Lock him up.

The AP, of course, will not turn over to the Secret Service the principle evidence in a major federal crime.

Gee, I wonder if they'd cooperate if Obama's email sessions with Scarlett Johanssen had been hacked.

Posted by: Ace at 11:40 PM | Comments (105)
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SEC adopts rules against naked short-selling

As opposed to the fully clothed variety when you get totally surprised that your retirement fund has just been @$$ raped.

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:31 PM | Comments (25)
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Palin keeps talking about "reform", lobbyist and cronyism, putting the government back on the side of the people (and I quote).  Sounds good.

Truth of the matter is, the only way we get a system where lobbyists aren't really capable of sucking the public dry of both their hard earned investments and their tax money through bail outs or favorable regulations is if the government a) gets their hands out of our pockets, stops taking our money and "investing it" or redistributing or whatever you want to call it and allows our citizens to do what is best in a capitalist, free economy: let us invest it or buy products and services from companies that WE believe are best and b) make government smaller.

Yes, dammit, smaller.  More regulation means bigger government with bigger dollars in the oinking piggy bank that government spends like a trust fund baby on crack.  Bigger government means more power to the government and less in the hands of people.  Believe me, big businesses like big government and don't you believe otherwise.  It is much easier to negotiate deals and get big, fat, oinking checks out of one entity than trying to get it out of 300 million different people. 

That is why certain giant health care insurance companies and providers are supportive of a government controlled health care and single payer entity.  They have pretty much come to the conclusion that, if you can't beat them, join them.  It would definitely be easier to by-pass 300 million potential buyers for a single entity than having to negotiate hundreds of different policies with the myriad demands of the public consumer.

And, this is no anti-capitalist, anti-corporation screed.   Far from it.  Free enterprise, competing for consumers and investors [no...I'm not talking about Andrew Sullivan]. Plus, I mostly blame us, the voters, who keep putting these cretins in congress and, basically, voting for them to give themselves more power. So that, yes, it is much easier to go to the government for a hand out than to continue convincing consumers and investors that the company is worth the risk. 

We are like abused spouses who keep believing these ignorant bumps on a log that we should "trust them" they are going to congress to fight for us.  This time.  They promise.  How many times do we fall for that line?  Every year it seems like the government reminds us that they are here to defend our freedom now hand over your money lest we throw your a$$ into jail, make your life living hell and generally break you to lower than a depression era share cropper.

Frankly, every time I hear someone talking about more regulation and over site by the freaking government it sounds exactly like putting lipstick on a pig. 

more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:10 PM | Comments (15)
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Oh-- and also: Methamphetamines.

I know what you're all worried about.

Is he an R or is he a D?

Well... Let's just let the absence of party identification answer that question.

Party affiliation -- none, apparently. He is, like Child Stalker Andrew "Bareback City" Sullivan, a Party of One.

But just to make it official.

How can the media even claim to be unbiased when every single fucking article about a Democrat in a scandal refuses to report his partisan affiliation?

Thanks to Alice H.

Posted by: Ace at 09:33 PM | Comments (55)
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Bumped. I dig this piece. Note the Andrew Sullivan Challenge.

Light content warning. It's been cleaned up, humorously, but it's still a bit edgy.

That's from Notropis.

If You Haven't Been Reading Andrew Sullivan... you're probably a bit mystified as to why I jumped ugly tonight.

Read this guy's piece. And he's a lefty fan of Sullivan's. Skip down his undue praise for Sullivan (quick -- can anyone recall a single article Sullivan's ever written?) and his idiotic conclusion and just read Sullivan's Child Stalking of Bristol Palin.

He just never lets up. Even after his bosses at The Atlantic told him to stop -- and he had himself a hissyfit and went on a one day strike -- he keeps finding fresh pretexts to hint and insinuate at what he has been forbidden to directly state.

