A non-coastal town in Maine is putting its old jail on the market. PETA has an intriguing proposal that will make all of you want to subscribe to their newsletter.

SKOWHEGAN, Maine - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has sent a proposal to the Somerset County commissioners to lease their jail for the worldÂ’s first Lobster Empathy Center.

The central Maine county is constructing a new jail and has put the century-old jail in downtown Skowhegan up for sale. The Realtor handling the sale called the offer "likely a publicity stunt."

"A prison is the perfect setting to demonstrate how lobsters suffer when they are caught in traps or confined to cramped, filthy supermarket tanks," PETA wrote in a June 2 letter to the commissioners. "The center will teach visitors to have compassion for these interesting, sensitive animals while also commemorating the millions of lobsters who are ripped from their homes in the ocean off the coast of Maine each year before being boiled alive."

Posted by: Slublog at 05:31 AM | Comments (59)
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Remember the heyday of weather doomsaying? Just a few years ago, we were inundated with predictions that weather patterns, juiced up with global warming and a dash of our toxifying of the world's oceans, were going to kill us all within a decade? Hurricanes stronger than ususal? Global warming. A rash of tornados tearing through Kansas & Oklahoma? Global warming. An April snowstorm killing Iowa's alfalfa crop and delaying planting of the corn crop? Global warming. (Global warming being blamed for a snowstorm? Forget it, he's on a roll.)

My how the mighty have fallen.

Now that Dr. Gray from the Hurricane Forecast Center has gone on the record with the opinion that Global Warming is mostly alarmist hype, I'm sure that we're going to see plenty of Soviet Style airbrushing of all his prior work. But don't you dare question their scientificalness. They all have many leather-bound books, which smell of rich mahogany.

UPDATE: Commenter Tex brings up a good point in the comments. My intention in this post was to point out the fact that Dr. Gray is being ostracized by the Cardinals of the Church of Global Warming because of his higher profile since Hurricane Katrina. If he was just another professor at Colorado State University, his heresy could go under the radar, but since his computer modeling of hurricanes has been higher profile since 2005, he must be silenced. I didn't realize that he has always been a skeptic, but I do remember hearing that Colorado State recently decided to defund his Hurricane Prediction Center, and he was charging that his skepticism was the #1 factor in that action.

Anyway, don't construe this as a slap at Dr. Gray's credibility. As far as I know, he's a stand-up guy.

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 09:06 PM | Comments (19)
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An aide attempted an "intervention" because of all the complaints (complaints?) of Clinton giving backstage passes to groupies, but wasn't able to gain access to Clinton.

Gina Gershon is among the women he "visits" in California, the claims go.

Posted by: Ace at 08:03 PM | Comments (61)
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No, really, that's not just a lame joke.

He wanted his ashes partly buried in a Pringles cannister, and his kin dutifully carried out his wish.

He was really proud of Pringles.

It is pretty nifty, really.

Thanks to rcl.

Posted by: Ace at 07:41 PM | Comments (19)
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People often wonder how Barack Obama's "former" Minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright came to embrace the conspiratorial belief that the US government introduced the AIDS virus into the black community. Most probably assume that this urban legend sprung up as most such legends do: with a crazy notion that happens to fall upon receptive ears and is internalized as fact forevermore. The origin of the AIDS conspiracy contains an interesting twist though, involving Soviet spies and an intentional disinformation campaign.
Throughout the Cold War the Soviet Union engaged in an "Active Measures" campaign of disinformation against its Western rivals most notably the United States.

Active Measures (Russian: "Активные мероприятия") were a form of political warfare conducted by the Soviet security services ... to influence the course of world events, "in addition to collecting intelligence and producing politically correct assessment of it". Active measures ranged "from media manipulations to special actions involving various degree of violence". They were used both abroad and domestically. They included disinformation, propaganda, counterfeiting official documents, assassinations, and political repression, such as penetration of churches, and persecution of political dissidents.

more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:48 PM | Comments (34)
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In a NYT article spinning on behalf of Jeremiah Wright's Krazy Konspiratorial Kondemnation of America, the NYT asserted that his suspicions about injecting AIDS into the black community weren't necessarily all that wacky, because, hey, the United States did attack other countries with biological warfare.

They've now corrected the story to admit there is no evidence of this. I'd have preferred them to say, flatly, it didn't happen, rather than using such weasel words to suggest the case is still open.

But how in the hell did this assertion make it past the multiple layers of painstaking editorial oversight and fact-checking?

The main annoyance of debating an unhinged partisan is that, if any premise is helpful to their argument, he asserts it must be true. After all, he knows he's right, he knows his cause is right, therefore he knows his argument is right, and therefore, QED, and necessary premise for proving his argument must be true. It's a "fact" because it must be a fact.

This is something everyone encounters on a daily basis. (Or a weekly or monthly basis, if you're more fortunate.)

But it speaks volumes that the NYT, with its multiple layers of painstaking blahbettyblah, now resorts to the same Partisan's Little Helper technique of just dreaming up a helpful premise and asserting, without evidence, that it is true precisely because it is helpful.

Reality-based community.

Layers.

Posted by: Ace at 03:50 PM | Comments (30)
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Great post from Jeff Emmanuel. This is the same Democrat Rep who recently admitted Democrats had "stretched the facts" about the feasibility and prudence of a quick withdrawal from Iraq, just to win the election.

