If She Pulls a Knife, He's Got To Kill a Wife: OJ Has Already Confessed Killing Niccole Brown To Oprah, Will Repeat Confession In Live Interview?!
— Ace

Bumped, because it was covered late last night, but it's still today's news:

Oh he's got a cover story:

She pulled a knife on him.

He just... um, took it from her, then stabbed her multiple times, and then cut her throat so badly her head was nearly severed from her body.

In... self-defense.

105 pound women are tough customers. You can't afford to take chances, and you can't afford to have them pop back up like The Shape.

Now, in Niccole Brown's defense, she was probably surprised to see her rage-junkie drug-addict ex-husband skulking about her her bushes uninvited.

Still, I guess this settles the matter, once and for all.

Self-defense.

Presumably she killed Ron Goldman, and OJ couldn't stop her in time.

He can only do so much.

Headline... thanks to Jackie Chiles, in the comments.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:30 AM | Comments (200)
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Time: God Save The Constitution From These Wingnuts Who Wish To Read It
— Ace

There's an old sophist gambit, older than hell itself. If you want to convince someone that plain words mean something bizarre, you first establish they mean nothing at all -- who can say what this inpenetrable plain English could possibly mean? -- and then, having established that words mean nothing, you then proceed to step two, assigning those words strange meanings.

Because, like, who can say.

Shabby, dumb, low-wattage gambit. About par for the course for the left and the media. (But I repeat myself.)

One Document, Under Siege

By RICHARD STENGEL

He means under siege by you, wingnutz.

Here are a few things the framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.

People on the right and left constantly ask what the framers would say about some event that is happening today. What would the framers say about whether the drones over Libya constitute a violation of Article I, Section 8, which gives Congress the power to declare war? Well, since George Washington didn't even dream that man could fly, much less use a global-positioning satellite to aim a missile, it's hard to say what he would think. What would the framers say about whether a tax on people who did not buy health insurance is an abuse of Congress's authority under the commerce clause? Well, since James Madison did not know what health insurance was and doctors back then still used leeches, it's difficult to know what he would say. And what would Thomas Jefferson, a man who owned slaves and is believed to have fathered children with at least one of them, think about a half-white, half-black American President born in Hawaii (a state that did not exist)? Again, hard to say.

The framers were not gods and were not infallible. Yes, they gave us, and the world, a blueprint for the protection of democratic freedoms — freedom of speech, assembly, religion — but they also gave us the idea that a black person was three-fifths of a human being, that women were not allowed to vote and that South Dakota should have the same number of Senators as California, which is kind of crazy. And I'm not even going to mention the Electoral College. They did not give us income taxes. Or Prohibition. Those came later.

Americans have debated the Constitution since the day it was signed, but seldom have so many disagreed so fiercely about so much. Would it be unconstitutional to default on our debt? Should we have a balanced-budget amendment? Is it constitutional to ask illegal immigrants to carry documents?

This is all absurd sophistry, because the Constitution is not about any of these things. It elaborates, simply, a process for passing laws about any matter, whether it's sexting, DNA, miniskirts, or Lady Gaga.

The Congress passes a bill in both chambers. It then goes to the President for his signature; if he doesn't sign the bill, both houses need pass it with 2/3rds majorities to establish it as positive law.

The Courts, it was asserted by John Marshall, have a role to play in this as well, and can strike down a law as unconstitutional if and only if it violates, clearly, one of the specific provisions of the Constitution (including its amendments).

The Framers did not have to know about sexting, DNA, miniskirts, and Lady Gaga to be fair experts in the procedures of government and passage of laws. They had already been involved in such tasks for decades, and had a few hundred years of English tradition to inform them, too.

And there's another clear meaning in the Constitution: That the charter establishes the powers of the federal government, which are great, but which are specifically limited to those powers enumerated therein, with some wiggle room contained in the necessary and proper clause. But against that lay the amendment no liberal wishes to acknowledge, the Tenth, which states that all powers not granted to the federal government by charter remain in the hands of the People, in the various states.

This is not a complicated scheme. It is merely inconvenient for liberals. What is complicated are the various arguments as to why the plain meanings of the document are not plain and all and should be read with explicitly opposite meanings.

