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I received a science fiction novel in the post yesterday – presumably due to my time on the Nebula Jury – and on the back the plot was described thusly, in yellow capital letters, no less:

SHE WAS SHOT PROTECTING THE PRESIDENT, AND SHE WOKE UP NAKED, IN THE ARMS OF A HUNK…

Note that this is a book published by the very same company for which the hosts of Electrolite are editors. That being said, I must acknowledge that the fact that the author’s name is Susan doesn’t necessarily indicate it was actually written by a woman.

An old-timer’s spin:

Your 38 yr. scenario doesn’t bother me; I’m 62, now, and I still, smoke drink, gamble, go to topless bars and carry a handgun. I really don’t expect to live to be 100. Maybe we can rent one of those small planes to fly over GW’s ranch, trailing a banner that says,”ARTICLE IV, SECT. 4″, U.S.CONSTITUTION. That way GW can say to his old, terrorist-looking pal, Vicente, “Gee, podner, I’d like to help you’all, but that pesky old Constitution of mine says “Government must defend us against invasion”.

I will be very disappointed though, that I never got the chance to take target practice at these illegals crossing the border, down here, in San Diego. Or, watching the Liberal pols and media wring their hands as we arrest all of the illegals in midnite sweeps, larvae and all. But, I’ll probably never be able to legitimately dunk a basketball, either.

We can only hope that more of the Illegal women coming over look like Salma Hayek….

The best bit is that last “probably”. Hope does spring eternal….

Armstrong Williams catches out the Post:

Exhibit A: The Washington Post recently printed a false story about me: In its Sunday Style section, the Post claimed that I was ridiculed at the Gridiron Club dinner, an annual dinner/roast where a wild pack of journalists gulp drinks and skewer their colleagues.

The Post claimed I was the target of some roasting, to the tune of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama.” The song has this chorus: ‘Sweet Home Alabama, where the skies are so blue / Sweet Home Alabama, Lord I’m coming home to you.’ The Post reported that as part of a skit, performers at the Gridiron club changed the lyrics into:

“Armstrong’s propaganda It sounds so true He’ll tout our agenda When the check goes through”

Funny stuff. Just one thing: the event never took place. The Gridiron had planned to do the skit, but ended up dropping it from the program. This is where things get real interesting. The Post not only reports that the skit took place, but that it was a rousing success: “It was really pretty darned funny, we are told. . . .”

Really? Told by whom? Certainly not by anyone actually in attendance at the event. All of which begs the question, did the Post reporter who concocted the story even attend the event, or did he just use an outdated program to cobble the story together? And where do you get the gall to create a reaction that never happened? I can understand putting a story outline together in advance of an event so as to better enable you to meet tight deadlines. But how do you create an audience reaction? How do you simply make up part of the news you’re supposed to be objectively recording?

But, but, if it’s in the newspaper, it must be true! Remember, these are the same people who very publicly worry about accuracy and bias in the blogosphere. If I were a large black woman, this is the point at which I would say: Mmm-hmmmm….

71 – Wisconsin
62 – Bucknell

Well, the Orange and the Blue made a game of it. Good on them. It was a no-lose situation, since knocking off a big name program like Kansas is about as good as it gets for a small school in March. But McNaughton is only a sophmore, so as the White Buffalo says, next year we’re going ALL THE WAY.

France’s political elite was stunned on Friday by an opinion poll that showed for the first time a majority of voters opposed the European Union constitutional treaty. Jacques Delors, former president of the European Commission, warned of a “political cataclysm” if France voted No to the constitution in a national referendum on May 29.

However, Mr Delors predicted that the Yes campaign, which has only just been launched, would ultimately prevail. “I believe in the good sense of the people. They will not confuse this vote with questions of internal politics,” Mr Delors said in a newspaper interview.

The poll of 802 people, conducted earlier this week, showed that 51 per cent of respondents would vote No if the referendum were held on Sunday. Support for the Yes campaign slumped 14 points from the previous month to 49 per cent, following a tumultuous spell in French politics.

I’m sure that even a few no votes won’t kill the EU, since it’s about as genuinely democratic as the Third Reich it is designed to replace. But it’s good to see that some Frenchmen are beginning to rethink the wisdom of a dictatorial pan-European empire. It wasn’t a good concept when Napoleon and Hitler were running one, and doing the same thing with a few soulless Brussels bureaucrats in charge is no improvement.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”

That’s a direct quote from the White Buffalo, following Bucknell’s upset of Kansas. The boys will all be walking a little taller today. Next up, Wisconsin.

badger badger badger badger BISON BISON

UPDATE: Chad the Elder snorts in disbelief: Their basketball squad just got bounced by noted basketball powerhouse Bucknell. Buck-frickin’-nell?

Word ’em up, Elder-san. Buck-frickin’-nell. B-U (clap, clap) beat you (clap clap).

