Did I say I was against clean coal? I meant for clean coal.

Just like when I voted for the war I now criticize McCain for voting for, I really meant to vote against it.

I was told there would be no prepositions in this debate.

Incidentally, on that Katie Couric interview:

She pressed Sarah Palin on how the fact that her state neighbors Russia qualified her as far as foreign policy experience. Apparently Miss Katie forgot that every border-state governor claims this. And governors who don't govern border states cite their intense peer-to-peer negotiations with fellow governors as akin to foreign policy experience. Hey, it's dealing with the top representative of a different state. State. Sometimes "State" means country. See?

And when they're not doing that, governors preparing to run for President arrange goofy, phoney, make-work photo-ops in other countries to talk about expanding trade or tourism to show "they've dealt with foreign leaders."

Um, it's bullshit. Clinton talking with Shimon Peres (or whoever) about getting more Israelis to visit Arkansas, and more Arkansans to visit the Holy Land, is not foreign policy experience. It's Shimon Peres being nice to a guy who's running for President in order to kiss up to him and extract favors later, in case he wins.

"Expanding tourism" between Arkansas and Israel is not exactly a high-stakes negotiation fraught with peril. Shimon Peres is not likely to take off his shoe and start pounding it on a podium threatening to "bury Arkansas."

Were Sarah Palin running for President, she could have arranged dozens of these nonsense meet-and-greets and let's-talk-about-getting-more-Israelis-to-come-to-Hot-Springs sessions. But she wasn't. She was just doing her job and wasn't padding her presidential resume with the political equivalent of running for the Treasurer of the Model Rocketry Club because you think it will "look good" for the admissions officers at Brown U.

Or, actually, like Uhhhbama's sudden interest in conducting "foreign fact-finding missions" the moment he began running for President. 'Cause you know, if you want the straight shit from a foreign leader, the best way to accomplish this is to sit in front a dozen cameramen and shake his hand in a highly publicized session of "Hey How's It Going? Cool" diplomacy.

Wow! You just shook the hand of a foreign leader and got your picture taken with him. A feat accomplished by a mere 10% of his supporters and 100% of his supporters willing to donate a thousand bucks to his campaign. However did you manage such a coup, Senator Uhhhbama?

Also bullshit: Miss Katie asked Palin if she'd ever actually conducted negotiations with the leader of Russia. Um, no, she hasn't. Obviously. (Though Palin did sneak in the "trade mission" thing -- which is how Clinton proved his "foreign policy credentials," too.)

What didn't Katie ask? If Sarah Palin had conducted (or overseen) a high-stakes, multibillion dollar deal with Canada and dealt with Canadian officials about a negotiation rather more important and substantive than getting a couple dozen extra Jews to visit Little Rock every year.

Why didn't she ask this question?

Because she knew the answer. Which was "Yes." And she didn't want Palin to be able to talk that answer up.

Palin's mistake was that she didn't bullrush this answer in there, even if Miss Katie was deliberately avoiding asking it.

But was it a mistake? Chances are, Palin did bullrush this important fact in there, but Miss Katie chopped it out of the interview.

Wouldn't want to give people the wrong idea or anything.

Posted by: Ace at 02:27 PM | Comments (31)
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I post links to polls that show McCain behind and I'm "defeatist."

What is my option? To not link these polls at all?

To link them but spin them? Guys, I've spun them before. Dozens of times. A lot of people on the internet are spinning them. Do you still need them spun?

Do I really need to say, everytime a poll shows McCain/Palin losing, the following crap you've all heard before and can regurgitate as well as I can?

1) Sampling favored Democrats.

2) Polls always favor Democrats, especially weekend polls, because Republicans are out of the house doing stuff.

3) There's a lot of time left/debates can change everything/a week is a year in an election season/most undecideds or soft leaners only make up their minds 72 hours before the election, or in the voting booth itself.

4) Polls have been wrong before. Dewey defeats Truman. Kerry's six-hour presidency.

