S. Weasel exults in the joys of "buggery and murder."

Her search for "sodomy:"

Gabriel Lawrence , was indicted for feloniously committing with Thomas Newton, aged 30 Years, the heinous and detestable Sin of Sodomy

...

William Griffin, was indicted for Committing Sodomy with Thomas Newton, May 10 . Thomas Newton thus depos'd. The Prisoner and Thomas Phillips , (who is since absconded,) were Lodgers for near 2 Years at Clap's House.

...

Thomas Wright , was indicted for committing Buggery with Thomas Newton. Jan 10 1724- 5. Thomas Newton thus depos'd. Last January 12 Month, the Prisoner had the Carnal Use of my Body at his own House, in Christophers Alley in Moor-fields...

...

William Brown was indicted for a Misdemeanour, in assaulting Thomas Newton, with an Intent to commit Sodomy with him

Thomas Newton? Dude, it's a rectum, not a clown-car.

It doesn't appear to be a gang-rape or anything. Seems like the guy just got pinched by the coppers and started ratting on his fellow "Sodomites."

Thomas Newton lodged at "Clap's House," a Place of Entertainment favored by Sodomites, and (it goes without saying) a "notorious Molly-House" (whatever that is).

Damn there's something fun about Olde-Timey English.

Oh by the way? One verdict and sentence of the above-accused read simply "Guilty. Death."

Day-um.

Thanks to jdub.

Posted by: Ace at 12:35 PM | Comments (46)
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At Hot Air, video of the classic Kinsley Gaffe, that is, the mistake of a politician admitting what he really thinks.

This is not going to be a campaign issue because The Narrative (TM) is so powerful. Republicans, and only Republicans, want high gas prices, because it helps out their oil-company buddies. (This despite the fact that Republicans are fighting to increase supply and thus lower per-unit profits on petroleum.)

But of course the Democrats want high energy prices. High petroleum prices encourage conservation by punishing oil and gas use, and also make those much-heralded "alternative energy sources" more competitive, not by increasing the efficiency or lowering the cost of such hypothetical sources, but by raising the cost of their competition.

The gas tax holiday is not a good idea because it does nothing at all to cure the fundamental problem of ever-increasing demand and stagnant supply (in fact, it marginally exacerbates it), but that's not of course why Obama opposes it. He opposes it because he thinks that using gas and oil is inherently evil, and by decreasing (even temporarily) the cost for such use, we increase the world supply of Evil.

Again, the MSM will simply not report on the dirty little open secret that liberal elitist Democrats have long been the most eager supporters of skyrocketing energy prices. If the market had not accomplished this goal for them, they would have done so through taxes or by further restricting supply.

John McCain could beat Obama like a red-headed stepchild on this issue, but of course Mr. Courage and Integrity is too busy pushing the same idiotic policies forced upon him by the Big Bullies at the New York Times editorial table.

And while we're not speaking of drilling in ANWR -- check out Jonah Goldberg's pictures of this desolate tundra wasteland that we've made it such a high national priority to protect from even the slightest blight. 19 million acres of this barren ice-crap, and we can't even drill on 2000 of them.

In a rain forest, there's some truth to the idea that if you destroy even a small section of jungle, you wipe out a "whole ecosystem." Jungle life is ferociously diverse and changes acre by acre like a city changes neighborhood by neighborhood.

That's not the case with ANWR. The same stunted pygmy-grass and same arctic tundra-vermin in any particular acre of this ice-glinted shithole are the same ones you'll find in all 19 million acres of it. (That is, for those acres that can actually support complex life at all.)

Double Vision: ANWR vs. the Grand Canyon.
Can you tell them apart?

So we're not drilling because we fear that if we do some microscopic ice-worms might have to migrate a few acres to continue enjoying their wondrous lifestyles eating frost-lichens.

And John McCain supports this because he doesn't want liberals to say bad things about him.

At least Barack Obama has an ideological reason for his absurd position. John McCain merely has vanity.

Thanks to Dave at Garfield Ridge for the reminder about Goldberg's ANWR pics.

More: DrewM recommends another Goldberg column:

In this sense the whole area is really just a Rorschach test for the imagination. There's little doubt that for much of human history most reasonable people would have considered this spot the definition of the word "godforsaken." You need not look back, for evidence, to the ancient pilgrims who died on the frozen tundra. You could simply read an old copy of the Washington Post from 14 years ago: "[T]hat part of the [ANWR] is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life."