A few years ago, Space Bunny and I had Thanksgiving dinner with a pro basketball player and his wife. He played for Georgetown back when they were trouncing us in the first round of the tournament. He not only remembered the game, but was kind enough to say that the Bison had hung tough with them for the first twelve minutes. It’s good to see them finally pull one off at the Big Dance.

Ben Shapiro grows out of Three Monkey Republicanism:

The time has come to do away with judicial review as a whole. The judicial branch has been politicized to such an extent that judges who fulfill Hamilton’s qualifications – judges who compare legislation to the actual Constitution – are dubbed conservative extremists, while judges who legislate from the bench are termed moderates. The system has become so thoroughly corrupt that the only choice left to us is a constitutional amendment ending judicial review of legislative acts.

“How can legislatures be trusted not to violate the Constitution, if there is no check upon them?” many will ask. The check will be the people themselves. If our elected lawmakers violate the Constitution, they will be answerable to us. This is not the case under our current system: Our judges are answerable to no one.

This is without a doubt young Mr. Shapiro’s best piece yet. I would only change one thing, which is to remind him that the federal judiciary actually is answerable to us. It’s called the Second Amendment.

When in the course of human events….

In a marriage of modern mythmakers, the Walt Disney Co. is marketing a film based on C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia. And in doing so, Disney will take a page from Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on Lewis’ novel for children and Christian allegory, will be released Dec. 9.

For Disney, the Christian marketing campaign represents a sharp break with corporate policy. Apart from Disney World’s annual Nights of Joy concerts, the film is the company’s first undertaking with the religious community. For some evangelical leaders, it represents the effective end of their Disney boycott.

The entertainment giant, which bills itself as a “Magic Kingdom,” has carefully avoided religion for most of its history. Yet Disney has launched a 10-month campaign aimed at evangelical Christians to build support for Narnia, a $100 million, live-action and computer-generated animated feature it is co-producing with Walden Media.

Given the success of THE PASSION and THE LORD OF THE RINGS, it would be incredibly stupid for Disney to have turned Aslan into a dechristianized were-beast, Peter and Edmund into gay lovers, Susan into a dominatrix attracted to animals and Lucy an abuse survivor gradually recovering her memories of her mistreatment at the hands of the Professor, but given Disney’s recent history, you’d be hard to put it past them. Fortunately, greed appears to have gotten the better of the usual Hollywood propaganda, so it’s possible that the movie might actually be all right.

I’m rather looking forward to it, but then, it wouldn’t disturb me if they messed it up the way it would have disturbed me if Peter Jackson had destroyed THE LORD OF THE RINGS. I very much like Narnia, but I don’t love it in the same way I love THE DARK IS RISING or even THE CHRONICLES OF PRYDAIN. Among other things, what happened to the electric appliances after the first book? Were they lost in the Telemarine dark age?

Nicholas Kristof writes in the New York Times:

The Democratic Party commits seppuku in the heartland by coming across as indifferent to people’s doubts about abortions or even as pro-abortion. A Times poll in January found that 61 percent of Americans favor tighter restrictions on abortion, or even a ban, while only 36 percent agree with the Democratic Party position backing current abortion law.

Although some regulars here have attempted to play around with the numbers and “prove” that most Americans favor a pro-choice position, their position is difficult to defend given the assertion by a liberal New York Times columnist that nearly two-thirds of the nation wants to junk Roe vs Wade and restrict women’s “right” to slay their unborn children.

Which should be pretty obvious, if you think about it. Legislators wouldn’t keep passing laws restricting abortion and having them shot down by the corrupt judiciary if they didn’t hold plenty of popular appeal.

Jonah Goldberg considers the silence of the felines:

Well, the inconvenient truth is that cats kill more American birds, particularly songbirds, than DDT and pesticides ever did. Wisconsin is considering allowing residents to shoot feral cats in part because a respected study found that felines kill between 7.8 million and 217 million birds in Wisconsin alone. Data from a Michigan study suggest that some 75 million birds are killed there just in the summer alone.

Estimates for how many birds cats kill in the United States vary almost as widely. The lowest estimates are around 100 million and go up to the 2.5 billion, though the consensus seems to hover around half a billion. What this leaves out, of course, is that many vulnerable bird species are particularly threatened by cats (and, alas, sometimes dogs as well), a non-native predator that often kills small animals for the fun of it….

For example, Carson’s memory is still invoked regularly by the anti-pesticide movement today. Anti-pesticide activists claim that some 67 million birds die every year from such chemicals. In other words, compounds that make food cheaper and more abundant for everybody kill between 10 and 20 percent of the number of birds killed by cats every year. And yet, environmentalists are terrified of making cats a major issue, because it will split the movement. An official at the World Wildlife Fund calls the cat issue a “third rail” for environmentalists.

Get rid of a bunch of filthy beasts AND upset the environmentalists while preserving nature. Do you see any downside? Because I sure don’t.