I'm not sure if "assault" is being alleged, exactly. Maybe these aren't actual assaults (even as alleged). But, if these are credible, obviously it makes it much more likely the masseuse is telling the truth.

Is this like too perfect to possibly be true?

The ENQUIRER recently uncovered shocking allegations, from two other massage therapists.

The first incident allegedly took place at a Beverly Hills luxury hotel when Gore, 62, was in Hollywood to attend the Oscars in 2007.

The second reportedly occurred a year later at a hotel in Tokyo.

A Beverly Hills hotel source told The ENQUIRER:

"The therapist claimed that when they were alone, Gore shrugged off a towel and stood naked in front of her.

"He pointed at his erect penis and ordered her, 'Take care of THIS.'"

Dude.

Three allegations? We don't know the details at all of the so-called Tokyo incident but multiple allegations of the same basic pattern of conduct are mutually reinforcing.

I don't get it if this is true -- I thought that that kind of Happy Ending was gotten usually only in a fake massage parlor which is actually just a shoddy front for prostitution, and that "real" masseuses do not engage in such prostitution, almost ever, and I thought further that this was a widely-known thing.

Could Al Gore have not know this? (Or am I wrong-- is this not as uncommon a thing as I would think? Can anyone tell me that they often get happy endings from real masseuses, and, well, can you admit it, too?)

Posted by: Ace at 08:37 AM | Comments (477)
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The Pro on her: She's popular, and probably among the few in West Virginia who could beat Joe Manchin.

The Con: She's actually pro-choice, the only pro-choice Rep from West Virginia.

Joe Manchin, on the other hand, is pro-life.

I'm pro-choice myself but the idea of running a pro-choice Republican against a more-popular pro-life Democrat in West Virginia seemed to me to be, what is the word?, friggin' insane.

For one thing: How the hell does she tap into the national conservative donor pool?

How do we run a pro-choice Republican in one of the states where that's a real political loser? (Note: I actually can't find a cite for that and might be guessing wrong. But I am assuming that "more rural" tends to equal "more pro-life" as it usually does.)

Well, thank goodness, Moore Capito will only be running for Representative. (Even after seeking, and getting, a special change in the law allowing her to run for Rep and Senate simultaneously.)

So we need a candidate. Here's a possibility.

John Raese, a Morgantown industrialist and former Republican Party chair who lost to Byrd in 2006, has told reporters he was considering entering the race. The filing deadline is Friday.

Platform seems Tea Party friendly:

The 60-year-old Morgantown businessman told the Charleston Daily Mail he would run on a pro-business, low-tax, low-regulation platform.

Raese unsuccessfully challenged Byrd in 2006 on a similar platform. He says the message resonates more today.

Oh, he lost 64-34, but: That was a Democratic year, 2006, and he was running against an institution. A corrupt, former-klansman institution, but an institution nonetheless. Plus, as a not-seriously-expected-to-win candidate, he'd've gotten no support at all from the party or anyone out of the state (and in fact not too many in the state either -- who wants to donate money to someone guaranteed to lose?).

34% doesn't fill me with joy but it is, I think, understandable.

Posted by: Ace at 08:00 AM | Comments (88)
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The Obama Administration got punked and tossed Shirley Sherrod under the bus without even pausing to check her out. Even the White House jumped to the "she must be a racist" story even though the video demonstrates the complete opposite.

Now Secretary Vilsack is saying what he should have said from the start:

“I am of course willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner,” Vilsack said in a written statement released around 5 a.m.

Suggesting, of course, that he didn't conduct a thorough review before demanding Sherrod's resignation yesterday. Similarly, White House officials spent the afternoon and early evening announcing that Vilsack had the President's full support, only to realize late that they had also assumed racism not in evidence. Finally, the NAACP, which comes off worst of the three, made a shamefaced U-turn and provided the longer video, which it had in its possession the whole time. The White House is getting slammed for rushing to judgment.

Here's the thing. The whole time, Sherrod was saying that the statements in the video were misunderstood. That it was a story about redemption and learning to overcome prejudice that had been chopped up. No one was listening (well, except The Anchoress). In fact, having now watched the video, I agree with National Review's Rich Lowry:

Full Sherrod video is not only unobjectionable, it's heartfelt and moving--a tale of overcoming hatred and rancor in the American south.

Sure, she's a Marxist and she doesn't like the Tea Party or Republicans. But that isn't a firing offense. She was done wrong. Secretary Vilsack says he's "reviewing" her case with the possibility that Sherrod will get her job back. She says she's not sure she wants it again.

