Welcome to a repeat of last weekend....

Jets v. Bengals/Eagles v. Cowboys.

My fearless predictions (not against any spread): Just like last weekend Jets and Cowboys win. Bet accordingly (in other words, the opposite).

Bonus prediction, what little attention the MSM pays to Harry "Light Skin" Reid will be spun into, Harry would love to see the blackest man imaginable who speaks in nothing but Ebonics elected President but you racists won't allow it so Reid supported the "light skin" non "Negro dialect" speaking Obama.

And you're a racist for mentioning it but that goes without saying. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 12:00 PM | Comments (281)
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Snow reported in central Florida and Naples on the west coast.

Its raining and FREAKING COLD in Palm Beach today...not unlike the nasty overcast crap you get in upstate NY in November and March. If the precipitation persists, it would not be out of the question to get sleet/snow tonight.

If anyone is considering coming down here to "bask in the sun" and "frolic on the beach", you might want to ummm...put that on hold unless you want to enjoy the beach in a parka and get frostbite. I just made a run to Home Depot and there's a LOT of people walking around in parkas.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 10:53 AM | Comments (127)
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How did I miss this story?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apologized Saturday following reports he had privately described then-candidate Barack Obama during the presidential campaign as a black candidate who could be successful thanks in part to his “light-skinned” appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

Journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann reported the remarks in their new book “Game Change,” which was purchased by CNN Saturday at a Washington-area bookstore. The book is slated for official release next Tuesday.

Convenient that this will be forgotten by Monday, though.

Musing: I guess the shock value here is the use of the term "negro." That's a big no-no, even for a 70 year old like Reid who, well...I view with some suspicion just because I figure everyone from generations older than mine are carrying around all this race baggage. (I know, sounds like I've got some age-ism baggage of my own.)

The negro thing compounds Reid's problem, but isn't the whole picture. Folks also objected when then-candidate Joe Biden called Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." I mean, Biden even used the much more PC hyphenated-American and he had pretty much everyone from the Right and the Left jump all over him.

Will Reid get the same treatment? Doubt it. They're not gearing up for a contentious primary and the Democrats have closed ranks, particularly when it comes to congressional "leaders" like Reid and Pelosi.

Here's what Joshua Micah Mickey Pacey Paisley Marshall wrote about Biden back in 2007, right about the time Reid was remarking on Obama's lack of accent:

Biden suffers from what one might with real generosity call chronic racial grandpaism. That is to say, the penchant for making comments that are not only racially offensive but also extremely silly and the sort of things that are sometimes excused or at least passed over from men, say, over 80 on the reasoning that they're from a different era and why get into it.

Excused?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 10:14 AM | Comments (293)
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Seems a little early in the day for an open thread, so here's a link dump on the Massachusetts special election.

The number one place to get timely and accurate information on the race is William Jacobson's Le·gal In·sur·rec·tion. He's been all over this story from the beginning and is at Brown HQ today. Keep scrolling.

From Ed at Hot Air: "Yesterday, Democrats got so rattled that they began speaking openly of keeping Brown out of the Senate for as long as they could once he wins."

Politico is discussing ways ObamaCare could still pass if Brown wins in ten days. Snowe's name appears.

And here's a news story on the debate between Brown, Coakley, and third-party candidate Joseph Kennedy.

I'm out for a while, so tawk amongst yaselves.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:36 AM | Comments (162)
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Friday at last. TGIF and welcome all M&M-types.

The 15 Best Sports Plays Of The Last Decade
And here's one of them from back in 2000 when Antonio Freeman of the Packers caught a ball while on his back, got up and ran it in for a touchdown and win for Green Bay in OT.

Oh and if you haven't already, be sure and sign up for the Yahoo AoSHQ group which is now up to 343 members. You can read the instructions for signing up here. more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 05:45 PM | Comments (829)
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No surprise. Either the courts must accept -- and bless as Constitutional -- the extraordinary treatment due to these vile monsters, and thus bless such treatment for all criminal suspects in the United States (plainly a hateful conclusion), or they must toss out all the evidence against them and set terrorists free.

It is the left's hateful agitation against all things Bush, plus Obama's delicately theoretical comprehension of the real-life flesh-and-blood world, that has brought us to this point.

And it will get worse.

A federal judge has tossed out most of the government's evidence against a tarrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan.

However, the judge said statements he made during two military administrative hearings at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, where he was assisted by a personal representative, were reliable and sufficient to justify holding the detainee.

Musa'ab Omar Al Madhwani allegedly engaged in a 2 1/2-hour firefight with Pakistani authorities before his capture in a Karachi apartment in 2002.

The detainee says that after five days in a Pakistani prison, he was handed over to U.S. forces and flown to a pitch-black prison he believes was in Afghanistan. He says he was suspended in his cell by his left hand and that guards blasted his cell with music 24 hours a day.

He said that he confessed to whatever allegations his interrogators made and that harassment and threats continued after he was moved to a different prison in Afghanistan.

Al Madhwani said that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay on multiple occasions threatened him when he tried to retract what he now claims was a false confession.

The judge said he was particularly concerned that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay relied on or had access to the coerced confessions from Afghanistan made by Al Madhwani.

Military tribunals were created to square this circle, and to ensure basic fairness and reliability while still recognizing the difference between illegal combatants and run of the mill criminals (and also to keep US civilian courts untainted, to keep them from having to bless extraordinary measures as perfectly Constitutional as regards regular criminal citizens), but of course the left and their champion Obama has rejected them as insufficiently prissy and pristine.

So here we go.

