Wait, wait, wait... I remember in 2004 the media was sternly lecturing us that such scurrilous attacks on someone's war record constituted a great evil called, what was it?, ah yes -- "Swift Boating."

Oh how the effete liberal sissies laugh, and laugh, and laugh...

I imagine the MSM will attack the feckless douchebag McGovern any moment now.

5... 4... 3... 2... 1...

Just give them a chance. It's coming.

Thanks to DrewM.

The Loser Dead of War: TMF notes:

So if getting shot down makes you an incompetent loser, what does that make the 55,000 who were killed?

Did he just basically besmirch all of the war dead and/or wounded from Vietnam?

Yup, sounds like it. Apparently the dead of war just weren't butch enough to hang with George Fucking McGovern.

Posted by: Ace at 01:22 PM | Comments (57)
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Seriously.

Bill Clinton accused Barack Obama's campaign of "playing the race card on me" and told a Philadelphia radio station that the Obama campaign took his Jesse Jackson comment and "twisted it for political purposes."

And as the interview concluded, Clinton turned to an associate and said, "I don't think I should take any s--t from anybody on that, do you?"

Let me see if I have this straight. African Americans vote with near unanimity for Democrats and when there’s finally an African-America candidate with a chance to win the party’s nomination, the most recent Democratic President accuses that African-American candidate of ‘playing the race card’?

Best Democratic PrimaryÂ…EVER.

Now Clinton denies ever saying it.

Today in Pittsburgh, Clinton was asked what he meant by saying the Obama campaign was playing the race card on him.

“When did I say that, and to whom did I say that?” Clinton asked, per ABC News' Sarah Amos.

“On WHYY radio yesterday," he was told by an NBC/National Journal reporter.

“No, no, no," Clinton said. "That’s not what I said. You always follow me around and play these little games, and I’m not going to play your games today. This is a day about election day. Go back and see what the question was, and what my answer was. You have mischaracterized it to get another cheap story to divert the American people from the real urgent issues before us, and I choose not to play your game today. Have a nice day.”

HeÂ’s really trying to kill Hillary's chances of winning isnÂ’t he?

Posted by: DrewM at 12:40 PM | Comments (39)
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I donÂ’t believe it for a minute but here you go.

Neither Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama would get the support of 50 percent of New York voters against Senator John McCain, a Siena College poll found today.

With the focus on the Pennsylvania Democratic primary today, even New York has become a tight race for the presidency, Siena found.

Clinton has a four-point lead and Obama has a five-point lead over McCain, the poll found.

“New York is looking more ‘purple’ than ‘blue’ these days, since neither Clinton or Obama gets 50 percent of the vote against McCain, and both Democrats have small and shrinking leads against the Arizona Republican,” said Steven Greenberg, Siena poll spokesman.

When you combine that with this poll showing him close in California, you can only think people are playing with pollsters or the Obama/Clinton fight is hurting the Democrats (at least for now).

If the McCain people believe this stuff I think it spells bad news for conservatives. McCain has said he wants to contest blue states and that means heÂ’s going to have to move further left to do that. And if McCain does win the presidency by taking previously Democratic strongholds, what exactly will he owe conservatives when it comes to appointments and policy decisions?

I know a lot of people deride ‘base elections’ but I prefer it to be clear to a politician what positions and which people are responsible for their success. If Maverick wins with lots of Democrats and independents, it won't be conservatives.

And yes, I know Reagan drew a lot of Democrats but he was a lot more conservative than Maverick is. Let's be honest, McCain's relationship with and to the conservative base of the Republican Party is very different than Reagan's was.

How could this play out and hurt Maverick? more...

Posted by: DrewM at 10:12 AM | Comments (45)
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The ad:

I have to say I do not for the life of me understand Allah's reaction here.

It is immaterial that the runner-up in the Republican Primary -- Mike Huckabee -- is a bleeding heart on death penalty cases. That's why many of us rejected him. What has that got to do with John McCain?

If the point is that there are a lot of people who agree with Huckabee's sta ce... well, I don't know. I'm sure there are some, as there must be. Obviously the death penalty is popular in America and particularly so in the Republican Party so... huh?

Seems like a good ad to me.

People don't vote on "issues." They vote impulses-- that is, they do not look to see what a candidate claims his precise position is on ever single issue. They look for his general impulse -- on trade, is he basicaly pro or basically anti? On taxes-- raise 'em or lower 'em? On crime and punishment -- justice first or mercy first?

I'm so tired of hearing from the left that we need a "substantive" discussion on the exact points of Obama's health care program vs. Hillary. Why? They're both fantasies anyway. Even if a health care plan were to be passed at all, it would be so changed by legislative bargaining as to look almost nothing at all like the starting presidential proposal.

As said in the Way of the Gun, "A plan is just a list of things that ain't gonna happen."

And so it is with Barack Obama. This is a powerful ad, I think, because it lets us know on what side of the justice/mercy line he's on. He's on the compassion/mercy/rehabilitation/let he who is without sin side of the divide.

That's important information. Why it's a wrong or crude to point that out is beyond me.

Posted by: Ace at 09:46 AM | Comments (31)
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Actually this is the sort of alarmism that alarms me, because it seems like science, rather than goo-goo Greenpeace political affinities, is driving it.

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

...

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

There is no doubt that the next little ice age would be much worse than the previous one and much more harmful than anything warming may do. There are many more people now and we have become dependent on a few temperate agricultural areas, especially in the US and Canada. Global warming would increase agricultural output, but global cooling will decrease it.

