Rusty wants help with complaints to these jerkoffs.

Posted by: Ace at 01:58 PM | Comments (9)
Post contains 26 words, total size 1 kb.

Clooney narrowly beat out Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Antonio Banderas for the honor.

Posted by: Ace at 01:54 PM | Comments (32)
Post contains 58 words, total size 1 kb.

Hm.

The MSM will confirm this shaky trend fifteen years after we withdraw completely from Iraq.

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (17)
Post contains 38 words, total size 1 kb.

No, seriously. Financially they're stable and prudent.

I remember those old "Invest in Iraqi Currency" ads that used to run in the sidebar when I had BlogAds. I didn't want to dis an advertiser, but I wasn't comfortable with those ads and I always wanted to reject them. I thought they were preying on the emotions on those patriotic Americans who wished us well in Iraq, and who wanted to make those well-wishes tangible, but who would probably end up losing money on their good intentions.

I have no idea how Iraqi currency itself is doing (other than knowing it's very stable) or if anyone made money on that, but I guess it wasn't a half-bad place to throw a few investment dollars after all.

PS: I'm not really telling anyone to invest in Iraq, by the way. I'm overstating for effect.

But if you were even considering heeding my investment advice, your investment portfolio is probably already well balanced between blue-chip Magic Beans and high-growth Pixie Dust, so I guess there wouldn't have been any harm anyway.

Posted by: Ace at 01:20 PM | Comments (14)
Post contains 198 words, total size 1 kb.

Just a tip from a commenter at Black Five who says he was at the hearing, but it all sounds plausible enough.

Thanks to DrewM.

Update: Black Five emails--

Attorney Jay Grodner showed up late. The Judge had him arrested with 20,000 bail. The judge (former Marine) read Grodner the riot act and finished up with a history of the Marine Corps and why Marines always have each others backs.

Grodner pled guilty and will pay $600 to the Semper Fi Injured Marine Fund.

Thanks to all who made justice happen for Sergeant McNulty.

Lou Dobbs on CNN will cover this story tonight.

Posted by: Ace at 01:06 PM | Comments (39)
Post contains 117 words, total size 1 kb.

I've already said conservatives are reading this statement uncharitably, but you know what? Huck's a dick so if Fred wants to pound on him for the line, have a party.

Thanks to someone.

Posted by: Ace at 12:21 PM | Comments (14)
Post contains 49 words, total size 1 kb.

As this guy notes, Stallone is fairly bright. I've always thought that -- even when he writes bad scripts, he still is writing scripts, now isn't he? And he's managed a few really good ones along the way.

He explains why Rambo doesn't take on Al Qaeda in the new Rambo film:

I thought the idea of Rambo dealing with Al-Qaeda, etc. would be an insult to our American forces that are actually dying trying to rid the world of this cancer. To have at the end of a 90 minute movie the character of Rambo seizing Osama bin Laden in a choke hold then dragging him into the Oval Office then tossing him in the President’s lap declaring “The world is now safe, Chief” would be a bit insulting.

Well, I think it's partly that, and partly the fact that Hollywood will not finance any movie featuring Muslim terrorists as the clear-cut villains they are without any moral equivalency injected into the narrative to "balance" it (as The Kingdom did recently). So he's partly lying about Hollywood politics and his unwillingness (or more accurately "inability") to confront them.

But he's right, of course, about the "insulting" nature of such a plotline. Comic-book characters have to confront comic-book problems and comic-book villains, not real-world problems and villains. I loved First Blood but hated Rambo. Because Rambo featured him "solving," mostly, a real-world (or at least putatively real-world) problem -- POWs left behind in Vietnam. That problem, if it is indeed real, is too real for our cinematic Sgt. Rock to take on.

I had the same problem with Rocky IV despite being a big fan of the series otherwise -- Rocky's going to take down the Soviet menace? Really?

And while I've praised Frank Miller for his courage in penning a Batman graphic novel featuring him taking on Al Qaeda, I've actually always had a bad feeling about the whole idea that I withheld. His intentions are praiseworthy, so I praised them. But Batman taking on Al Qaeda? I don't know if the mix of comic-book power fantasy and real-world horror will work. I suspect it won't.

In fact, I'm pretty sure it won't.

Doesn't seem like that book is ever actually going to come out, though, so I guess we'll never know for sure.

There are a lot of movies Hollywood could make about men fighting Al Qaeda. There are, in case they haven't noticed, real flesh-and-blood heroes doing so right now. Such movies would make hundreds of millions of dollars and couldn't be assailed politically because they're based on real world events.

