Take 2

This time I'm ripping off a real lawyer, tattoos and all. Ladies and gentlemen, Dodd Harris:

Seconds to his blessing of Command Post - the first place to go for late-breaking news anywhere in the world. Kudos to Michele, blog MVP.

A picture of a man being removed from divorce court. Your caption may differ - enter the contest!

Of Schrödinger's Politician John F'ing Kerry, who can hold all positions at once. His filthy-rich African-American wife's positions are interesting too.

But here's the corker - PeTA's proposal to amend the Constitution. These people walk among us...

Why bother? Just start at the top...

Sheesh, what's with this lawyer thing all of a sudden? I must be missing my daily fix of Glenn Reynolds.

Does John F. Kerry have the stamina it takes to be President?

Via Drudge, we have this from the NYTimes:

"Mr. Kerry arrived Wednesday night for a full week of rest and relaxation, and a rare bit of privacy with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, at their high-altitude retreat.
His getaway came at a particularly rough time for the senator, the expected Democratic presidential nominee. For more than a week, he has had to defend himself from an onslaught of attacks by President Bush and millions of dollars in negative advertising, while taking criticism for calling Republicans 'crooked' and 'lying' and claiming to have the support of leaders whom he has not named. Moreover, a New York Times/CBS News poll indicated that many Americans were beginning to see him as the kind of politician who says what he thinks people want to hear.
Several Democrats and Kerry aides said some of his missteps were a result of exhaustion. They and some of the senator's friends said the vacation could not have come too soon. 'He needed it about as badly as anybody could need it,' said Sam Grossman, a real estate developer who has skied with Ms. Heinz Kerry here for decades, and with Mr. Kerry for years. 'The best thing that can happen is he'll sleep, relax, eat some good food, and then, in a couple of days, he'll be back firing again.'"

The last few primaries have been a cakewalk, so he shouldn't have been too worn out from that. If he gets exhausted defending himself, then makes more mistakes due to exhaustion, then when will things get any better?

It's a long time until the election. Then if Kerry wins, he'll have to come up to speed as President, staff his executive branch, and look forward to a mofo of a payback from Republicans when it comes time for confirmations. And then, if my theory is correct, it'll get a lot worse...

So IMO that's one more reason not to vote for Kerry. It's not just his foreign policy that's weak.

Larry Elder: Answers for the 'swing voter'

Right here.

How to get a lawyer to do your work for free

It's easy. Just go to one of their blogs and link all their stuff. You get all that research for nothing. So today I ransacked Clayton Cramer's blog.

Imagine being a wrongfully imprisoned person receiving a bill for room and board?

What a jackass FDR must have been! The Manhattan Project, strategic bombing, suspension of publication of scientific publications, all because he was afraid Hitler would come up with nuclear weapons. And then after the war, it turned out that there weren't any such WMDs. And unlike the current situation, they hadn't even caught Hitler using WMDs. I guess FDR is lucky he didn't have to run against John Kerry.

This shows what might have happened if that near-miss asteroid actually hit.

Or how about self-inflicted hate crimes?

Maybe it'll be easier just to go to the top and scroll down.

UPDATE - In the comments Mr. Cramer assures me that he is not a lawyer. I expect to hear from his attorney any minute. But my idea stands, doggone it - just go see Stuart Buck or The Dodd or Hawspipe instead.

Twin twins

From the Houston Chronicle:

Jacob, Jacoby, Jason and Justin -- two sets of twins weighing from 2 pounds, 5 ounces to 3 pounds, 4 ounces -- were delivered healthy by Caesarean section at the Woman's Hospital of Texas.

Good luck. The article offered a prediction that it would take as many as 10-15000 diapers that first year.

Why did the Jews stay in Europe in the 30's?

This woman attempts to explain. She's a Jewish woman who has lived in France in 1972, and now fears that she must leave.

From Moe Freedman at Occam's Toothbrush.

Morality from the heart?

I'm agnostic. Dennis Prager is not. But we can agree on this.

Bernadette, Rhonda and Jacquelyn

Anybody here, seen those three names lately? Do you wonder where they've gone? Do pop songs have a big influence on girls' names?

I'm guessing that there are a lot of 39 year old Rhondas out there. Why? Because in 1965 the Beach Boys had a big hit with "Help Me, Rhonda". (Who was Rhonda, anyway? I've been scrounging on the web and haven't found any clues yet. Or was it just a name chosen at random?)

If her name is "Bernadette", I'm guessing she's probably around 37, because that's when the 4 Tops had their big hit. Along the way there has also been a novel "The Song of Bernadette" and the Irish woman Bernadette Devlin, so they may confound the data.

And then there are other pop culture figures - how about Jackie Kennedy? I'm guessing that about any Jacquelyn you meet is pushing 40...