Two decades have intervened, and an environmental fatwa has been issued declaring that the word "pristine" is synonymous with "beautiful" or "sacred." Of course, anyone who has seen a mint-condition AMC Gremlin knows that pristineness and aesthetic appeal have only a coincidental relationship. Even ANWR fetishists concede that in the winter, with its complete darkness and 70-below-zero temperatures-not counting wind chill-this is no paradise.

But then, it's no paradise in the summertime either. During the winter, the entire coastal plain is covered by a vast tarp of ice; when the sun comes back, the resulting thaw creates, well, lots of puddles. These patches of freestanding water pock the flat tundra for as far as the eye can see; that's why this barren region is the only place the U.S. government recognizes as both a desert and a wetland. The water in an old tire can breed thousands of mosquitoes; a puddle in a junkyard, millions. ANWR is the Great Kingdom of the Mosquitoes.

...

Today, crews aren't allowed on the tundra. "If I took a leak out there, I'd get fired," an engineer tells me. "In the winter, if you spill some coffee into the snow, you'd better go get a shovel and dig it up."

...

"I knew a guy who got fired for throwing a rock at a fox," the former ranger tells me, with great exasperation. He wasn't throwing rocks for sport, mind you; apparently almost all of the Arctic foxes are rabid. If you get bitten by a rabid fox with inactive rabies, you get those infamous shots. If you get bitten by a fox with active rabies, the company pays for your funeral. "Every single fox head I've sent to Anchorage for testing has come up positive," he explains. I make a mental note to thank God that I don't have a job that requires the harvesting of rabid fox heads.

Madness.

Thanks to Slublog again for the "Double Vision" pic, too.

UPDATE: Bloomberg agrees with Obama.

Posted by: Ace at 11:58 AM | Comments (34)
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State Supreme Court Justice Edward Lehner orders Governor and state legislature to raise judge's pay within 90 days.

Including his own.

Lehner, who acknowledged he would be affected by his own decision, ordered the state to raise judicial pay to reflect cost of living increases since 1998.

Lehner said judges haven't had a pay hike in 10 years and lawmakers unconstitutionally linked their own raises to onw for the state judiciary.

This system seems a bit imperfect to me too, not that I want to get all into that argument again.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 11:01 AM | Comments (16)
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The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round...

Just tipped by JackM. DrewM. sends this link.

I love the reason Obama provides for the resignation of the guy not even working for him in the first place:

“Jim did not want to distract in any way from the very important task of gathering information about my vice presidential nominee, so he has made a decision to step aside that I accept.”

Of course, of course. Dance with the girl that brung ya and all that.

Jim, We Were Just Getting to Know Ye: MamaAJ points this out:

Rockville, Md.-based ISS, which covers some 3,500 companies worldwide, each year accuses only about 2% of them of paying compensation that's out of whack with performance. But Gannett and Temple Inland were among that group in 2005, and Johnson is the head of both companies' compensation committees. The two corporations' option and stock awards weren't tied closely enough to performance, ISS maintains. Shareholders ignored the warning and didn't support pay changes.

Ken Lay and Enron were a lot more "tangential" to George W. Bush than this guy is to Obama, and yet Obama, of course, will skate on the hoary charge of drawing support from corporate raiders who line their pockets with money belonging the companies they ostensibly serve.

The Magic Bus: Gotta give Obama's bus credit -- it's good at what it does.

Thanks to IreneFingInene.

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (21)
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Or the Grand Canyon.

DPUD finds McCain's federalism evasion on California and Florida drilling pretty unconvincing, too.

I note that McCain offered conservatives a promise -- seal the borders first -- which seems open to interpretation and revision.

But he's standing firm on his promise to liberals about ANWR, despite $4.00+ gas (and rising).

And as regards the latter -- a flip-flop is easy to justify. McCain's ANWR pledge was made when gas was dirt cheap at a mere $2+ a galllon. What wonderful days. We didn't know how good we had it.

Now gas will likely pass $5 a gallon before this season is through and possibly top $6 by the election. Whatever benefits there are to keeping a desolate wasteland of frozen mud "pristine," there are costs associated with that too, and as the costs rise, the benefits of a policy change.

I have some small hope here, as McCain is willing to toss principle aside when he feels threatened, when he feels as if he might lose. His vaunted disdain for personal and misleading attacks dissipated pretty quickly when Mitt Romney challenged him.