And, because most of our War on Terror vets have high legal bills owing to the fact that they're all kill-crazy maniacs, I'm sure Hollywood could purchase their life-rights fairly cheaply.

But we won't get a movie like that, of course. We will get movies about the war, movies like Lions for Lambs and Stop-Loss and In the Valley of Eljah, featuring vets as victims/dupes ("if you don't do well in school, you wind up in Iraq") who need saving by Hollywood's preferred heroes, to wit, lawyers, college professors, reporters and psychiatrists.

But Rambo taking on bin Ladin? Nah. Sure, he's fighting real world villainy in his new movie, but it's distant from us, more easily trivialized.

Thanks to spongeworthy.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (37)
Post contains 568 words, total size 4 kb.

I think this says more about his off-the-cuff dog-ate-my-homework thought processes, such as they are, than about his actual concept of constitutionalism.

There's no doubt that the "living Constitution" terminology is one favored by the left as a justification for changing by judicial fiat what is supposed to be an unchangeable document (save for Amendments, a process of change clearly spelled out in the Constitution). That is I think what Bryan seizes upon in
critiquing the Happy Huckster.

But Huck here is, I think, in context, defending the basic notion that the Constitution can be changed by the amendment process and always was envisioned as being changeable via this route. He's defending his idea of outlawing abortion and gay marriage by amendment (not by judicial fiat), so while he's using the language favored by the left to explain that there is nothing "unconstitutional" about changing the Constitution by the amendment process explicitly contained within in it, he's not saying anything particularly outrageous from a conservative point of view.

Whether or not the amendments he seeks are desirable or politically possible -- or more likely just silly panders to his core constituency -- is another question. But no one, certainly not conservatives who believe, ultimately, in the Constitution and its plan for a supermajoritarian process of amending it, can really find too much fault with the Huckster here.

Hell, even on his use of the language of the left, I give him a pass. It's really just using their own claims against them -- they're forever claiming the Constitution can be changed on a judge's whim because it's a "living, breathing document," so certainly it can be changed by the process explicitly coded within it.

We all believe in a living, breathing Constitution, ultimately. The difference is that the left thinks that a judge can amend the Constitution, whereas an American who actually believes in the document thinks it requires 2/3rds of both houses of Congress and 3/4s of the state legislatures. There is textual support for one but not the other.

On the other hand, Huck's apparent desire to be named the Republican nominee so that he can lose 63-35 in the general election has spurred him to embrace the Confederate flag, which is simply politically toxic. And once again he injects this painful issue into the GOP nomination process so that all the other candidates can suffer.

I guess maybe he saw an opening to peel away some of Ron Paul's neoconfederate support.

Kinda-sorta related, Ray Robinson writes of federalism and Thompson's principled embrace of it -- not just the standard form of federalism when I want the states to win, national control when the states aren't doing what I'd prefer -- and how that can sell in South Carolina and the south generally.

Oh, and Fred picks up another endorsement: Melanie Morgan of Move America Forward.

Apologies... In a rush to write and write "punchy," I first wrote that Bryan "tore Huck a new one." He objected to that, stating that he didn't rant and in fact announced his intent not to rant.

I changed that "tore Huck a new one" to "critiqued him." It's far closer to the mark; I just couldn't think of something better than the anodyne "critique" as I wrote, so I overstated not to distort Bryan's post but rather just to avoid a lame word.

The lame word says it better, though.

Posted by: Ace at 11:46 AM | Comments (11)
Post contains 585 words, total size 4 kb.

Oh, man.

This is fucking brilliant. It's real, too. The crimes are, at least.

Do we need more programs for these unhinged lunatics? Do we perhaps need to require the entire staff of the NYT to register as likely sex offenders -- for the children?

Well-played, Iowahawk.

Thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (32)
Post contains 86 words, total size 1 kb.

Very funny.

And true, no matter what Bryan from Hot Air thinks.*

* At least it was true in my day and my area of the country, which was not the Dallas area. Any kid who liked the Cowboys just didn't have that American impulse to support an underdog or an upstart. Any kid who liked the Cowboys in the 70's and 80's -- and who wasn't from Dallas -- just wanted to go with the Master Team and enjoy the Torchlight Parades and the Party-Approved Displays of Aryan Female Flesh.

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Comments (32)
Post contains 113 words, total size 1 kb.