You'd think this would be easier.

All Michael Buday wanted to do was take the last name of his wife, Diana Bijon, when they married.

But it took two years, a lawsuit alleging sex discrimination and a change in California law before he picked up his new drivers license in the name of Michael Bijon on Monday.

"It was personal. I feel much closer to (Diana's) father than I do mine. She asked me to take her name and I thought it would be very simple. I never imagined the state would make it so difficult," Michael Bijon, 31, told reporters.

...

After months of frustration, the Los Angeles computer programmer and his ER nurse wife Diana, 29, took their problem to the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

A double barrel name would have been no problem, nor would Diana and Michael deciding to each keep their birth names. But California and some 40 other U.S. states provided no place on the marriage license application, and driving license, for the groom to choose the bride's surname.

Portly Pirate calls this the ultimate in P-whippitude, but...

Buday... or Bijon? Question: If you're a guy with a lame last name and your wife has a better one, is there any allowance here?

What if you were dating, say, a girl with the last name Reagan, for example? And your own last name was Lipshitz?

Not good enough? Okay, what if she's part Commanche Indian and her real given last name is Skywalker? You still gonna cling to your lame name out of a sense of patriarchal obligation, huh?

Not me. I'd be Ace Skywalker so fast it would make your head spin, buddy.

Posted by: Ace at 02:01 PM | Comments (71)
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(I've tried to write this darn post three times, but I've left the broken & bleeding drafts in the internet ether every time. This time, I'll push forward and do the whole thing in one bite.)

* SPECIAL NOTE TO RUSH LIMBAUGH: Hey Rush. How ya' doin'? Big admirer of your work, especially "Operation Chaos". I know that you get summaries of the best posts on the internet every day from your dilligent staffers, and hopefully one of them will find this like they did with Ace's post about Reverend Wright last week. One favor? When you plug "Ace of Spades" on your show, please remember that it's ace.mu.nu, not ace.com, and I'll consider that to be credit enough for myself. Ace lets me play with the blog when he's recovering from hangovers or incarcerated for "72 hour mental health observation periods", so he deserves all the credit for the work. Plus, he'll take care of me with a bigger bonus check at the end of the year. We ARE getting bonus checks this year, right Ace? *

When Rush Limbaugh announced his "Operation Chaos" with the intention of throwing Hillary Clinton a life preserver & stretching out the (D) primaries until June, I thought it was a great idea. I never imagined it would be part of helping resurrect Hillary's campaign, but then again, I never knew that Whitey invented AIDS to kill the Black Man (You'd think that being white myself, "The Man" could have sent me a frickin' postcard or something). Ever since he announced the operation, I've had an uneasy feeling that I've heard about this before. Somewhere in my mind, there was a wisp of a memory about an operation that consisted of getting deep into enemy territory and pissing in their Margaritas (gratuitous Cinco de Mayo reference) or slipping a wrench into the works.

Last week, I got my "American Rifleman" magazine in the mail, and now I remember what "Operation Chaos" reminds me of: "Project Eldest Son", a SOG operation from 1967 to 1969 that attempted to affect the North Vietnamese Army's morale with sabotaged rifle, mortar & machine gun ammunition. I'll go into more detail after the break, but unfortunately I can't find an "open" version of the article to link here (there's a copy on the NRA's website - American Rifleman is the official publication of the NRA - but it's in an area limited to members only), so I'll try to excerpt enough of the article for "fair use". Sorry about the length, but you know how I get when it's a technical issue. more...

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 01:02 PM | Comments (54)
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Including Iron Man and a "designer dominatrix metallic suit".

It's hip and edgy.

There's a link in the article with some pics.

Haaawt!

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 12:57 PM | Comments (6)
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Funny how the networks are quick to accede to the political desires of liberals, without worrying too much about "pandering" or subcontracting their own highly-trained sense of news-value to the lay public, so long as that lay public can be used as a pretext to do what what the liberals in the newsroom want to do anyway.