Today, he used Governor Palin's statement that she polls the family on decisions about running for office for yet another unhinged bout of "asking questions" in a post sarcastically titled, I think, "The Girls' Choice."

I don't know what point he was trying to make. I'm not sure he knows what point he was trying to make. Besides the fact that his brain is degenerating either due to AIDS medicine or steroids, he's also operating under the stricture that he cannot quite come out and say Bristol Palin is Trig Palin's mother anymore, and he therefore writes in a frankly baffling manner as he both attempts to insinuate and disguise his insinuations simultaneously. His writing is, then, even more insensible than usual.

For me, though, it was the last straw among many last straws. Even when threatened with termination, he cannot stop savaging the Palin family. He cannot stop himself from hinting that Bristol Palin is Trig's mother. He. Cannot. Stop.

Because he is a lunatic.

He really believes this, incidentally. I know this for a fact. Even today, he believes this. Even today, now that recent pictures show us what Bristol Palin looks like pregnant -- and of course we have not seen her in such a "delicate condition" previously -- he still believes it. Like a lunatic, he makes this point in in his correspondence: BUT IS IT HER BABY?!!

It's not just partisan hatred -- though surely it is borne of partisan hatred. But the fact is he is simply losing his cognitive functions. His once splendidly mediocre mind is degenerating day by day. His writing skills, which once placed him easily in the top sixty or seventy percent of his field, enough to land him a high-prestige job as a, ahem, blogger, may now be compared unfavorably to the senseless racist rantings of Ron Paul's old newsletters (which, incidentally, he defended as an understandable and excusable excess). His middling power of insight, which has allowed him to achieve what few other writers can boast of -- to have spent twenty years writing prolifically without leaving a single memorable column or original thought or even a quotable sentence behind -- are diminishing by the hour.

(And before you say I am uncharitable, I challenge you all again: Name me a single column of Sullivan's you remember. A singe turn of phrase. A single aphorism. A singe compelling idea that stuck with you. Can you? I don't believe you can. I don't believe anyone can. Many of you will say "But he used to be a good writer." Oh? Well, then -- it shouldn't be difficult to remember a fine phrase or piercing thought that stuck with you. That stayed with you. That you can recall at all. I'm waiting.... All I can remember, personally, is that he quoted unhinged rants from the left wing and gave them "funny" award titles. Not exactly an innovation, and hardly the sort of legacy a great writer leaves behind. Can you remember more than that? His reputation, such as it is, was not built upon elegance of phrase or clarity of thought but upon his relentless self-promotion of himself as an identity-politics oddity -- Gay Catholic Tory -- and his shrill emotionalism and cheap resort to ad hominem tarted up with SAT vocabulary-builders.)

Posted by: Ace at 09:56 AM | Comments (91)
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Looking back, it was all a pretty bad idea.

I'm keeping the threads, and you are welcome to read them and comment on them, but I want them off the front page. Too screedy, too angry. Too... honest, actually. Effective communication sometimes requires a bit of pretense.

I lost it. I am just so. Fucking. Sick of this shit. Screaming at these people that they're indecent does no good. They view their indecency as some kind of badge of authenticity and righteousness.

I thought the only thing that could possibly work is the shoe-on-the-other-foot proposition: If you believe these to be the rules the right should play by, let us see if you chafe and recognize the indecency of them when turned back upon you.

But it's not me. Or rather -- it is me, just not the pretend-me I'd like to put out to the public.

Anyway, links to the threads, now buried back in January 2005, below. more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:45 PM | Comments (111)
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Oh, my darling hearts. AOSHQ can be a cruel place.

Things look rough right now yes? You are all in a turmoil, and crave the touch of a cool hand upon your fevered brows.

Fear not.

I will post a tender bite of cheesecake for every day that Ace must post Sully's RAWMUSCLGLUTES profile. more...

Posted by: LauraW at 06:26 PM | Comments (39)
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The media will not report this. Get the word out to everyone in your email lists.