Now he makes this curious claim:

If you just want to read it:

In February 2007, Kanjorski went to the floor of the House to say:

Ms. Speaker, I rise today to join the overwhelming majority of the American people, the Congress, and many top U.S. military commanders to voice my opposition to President Bush's ill-conceived plan to send more American troops into the middle of an ongoing Civil War in Iraq.

Then, in an interview from just days ago, Kanjorski said:

We've taken public positions which have now forced the president to go into the surge mentality, which is somewhat working.

More from Jeff (but there's still good stuff at his link):

Talk down the war's progress at all costs, and say things like this: "The war is lost. The surge has failed" (Sen. Harry Reid); The surge "is a failure" (Rep. Nancy Pelosi); "The U.S. troop buildup in Iraq has failed" (Sen. Carl Levin); The president is "desperate...to shore up support for his failed "surge" strategy" (Gov. Bill Richardson); "We should stop the surge and start bringing our troops home" (Sen. Joe Biden); "As many had forseen, the escalation has failed to produce the intended results" (Reid and Pelosi); "It's clear that the current strategy – the President's escalation – has failed" (Sen. John Kerry); and "According to...Republicans, and unfortunately even some Democrats, the President's surge in Iraq has been a resounding success. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth" (Rep. Robert Wexler).

Wow. Now that's change we can believe in.

The Liberal Democratic Party

It's called "reverse psychology." Look it up.

Bugs Bunny demonstrates this principle -- which Obama will employ to great effect in his meetings with Ahmadinejad -- in the following clip. Which includes a by-now-played-out internet-rage parody.

Posted by: Ace at 03:07 PM | Comments (31)
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But the trouble with such a book is that people with far more credibility and talent have been pumping them out for years.

The best Scottie McClellan could hope for with such a book -- assuming some soft-hearted conservative gave him a break and bothered publishing it all -- would be mostly heavily discounted "sales" basically given out freely to people who attended his mostly-skipped speeches at conservative conferences. "Sales," mostly at a bargain-basement practically-giving-them-away price, that would number in the tens of thousands... if it was a halfway decent book.

Which it probably wouldn't be.

But a purported takedown of the president... a tale of duplicity and impeachment-level crimes and misdemeanors from a "Bush insider"... well, that would sell like gangbusters on the left, wouldn't it?

Scott McClellan could not easily sell his book to conservatives, who basically considered him, at best, an amiable incompetent, far removed from any serious policy decisionmaking and with nothing terribly interesting to say. It's not that we wished him ill. It's just that we pretty much regarded him precisely the way the liberal media regarded him, as a nebbishy dunce who could barely string three talking points together, nevermind a whole book.

But change the audience, write the exact opposite of the book you first pitched to publishers, and you've got a chance at a bestseller.

[I]nstead of whacking the press for not digging deep enough into the Bush administration’s rationale for war, as he does in his memoir, the proposal dings the press for a left-wing bias. “Fairness is defined by the establishment media within the left-of-center boundaries they set,” he offers. “They defend their reporting as fair because both sides are covered. But, how fair can it be when it is within the context of the liberal slant of the reporting? And, while the reporting of the establishment media may be based on true statements and facts, is it an accurate picture of what is really happening?”…

“I will directly address myths that have been associated with [the president], some deliberately perpetuated by activist liberals and some created by the media, and look at the reality behind those myths,” he writes. His book, as published, would seem to indicate that after looking behind those myths, he apparently decided many of them were accurate.

McClellan also promises to “get into the influence of activist liberal reporters, like Keith Olbermann, Nation Editor David Corn, and Washington Post blogger Dan Froomkin, and activist liberal media personalities like Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, Al Franken, Bill Maher and Arianna Huffington.”

Instead, he did a 50-minute turn with Olbermann on his MSNBC program Thursday night — an interview in which Olbermann described McClellan’s book as the “Rosetta Stone for understanding the last seven years of American history.”

...

McClellan promises plenty of material on the media and even offers a chapter on NBC correspondent David Gregory. “I will take a look at notable personalities in the White House Briefing Room, including David Gregory and Helen Thomas. I anticipate an entire chapter about the former,” he promises.

So, Scottie's book proposal promised an attack on Olbermann and a (qualified) defense of Bush. Instead, it was, um, "tweaked" to rip Bush and give Olbermann a Matthews-level thrill up his leg.

And it sold, of course.

Conservative publishing houses are very cheap, from what I've heard, and very focused on the bottom line. Liberal publishers -- by which I mean all other publishers not expressly conservatives -- have a lot more money to just give to liberal favorites whether or not their stupid books will sell more than a couple of dozen copies.

I guess we need a big, big publisher that can afford to pay shameless incompetents like Scottie McClellan sizable advances for books that won't sell. That will at least immunize them against the blandishments of the deep-pocketed liberal media machine.

Posted by: Ace at 02:59 PM | Comments (21)
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This woman has been on FoxNews all damn day. She's shrieking hysterically about refusing to vote for an "inadequate black man" and says she'll vote for McCain. And she seems pretty serious.

Then again, she's crazy. Apparently she was kicked out from that Democratic rules committee meeting, where she was spreading pro-Hillary literature and the scent of White Shoulders mixed with mothballs and feet.

Her name is Harriet Christian. Oh, what a giveaway.

Posted by: Ace at 01:49 PM | Comments (29)
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I love Bond, I love this song, I love Sandler. And I'm eager to see You Don't Mess With the Zohan. So I'll put it up.

Sandler called doing this "the most arrogant thing I've ever done." more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:31 PM | Comments (21)
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