Imagine if FoxNews announced "We're going to have Wright updates every half hour, because that's what our viewers want."

I imagine they'd be castigated for deferring to their bitter, gun-clinging audiences' wishes.

Because CNN has a better audience, of course. It's liberal, and, as such, can be trusted to help make the big news-judgment decisions.

Because ultimately it's not a J-school credential that empowers one to decide what should and should not be in the national debate -- it's an adherence to the liberal political philosophy.

Thanks to Blacksheep.

Self-Congratulatory: Allah notes in this video how ostentatious John Roberts is in declaring his network to be officially in the tank for Barack Obama, as if he expects to be congratulated for it.

Which of course he will be. And those who dare to ask difficult questions of Obama will be maligned. Ask Charlie Gibson.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (27)
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No content warning, despite being from The Hostages. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:18 PM | Comments (17)
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This anchor is black, but what's the deal with putting on the Shaft Seduction voice when reading Kwame Kilpatrick's text messages?

Ah, well. Most newsreaders are failed actors at heart. I guess he's just tapping his inner blaxploitation thespian.

Thanks to Bart.

Posted by: Ace at 12:04 PM | Comments (23)
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Jeff Foxworthy just emailed me to say, "Oh, right! I forgot that one!"

Nothing announces to friends and family that you lived a full, rich, vibrant life than your final request of being buried inside a downscale beer can.

Thanks to Paulitics.

Thanks for the headline to no particular reason.

Posted by: Ace at 11:44 AM | Comments (38)
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Can anyone else understand this logic?

There may have been some element of racism among these culturally conservative voters, who support Democrats if they think the politician is strong and empathetic toward their struggles; Obama appeared neither.

So such Democrats generally support a politician, no matter what his race, if he appears "strong and empathetic toward their struggles." Obama, by Hunt's own admission, "appeared neither."

Conclusion? "There may have been some element of racism."

Yes, there must have been, because such voters' disdain of Obama is easily explained by the factors you yourself just laid out, Al. So of course there must be secret reasons lurking below the obvious ones.

Thanks to Geraghty at the soon-to-be-called The Obama Spot.

Posted by: Ace at 11:28 AM | Comments (16)
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Good Lord, get a life, people:

After a Red Sox-Yankees argument spilled outside a bar, a Yankee fan aimed her car at a group of people to scare them and didn't brake, hitting and killing a man, authorities and witnesses said.

The Yankees fan, Ivonne Hernandez, was arraigned Monday on reckless second-degree murder and drunken driving charges and was held without bail. She did not enter a plea.

There's no aggravated vehicular homicide in baseball. There's no aggravated vehicular homicide in baseball!

Posted by: Ace at 11:22 AM | Comments (15)
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Interesting as always, but I find Hitch sadly, knee-jerkedly in a headlong rush to excuse Barack Obama himself (that old leftism is hard to quit), which in turn finds him looking for a convenient scapegoat.

You can click on the link for his attempt to absolve Barack by blaming Michelle; I'll just quote this.

Liberal comment on Wright, and on the incredible damage that this conceited old fanatic has done to the Obama campaign, tends to dwell on the negative effect that black chauvinist rhetoric has on white working-class voters. Fair enough, I suppose. But why should a thinking black member of the working class want any truck with a Farrakhan fan or with a moral idiot who thinks that the drugs and disease in the black community are imposed by an outside conspiracy? I don't need any condescending liberal to explain to me why black Americans are inclined to be touchy about the way their forebears were treated any more than I require a patronizing former Harvard law student to guide me through the anxieties of the gun-owning and hunting community. I can quite easily understand these points without pedagogic assistance. What I won't be told is that Tawana Brawley was right, or that AIDS is the fault of the government, or that Jews were behind the slave trade, or that there is a secret Masonic code in the dollar bill. And the apologist for murder "Minister Farrakhan" and his big-mouth Christian friends flirt with this kind of half-baked garbage every day.