So it's possible the man's great vanity might yield on this crucial policy point as Obama starts to whoop him.

Of course, by then, it could all be more or less over.

Posted by: Ace at 10:57 AM | Comments (22)
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As a devoted fan and zealous watcher of the best show on television, "Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld", I feel obligated to bring this story to the attention of the blogosphere.

For it involves one of Gutfeld's favorite things. No, not assless chaps and butt-plugs. OK, those are two of his favorite things. The favorite thing I actually had in mind was UNICORNS.

You see, the Gut has long been a fan of the allegedly mythical creatures with the single long horn that is rumored to be capable of both healing injuries and also meeting all your deviant needs outside the Port Authority terminals at 3:00 AM.

And while many scoffed and dismissed his passionate claims that unicorns were real, Gutfeld has been vindicated.

For science has captured one. Yes, Virginia, Unicorns are real. In fact, there is even more proof that unicorns exist than there is of Bill Schulz's heterosexuality. Because, unlike Schulz's proclivities, Unicorns have been captured on film.

It's only a matter of time now until Fluffy McNutter gets photographed in the wild, probably spreading lotion on a young Laotian houseboy's back while sipping Mai Tai's through a specially modified gag-ball. And then? The Gut will be completely and totally vindicated.

Congrats, Greg! Not everyone can seek sexual release through the high-art of hobo-strangulation. For your sake, and the sake of all those with whom you work, I hope this finally brings you the satisfaction that has been so long in coming.

And if it doesn't? I hear Levy has some really primo imported Mexican cat snuff-films. There's nothing like seeing a pussy get what's coming to it, after all, to really stimulate the artistic juices.

But what do I know? I'm a dog guy.

Posted by: Jack M. at 10:15 AM | Comments (32)
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"My conception of the presidency is basically avoiding
difficult work and asking hard questions of my crucial advisers...
I just want to look cool ridin' around in tanks!"

It also has some relevance to that executive-pay argument we had all day yesterday, but don't let's get into that again.

Last month, Sen. Barack Obama turned to James A. Johnson, a former Fannie Mae chief executive and Washington insider since the Carter administration, to lead the vetting of potential running mates for the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee.

But four years earlier, as Johnson was angling for a job if Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) was elected president, Fannie Mae did some vetting of its own. Company executives had grown so worried about the lucrative consulting deal they had cut with their former CEO that they considered enlisting an outside investigator to comb through the deal "in light of issues that could come up during Senate confirmation . . . or White House review of the consulting contract," according to company documents unearthed by federal regulators.

...

The questions about Johnson began after the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that he received more than $2 million in home loans that might have been below average market rates from Countrywide Financial, a partner of Fannie Mae and a leading purveyor of the kind of subprime mortgages that spawned a national housing crisis.

Responding to questions yesterday about that article, Obama said: "I am not vetting my VP search committee for their mortgages. These aren't folks who are working for me. They're not people who I have assigned to a particular job in a future administration."

...

As CEO of Fannie Mae, Johnson, a former chief of staff to Vice President Walter F. Mondale and chairman of the board of the Kennedy Center, was the beneficiary of accounting in which Fannie Mae's earnings were manipulated so that executives could earn larger bonuses. The accounting manipulation for 1998 resulted in the maximum payouts to Fannie Mae's senior executives -- $1.9 million in Johnson's case -- when the company's performance that year would have otherwise resulted in no bonuses at all, according to reports in 2004 and 2006 by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight.

In a 2006 civil enforcement action against Fannie Mae, another agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, called the company's 1998 accounting "fraudulent" and said numbers were "intentionally manipulated to trigger management bonuses."

Johnson left the company before it was swept up in an accounting scandal that tarred its reputation, but even during the years of scandal, Johnson was reaping hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting fees and other compensation, $3.3 million in all between 2001 and 2006.

...

Although OFHEO said Johnson benefited from the earnings manipulations, the agency did not accuse him of participating in them, and the SEC did not accuse him of any wrongdoing. He ended his term as chairman and chief executive of the District-based company in December 1998, before Fannie Mae reported its financial results for that year. In 1999, he served as chairman of the company's executive committee.