5) The margin of error applies to both candidate's levels of support. A +/- 3 point margin of error means that either could be plus or minus three points, meaning the whole poll can be off six net points.

6) Every poll will be outside the margin of error 5% of the time.

7) Some other polls show McCain doing better/McCain has internals showing him doing much better.

Cherry picked state polls show some reason for optimism.

9) The Bradley Effect.

10) Obama's cultists are unreliable voters.

11) Obama is effectively "the incumbent" in this election and most undecideds will break 70-30 in favor of McCain.

12) The only poll that counts is on Nov. 4.

Look, just because I don't say these things every time I put up a poll post doesn't mean I don't agree with them (or most of them).

But I'm now putting up polls every day. Sometimes twice a day. Are you really requiring of me, in order to show I'm not defeatist, that I put up disclaimers 1-12 after every single post about polls?

Why? Is anyone on this site unaware of those caveats? Have they not been mentioned six bazillion times before?

Maybe I'll just start automatically linking this post to show I'm not a "defeatist."

I don't know what's being asked of me -- that I embargo all negative news, or engage in pointless repetitive spinning every time I mention it. Clarification on this point would be helpful.

Seriously, this stuff is obvious and has been said a billion times before. I have no new fresh take on it. I cannot really add to it in any interesting or novel manner. It's not my forte.

Jim Geraghty can add interesting analysis of this sort. (And check out his earlier posts on Virginia and Pennsylvania.) But I don't have that gift, alas. I do what I can. Usually I have no particular comment.

Now I can try to link Geraghty more (I had six of his posts open that I wanted to link yesterday, but, alas, I got single-minded on the credit crisis), but, come on, have some perspective. My posting a bad poll without comment is not equal to me pronouncing, with Harry Reid, "The war is lost."

I haven't said that. I will continue not saying that. I will say we're behind -- not by an especially large amount; many campaigns have overcome such slight margins in the past -- and that the direction is currently against us. And, knowing that, we can guess at the cause (the credit crisis) and therefore guess at what it will take to reverse this (one, spread the word far and wide that this is almost entirely a Democrat-created crisis, John McCain sounded the alarm but Democrats refused to vote his bill out of committee on a party-line vote, and three, try to convince socialist-fearing Republicans that seriously, we almost certainly need to do something dramatic here, unless we want to go into the election in a huge economic downturn with Obama preaching the Opiate of the Unemployed Masses, true old-school socialism).

Anyway. I don't know. You want a cocoon? Liberals cuddle up in the warm protective cocoon of carefully-scrubbed news guaranteed to tell them only what they wish to hear, and it does not work very well for them.

Posted by: Ace at 01:54 PM | Comments (101)
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Also kinda hot.

Not the dude, you homos. The stunt.

Thanks to JackStraw and other morons.

Posted by: Ace at 01:33 PM | Comments (20)
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I've gotten so many hits off that search term. And now, it's over.

Or is it just beginning?

Below, the video of the competition... but it's already been yanked by YouTube on a copyright infringement beef, so all that's left is the blurry screencap, which may or may not show Sarah Palin. It probably does, but I don't know.

Looking through the blur? Hot. Everything I thought it would be, and so much more.

She did, in fact, enter the competition for the scholarship money, it has to be noted.

Posted by: Ace at 01:25 PM | Comments (32)
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Seriously. That's not even spin.

Well, it is spin, but not mine.

It has to be noted that Playboy has kinda been dying and flirting with bankruptcy for some time. Penthouse and genuine hard-core pornography cut into the core business of the magazine pretty badly. For a while I think they made money off their cable tv soft (?) porn pay channel, but I'm guessing that's barely profitable now due to the fact that, um, you can get all the free porn you want on the internet.

Not sure what Playboy's draw is anymore. Yes, some of their chicks are hotter (though in that particular airbrushed Playboy way), but they're not doing anything overtly sexual. So you get not-really-porn with cute but airbrushed chicks, but, Hey!, you get that important editorial by Norman Fucking Mailer on how much America sucks every other month.

