Gotta get off the Iron Man thing and post news.

If you want to skip the cross-tabs stuff, read the first paragraph or two and then skip down to the "Dude?" at the end.

Tomorrow is do-or-die for Hillary. More and more delegates are publicly admitting what they'd long decided -- to support Barack Obama. Even many of Hillary's former supporters are shifting, and more threaten to should she not make an impressive stand tomorrow.

But there's actually an outside chance she will make such an impressive stand. If she can win Indiana convincingly and only narrowly lose North Carolina with all its black Democratic voters, she's got some real momentum.

And if she can actually beat Obama in North Carolina -- long considered an automatic win for him, and actually a easy, big automatic win for him -- Obama's own momentum is not merely arrested but reversed, and nearly disastrously. It's possible -- Obama always polls better than he performs.

And Hillary has a series of in-the-bag states coming up for her (West Virgina, Kentucky) and the Hillary-is-a-Winner storyline will dominate the news.

Wins would also allow her to effect "The Nuclear Option" -- ramming through a rules-change to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates and almost negating Obama's pledged-delegate lead. A majority of those on the rules committee are Hillary supporters, but they won't take such a serious and possibly calamitous step without serious evidence that she just might win this thing (and should win this thing).

Twin victories tomorrow would make that Nuclear Option... well, still very unlikely. But possible, at least.

Corrected: Hillary down by three, not up by three. Thanks to Allah for straightening out my loose shit.

Posted by: Ace at 10:29 AM | Comments (30)
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Three stars. Maybe three and a half, but it's hard to give such a silly bit of fluff three and a half stars -- though it should be said as far as silly fluff goes, this is pretty damn good silly fluff. Nah-- definitely three stars. The piss-poor final confrontation, which could have been Superman II level, is instead Superman Returns level, and just doesn't deliver.

Tony Stark, either "the DaVinci of our time" or "The Merchant of Death" or both, is a brilliant billionaire engineer and weapons magnate, irresponsible, unserious, selfish, and callow. He's an adult with the immaturity of a teenager but the vices of a dissipated playboy (namely, alcohol, womanizing, driving too fast, and a general disregard for other's needs or time spent waiting for him).

On a visit to Afghanistan to demonstrate his new wonder-weapon, the Jericho, the first weapon using his patented "repulsor technology" (though it should be noted the weapon doesn't seem terribly advanced in terms of actual effectiveness-- it's just basically a missile loaded with independently-targeted submunition warheads), his convoy is attacked by Taliban terrorists multiethnic but decidedly swarthy thugs whose chief political agenda seems to be blowing up villages and taking frightened farmers hostage for no particularly good reason. Maybe they demand ransom and tribute in the form of dirt and squalor.

And the convoy is attacked with Stark's own weapons, which have fallen into The Wrong Hands. more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:58 AM | Comments (106)
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What's the worst that can happen?

Erik Youngdahl and Michelle Garcia share a dorm room at Connecticut's Wesleyan University. But they say there's no funny business going on. Really. They mean it.

They have set up their beds side-by-side like Lucy and Ricky in "I Love Lucy," and avert their eyes when one of them is changing clothes.

My God I hope so.

Thanks to krakatoa.

Posted by: Ace at 08:10 AM | Comments (93)
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Who ya gonna believe, the anti-Israel AFP and its jihad corps of Hamas stringers or your own lyin' eyes?

Previous reports of the deaths of plucky and impish children must be updated to also include "collateral damage" to anti-tank weapons and machine guns. And the men carrying them, of course.

Thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 07:59 AM | Comments (16)
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Bill Ayers, famous "mainstream fixture" of the Chicago scene, poses for a magazine trampling the American flag when Barack Hussein Obama was but a sprightly lad of eight forty one years old.

"Mainstream." "Fixture."

I do concede Ayers has grown -- at least he's constraining himself to only desecrate flags, rather than living human bodies.

Another Obama-Ayers Connection: They seemed to have served on another board together. Though Obama continues to obfuscate, or as one Hillary supporter put it in another context, "shuck and jive" on the issue.

Posted by: Ace at 07:14 AM | Comments (51)
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Have a margarita, morons. It's on me!

I'd share a Cinco de Mayo story here, but I just don't have anything worthy of you guys.

Later: Okay, so all my Cinco de Mayo's end the same way. We go out for desserts then drinks. My friend passes out in the bar. I have to carry her out to the car while a hundred suspicious strangers watch. Then, for good measure, she pukes on my shoes once I get her in the car.