A federal regulatory agency suggested that even if Johnson's compensation for 1998 were entirely justified, Fannie Mae obscured its magnitude, disclosing pay of $6 million to $7 million a year in 1998. But Johnson was allowed to defer 111,623 shares of Fannie Mae stock, a move that was relegated to a footnote and not included in the company's summary compensation table.

Total compensation that year was closer to $21 million, according to an internal Fannie Mae analysis cited by OFHEO.

Anticipating questions about the agreement in 2004, Fannie Mae even drafted question-and-answer talking points, including: "Gimme a break. He's hiding his compensation."

And of course he got outsized perks from the company after leaving it in a shambles. Including those now-famous below-market-rate mortgages arranged by helpful executives at Countrywide, a partner of Fannie Mae, and of course a company still seeking to curry favor with powerful Democratic establishment insiders.

As most of the Democratic establishment supported Hillary (at least initially), I wonder if Obama is now forced to recruit from those operatives so tarnished (or inept) that not even Hillary would have them.

Thanks to Mom.

"Tangential:"

Thanks to Slublog for that pic. I checked my email hoping he'd provided that one since I last spoke to him, and what do you know, he did.

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Comments (18)
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First itÂ’s thought crime prosecutions, now this. What the hell is going on up north?

Facing a shortage of foreign exotic dancers, a group representing 53 of Ontario's strip club owners is turning to immigration consultants to find a loophole in the rules governing foreign workers.

The Adult Entertainment Association of Canada is looking for alternative, legal, ways to hire foreign-born strippers and dancers. One way might be to use foreign student visas since foreign students can now work for 20 hours a week in any job, said the group's executive director Tim Labrinos.

They still make beer and play hockey up there, right?

h/t The Corner

Related: Rep. Anthony Weiner, alleged boyfriend of HillaryÂ’s body woman Huma, has introduced legislation making it easier for foreign models to get into the US. Finally! Immigration reform we can all get behind.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:09 AM | Comments (41)
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Since the last couple of days here at AoSHQ have featured a number of post taking shots at Seattle and since I was born in raised there and have lived all of my life there and am part owner of a small business inside the city limits, I wanted to make sure I also got in a swift kick to the nuts while I had the chance.

All City of Seattle properties are about to become a Gun Free Zone:

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has signed an executive order that asks all departments to come up with a plan within 30 days to ban guns at all property owned by the city. Nickels signed the executive order after the recent shooting at the NW Folklife Festival at Seattle Center that wounded two people. "At many of our properties, including City Hall, you can bring a gun if you have a concealed weapons permit. Under this order, people with concealed weapons will be asked to leave or hand over their gun." It's a city rule that cannot trump state law. The only thing the city and police can do is kick someone with a gun out of a building or an event.

Now for those of you who have jobs and therefore have never been to the Folklife Festival, this is where people who do not bathe regularly gather to do what they normally do the other 364 days of the year, nothing productive. This year there was a shooting at the festival that injured some people. Over the course of the 37 year history of Folklife, the number of shootings now totalÂ… I may need some time here to calculate this, fire up that new petraflop computer down at Los AlamosÂ… including this 1 shootingÂ… that would be 1. Just to recap, 1 shooting in 37 years, no deaths, just injuries from 1 shooting... in 37 years. Millions of people have gone to this festival over the years and there have been 1 shootingÂ… in 37 years.

So Mayor Greg Nickels has taken it on himself to make us all safer from this epidemic of violence from this 1 shootingÂ… in 37 years, by deciding unilaterally that the constitution, the part that says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, should no longer apply on city owned property.

Now I understand the need to get this gun violence at Folklife down to a rate that would make other gun free zones such as post offices or schools envious... ok, those might have been bad examples. But wouldn’t a better idea be to limit other constitutional rights that have no doubt been the source of more violence? How about if the Mayor imposed a restriction on speech, such as outlawing the phrase “Dude, you sure this is not oregano?” at Hempfest or any sentence that started with the phrase “Yo Mama” at the hip hop festival, wouldn't that result in a greater reduction of violence? I am sure the ACLU would not have a problem with this idea either. more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:35 PM | Comments (38)
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What? Can't be stupid on Tuesday nights?

I say si, si se puede!

Silly J-Mac video at the Splitters (courtesy Pupster Video Productions). Chock full of S. Weasel and Slublog pshop goodness.

And just so I can be hatin on Obama too, next in an ongoing series from the Slublog Gallery of Fine Art, more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:47 PM | Comments (23)
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