Not me.

Stashiu, whom you may know from Patterico's and his own blog, is in a fight to keep his adopted daughters due to a trivial paperwork error years ago. But the fight is expensive, and if you can manage it, he could use your help.

Stashiu is the proud father of two adopted daughters. Unfortunately, Stash later found that the lawyer who was supposed to square away all the legal paperwork for the adoption didn't quite get it right, so he has to now backtrack with new lawyers to get things right and finally seal the deal. The process is costing Stash and his family a king's ransom.

The tough financial situation and worry over the prospect of losing his two daughters is unsurprisingly starting to wear him down and take a toll on his health. Several people have been in contact with him over the weekend and suggested he start up a donation account.

And if you're a family law attorney... well, contact him!

Posted by: Ace at 01:39 PM | Comments (20)
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Members of the opposition are complaining that the current administration is dragging its feet setting up their emissions monitoring registry. The administration counters they're working on it, and blamed the previous administration for generally mucking things up (rule number one, deny deny deny). Said registry is required to demonstrate proof of Canada's compliance with emissions targets.

Targets they can't meet.

So the administration revised emission targets, claiming the ones previously agreed to are unachievable, totally unrealistic and caca poopoo.

Canada had agreed under the international Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to 6.0 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, but emissions have instead increased by more than 35 percent.

Last year, the government outlined a new plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent, based on 2006 levels, by 2020, saying the targets agreed to by the previous administration were unattainable.

I'll add Dave in Texas' .02 here: the revised target is also unachievable, totally unrealistic and caca poopoo.

The only way they can "reduce" emissions is to participate in the stupid ponzi game of trading carbon credits with other countries, because there's no way in hell they're actually gonna reduce jack shit. And if the UN overlords decide against them on registry compliance, they'll be barred from doing that.

I'm sure the current admin is really, really worried about that.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 12:48 PM | Comments (35)
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Which, for reasons I can't understand, is only being syndicated on Iowahawk's site.

You'd think it would at least get picked up by a Chicago paper. Or Oprah's magazine.

Dear Barry:

I am a graduate student at a large Midwestern university. Last semester I was seduced by an older female professor and we have been having a secret affair ever since. I know this is probably a "no-no," but despite our age gap we share many common ideas and values, and she has been very helpful in lining up grants and scholarships for me. The trouble is I recently discovered that she is also a fugitive bomb maker from a radical neo-Maoist terrorist splinter cell affiliated with the Manson family. My conscience tells me I ought to break things off, but I'm worried how it might affect my GPA. Please help!

Torn in Evanston

Dear Torn:

You did say "secret," didn't you? So let's keep it that way, and make sure you maintain plausible deniability. If Professor Hot Lips starts talking dirty about revolutionary bombing, try to steer the pillow talk back to something more innocuous, like Derrida or the price of arugula.

Thanks to RobG.

Even funnier than that, though, is Chris Matthews whining once again that some Republicans voted for Hillary.

Again, there was no such weary outrage when Kos directed his drooling minions to do the same thing to Republicans in Michigan.

Posted by: Ace at 12:47 PM | Comments (12)
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He's exercising his right to free speech by denying someone else theirs, but that's fine, because the speech he's stopping is worthless. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 PM | Comments (39)
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I saw this on FoxNews earlier. JackM. tipped me it was embeddable.

I'm posting this to alert everyone to the dangers of body dysmorphic disorder. It's a public service.

Although I am of course as horrified as this as I'm expected to be, I am somehow able to rationalize it as not so bad. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (66)
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Yes, they were ultimately right, but that was a 50/50 guess they got lucky on. Plainly, with only 20,000 votes separating Obama and Hillary (less than 2%), it was not accurate to declare Hillary the winner so early in the night.

Fox News waited until a quarter after one.

Does CBSNews confess its error and offer a forthright explanation of how they got it wrong?

If that's what you think, you haven't been paying attention.

They claim they had some kind of advanced information about exit polls before AP.

Really? Did that advanced information tell them Hillary was just barely going to squeak by with such a thin margin?

Posted by: Ace at 10:53 AM | Comments (24)
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Excessive force?

Most likely. But then, I find it easy enough to rationalize away.

Posted by: Ace at 10:10 AM | Comments (51)
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In case you're too cool to know, Two-Face is one of Batman's oldest villains. His backstory (not sure if this was always his backstory, or a later retcon) is kind of interesting: Harvey Dent was a crusading DA who was one of the only men in Gotham besides Jim Gordon who worked with Batman. In fact, Harvey Dent was working with Batman while Gordon was still hunting him as a vigilante (according to Batman: Year One, at least; in a cute turn, Dent was actually on Gordon's short-list as a likely suspect for the man disguising himself as Batman).