Millions will starve if we do nothing to prepare for it (such as planning changes in agriculture to compensate), and millions more will die from cold-related diseases.

Oh, it gets worse, but I don't want to ruin your day. He notes the earth's "natural state," if you will, involves most of North America and Europe being buried under 1.5km of glacial ice, and we're actually in nice little pause from that situation. But a real Big Chill could change that.

I have trouble crediting such scenarios, just because they are so beyond my experience, but maybe it's time to start pumping out greenhouse gases as fast as the dickens.

Thanks to JackM.

Posted by: Ace at 09:33 AM | Comments (75)
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Got a couple of Hollywood-related links for ya.

First up, Sigourney Weaver says that she wanted to do another Ripley movie before Fox destroyed the franchise with Aliens vs. Predator.

“The last time [Ridley Scott and I] saw each other we talked about it. The character is still interesting [and] I’d love to work with Ridley again,” Weaver said. “But Fox has effectively killed it because of ‘Alien vs. Predator.’ What else can you do with the creature? You can take the situation, you can go back to where they came from. …To play someone who ages a couple hundred years was fascinating. [But] let [Ripley] rest.”

Ripley was, of course, the finest film heroine of all time, so I'm presently on my way to Century City to bomb the Fox offices. The Xenomorph wasn't bad in those films either.

Second, Victor Davis Hanson is unhappy with Hollywood and he's singled out as one reason why:

It is more interested in political correctness than profits, as the Iraq War movie bombs attest. Talent is no longer gravitating to Hollywood, but staying put in Europe and Asia. Alternate media, from the Internet to video games to cable television, mean that fewer go to the movies anymore (I went once in the last 12 months). The old bread-and-butter genres—like the Western or the war movie—are either moribund or merely landscapes for political revisionism.

One difference is the steady decline in the quality of male actors. We simply do not have a James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Bill Holden, or John Wayne any more, much less brilliant against-the grain actors like a Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, or a Yul Brenner, nor character actors like a Slim Pickens or a Ben Johnson.

Today’s he-man actors don’t even sound the same as the old breed. Compare the speech patterns and intonation of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracey, Henry Fonda or Bill Holden to those of a Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks—and there seems to be a new, but separate species of male. The appeal of a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, or Daniel Day-Lewis is that they sound like, well, the old breed rather than sensitive metrosexuals.

There's two problems here. First, he picks Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, and Tom Hanks to be "today's he-man actors." Don't think so, homie. At the top of the list would have to be Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, and Will Smith. And there are several young actors with some serious chops that are worth keeping an eye on (for example, the younger guys in The Departed). As far as character actors go, Kevin Spacey and Ed Norton cannot go without mention.

Second, it's true that the Western and the War Movie have lost audiences, but it's not because Hollywood lacks good male actors. Tastes change. John Wayne turned out two westerns or war movies a year from 1940 to 1970 (sometimes as many as three! in a single year) and people ate it up. Good for them, but I just saw 3:10 to Yuma and that has pretty much satisfied my interest in Westerns for the rest of the year. I might watch Tombstone if it comes on the TV.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:30 AM | Comments (77)
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Impress your friends by saying Michael Barone-ish things about precisely what kind of a vote Obama needs out of Philly to deny Hillary a big night.

Something to keep in mind: those racist, bitter, Bible-thumpin' shotgun-pumpin' cousin-humpin' outhouse-dumpin' small towns will be reporting their tallies late.

BPT -- Bitter People Time and all.

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (18)
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Little by little, the MSM begins to tiptoe up the line of admitting its great, central sustaining myth is shabby lie and always has been.

"I didn't go to journalism school," Stengel said. "But this notion that journalism is objective, or must be objective is something that has always bothered me - because the notion about objectivity is in some ways a fantasy. I don't know that there is as such a thing as objectivity."

This is the same guy who claimed that "People trust us [journalists] to make decisions" and that journalists are "experts at what we do." His new remarks continue in that vein:

"[F]rom the time I came back, I have felt that we have to actually say, ‘We have a point of view about something and we feel strongly about it, we just have to be assertive about it and say it positively,'" Stengel said. "I don't think people are looking for us to ask questions, I think they're looking for us to answer questions."

No, they're looking for you to talk to people who actually might have answers and report on what they say. And if there is a split in authority, they're looking for you to report both (or all) answers, not use your scary-honed journalistic expertise to decide among them which is true.

Posted by: Ace at 08:08 AM | Comments (24)
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I'm posting this as comment fodder. I guess the angle here is just the ongoing debate over whether marriage is actually good for men.

I know a lot of women question that as well.

I hear a lot of good things about marriage, too. But mostly... not so much. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:35 AM | Comments (144)
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I don't jog. I have healthier pursuits than that.

Frequent masturbation may help men cut their risk of contracting prostate cancer, Australian researchers have found. It is believed that carcinogens may build up in the prostate if men do not ejaculate regularly, BBC News reported on Wednesday. The researchers surveyed more than 1,000 men who had developed prostate cancer, and 1,250 men who had not. They found that men who had ejaculated the most between the ages of 20 and 50 were the least likely to get cancer. Men who ejaculated more than five times each week were a third less likely to develop prostate cancer.

Sexual intercourse may not have the same effect because of the higher risk of contracting a sexually transmitted disease, which could in turn raise the risk of cancer.

So masturbation good, frequent masturbation better, and actual sex risky?

Check, check, and check.

I think I'll start smoking more!

Thanks to DrewM.

Posted by: Ace at 06:56 AM | Comments (60)
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