What this jackass is arguing for, of course, is the proposition that because there are a few areas of legitimate dispute in the Constitution, that means the whole document is meaningless, and we can assign it any meaning we like, and of course the meaning he would like to assign it is directly contrary to those words we certain can understand: He would like to replace the basic system of promulgation of laws by the legislature, signed by the President, with a limited role for the Courts as argued by John Marshall, with a system is that is plainly against the clear meaning of the Constitution, that the Courts shall establish all laws, and always with a liberal agenda, or at least all important laws.

We citizens can, say, have input into whether the taxes on cigarettes shall be 90% or 92% or somewhere in between. Anything more fundamental than that is too important to be left to the people and their representatives in the national legislature, and can only be decided by an elite body with the wisdom and crucial technical expertise in one single area of life (legal interpretation) to make such judgments.

This gambit, then, essentially says that the Democratic Republic plainly conceived by the Constitution is in doubt, and therefore the Constitution must call for something else, which is of course, not democracy and not a republican form of government.

If only these wingnutz would understand the central message of the Constitution: People cannot be trusted to govern their own lives and require an appointed super-legislature of Learned Men to make their decisions for them.

Thanks to CuffyP.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (191)
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Top Headline Comments 6-23-11
— andy

Gabe's out doing lawyer stuff this morning. Allegedly.

Speaking of lawyers ...

Mark Cuban handled his Dallas Mavericks' winning their first NBA championship with great humility, especially by the standards set during his 11 years as an outspoken -- and occasionally obnoxious -- owner.

However, Cuban couldn't resist rubbing it in the face of former Mavericks owner Ross Perot Jr. via the Dallas County courts system.

Mark Cuban's lawyers submitted this visual support Wednesday as part of a four-page court filing (see below) asking for a 2009 lawsuit filed by former owner Ross Perot Jr. to be dismissed.

Exhibit A below the fold. more...

Posted by: andy at 03:46 AM | Comments (415)
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Let's fix this Public Sector Union pension problem!
We just need to kick in 1,400 bucks per household!
A Year.
For 30 Years.
[Arthur K]
— Open Blogger

De Rugy lays out just how much of a mess we worked ourselves into over the last couple of generations.

These quotes speak for themselves. I've got nothing to add... except Read The Whole Thing.

...contributions to these systems (state and local pensions) would have to immediately increase by a factor of 2.5...

Shifting all new employees onto defined contribution plans and Social Security still leaves required increases at an average of $1,223 per household. Even with a hard freeze of all benefits at today’s levels, contributions still have to rise by more than $800 per U.S. household to achieve full funding in 30 years.

I know you've heard this next bit in the next paragraph a 100 times just on this blog, but it bears repeating because it is the key point of this whole mess.

But public workers have a unique relationship with elected officials, because government employees are effectively negotiating with bosses whom they can campaign to vote out of office if they don’t get what they want. ...

California alone needs to begin devoting an additional $28 billion a year to state and local public pensions to remedy an existing shortfall, according to one nonpartisan study - and nationwide, estimates of such deficits reach into the trillions over the next few decades.

"We had no idea what we were doing," said Tony Oliveira, who as a supervisor in Kings County, in central California, voted to increase employees’ benefits, and now is on the board of the state’s enormous pension fund. "This was probably the worst public policy decision in the state’s history. But everyone kept saying there was plenty of money. And no one wants to be responsible if all the cops quit to get paid more in the next town."

... there is a bigger policy lesson in these changes: Some promises are simply unsustainable, so lawmakers need to stop making them. Broken promises have a staggeringly high price for everyone (taxpayers, yes, but also the public employees who were kept under the illusion that the impossible was possible), on top of the cost of maintaining an unsustainable system in place for years.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:11 PM | Comments (50)
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Owner of "Betty" Account, Whoever It Is, Releases Purported Emails With Gennette & Other Players
— Ace

Patterico's document dump, Part 1. He comments that he has a lot of material to sort through and organize, and more is coming.

It's not really super-awesome except for the suggestive first tweet: That Gennette isn't "supposed to" communicate via online messaging anymore.