We do this every year.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:08 AM | Comments (27)
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If they think you're being evasive, they'll send you on a wild goose chase.

Federal judges grew increasingly impatient and sometimes angry Tuesday as they questioned government lawyers on why the United States denied asylum to three women who suffered genital mutilation in Guinea.

The three judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals must decide whether the Board of Immigration Appeals was right to deny asylum to the women and permit them to be returned to Guinea.

[...]

At the hearing, the judges seemed particularly upset at a conclusion by the government that it was fair to return the women to Guinea because they could not suffer further persecution since mutilation had already occurred. At times, all three judges raised their voices or cut off lawyers to make a point.

[...]

After lengthy arguments, the judges ordered lawyers to submit written records to show if the government had ever encountered an asylum case that was denied on the grounds that the same leg could not be amputated twice or the same organ removed again.

I doubt they'll find any, and it's going to be embarrassing to have to tell the panel that. But the DoJ lawyers here can be forgiven for having some trouble answering the judges; they've got a very tough case, one that's already been lost in the Fourth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits.

The problem is that sometimes lawyers are asked to defend arguments that are, well, indefensible and to do it without irritating the court can be difficult. The ruling in this case was a foregone conclusion from Day 1, but the lawyers still have to make the best case they can make.

A brief discussion of the legal mumbo-jumbo here is tucked below the fold for anyone who is interested. more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 12:04 AM | Comments (26)
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This type of thing cracks me up. Two democrats with identical records when it comes to guns (ban them!) and identical policy proposals for next year (let states and localities do the dirty work) are bashing each other in the hunt for votes from gun owners. Neither can actually claim to be good when it comes to gun rights--no one would believe them if they tried--so both are trying to cast the other as quite bad.

This never would have happened if the Democratic contest had ended on Super Tuesday. Obama and Clinton are scraping the bottom of the barrel looking for atypical voters--for Democrats, anyways. This is great news for Republicans.

First, Democrats have been hiding from the issue during Bush's presidency. Al Gore's virulently anti-gun primary campaign is partially blamed for his loss and for many down-ticket losses in 2000. Democrats realized that as long as they shut up about guns Republicans couldn't use the issue to bludgeon them. Their lack of support for new gun control measures has been especially useful as many of President Clinton's anti-gun laws expired.

Now that Democrats are ready to talk about guns again, we should be hitting them hard on the issue. Neither Democratic candidate can move all that far to the right on guns--not as long as the primary continues--and McCain should be taking this opportunity to stake out a vocal pro-Second Amendment position. Seriously, it's as simple as a little patriotic music with McCain reading the Second Amendment crosscut with Clinton and Obama saying "Leave it to states to make that decision."

Second, when Democrats (and the legacy media) talk about guns, they invariably get something wrong. Clinton, who seems particularly fond of negative anti-Obama mailings, made a bit of an oopsie with this one:

This is a little nit-picky for my taste, but the Politico's Ben Smith gives it to Clinton with both barrels:

Sen. Hillary ClintonÂ’s mailing attacking Sen. Barack ObamaÂ’s record on guns appears to include a striking visual gaffe: The image of the gun pictured on the face of the mailing is reversed, making it a nonexistent left-handed model of the Mauser 66 rifle.

To make matters worse, a prominent gun dealer said, itÂ’s an expensive German gun with customized features that make it clearly European.

“The gun in the photo does not exist,” said Val Forgett III, resident of Navy Arms in Martinsburg, W.Va. Forgett's company was Mauser’s agent in the United States when the gun was released, and it sold Mauser guns here again in the 1990s. “The bolt is facing to the left side of the receiver, making it a left-handed bolt action rifle, indicating whoever constructed and approved the mailer did not recognize the image has been reversed.”

Forgett said the error would be obvious to sportsmen.

Are Hoosiers really going to care that some PR flake flipped the image when they made the mailer? Of course, Democrats have long distorted the facts on guns. You'd think Clinton would have taken more care.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:41 PM | Comments (60)
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It is getting so you can't believe what you see with your own eyes anymore. Take a look at these four videos and decide for yourself if they are real or CGI fakes. The good thing about CGI is that if that "embarrassing" video of you, that should have stayed in Vegas ever makes it onto youtube, you can plausibly claim it's just a disturbing fake.

Shark Surfing USA:

more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 02:48 PM | Comments (31)
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If you want.

Posted by: Ace at 10:24 AM | Comments (42)
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