Alright, in the name of science I simply must know if these things have any influence. So, from the top 1000 names lists from the Social Security Administration we have the following name frequencies by decade:

1940 Rhonda 340
Jacquelyn 206
Bernadette 240

1950 Ronda 345 (Rhonda did not show)
Jacquelyn 218
Bernadette 271

1960 Rhonda 46 (and Ronda was 218)
Jacquelyn 266
Bernadette 287

1970 Rhonda 92 (and Ronda was 348)
Jacquelyn 340
Bernadette 426

1980 Rhonda 303 (Ronda was N/S)
Jacquelyn N/S
Bernadette 555

1990 Rhonda 853
Jacquelyn 271
Bernadette 891

N/S=No show - not in the listing.

Hmm. Rhonda/Ronda spiked bigtime in the 60's, stayed respectable until the 80's, then dropped like a rock in the 90's. Bernadette was actually falling and continued to fall after the 4 Tops (I wonder what this would look like if broken down by race). Jacquelyn was gone by the 80's but recovered in the 1990's (I'm guessing that that coincided with the death of Jacquelyn Kennedy Onassis, but the data cannot distinguish this).

Is this scientific? Not particularly. I used ranks, not frequencies. I haven't worried about name variations except in the case of Rhonda, and the data I'm using has some significant limitations itself. And if you even asked, you're no fun anyway.

Little Audrey!

You don't remember her? You must not have watched the kids' shows available in central IL in the 60's. "The Captain Jinks Show" ("Say goodnight, Captain" "Goodnight, Captain") showed her, Herman and Katnip and various other obscurities regularly.

Toonopedia says she was basically a ripoff of Little Lulu. She even had the same voice performer, Mae Questel, who also did Betty Boop and Olive Oyl (good grief, couldn't Popeye do any better than that? He even had to fight Bluto for her. We had better in my old engineering school...).

Audrey was PC before there was PC:

The Harvey Comics version of Audrey has an interesting distinction. Audrey's friend, Tiny, was colored black ? that is, "colored" black, because the coloring was the only way in which his racial heritage was indicated. This makes Little Audrey, in all probability, the first racially integrated comic book series in which absolutely no stereotypes of any kind were used.

How to Stage a Controversy

Democrats would love to keep George W. Bush from reminding us of 9/11. He'd be held accountable for increased defense spending, physical security strictures, and a huge negative impact on our economy without being able to defend himself.

Imagine FDR in 1944. Americans are dying abroad by the thousands, taxes are sky high, various items are rationed, and the government is spending money like mad. Apparently today's Dems think it would have been out of line for him to remind us of Pearl Harbor lest we disrespect the dead and the feelings of the living.

Matthew Continetti describes how the Dems tried to put 9/11 out of bounds here.

Sissy nation?

Maybe.

Stolen from Betsy's Page

"We all gotta eat"

The Patriots' offer essentially would guarantee Law $15.6 million over the next two years ($6.6 million bonus, salaries of $4 million this year and $5 million next year), according to the Globe. His current contract calls for him to earn $16.9 million over the next two seasons.


"I would be a fool to take less than what I already make," Law told the newspaper. "So you're telling me, if I make $17 million over the next two years, if I'm a Patriot, I'm going to accept $15.6 million? That's a pay cut. I said it a thousand times, I'm not taking no pay cut...."

St Louis Star Ball - tonight and all weekend

It's still worthwhile even though *I* won't be competing there this year... Everything you need to know to get there and enjoy some of the best amateur and professional dancing ever is right here.

The event is managed every year by the Just Dancing studio in Manchester, MO just west of St. Louis. If you want to get started with dancing and you're around StL, that's the place to go, from the greenest beginner to the national level.

It's about time!

That most Politically Correct of devices, the condom, is threatened with exposure::

"WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is considering requiring warning labels on condom packages noting that the contraceptive devices do not protect users from all sexually transmitted diseases, a Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) official said Thursday.

Most recent studies indicate condoms do not safeguard against human papillomavirus, or HPV, a little-known but widespread sexually transmitted disease that, untreated, can cause genital warts or cervical cancer. "

The FDA "has developed a regulatory plan to provider condom users with a consistent labeling message and the protection they should expect from condom use," said Dr. Daniel G. Schultz, director of the agency's Office of Device Evaluation.

The agency "is preparing new guidance on condom labeling to address these issues," Schultz told members of a House Government Reform subcommittee.

The FDA has considered warning labels since 2000, when President Clinton (news - web sites) directed the agency to re-examine whether information included in packages accurately reflected condom effectiveness in preventing all sexually transmitted diseases, including HPV.

But some lawmakers feared that such labels could turn people away from using condoms, thereby increasing the risk of contracting diseases such as AIDS (news - web sites), chlamydia and gonorrhea.