Could be a family member's advisement.

Could not be.

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 PM | Comments (41)
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Fugitive Boston Mob Kingpin And Brother of... Um, Longstanding Masschusetts President of the State Senate Whitey Bulger Arrested In... Santa Monica?
— Ace

Nice town.

Bulger fled Boston in late 1994 as federal agents were about to arrest him in connection with 21 killings, racketeering and other crimes that spanned the early 1970s to the mid-1980s.

...

The arrest came as the FBI launched a media campaign in 14 cities to help determine Bulger's whereabouts.

Let me go the next step as a professional blogger and look that media campaign up for you:

The FBI today doubled the reward for Catherine Greig, the girlfriend of James “Whitey” Bulger, and announced they have created a new public service announcement targeting women for new tips about the two fugitives.

And this is clever: They also took out full-page ads in cosmetic surgery magazines to flash pictures of her to plastic surgeons --asking the question:

Posted by: Ace at 08:39 PM | Comments (66)
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They'll Tell You Who They Fear? Rick Perry, Homo!!!
— Ace

No, not really, but the left is up and running.

A couple of weeks ago I was speaking with a politically-connected kind of guy. I had just begun getting into Perry and was looking over his basic bio. I asked this guy: "Any baggage?"

-- "Rumors."

"What?"

--"Boys."

"Proof?

--"Nahhh."

Yeah, it was actually like that. Anyway, NY Magazine takes the Texas Democrats' smear national:

Rick Perry, if he enters the GOP primary race, will be well-positioned to chip away at Mitt Romney's front-runner status. But while Romney has, at least for political purposes, an impeccable marriage to wife Ann, Perry's marriage to wife Anita has long been dogged, at least inside Texas, by whispers.

Politico resurfaced the rumors for the national crowd this week, explaining that "his team is more than prepared for a re-airing of unsubstantiated rumors." (For instance, in Politico articles re-airing them. Or Daily Intel posts discussing those articles.) The most vicious gossip, which Perry publicly addressed in 2004, alleged that he was gay and had cheated on his wife with a member of his administration. The Austin Chronicle, the one paper that seems to have been willing to devote actual ink to the story, wrote that though they were "extraordinary in their baroque detail and remarkable persistence," there was no evidence whatsoever, and "numerous other reporters, from here to New York, have looked into the rumors, with, as far as we know, an identical lack of results."

But the gossip didn't go entirely dormant, at least not when it was politically expedient: Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Perry's opponent in the 2010 gubernatorial election, juiced up the SEO keywords of her campaign website with "rick perry gay." That same election, a Democratic PAC ran an ad in most of the major Texas newspapers that was clearly meant to remind voters that Perry's red-blooded American maleness wasn't an established fact: "When he's not in San Francisco Â… Perry's Â… flipping through the pages of his Food and Wine magazine Â… in his fancy Â… rental mansion," read the copy. (Perry does not support gay marriage; Texas Democrats, theoretically, have made LGBTQ rights an important part of their platform. The party was silent on the gay-baiting ads.)

Different states have a different politics, and I've been saying for years Texas' liberals are among the dirtiest and most brazen. And their Republicans aren't choirboys, either.

All I can say on this is: Really? Guy's been a senior government official for... 20 years? First Agricultural Commissioner, then Lieutenant Governor (under Bush), then governor for going on 10 years, a record... and in all this time the outrageously gay Rick Perry hasn't actually done anything outrageously gay?

And before that he was in the Air Force, which was of course then no-gays-allowed, and managed to not get the boot even though he was in one of the randiest periods of a person's life, just-post-teenaged-years-but-now-with-an-income-and-an-apartment?

I'll mention two things that shape my impression of Politickin', Texas style.

I used to hang out on Salon's message boards, pickin' fights, after I got booted off Slate's boards and before I thought, "Hey, maybe I should just start a blog." There was a guy there named Fergussen Foont, who I have to tell you, is a chapter in his own right.

You know that "Michael Moore Goes on a Manhattan Murder Spree" thing I have in my greatest hits? Yeah, that wasn't originally about Michael Moore. It was about this Fergussen Foont.

