US District Judge Sam Lindsay strikes down Farmers Branch ordinance 2903 requiring apartment owners to obtain and maintain evidence that residents are US citizens or legal residents.

I take a little pride in FB passing this law, 2 to 1 a year ago. Farmers Branch is a little suburb just north of Dallas where I grew up (arguments regarding my "growing up" are off bounds so there). All they are trying to do is enforce immigration law that the federal government can't or won't.

Good luck David (what a great name that is). Goliath is that big ugly fucker smacking his chest and calling you out. One smooth stone, well flung, can change everything.

Oh, and Sam?

Clinton appointee.

Judges matter.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:05 PM | Comments (37)
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Huma nature. Francase thinks this explains why Hillary has alternated crying and positing assassination scenarios the past few months -- Huma switched teams.

Hillary Rodham Clinton wasn't the only New Yorker working for votes in Puerto Rico over the holiday weekend.

Rep. Anthony Weiner was again by her side, more evidence of a loyalty to the senator that could fuel Weiner's own effort to become mayor of New York City.

...

Of course, politics is only part of the reason he's still on the campaign trail while many of the senator's other boosters have grown quiet.

I'm doing a lot, but it's largely because I'm dating Huma," he said.

That would be Huma Abedin, an aide to Clinton who, in political parlance, works as a "body woman" _ forever at the candidate's side, keeping track of her needs as she races through the hurly-burly of campaign events.

Cupid is no stranger to the campaign trail, but living out of a suitcase can test a couple.

"It's not a great environment to forge a relationship," he conceded, and then added "And by 'environment,' I mean Hillary's vagina."

I added in that last bit.

Now, Weiner is 1) nebbishly ugly and 2) a superdelegate.

How does this Hillary-supporting superdelegate land a hot piece of ass like Huma?

Catch my meaning?

Just wondering what I could get out of supporting Hillary. I've always had a thing for Dee Dee Myers. She seems dirty to me.

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (56)
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And I thought Secretary of State John Kerry was the worst news today. I was wrong.

I've always scoffed at the notion that the Democrats could win control of a 60-seat filibuster-proof Senate majority in November, but the Hill's Aaron Blake points out that "Democrats have now polled ahead or within the margin of error in 11 Republican-held seats, as polls conducted in recent weeks show openings in second-tier targets including Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas. . . Democrats have also polled ahead in at least some of the polling in Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia, polling substantial leads in the latter three. They have also been within the margin of error in Minnesota and Oregon."

Speechless.

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (70)
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Good Lord. How awful.

Kerry aides insist heÂ’s not angling for the job and point to his long involvement in foreign affairs. It started with his famous testimony as a 27-year-old veteran questioning the Vietnam War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It continues today, at age 64, as the No. 3 Democrat on the same panel.

But envisioning him in the post would hardly be a stretch given Obama’s chances at securing the Democratic nomination, a general election shaping up as a “change” campaign and Kerry’s relationship with the Illinois senator.

There's only one thing more awful than a John McCain presidency, and Barack Obama is promising it -- and so much more.

Posted by: Ace at 01:21 PM | Comments (171)
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Can't wait for the next round of stupid congressional hearings.

DALLAS (AP) - Exxon Mobil Corp. chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson will retain both of those jobs at the world's biggest publicly traded oil company after a highly public, Rockefeller-led push to separate the roles that failed again Wednesday.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the chief complaint of John D.'s descendants is ExxonMobil's stubborn insistence on being an oil company and not "investing enough" on alternative energy research.

In all 17 shareholder proposals were shot down, all of them opposed by the greedy board of capitalist pig directors.

Tillerson isn't afraid to state the obvious: we're gonna need oil for a long damn time.

"Notwithstanding the growth in all of the other options for supplying energy—renewables, nuclear, biomass, alternatives—the world's going to require substantially fossil fuels to meet its energy needs," Tillerson said. "And two-thirds ... of that is going to come from oil and natural gas."

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 12:43 PM | Comments (17)
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Better known to many of you as "Thursday."

Posted by: Ace at 12:01 PM | Comments (29)
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Below the foldÂ…they can run but they just die tired. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 11:50 AM | Comments (51)
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Only "edging ever-closer" to self-parody, though. Not there yet.

File this in the no duh category.

lbermann is edging ever-closer to self-parody, or, worse, predictability. (As soon as the Clinton gaffe broke, blog commenters were wondering how ballistic he would go, and he obliged, and how.) Even if we concede his argument—that Clinton was at best callously and at worst intentionally suggesting she should stay in the race because Obama might be killed—every time he turns up the volume to 11 like this lately, he sounds like just another of the cable gasbags he used to be a corrective to.

But mostly his outburst reminds me of how the long Democratic primary has divided the left-of-center media (or at least, the media outlets with a left-of-center audience) into camps, like a bad divorce. Personalities and institutions that were once universally beloved by people who were sick of the Bush administration have either taken sides, or have been perceived to, splintering what used to be a unified and largely uncritical amen chorus.

A curious admission. He goes on to name comedy (ahem) shows like Stewart's and Cobert's, and liberal columnists, as those formerly part of this "unified and largely uncritical amen chorus." I wonder if he secretly acknowledges Time magazine as part of this chorus.

Next comes one of the most obvious, oblivious statements I've read in recent years:

...

It's probably asking too much, but maybe the experience of being annoyed by someone you used to constantly agree with could teach political audiences something about how they have appeared all along to their adversaries. Think about it: if you've found yourself suddenly irritated by any of the people or outlets I mentioned above this election, is it really they who've changed? Or are they simply less charming when they're not confirming your comfortable beliefs?

Sometimes, maybe, the only way to really understand how your idols sound from the other side is to actually find yourself on the other side of them.

Shut up, really?

