- I missed it. Still, kinda fun to think about.

Google would, if anything, make the Times even more leftwing if you can imagine such a thing. But I'd be interested in seeing what sort of job Pinkie Sulzberger manages to land once his dubious services are no longer required at the family business.

I see a failed talk-show on Al Gore's Current TV in his future. And other failures too. A new magazine, quickly bankrupted after four or five issues. Buying a stake in an up-and-coming independent production company, which then produces a string of failures and goes belly-up.

Lots of fun stuff that rich 20 year olds get to play around with when the family fortune permits them.

Via Protein Wisdom, which, among lots of other good stuff, wonders why the Soros study documenting Bush's "lies" gets spun by the press as news, whereas the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth's own press releases were greeted by an MSM investigation into their "partisan connections."

I haven't seen a single MSM story yet note that the "lies" story was bought and paid for by radical leftist George Soros. They keep claiming his shell companies are independent "non-profit" groups.

Posted by: Ace at 02:41 PM | Comments (16)
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Or a rock.

That's the actual picture, minus the Ron Paul sign of course.

Photoshop provided by Holland Studios, which does a lot of funny photoshops.

Story provided by Slublog, in the sidebar.

Posted by: Ace at 02:05 PM | Comments (41)
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Romney 28, McCain 25, Giuliani... 19. Ouch.

Post-Fred. Biggest issue providing separation? Immigration. Of those 15% of voters who named immigration as a top issue, 50% went for Romney, 14% for McAmnesty.

Fredheads seem to be coalescing around the next-most-conservative candidate, as blogpolls indicated.

Via Hot Air, which is despairing that all its old Hugh Hewitt jokes just don't play with the same ironic bite as they did a couple of weeks ago.

Posted by: Ace at 01:42 PM | Comments (44)
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From down around 320 to up, at day's end, 299.something-something.

Wall Street pulled off a stunning comeback Wednesday, surging higher in late trading and wiping out what looked to be yet another precipitous decline. The Dow Jones industrials, down more than 323 points in earlier trading, ended the day with an advance of just under 300 points, according to preliminary calculations.

While such volatility has become a hallmark of Wall Street's performance in recent months amid the ongoing housing and credit crisis, analysts saw some positive signs in the day's trading.

"There does come a point and time when the market itself recognizes that it got out of hand, and that is when bargain-hunters can come in," said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Avalon Partners.

The Fed's decision Tuesday to lower its federal funds rate by 0.75 percentage point to 3.5 percent has been met with some skepticism, but it gave intrepid investors Wednesday a reason to buy the severely dented stocks in the financial sector.

"You might say this is a belated reaction to what the Fed did this week, compounded by hopes for the Fed to do more next week," Cardillo said. Traders who bet on the Fed's target fed funds rate were pricing in on Wednesday a 100 percent chance of a 0.50 percentage-point cut by the central bank when it meets next week.

This can only benefit one man: "Flounder" from Animal House.

Thanks to Gabe.

No Cowbell! Some want cowbell. Um, no. Stock movements aren't cowbell worthy and in any event we've hit some rocky shoals. I don't provide dishonest, politically-invested wishful cowbell.

I only provide the real thing. Otherwise, this site is nothing more than several hundred morons spouting off on-line about subjects they know almost nothing at all about.

However, I have added some cowbell for the ladies alone. That pic of Flounder. He's holding a gun. While doing a crime.

That's sexy, baby.

Posted by: Ace at 01:17 PM | Comments (26)
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I had been willing to give McCain a partial pass on the Gang of 14 compromise, figuring it actually helped a few conservative judges through. So in net effect, it helped the cause.

Andrew McCarthy (Pretty In Pink, St Elmo's Fire) argues persuasively that's not the case at all.

Forcing our political representatives to tell us where they stand is a fundamental democratic principle. Even losing a “nuclear option” vote would have been valuable for conservatives: It would have identified which Senators believed — like Sen. McCain obviously believes — that preserving senatorial privilege took precedence over their constitutional duty to consent to, or withhold consent from, judicial nominees.

Besides preserving their privilege (which allows a single senator, for absolutely no reason, to prevent a president from fulfilling his constitutional obligation to appoint officers of the United States, without whom the government cannot function), McCain and his confederates were most determined to avoid accountability. That was the essence of the Gang of 14 deal. The senators pretended, in a bluster of high-minded twaddle, to resolve the controversy without disturbing the chamberÂ’s procedures. It was nonsense.

At the time, the president had made ten nominations that Democrats (and some Republicans) blocked. Three of them had been so abused by the senatorial intransigence that they finally withdrew their names from consideration. Of the remaining seven, the Gang of 14 agreed there would be a vote on only three. It then went on to preserve the filibuster, purporting that it could only be invoked in “extraordinary circumstances.”