Anyway, for about six months before the 2000 elections, he informed me (everyone) several times a week that there was a picture of Bush dancing naked on a table, holding his pickle, and maybe doing gay stuff with another dude, and he had personally seen it with his own two eyes, and this photo would emerge just before the election.

Nicholas Kronos, can I get a witness here? Stumbo? Anyone from those Bad Old Days want to back me up on this?

Well, you know about that picture. Or, rather, you don't. It was just made up.

This guy claimed to be some kind of operative. I think he's just a retard, but who knows, there are a lot of retards in politics, you may have noticed. The picture story was "extraordinary in its baroque detail and remarkable persistence," too.

The other thing I know about Texas politics: Bill Burkett, the sad, silly-ass pathetic broken-down half-crazed bridge-troll who faked up those ridiculous "TANG absenteeism" forgeries.

Those claims about Bush, too, had been "extraordinary in baroque detail and remarkable in their persistence." Everyone had heard this endlessly-promulgated rumor for years. Most of the people spreading it claimed to "know it from someone who'd know."

Burkett claimed to have first-hand knowledge. He claimed he personally witnessed the "cleansing" Bush's files. And this was back in 2000, before he'd hatch his absurd Microsoft Word documents on unsuspecting doddering old fool Dan Rather and his vile henchthing Mary Mapes.

Oh, but Burkett had more. So much more. See, he physically touched the "cleansed" documents, too:

Instead I looked down into the trashcan.... And on top of that pile of paper, approximately five-eighths of an inch thick, and Jim wanted me to estimate the number of pages and I said probably between 20 and 40 pages of documents that were clearly originals and photocopies. And it wasn't any big deal, I looked at it, it was a glance situation, and it made no sense to me at all except at the top of that top page was Bush, George W., 1LT.

And I look back at it now and I know I was troubled that those documents were in the trashcan. I did ruffle through the top six to eight pages.

Let me hat-tip Charles Johnson (so long as we're stepping into the time machine) to find the curious documents he "ruffled" through:

So that's what I think. I think we've got a very talented politician here, someone who just beats 'em, and someone who -- like many Southern politicians of his generation -- defected from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party when it was clear there was no longer a "conservative wing" of the Democratic Party in existence any longer.

And I think they got pretty steamed about that. And so I think they cooked up a queer rumor about a guy who married a girl he'd known since, get this, elementary school (though they didn't start dating until high school).

If this guy's so frickin' gay, where is the evidence? Who's seen this? Who has he shtupped?

This isn't those gay-friendly northern states, like New York, where they had a gay mayor for years and everyone was civil enough to pretend to not notice.

This isn't New Jersey, where a complacent media would blow off gay rumors about a liberal Democratic Governor they liked.

This is Texas, where the Big Q charge still carries a bit of heft. Texas, where the old maxim holds that your career in politics is over only if they catch you with a dead girl or a live boy. Steers and queers, my friends. Steers and queers.

And Texas media liberals are the among the worst c***suckers out there. At least New York media liberals are a little calm about things because they know they're untouchable.

Texas media liberals, on the other hand, are under siege, in a little bastion of Austin surrounded by a sea of hooker-lipstick red. They're not in control, like New York City media liberals. So they're cranky.

So all these Texas media liberals have had this rumor endlessly pushed to them that a guy who holds Christ Day and is against gay marriage and all that is actually an undercover Boy Baster and therefore a...

sexual hypocrite!!!

...but they haven't been able to do anything but chatter about it?

And now it's debuted for the national audience, in the same sad state of full and total unencumbrance by evidence, and not only evidence, but even a live party to make the allegation, someone willing to put a name to the claim?

Okay.

But thanks, NY Mag, because I did want to mention this. Better to have this crap out in the open where people can discuss it and judge it for what it is than to have it whispered about in the darkness.

In honor of Rick Perry officially coming out of the closet, loud and proud, allegedly, here's a song that's totally gay but pretty damn great.