Interestingly, the core message of "the Playboy lifestyle" -- why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free? -- is the business' undoing.

I think his daughter is just trying to keep this outdated business afloat long enough so that this Nasty Old Satyr still has his mansion when he dies. No greater love hath any daughter for her father and etc.

Still. Playboy bunnies. Being laid off. (Off, I said.)

The writers of The House Bunny just emailed me to say, "What, he couldn't have announced this two months ago?"

You Know Why Hugh Hefner Pisses Me Off? In order of increasing revulsion...

1) His cutesy attempt to brand a soft-porn rag as somehow classy by including advice about gold-stereo-cables and the occasional crappy article from a name writer who's obviously slumming and phoning it in for Playboy. Seriously -- have you read the "articles" in Playboy? Sometimes I've been happy to see a name author on the cover. But the article inside always turns out to be the crappiest, most autopilot piece of shit I've read by that author. When an author gets turned down for a piece by other respectable outlets, he turns to Playboy, which pays good rates and is always hungry to get a name on its cover to sell the idea it's a prestige magazine.

2) His odious libertine leftist politics. It should be noted that the sexual politics sold by Playboy only can possibly work for either 1) an 18-to-25-year-old male with a good job and lots of disposable income, who can really get away with the girl-a-week sexual adventurism Playboy preaches, 2) a millionaire Old Satyr like Hugh Hefner himself, or 3) a non-talent bitter dwarf who hangs out at 'The Mansion" all the time and takes advantage of young women who have somehow convinced themselves that the path to stardom runs through sucking Bill Maher's dick in the grotto.

3) And that segues into the worst thing of all: He's basically got young, kinda-dumb and starstruck girls working at his Mansion as informal-arrangement whores. Because he's duped them into thinking fucking Bill Maher and his fellow aging satyrs will somehow get them "discovered." And to sell this notion to gullible young woman -- most dirt poor and desperately trying to escape the lower class -- he hangs pictures of the three Playboy bunnies who ever got work outside Playboy itself or an escort service, Pamela Anderson, Adrianne Barbeau and Anna Niccole Smith.

There have been, who knows, 3 to 6,000 bunnies either photographed in Playboy or living as whores at the mansion. Three ( four? how many? no more than ten) have actually had their careers shoot up like a rocket enough to star in such high-budget movies as Creepshow, The Fog, Swamp Thing, Barb Wire, and whatever that excrescent Anna Niccole Smith/Andrew Dice Clay straight-to-DVD movie was called.

But on this thin reed, he hangs out the hope to all these very young, very poor, and very naive girls that if they just slip off to the Balloon Room with Bill Maher and give him a handjob, all their dreams will come true.

This part of it is simply nasty. That's immoral -- and I don't mean the sex. I mean taking advantage of these women with gross lies.

And encouraging them to blow the venomous pockfaced mutant dwarf Bill Maher.

Posted by: Ace at 12:43 PM | Comments (87)
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Pardon the wildly misleading headline.

Mother, son going to work together. Their office? The War in in Iraq.

I hope no one's bothered by the headline. I do these misleading headlines for three reasons:

1) I think they're funny

2) I like fucking with readers with a headline, and then imagining their surprise when they see the actual story

3) Most importantly, it's my running commentary on the MSM. I enjoy, as they so obviously do, taking a story and giving it a wildly negative spin in the headline utterly unsupported by the facts. Or as in my "Sarah Palin Proves Diplomatic Chops," showing how easy it is to take their preferred spin, give it a 180 degree opposite spin, and thus demonstrate their spin is entirely contrived and arbitrary.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (36)
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Holy crap! Something actually happened today.

Senate Republicans on Friday blocked a plan by Democrats to pump $56 billion in government spending into the economy through public works projects, help for the jobless and money for states struggling with their Medicaid bills.

The 52-42 tally fell well short of the 60
votes needed to defeat a GOP filibuster. The White House promised a
veto anyway, saying the measure would not work and would cost too much.