I don't know what the Jackass In Chief will do. I know he doesn't dare risk his poll numbers crashing further after one after another terrorist is sprung by his moronic decisions. I guess I expect him to just hold these fellers indefinitely, or to... put them right back into the military tribunal system.

If that's possible. Which I don't know it is. Once someone enters the US criminal justice system, courts will not usually approve their transfer to a system that affords them a lesser standard of rights. Once they've got all the standard US criminal rights, courts do not strip them of such.

Thanks to Evil Bun-Bun.

Posted by: Ace at 12:54 PM | Comments (443)
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I know some have said, 'gee it's great that He, unlike Bush, is taking responsibility". I'm talking about the full on knob slobbering we usually get.

Take for example this post by Marc Ambinder who the day following the Christmas attack praised Obama to the hilt for not running to the cameras and staying low key. Of course that was 11 days and 6 increasingly serious statements ago but no one ever said the life of the worshipful was easy.

I really wanted to go off on what I thought was Obama's piss poor performance yesterday and hook it to some idiotic liberal praise but not even Andrew Sullivan has taken the bait. The NY Times tried halfheartedly in an editorial but it wasn't what we've come to expect.

Some didn't even try to defend him. The Washington Post editorialized that, "His proposed fixes did not entirely reassure. "

So help me out, where's the full on "Mr. Wonderful was wonderful!!!11!!!" defense we've come to expect? Are the Obama supporters as shocked at how bad he and his team look as we are? Are they just riding out the storm of tough talk and hoping he doesn't actually mean what he says about getting tough?

The absence of full throated lefty love for yesterday's performance strikes me as a dog that didn't bark.

Related enough: A lot of folks on the left seem to be outrageously outraged that Rudy Giuliani said there were no terrorist attacks on US under Bush but we have had one under Obama. Obviously that's wrong but people seem to be making a bigger deal of it than Obama's 'isolated extremist' characterization of Abdulmutallab. Rudy fessed up that he was obviously wrong with in hours but no one seems interested in reminding Obama that he jumped to an erroneous conclusion that he's spent the last 2 weeks backtracking from.

I guess some statements just go down the memory hole.

Posted by: DrewM at 12:29 PM | Comments (103)
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Gibbs fielded a "double-dip recession" question today. He would not answer it (wisely, actually). But that's out there.

Obama's policies are deepening, not diminishing, the recession. And even his biggest fellatists in the media can't pretend differently.

Innocent Bystanders continues to graph the disaster:

That's the shrinking US workforce, as millions of jobs are eliminated and millions more workers remove themselves from the workforce entirely by just giving up.

As you can see, the line appears to mostly follow a straight-line path downward. There is no graceful easing at its terminus.

Posted by: Ace at 11:45 AM | Comments (256)
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Douchebags -- they say vaguely the cartoon sat on the internet for two months without notice, until "the conservative blogosphere" noticed it.

No link. Of course no link.

Anyway, they once again claim that because a single tea party activist carried one sign using the term "tea bag," the "conservatives" invented the term "teabagger" for themselves and so it's our fault liberals have used that slur 66 bazillion times since that one guy.

No Apologies! I headlined this wrong. Byron York sets me straight:

ational Public Radio executives say there will be "no apology" for an animated cartoon on the network's website that has angered thousands of conservatives. The cartoon, entitled "How to Speak Tea Bag," by satirist Mark Fiore, will remain on the NPR site, executives tell NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard.

...

"Tea Bag," the video concludes. "Because other languages are just too hard."
Shepard, the NPR ombudsman, writes that the cartoon was originally posted on the NPR site on November 12, 2009 and attracted little attention. This week, however, it has been discovered, and NPR has gotten lots of comments, many of them from offended conservatives. (At this moment, there are 1,261 comments on "How to Speak Tea Bag" page.)

Shepard says neither she nor the NPR staffers who approved the cartoon knew that there was anything derogatory about the phrase "tea bagger."

Let me clear up my error: It was the NPR Ombudsman who said the cartoon did not reflect NPR values. I forgot that the Ombudsman is just one voice, and not really the voice of the organization at all.

So while the Ombudsman finds fault with it, NPR executives, who are really NPR, are saying "No apology."

Posted by: Ace at 10:38 AM | Comments (142)
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Democrat connected polling firm (that was credible in VA and NJ races) says Coakley v. Brown is a real race.

The firm, Public Policy Polling, says they will release their numbers over the weekend but they are dribbling out some information on their blog.

According to their info, a plurality of those planning to vote oppose the health care bill and Brown's favorables are better than McDonnell's and Christies were prior to their races.

Bottom line.

This has become a losable race for Democrats- but it could also be easily winnable if Coakley gets her act together for the last week of the campaign. Complacency is the Democrats' biggest enemy at this point and something that needs to be overcome to avoid a potential disaster.

A taste.

"People know IÂ’m the only person who can stop the debate on this monstrosity of a health-care bill and make them go back to the drawing board. IÂ’ve had a lot of people tell me this isnÂ’t JFKÂ’s party anymore. TheyÂ’re all about more taxation and more spending and not looking out for everyday workers. IÂ’m for lower taxes and less spending, and I think the best way to stimulate the economy is across-the-board tax cuts. It was true in JFKÂ’s time, it was true for Ronald Reagan, and itÂ’s true now."

The question is, is that what people in one of the most liberal states want in a replacement for one of the most liberal senators in history? So far the answer is, they seem to be considering it.

There's just over a week until the election (1/19)...visit Brown's website to donate and/or volunteer.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:44 AM | Comments (105)
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