That this was an utterly empty commitment was palpable from the agreement itself. The Whites assert:

While the agreement's "extraordinary circumstances" clause was vague and perhaps even unenforceable, the Gang never allowed it to be used successfully to allow a filibuster—most likely because the Gang of 14 also did not foreclose ultimate resort to the nuclear option in such situations.

This is preposterous. The Gang of 14 deal itself continued four of the filibusters, two of them conclusively. As the Whites concede, the deal “cited two nominees (William Haynes and Henry Saad) whose fates would not be decided by the agreement, effectively killing those nominations.”

Now follow this: four of the nominees (Haynes, Saad and two others) (a) had been filibustered before the deal and (b) were not given an up-or-down vote by the deal. Ergo, the deal kept those filibusters going. It did so, moreover, without anything approaching extraordinary circumstances — even as Sen. McCain and his accomplices claimed there would be no further filibustering absent such circumstances. And, as the Whites further confusingly acknowledge, the nominations of Haynes and Saad were “effectively kill[ed]”; that is, though the Whites say the Gang of 14 agreed those nominees’ “fates would not be decided by the agreement,” their fates were precisely decided by the agreement. Further, to the extent there might have been some wiggle room around the agreement, Haynes is to this day being blocked by McCain. So, though the deal he spearheaded may represent “straight talk” to Sen. McCain, it’s unlikely the nominees — or many other people — would see it that way.

I've been emailing McCarthy to find out if he or Levin has written an article about McCain's actual commitment to supporting -- or appointing, if elected President -- conservative judges. I don't think they've addressed this point specifically.

But I'll just note that we know when McCain is emotionally stirred by an issue. He gets angry. He called, for example, Senator Cornyn a "chickenshit" and screamed "Fuck you!" at him when he tried to alter McCain's comprehensive piece of shit to make it more palatable to sovereignty-minded conservatives.

Can anyone recall McCain putting his political chips on the line for a single conservative judge? Can anyone remember him displaying his well-known temper when a very fine man, Miguel Estrada, was slandered and filibustered by the Democrats for no other reason than the fact that he was eminently qualified, young, and Hispanic, and therefore a likely Supreme Court pick one day?

Because I don't.

A lot of people give Giuliani grief over his commitment to nominate conservative justices. I don't, myself. Because I know law and order guys hate liberal judges just as much as pro-life folks. Whether he's pro-choice or not, he doesn't want judges on the bench who invent new rights.

But I don't see much examination over McCain's commitment to judicial conservatism. And yet we know that in the filibuster fight, he sided with Democrats to, essentially, preserve and ratify their victories in blocking good, qualified conservative judges. And we also know that while he may expend political chits on a few issues of importance to him -- the war and pork, mostly -- we never seem to see him using that MSM-supplied halo in the service of helping conservative jurists get to the court.

Many of us seem to be assuming McCain would fight for a conservative judge. Why? What evidence is there of this? All the evidence we have points in the exact opposite direction.

If you like Justices Kennedy and Souter and Breyer, you're going to love President McCain. Because I see many such "consensus judges" with "solid bipartisan backing" being nominated by President McCain.

Posted by: Ace at 01:09 PM | Comments (39)
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Shit, they've uncovered our evil plan.

The new study suggests that warmer seas, caused by greenhouse gases blamed for a rise in global temperatures, are linked to an increase in vertical wind shear, a difference in wind speeds at different altitudes that can tear apart nascent cyclones.

Ok, not really. They're just suggesting that records of US landfall storms are more representative because prior to the 60s we couldn't accurately identify or track storms that started and died at sea. So they used US storm data in their research.

Still, it would have been awesome if we had really planned to use SUVs to send the damn things to Mexico instead of Galveston.

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 01:03 PM | Comments (10)
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While another one shows McCain with a three point lead.

The last four polls split -- two giving Romney a 5 point edge, two others giving McCain a five point edge (well, a five point and four point edge).

Giuliani's fall may be bad news for Romney, though. If he drops out, I'm thinking most of his voters go for McCain. Maybe not an overwhelming majority, but McCain gains.

Or, who knows: Perhaps all the McCain-leaning Giuliani voters have already defected to McCain, so that those left (like me, kinda-sorta) are those who view McCain as the least attractive candidate they could still maybe vote for.

Posted by: Ace at 11:51 AM | Comments (20)
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Hmm... Marines, soldiers, Hollywood prettyboys... the Westboro Cult seems drawn to male beauty like a moth to a flame.

A flaming flame. A flamboyantly flaming flame which is en fuego.

Though I have to say I'm not happy about all the times chicks have forced me to watch 10 Things I Hate About You.

But I put the blame for that on Julia Stiles. For some reason, chicks love Julia Stiles. I think it's because she's not actually all that goodlooking so she's not threatening.

Posted by: Ace at 11:38 AM | Comments (54)
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