The dems are going to back up and try it again later in the day, but I don't see that getting anywhere either. With the Economy crisis and a $700 billion dollar bailout amount looming in the background of every bit of news that hits our ears these past few days you would think that Congress might want to stave off other needless spending in the meantime. Still, there are some interesting comments coming from either side of this bill. The White House opposes and claims that it is "needless spending" while the Democrats claim that it is, basically, the BEST STIMULUS PACKAGE EVAH.

"Record spending that could lead to record tax increases or higher deficits will not advance our economic recovery," the White House said
in a statement.

I completely understand that statement, but I don't see how that "other plan" wouldn't have the same type of adverse effect on the taxpayer. However, that's another argument for another time I suppose.

Democrats contend that with the administration insisting on a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street holders of toxic mortgage securities, President Bush should join them in providing federal help to the middle class and the poor. They cited studies by economists that say providing money - through food stamps and unemployment insurance - to people likely to spend it immediately has a proven record of boosting the
economy.

"It injects money into infrastructure projects to create
jobs directly and generate new economic activities," said Sen. Tom
Harkin, D-Iowa. "We get the biggest buck stimulus-wise ... by expanding
food stamp benefits. That's the best. The second best, extending
unemployment benefits."

Emphasis mine.

Yes, providing money to people who will spend it immediately will stimulate and boost the economy. However, since this package was designed to only benefit people who have little or NO income at all I fail to see how it will stimulate anything. The difference in this program and the Bush Stimulus package is that the first package actually put usable dollars in to the hands of citizens who could actually use it. This package, however, only increases medicaid, unemployment, and social program benefits that, at last I checked, weren't really classified as usable or viable income other than what could be classified as "basic". This new stimulus package only seems to serve as a means of KEEPING the people dependant on these social programs more bound to the social system. How does this help our economy again? You don't ever hear of the great food-stamp and jobless sector of our economy that kept this ship afloat now do you?

No, you don't.

Not to mention it would have funneled more money in to Medicaid which, I should point out, is just about bankrupting itself due to it's flawed design. I know this because my own very state is having it's own financial crisis due to the overwhelming debts being gained by the atrocious program.

Hopefully the House version wont get passed either, but we'll just have to wait on that one.

*I apologise if this post is out of place or unwanted. The Open Blog thing is a bit vague to me now considering I see it happening more and more frequently instead of just in the early hours or in the event that Ace isn't here.

Plus, it's about actual congressional news that took place today other than the bailout. So, if one plans to flog....please be forgiving.

Posted by: Open Blog at 12:24 PM | Comments (49)
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Finally, An On-The-Record Confirmation From McCain

26 Sep 2008 12:33 pm

The Washington Post yesterday asked the McCain campaign on the record whether Trig Palin is Sarah Palin's biological son. Howard Kurtz, one of the most prominent media journalists in the world, asked that question.

By answering the Kurtz question on the record, McCain spokesman Michael Goldfarb is indeed saying that this is a legitimate factual question, as it is. Here is the answer, the first on-the-record confirmation of Sarah Palin being the biological mother of Trig, courtesy of the Washington Post:

"These rumors are false. It is her baby. The whole thing is absurd. All of this rests on the fact that she wore her pregnancy extremely well. A couple of months later, there are a ton of pictures showing she is obviously pregnant. It's ridiculous. There's just nothing to it. We're not going to release her gynecological records to prove it. It's just madness."

I am delighted to publish this statement from the McCain campaign. I have always been delighted to publish factual statements by any campaign. I have been waiting to publish such a clear confirmation for almost a month.

[End quote.]

But hold on -- Andrew Sullivan, Internet Detective, is still on the case!

[Further quote:]

The only trouble with this statement from the McCain campaign is that it is untrue in one respect.