"Anything that undermines the effectiveness of condoms for these uses will have serious public health consequences," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. "Are condoms perfect? Of course not. But reality requires us not to make a public health strategy against protection, but rather to ask a key question: compared to what?"

Some lawmakers "insist that abstinence-only education is the solution to teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases because abstinence works each time," Waxman said. "Well, the evidence, however, indicates that abstinence-only education works rarely, if at all."

Responded Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va.: "This is not about social ideology, or religious ideology. It's about informing women. ... And truly, the only way to be protected is abstinence. That's not ideology — it's fact."

The White House wants to double, to $270 million, federal spending on education programs to convince young people that abstinence is the only certain way to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. But an independent report for the government two years ago indicated that no reliable evidence exists that abstinence programs work.

More than 2 million American women are infected with HPV each year, said Dr. Ed Thompson, deputy director for public health services at the Centers for Disease Control. Ten thousand women are diagnosed annually with cervical cancer, claiming 4,000 lives, Thompson said.

Of course there's the usual ridiculous statement about abstinence programs. Read this sneer-quoted double-talk to see how far backwards some of these creeps will bend to try to convince us that abstinence fails the same way a condom does.

Kerry voters? Count on it.

Yep, I even stole the title from local boy Rodger Schultz. I can't figure out which one is dumber - the drug pushing asthmatic or the 100% minority owned firm that wasn't 51% minority owned.

I never read this in my high school history

From The Washington Times: "An American historian says that more than a million Europeans were enslaved by North African slave traders between 1530 and 1780, a time of vigorous Mediterranean and Atlantic coastal piracy.
The number of white European slaves is only a fraction of the trade that brought 10 million to 12 million black African slaves to the Americas over a 400-year period, historian Robert Davis says, but his research shows the slave trade was more widespread than commonly assumed. The impact on Europe's white population was significant."

Kid power

It’s thought that nearly a billion and a half people around the world don’t have access to safe drinking water. People often walk for miles every day to find it, which can take hours. That’s why the task of getting water has been considered a difficult, tiresome job.

But that’s changing in South Africa. The World’s Amy Costello visited a place where getting water has actually become fun.

Kids run in a circle and push a merry-go-round faster and faster. Those who are seated on the ride, get dizzy from the speed...laughing and giddy from the force of gravity.

These kids are having so much fun, they don’t seem to realize they’re working. Then again, that’s the idea behind the Play-Pump…a merry-go-round with a mission.

....The World Bank recently recognized the Play Pump in a worldwide competition and provided 160,000 dollars to install forty more Play-Pumps around South Africa. The World Bank’s Michael Kubzanksky says that of the 450 projects funded by the competition, the Play-Pump’s one of the best.


...There are plans to put the Play-Pump into other African countries. It may come as no surprise to parents…but Field says the energy created by kids turning a merry-go-round generates enough power to supply a village of 3000 people with clean drinking water.

Each pump costs about seven thousand dollars to install.

But if they could get married...

Drudge linked to something under a headline like "Rise in syphilis tied to Internet", so I dug a little deeper. Incidentally, in the following, "MSM" means "men having sex with men":: "Among 151 MSM interviewed, nearly 45 percent reported meeting sex partners online, and roughly one fifth of those men had no other contact information for the partner besides an e-mail address."Yep, it's the Internet's fault alright. And back when, as documented in "And the Band Played On", men would lie in bathhouses, nude with their butts in the air waiting for a stranger to sodomize them, that must have been because of Ronald Reagan's views on AIDS.

Well, maybe the chat rooms should be shut down, eh? Oh, you could chase them off AOL, but they'd be back elsewhere, and with even less supervision.

But if you did successfully shut down chat rooms, it would be just as it was in San Francisco some years ago with bathhouses. When some gay groups recognized that they were the nuclei for the spread of AIDS and lobbied to shut them down, there was mass outrage. I don't know if they're back open now or not, but they're irrelevant - sluts are sluts.

Are all gays like that? No. But it would be nice to hear them disavowed once in a while, especially when some of them want us to take the idea of gay marriage seriously.

But if she had gone hunting with them, that would have been different

Another high court justice faces questions on ethics: "WASHINGTON -- Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has lent her name and presence to a lecture series co-sponsored by the liberal NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, an advocacy group that often argues before the court in support of women's rights that the justice embraces."

Atrios for President!

Why not? - how much worse can he be than John Kerry? It's harder to tell the difference every day, and then Kerry described his Republican critics as "the most crooked ... lying group I've ever seen." Perhaps it's just a coincidence that he had just been speaking with Howard Dean.

And in the same article Kerry is proposing "deeper tax cuts for the middle class than proposed by President Bush". I can't wait to see this.