BTW Andrew Breitbart says he only got the shortened, edited video and posted exactly what he got on Big Government. It was this short version that led him to condemn Sherrod's "racist tale" and the NAACP folks that heard it.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:36 AM | Comments (504)
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The cake is a lie.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:15 AM | Comments (80)
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Well, this is sort of what happened, my problems with the video tape notwithstanding.

Breitbart did bullrush the White House and NAACP into making snap decisions, showing their cowardice, that they now regret.

But... Well, I guess we'll see how this works out.

Exit Purely Rhetorical Question: Is it better to act carefully or act forcefully?

Purely rhetorical answer: I wonder about this. For all the criticism, Breitbart got results from smashing a hammer into random fragile objects here. If he did some damage to himself... well, I guess he's in the best position to judge if he can bleed it off.

Posted by: Ace at 10:52 PM | Comments (274)
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More good stuff. Not great, good. Tasty. Makes me want more.

Looks like we got our first "reporter"! Not just an opinion writer at a liberal magazine; a reporter at Bloomberg:

“You know, at the risk of violating Godwin’s law, is anyone starting to see parallels here between the teabaggers and their tactics and the rise of the Brownshirts?” asked Bloomberg’s Ryan Donmoyer. “Esp. Now that it’s getting violent? Reminds me of the Beer Hall fracases of the 1920s.”

Here was a response. This guy is a nothing (so is Donmoyer, actually, but whatevs) but enjoy the full crudity of his response:

Richard Yeselson, a researcher for an organized labor group who also writes for liberal magazines, agreed. “They want a deficit driven militarist/heterosexist/herrenvolk state,” Yeselson wrote. “This is core of the Bush/Cheney base transmorgrified into an even more explicitly racialized/anti-cosmopolitan constituency. Why? Um, because the president is a black guy named Barack Hussein Obama. But it’s all the same old nuts in the same old bins with some new labels: the gun nuts, the anti tax nuts, the religious nuts, the homophobes, the anti-feminists, the anti-abortion lunatics, the racist/confederate crackpots, the anti-immigration whackos (who feel Bush betrayed them) the pathological government haters (which subsumes some of the othercategories, like the gun nuts and the anti-tax nuts).”

Then came the denunciations of FoxNews, and the demands it be taken off the airwaves, which it's not actually on, being on cable, not broadcast waves. But such details don't trouble our very smart, very connected JournoListers.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.”

I quote this because of the remark about peer pressure: I think that's critical, and that explains a lot about the media.

When Dave ("Who?") Weigel wanted to bash conservatives about Palin, he asked why we were freaking out over Joe McGinnis invading her privacy, because "any journalist" would jump at that chance.

See, that's the problem Dave: No they wouldn't. How do I know this? Because they haven't. Bill Clinton's a big, important figure to write biographies about; how come no one's renting the apartment across the street from his wink-wink "executive offices" in Harlem and peeking at him to see who visits him?

Same with Hillary. There are a lot of interesting subjects who'd sell a lot of biographies -- and for all of them, the lurid promise of exxxtra special access!!! Spy footage!!! would sell even more copies.

So why, Dave, if this is something "all journalists" would jump to do, do they not... actually... do... it?

It's because you're wrong. Not "all journalists" would do this about their subjects. Not because they don't want to sell more books. But because the peer disapproval from their like-minded liberal colleagues discourages them from spying on Hillary Clinton.

And they do it to Palin because none of them care if Palin's privacy is invaded; in fact, they applaud it. Because she is "The Other." She is inhuman -- and you can treat her worse than an animal.

You know, for the left's constant blather about "The Other" (an idea with merit, I think), they sure the hell are oblivious to their constant Otherizing of others, aren't they? You'd think that people who never shut the fuck up about Otherizing the Otherish Others would once in a while realize, "Hey, you know what? I think I'm indulging in a little Class-A Otherification here myself."

But I digress.

Behold the power of peer pressure. Recently the Washington Post made excuses for itself, as it always does, about its failure to cover The Black Panther story. Oh, it's, like, because we didn't hear of it, or we thought we had it covered, or there was just too much damn news that week.

Bullshit. You would have spiked circulation by 25% that week by covering it, for doing nothing other than doing your jobs.

So why didn't you publish it? Peer disapproval as each of your liberal buddies asks you why you're so racist.

Peer pressure. These bloodless, sweatless, sexless nobodies know nobody but their own pathetic kind, and they're all so career-oriented they have subverted every flash of actual humanity and personality they have to better conform to the herd's expectations. And the herd doesn't like race stories (at least race stories that don't feature the preferred villain Big Whitey), and so they internalize that in what passes for their personalities and they in turn don't like race stories either.

And FoxNews...? Why, they're not amenable to peer pressure! Rogues! They report different things than we do!

There's more to the DC article, of course. Like a producer at NPR having masturbatory fantasies about Rush Limbaugh's death.