And, liberal media, since you're so eager to chase down gay rumors: Man, have I got a corker for you.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:32 PM | Comments (261)
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More On Jon Stewart Being Misinformed About Conservatives [OregonMuse]
— Code Red

One thing I think we all noticed about Jon Stewart when he was being interviewed by Chris Wallace is how adamant he was, almost angry, when he insisted that Fox viewers were "misinformed". He kept repeating this point, using words like "every poll", "consistently", and "poll after poll". He really seemed to have a desperate need to believe this, and the corollary that Fox is not a legitimate news organization.

Apparently, the need for affirmation is strong in other progressives as well. Where I work, some guy is fond of printing out opinion pieces from lefty sites and leaving them in one of the restroom stalls (presumably as reading material you can ponder while doing your business).

Today, the guy left a printout of this article (warning: link to lefty fever-swamp site), and I all I can say is, congratulations all the moron commenters in previous threads who correctly identified what Stewart meant by being 'misinformed', which, when boiled down, means not giving lefty-approved answers to poll questions. The article quotes some poll results of Fox viewers:

• 91 percent believe the stimulus legislation lost jobs
• 72 percent believe the health reform law will increase the deficit
• 72 percent believe the economy is getting worse
• 60 percent believe climate change is not occurring

Does this sound misinformed? Why, yes, very much so!

What's interesting here is that these are all talking points out of the progressive-left/DNC playbook. At best, I would call the answers to these questions controversial. Other charitable adjectives I might use would be 'debatable' and 'disputed.' There isn't anything straightforwardly factual about any of the answers. Why not ask questions such as:

Who is Speaker of the House?
What does the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution say?
How many terms can the President serve?
What is a filibuster?
Is Jon Stewart a lying, dishonest hack, or what?

OK, so maybe I fudged a little on that last one. The point is, if getting the correct answers to poll questions requires a high degree of partisan commitment, then you're not really measuring anything except the degree of partisan commitment. And articles like this are not meant to be informative or convincing (since they're obviously neither), but rather they're published in order to soothe, reinforce, and maintain the cocoon that progressives have woven around themselves, a warm little insulated cocoon where Obama is a great leader, government spending creates jobs, socialism works, and Jon Stewart is not a lying, dishonest hack.

Posted by: Code Red at 06:21 PM | Comments (10)
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Overnight Open Thread - Hump Day Edition
— Maetenloch

Dolphins: Nature's Gangbangers

Long-time ONT readers know that the dolphins are into rapin'. A lot. But really that's only if they like you.

And if they don't like you, well then you get a little of the cetacean ultra-violence:

Seemingly random acts of violence by bottlenose dolphins on porpoises have been reported in the Pacific Ocean off California. And recent marine mammal research confirms what could have been guessed: the attackers are young, sexually frustrated young males.

"Porpoises, come out and play-yay!"

In one particularly violent attack, three dolphins corralled their victim before seven others joined them to ram the porpoise to death. Cotter found most shocking the fact that two dolphins remained behind to play with the carcass before pushing it towards his boat. "It was almost like they said: 'We're done playing with it, here you go'."

So next time you get dolphin-raped and are feeling down, just remind yourself that it could have been a lot worse - death by dolphin and/or death by dolphin rape-rape.

Maybe if we set up a program for Phin outreach and re-education we can stem the tide of aquatic Hannibal Lectors before they reach our schools and Kwik-E-Marts, and redirect them into more fulfilling careers such as directing films or perhaps even leading international monetary funds.

more...

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:57 PM | Comments (345)
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Chris Matthews: I Hate So-Called Evenhanded So-Called Objective Journalism
— Dave in Texas

I don't even think he listens to himself anymore.

When it comes to "objective truths" such as man-made global warming, the media needs to tell the flat-earthers to shut up.

IÂ’m with you on that, Eric. I hate that so-called evenhanded so-called objective journalism. You know, you know, you canÂ’t say something isnÂ’t true if itÂ’s true in the interest of evenhandedness.

Some truth just needs to be shoved in your face, deniers.

He's just running with Al Gore's complaint, that the media currently is backing down a bit more than he thinks they should in the face of contrary factual evidence that we're killing carbon trading futures the planet.

Hey, I thought skepticism and objectivity were good things. But then I'm an idiot. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:01 PM | Comments (189)
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