In fact, Kurtz had to add an update to correct the quote he did not fact-check before publishing:

Update: In the interest of being precise, it is not true that there are "a ton" of pictures of a pregnant-looking Sarah Palin out there from earlier this year. I can recall seeing only two, and a Google search didn't turn up any others. So I went back to Michael Goldfarb and asked whether he had an estimate of the number of such photos. "I've seen a couple of pictures of her looking extremely pregnant," he said. "I don't remember how many I saw." Could he guide me to what the campaign had? "We never took this seriously enough to assemble it," Goldfarb said.

So the McCain campaign called two photographs a "ton" and Kurtz printed their untruth without even checking Google. That tells you a lot about the ethics of Michael Goldfarb and a lot about the journalism of Howard Kurtz. Kurtz is happy to publish statements from the McCain campaign without even checking their veracity in Google.

[End quote.]

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan, Internet Detective, could call up the Anchorage press, which can tell him "Yes, Sarah Palin was visibly, hugely pregnant for at least two months before delivering her baby," but apparently that's too much work for him.

Daily Dementia flashback.

Gif courtesy of McGurk.

Incidentally, the "most popular one-man blog in the world" feels that crawling up the Palin family's uteruses is the most pressing story of the day.

Other people are talking about the credit crisis.

Priorities.

As I've said, a hundred times: Why does Andrew Sullivan do this? Because he's incapable of writing about anything else. He's only in his comfort zone when he's analyzing Melrose Place level "issues."

He's like Maureen Dowd, only not funny.

Wait -- Maureen Dowd is like Maureen Dowd, only not funny.

Well, he's like Maureen Dowd without the Pulitzer.

Or a basic understanding of the female reproductive cycle.

I swear to God, Sullivan -- if you merely Google "vagina," you won't get girl-cooties.

Oh: He's giddy, you understand, because he desperately wants someone to acknowledge this as a "legitimate issue," as he claims Michael Goldfarb does by labeling it "madness," which is how people usually refer to legitimate issues.

And he needs that because the editors of gay gossip site and antisemitic conspiracy newsletter The Atlantic told him he was bananas, and that he was embarrassing the magazine, and that he had better stop it if he wished their association to continue. As he hinted darkly after this little chat, "some issues are apparently not fit for mainstream establishment Beltway discussion," or words to that effect.

This is a great day for him because he thinks he can now present this to the editors of gay gossip site and antisemitic conspiracy newsletter The Atlantic and squeal (girlishly), "LEGITIMATE ISSUE!"

I don't know if they're going to see it that way.

Michael Goldfarb just called him a lunatic, but he thinks the Warren Commission just agreed to re-open the Kennedy assassination case.

Bugs!

Hmmm... Five minutes after I call attention to Sullivan's madness, Marc Ambinder, blogger at gay gossip site and antisemitic conspiracy newsletter The Atlantic, links Kat-Mo's piece defending Palin.

Marc Ambinder never links this site.

Is Marc Ambinder actually trying to draw attention to the embarrassment Sullivan and pressure his editors to fire him?

Hey -- it's a wild conspiracy theory for which I have no evidence.

But -- as always -- I'm "just airing questions."

Release the documentation, Marc. Provide timestamped screenshots that you were reading Kat-Mo's post on Palin rather than my post on Sullivan just before you linked the site.

No documentation? Well. I guess that tells you something about Marc Ambinder's journalistic ethics, eh?

I think I just got confirmation that Sullivan's degenerating brain and advanced dementia is a legitimate issue.

Posted by: Ace at 11:39 AM | Comments (94)
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Hmm.

Who are these Somali pirates, and is there any way to get them on the payroll?

Or are they already on the payroll?

KRYMB.

Posted by: Ace at 11:30 AM | Comments (33)
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That Battleground Poll was nice, but everyone else shows McCain losing ground.

Also, click the "Brutal" link at post bottom -- the GOP losing nine Senate seats (thus giving Democrats the coveted filibuster-proof majority) is not, it is claimed, implausible.

Posted by: Ace at 10:42 AM | Comments (98)
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