Posted by: Ace at 10:47 PM | Comments (85)
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No wonder he wanted em so bad.

Star Wars-style laser beams have been used for the first time to shoot down aircraft in flight, it was revealed last night.

The anti-aircraft laser shot down four unmanned drones at a US Navy test range off the coast of California.

Mounted on a warship, the space age weapon was fired over two miles to hit one drone travelling above the Pacific Ocean at more than 300mph.

The invisible beam can only be seen when it strikes its target.

It can't be seen. It's a ninja laser beam, mounted on an awesomeship.

You can't fight something like that. All you can do is hope you're not pissin it off.

[tip via gabrielmalor]

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:35 PM | Comments (90)
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Good evening all M&Ms.

Remembering The Apollo 11 Moon Landing - July 20, 1969

It's barely been mentioned in the news but today is the 41st anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a milestone in human achievement. On this day in 1969 at 20:17 UTC the lunar module Eagle carrying Neil Armstrong and 'Buzz' Aldrin sat down on the moon's surface. A few hours later Neil Armstrong became the first hum to step foot on the moon.

To commemorate the occasion here are a few sites to check out -
Gizmodo did a live blogging of the landing last year but it's worth reading through again.
And Jason Kottke is hosting live TV coverage of the landing in real time. So load the page and leave it open - the next event will start at 22:51 EDT.
Check out this site for complete coverage of the Apollo 11 mission.

Here's a combined video of multiple feeds showing what was happening in mission control and the view from Apollo simultaneously. The numbers they're calling out are how many seconds of fuel are left before they have to abort the landing. Neil Armstrong has never said for sure but he's strongly hinted in later interviews that even if they had hit the abort limit he would still have gone for the landing if he saw a safe place to land.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:29 PM | Comments (706)
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By that sneaky Andrew Breitbart.

With regard to the initial media coverage of the resignation of USDA official Shirley Sherrod, we have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias.

Having reviewed the full tape, spoken to Ms. Sherrod, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans.

The fact is Ms. Sherrod did help the white farmers mentioned in her speech. They personally credit her with helping to save their family farm.

Beck Supports Sherrod. Beck thinks Sherrod got the bum-rush, because Obama's bus' tires needed some cushioning.

You Know... Beck makes a great point here. I am really on Team Beck on this, I think.

Krauthammer just said on Special Report she deserves her job back... and restitution.

The Anchoress brought up this possibility -- that the tape didn't seem complete, and that Sherrod seemed to be building to something that we never heard.

In fact, that does seem to be the case, given that the wife of the farmer helped in this tale is now vouching for her.

That farmer's wife, however, is saying Sherrod is a "friend for life" who saved their family farm from foreclosure.

...

The incident in question, however, took place two decades ago, and the wife of the farmer in question told told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sherrod "kept us out of bankruptcy."

"Her husband told her, 'You're spending more time with the Spooners than you are with me,' " Eloise Spooner, the wife of the farmer, told the AJC. "She took probably two or three trips with us to Albany just to help us out."

Spooner also remarked on CNN this afternoon, Sherrod "helped us save our farm by getting in there and doing all she could do to help us."

Sherrod admits she did in fact give the guy less help than she would have given a black guy (and claims this guy was trying to show he was "superior" -- really? Sounds like she's the one with the superiority problem), but that was 24 years ago, and if she was building to a lesson ("But then I became friends with them and learned" etc.) it makes it a different sort of story, doesn't it?

If the tape has been stripped of that kind of context, this is going to be damaging to Breitbart (even if he didn't strip that context out, but received the tape in that condition), who has been on quite an amazing run and has gotten to be very credible (and, to liberals, frightening).

Not sure about this yet.

Mistake Of Intent On Obama's Part? It should be noted that Breitbart did not release this tape to get Sherrod fired (I mean, "Who?") but to demonstrate the NAACP had racists in its midst.

The problem here is not really Breitbart's -- Breitbart released the tape to establish the NAACP contains racists, and the NAACP made a big spectacle of throwing Sherrod under the bus to refute what is irrefutable.

In other words, the NAACP made the story about Sherrod. When the story had always been about the NAACP.

The Anchoress: Here's her musings on this.

She listened carefully when others didn't.

Posted by: Ace at 02:22 PM | Comments (1170)
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Remember this guy? Video below the fold, but if you don't want to click, he responded to a question about the constitutionality of ObamaCare's individual mandate by responding, honestly but horribly, "I don't worry about the Constitution on this to be honest." And then he cited the Declaration of Independence's statement about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as his constitutional authority. (When it's pointed out this isn't in the Constitution, he offered, "Well, either one.")

A poll conducted by his opponent puts it at 45-32.

Thanks to chip. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (362)
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