He also muses that if there were more anti-Obama partisans in the media, the other half of the Democratic Party could suddenly appreciate what it's like to be on the wrong side of the media's collective partisan -- and then suggests that Republicans, too, could benefit from such an object lesson.

Republicans, too? Really? We need to see what it's like to be grotesquely insulted and dismissed by the media? We're really in need of that schooling, huh?

It's so amusing that after 50 years some liberals finally seem to have woken up to liberal media bias. Only because they were on the bad end of it, of course. Previously these free-minded, endlessly thoughtful, self-critiquing True Believers in Fairness had just plum never noticed that the media seems to give a free ride to liberals while viciously attacking non-liberals.

Of course, this blogger, having finally gotten media bias, will quickly forget all about it once the Democratic Party and its parent company the Media Party unites around Barack Obama. No longer will he find Keith Olbermann to be bordering on self-parody, nor will he find anything objectionable in how the monolithically liberal media reports the news.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (47)
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Charles Johnson wonders why they didn't disable comments in a post in which an Iraq soldier discusses his kills. That's just baiting the HuffPosters to show their support of the troops, isn't it?

LGF has the link and more quotes. I might have added a quote here or there.

May God send this country and its people their just rewards. This country is built on other people’s refuse, other people’s criminals. They didn“t teach you in school about ”indentured servitude“; this is how the UK emptied its prisons. In the South of the US the white population is predominantly Irish, Scottish riffraff, low life, criminals, racist Goobers.

Let me remind you: ”Give me your tired, your poor ...Your huddled masses... The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.... Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me". And they sure sent them here!!

...

I'm literally crying hot tears. The only thing keeping me from losing it altogether is the comforting pressure of the Boba Fett action figure lodged firmly up my ass.

...

They were trained to be killers, that is what they do, many videoÂ’s are out on sites that show tiny babies mutilated by our men. Many stories, it is what Bush, Cheney wanted, that is how they are trained as are the LatinoÂ’s they are training in Georgia for Bush right now, killers, that is why 1800 a month are trying to commit suicide, they cannot live with what they have seen or maybe have done, very sad. Bush has his people do his mass murders for him, he tortured frogs when a young child and we know the profile of a serial killer always tortures animals when young, so now Bush has it all ways, frogs, our young men,the Iraq people,Gitmo, when will people stop him by Impeach.org

...

I can't take it anymore. As a protest against Bush and his Kristian Kommando Killers, I just stuck a Jango Fett figure up my ass too.

Does that make me gay? Or, if not gay, at least Mandalorian?

...

to invade, occupy, and murder innocent people has become an art form for our all volunteer military.

...

Okay, I don't know what I was thinking with the Jabba the Hutt Action Playset. I guess I overestimated my commitment to ending this repulsive war. And also, the maximum volume of my duodenum.

...

This is repulsive. Individuals are ultimately responsible for their actions. While i applaud those that step forward to tell the truth, is it really a surprise to anyone? Abu Ghraib was only a preview of what was to come, not an anomaly.

The time to remove the halo and silence the hero worship rhetoric has long passed. We are funding genocide with every tax dollar we pay.

Shame on the US.

...

Anyone know a good proctologist? Like the kind who wouldn't laugh at you if you said you stumbled and fell down on a Star Destroyer which just happened to be pointing upwards directly at your, you know, "Death Star Exhaust Port"?

The funny thing is that they do, in fact, support actual murderers, such as Che Guevera and Abu Jamal Mumia.

So heroes are murderers and murderers are heroes.

Thanks to CJ.

Clarification/Correction: I meant to write he was an Iraq soldier, a US solidier in Iraq, not an Iraqi soldier. Apologies for the error.

Thanks to The Sniper, who's digging up info on this Winter Soldier nut.

Posted by: Ace at 08:58 AM | Comments (48)
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She's certainly going down swinging.

We have not gone through this exciting unprecedented historic election only to lose," Clinton said at an event in Billings, Montana.

"You have to ask yourself who is the stronger candidate?" she continued. "And based on every analysis of every bit of research and every poll thatÂ’s been taken and every state that a democrat has to win, I am the stronger candidate against John McCain in the fall."

I'm guessing this sort of rhetoric is going to end any hope of a unity ticket.

Update - Doubling down. From a letter to superdelegates

After seven years of feeling invisible to the Bush administration, Americans are seeking a President who is strong, experienced, and ready to take on our toughest challenges, from serving as Commander in Chief and ending the war in Iraq to turning our economy around. They want a President who shares their core beliefs about our country and its future and "gets" what they go through every day to care for their families, pay the bills and try to put something away for the future.

We simply cannot afford another four - or eight - years in the wilderness. That is why, everywhere I go, people come up to me, grip my hand or arm, and urge me to keep on running. That is why I continue in this race: because I believe I am best prepared to lead this country as President - and best prepared to put together a broad coalition of voters to break the lock Republicans have had on the electoral map and beat Senator McCain in November.

Recent polls and election results show a clear trend: I am ahead in states that have been critical to victory in the past two elections. From Ohio, to Pennsylvania, to West Virginia and beyond, the results of recent primaries in battleground states show that I have strong support from the regions and demographics Democrats need to take back the White House. I am also currently ahead of Senator McCain in Gallup national tracking polls, while Senator Obama is behind him. And nearly all independent analyses show that I am in a stronger position to win the Electoral College, primarily because I lead Senator McCain in Florida and Ohio. I've enclosed a detailed analysis of recent electoral and polling information, and I hope you will take some time to review it carefully.

Remember: she's comparing herself to Barack Obama, not president Bush. What a brutally subtle way to remind voters of Obama's faults. These guys are masters at bare-knuckle politics, which makes her appeal correct - she would be harder to beat in the fall.

Posted by: Slublog at 08:32 AM | Comments (29)
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