This entire scandal has the Democrats' fingerprints all over it. And Obama's right in the middle, collecting the most money from these people -- except the odious chairman of the banking committee, Chris Dodd, who by the way received "VIP" mortgage rates from CountryWide -- and yet the Obama camp and the media (BIRM) are trying to hang it on McCain.

McCain, the guy who warned everyone in 2005 that we needed reform or precisely this would happen.

Dan Collins... Has been pounding this drum all week. Read him.

ACORN! Why did Fannie and Freddie make so many unsound loans?

Because Obama's buddies in ACORN pressured them to. And then (as the video in a previous post noted) Fannie's CEO called Barack Obama a member of the "family" and thanked him for pressuring him to make unsound loans.

Which you now have to subsidize.

And Barack Obama's Finance Chair, Penny Pritzker, has a "special place" in engineering the sub-prime meltdown:

“The [sub-prime] financial engineering that created the Wall Street meltdown was developed by the Pritzkers and Ernst and Young, working with Merrill Lynch to sell bonds securitized by sub-prime mortgages,” Timothy J. Anderson, a whistleblower on financial and bank fraud, told me in an interview.

“The sub-prime mortgages,” Anderson said, “were provided to Merrill Lynch, by a nation-wide Pritzker origination system, using Superior as the cash cow, with many millions in FDIC insured deposits. Superior’s owners were to sub-prime lending, what Michael Milken was to junk bonds.”

Thanks to Jack Straw.

Posted by: Ace at 06:25 PM | Comments (23)
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Dear Editor of Ace of Spades,

I am writing you on behalf of a research team from the Psychology Department at New York University, in the hopes that you might be able to help us with our timely and important research about the cognitive bases of electoral decision-making. We would be very grateful to you if you could possibly help us recruit politically inclined respondents to our survey by posting to your blog the link to the online survey we are conducting as part of this research...

And on and on and on.

My response:

With all due respect, why bother? I've read these studies before. You already know all the answers: Liberals vote out of rationality and hope; conservatives vote out of irrational prejudice and fear.

There's no point collecting data when the conclusions have already been drafted.

Thank you for your interest, but I can write your paper for you without bothering with the middleman of data collection.

Cheers,

Ace

Added a PS:

To make my complaint clear:

We all know that conservatives are more fond of tradition and liberals are more fond of fads and "new things."

Now, we already know that. There is no reason to even collect data on it. It's a fact. It's 75% of what makes conservatives conservative and liberals liberal.

But rather than framing it neutrally, you -- if you are anything like the six bazillion psychologists before you -- will say "liberals show they are more OPEN-MINDED and RECEPTIVE OF NEW IDEAS AND NEW EXPERIENCES than conservatives, who are CLOSED-MINDED and FEARFUL OF ANYTHING NEW OR DIFFERENT.

I could take the same data and give it a different spin:

Conservatives are more mature and comfortable with themselves. Liberals, however, similar to juveniles, are seek out fads and transient fashions, much like teenagers "identity shop" by trying out new personae until one fits.

The thing is, the data should be reported straight. Neutrally. And if you're going to spin a value judgment on to it, there is no reason to favor the "CONSERVATIVES FEARFUL" spin over of my own "LIBERALS FADDISH AND ONLY PARTIALLY-FORMED IN THEIR ADULT PERSONAE" spin.

But I know in advance -- well, I know to a 99% certainty, based on the all of the similar studies I've read previously -- that it's going to be CONSERVATIVES FEARFUL.

Why bother? Let's just skip the whole pretense of faux scientific rigor and get right to the money graf: Conservatives suck, liberals are better and smarter. And like trying out new foods and listening to "World Music."

Posted by: Ace at 05:55 PM | Comments (78)
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...but I don't think he needs us telling him that. I'm sure it's in the works.

And include this too -- Fannie Mae CEO calling Obama a member of the "family."

Posted by: Ace at 04:33 PM | Comments (44)
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