Nettled at last by the way in which this has upset his campaign, Sen. Obama last week cut the ties that bound him to his crackpot mentor. Well, high time. But those who profess relief at this should perhaps revisit what they thought (and wrote) about the earlier Philadelphia speech in which Obama was held to have achieved the same result with less trouble. If he was right last week, then the Philly speech was a failure on every level, and if it was a failure on every level, and thus left Obama hideously vulnerable to the very next speech made by his foaming pastor, then that must raise questions of eligibility for the highest office.

Let me get to the left of Hitchens and rap him for seeking a Lady MacBeth in Margaritaville -- some people claim there's a calculating, malign woman to blame.

Whatever "influenced" Obama to choose and support a conspiratorial racist demagogue as his "spiritual mentor," it was still Barack Obama's decision to do so.

Barack Obama had at least one reason to seek the blacker-than-thou cred that Wright gave him that Michelle Obama lacks -- Barack Obama, being mixed race, had to strive to show his "authenticity," a need Michelle Obama didn't have.

Thanks to both CJ and Alice H.

You Definitely Can't Blame Oprah Winfrey... who left Wright's church long ago, when Obama should have.

Winfrey was a member of Trinity United from 1984 to 1986, and she continued to attend off and on into the early to the mid-1990s. But then she stopped. A major reason—but by no means the only reason—was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

According to two sources, Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright's more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America's favorite daytime talk-show host. "Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost," said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey's personal sentiments. "She's always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn't be smart. She's been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright's anger-filled message didn't surprise her. But it just wasn't what she was looking for in a church." Oprah's decision to distance herself came as a surprise to Wright, who told Christianity Today in 2002 that when he would "run into her socially Â… she would say, 'Here's my pastor!' " (Winfrey declined to comment. A Harpo Productions spokesperson would not confirm her reasons for leaving the church.)

But Winfrey also had spiritual reasons for the parting. In conversations at the time with a former business associate, who also asked for anonymity, Winfrey cited her fatigue with organized religion and a desire to be involved with a more inclusive ministry. In time, she found one: her own. "There is the Church of Oprah now," said her longtime friend, with a laugh. "She has her own following."

The Great National Dialogue On Race -- Um, Where Is It? A good point:

Right about now, his much-heralded tutorial on race relations is looking more like Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech than the Gettysburg Address. Because, after last Tuesday's formal renunciation of his ties to Wright -- and presumably also his white grandmother and all blacks -- Obama looks not only tardy but thoroughly hypocritical. Didn't Obama's vaunted speech call for an open national dialogue on race, a subject he said was too important to ignore? Didn't he urge us to address those "old wounds" that still fester today? Whether you agree with him or not, isn't that exactly what Wright was doing last week when he reappeared in public to make more provocative statements on race and politics?

That's no way to start a dialogue, Mr. Obama. You don't call on people to talk and then renounce someone for speaking his mind. Because Wright didn't really say anything new last week, it seems that his only new sin is that he called Obama's bluff and, well, sparked another national dialogue on race. Which, of course, points to the absurdity of Obama's call for more racial dialogue in the first place.

Obama evidently hoped a racial dialogue would amount to a tidy academic seminar in the well-behaved, elite Ivy League, about home mortgage lending rates, test scores or economic opportunity. Presumably, after the lecture there would be time for questions and answers, maybe even some light refreshments, and no one who mattered would go on the attack.

Or better yet, maybe he imagined one of those interminably self-congratulatory racial roundtables at which the self-appointed black representative speaks to the Latino, Jewish and Asian chieftains to discuss their peoples' grievances, after which they'd all shake hands, pat themselves on the backs for "talking together" and herald a new day in race relations. Maybe they'd air the proceedings on public television or, at the very least, National Public Radio.

But lovely as it sounds, apart from the elite spokespeople, that's not the way race is lived and felt in America.

Posted by: Ace at 11:05 AM | Comments (18)
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