But then he got splashed with acid disfiguring half his face. And became obsessed with duality and the number 2. And began deciding whether to spare or murder people based on the flip of a double-headed silver dollar, one side bright and shiny, the other side scarred and deformed. And so one of Batman's few friends became one of the worst psychopaths in Gotham City.

Anyway. Although he showed up in Batman Forever as a glorified extra, playing second-fiddle to Jim Carrey's over-the-top Riddler, his make-up was fairly cheesy.

Apparently he's the next featured villain, and hopefully won't have to compete for screen time with a secondary villain. And his new make-up job is definitely not cheesy, but pretty horrific.

Picture of the new-look Two-Face here, but observe a Macabre Image Content Warning for general gruesomeness. I'm not sure they can get away with a PG-13 if this is what he's really going to look like.

Also, in case you missed it, here's the new trailer for Dark Knight.

Thanks to Dave R.

Posted by: Ace at 10:00 AM | Comments (47)
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We could be heroes.... just you and me...

It turns out that Shearman & Sterling, a 1,000-lawyer firm with offices in 19 cities all over the world, has substantial business dealings on six continents. Indeed, Shearman’s client care for Middle Eastern matters has established a new industry standard: The firm’s Abu Dhabi office states that it has pioneered the concept of “Shariah-compliant” financing. In Kuwait, the firm has represented the government on a wide variety of matters involving billions of dollars worth of assets. So the party underwriting the litigation on behalf of the Kuwaiti 12–from which all of the detainees have benefited–is one of Shearman & Sterling’s most lucrative OPEC accounts.

Shearman & Sterling did far more than just write legal briefs and shuttle down to Gitmo to conduct interviews about alleged torture for the BBC. In addition to its legal services, the firm registered as an agent of a foreign principal under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) as well as the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA) to press the Kuwaiti detaineesÂ’ cause on Capitol Hill. Shearman reported $749,980 in lobbying fees under FARA for one six-month period in 2005 and another $200,000 under the LDA over a one-year period between 2005 and 2006. Those are the precise time periods when Congress was engaged in intense debates over the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act, legislation which Shearman & Sterling and its Kuwaiti paymasters hoped would pave the way for shutting down Guantanamo permanently and setting their clients free.

Mr. Wilner, a media-savvy lawyer who immediately realized that the detainee cases posed a tremendous PR challenge in the wake of September 11, hired high-stakes media guru Richard Levick to change public perception about the Kuwaiti 12. Mr. Levick, a former attorney whose Washington, D.C.-based “crisis PR” firm has carved out a niche in litigation-related issues, has represented clients as varied as Rosie O’Donnell, Napster, and the Roman Catholic Church. Mr. Levick’s firm is also registered under FARA as an agent of a foreign principal for the “Kuwaiti Detainees Committee,” reporting $774,000 in fees in a one year period. After the U.S. Supreme Court heard the first consolidated case, the PR campaign went into high gear, Mr. Levick wrote, to “turn the Guantanamo tide.”

In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to accomplish two things: put a sympathetic “human face” on the detainees and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a part of al Qaeda’s jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a “teacher on vacation” who went to Afghanistan in 2001 “to help refugees.” The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden’s chief spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became the innocent victims of “bounty hunters.”

More at the link.

Posted by: Ace at 09:30 AM | Comments (31)
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Two weeks ago I wrote that a federal gas tax holiday wouldn't help consumers much because at least half of the benefit would go to sellers. I called it a pander and a waste of time, and I suggested that if we really wanted to help consumers by reducing high prices at the pump, the quickest way would be for states to have a gas tax holiday:

One avenue that should be explored is cutting state gasoline taxes. Of course, this would require action in the state legislatures, and then McCain couldn't hold himself out as some kind of hero of the people. State and local gas taxes are typically larger than the federal tax. More importantly, state gas taxes overwhelmingly increase the price for consumers more than they do for sellers.

A state gas tax holiday would work better than a federal gas tax holiday because it is much easier for gas companies to avoid high-tax, high-regulation states than it is to avoid federal taxes and regulation. That makes the supply much more elastic at the state level than at the federal level.

The last time we talked about this, I was challenged in the comments that an 18.4 cent decrease in gas taxes would result in an 18.4 cent decrease in the price at the pump. That's not the case because taxes are shared between consumers and sellers in proportion to the elasticities of supply and demand for the product. I estimated that at the federal level, about half the tax is paid for by consumers and half by suppliers. And now, I have numbers to back that up (PDF). The study also supports my contention that state gas tax holidays are where we can find a greater benefit for consumers.

Now, I'm pleased to see that states are considering gas tax holidays, including Florida, Missouri, New York, and Texas. When you get right down to it, the average savings will only be between $10 and $80 (depending on state) for the average consumer over the summer, but at least the state legislation has a chance of actually achieving what it's aimed at, especially in high-tax, high-regulation states: substantially lowering the price at the pump.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:26 AM | Comments (25)
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