Republicans and Republican-leaning independents have no clear favorite
for the party’s 2012 presidential nominee at this point, with Mike
Huckabee (18%), Mitt Romney (16%), and Sarah Palin (16%) in a
statistical tie for the lead. They are the only candidates in the
crowded field of potential candidates who register double-digit support.
Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, and former Utah Gov. and
current Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman were included for the first
time and received 4% and 1%, respectively.
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Harry Reid doesn’t like hookers. But the Senate majority leader’s statement to the Nevada legislature urging that prostitution be made illegal in his home state went over like a lead balloon.“I think the time has come for us to outlaw prostitution,” Reid said Tuesday in an address to a joint legislative session in Carson City. The response? Silence from the packed chamber.
Prostitution is against the law in Las Vegas and Reno, but most Nevada counties allow and regulate the world oldest profession.
The lifelong Nevadan, born in the little town of Searchlight, devoted three paragraphs to prostitution in a lengthy speech about tax relief, clean energy, the benefits of the stimulus bill, and other public policy issues.
Meanwhile the Shady Lady Ranch is looking to expand its client base to include the fairer sex.
Brothel owner Bobbi Davis got the go-ahead Tuesday to hire what her website cheekily calls “a few good men.”
Her Shady Lady Ranch is searching for “service-oriented” guys willing to become Nevada’s first legal male sex workers.
[...]A county board’s vote Tuesday affirming that Davis could offer “shady men” to her clientele followed months of rancorous debate among the state’s legal brothel community. The industry, in its own peculiar way, is somewhat conservative: Considered an anachronism of bawdy mining camps by some Nevada newcomers, it often balks at change.
I asked the woman if she thought Scott Walker was like Hitler, and she said “Yes.” So I said, “Are you saying that you think fascism could come to America,” and she said, “It’s what’s happening.”
Rhetoric vs. Reality: Liberal Protest of Gov. Walker’s Budget Repair Plan
Wisconsin Democrat Senators have reportedly fled the state to avoid a budget vote that is opposed by various union interests. Courage. Law enforcement has been sent to round up the truant donks. Meanwhile, public employees unions are demonstrating their value by taking to the streets and comparing the Republican Governor to Hitler.
From Megan McArdle, who brings sanity to The Atlantic:
So my post on the liberal slant in academia
has garnered what I believe to be a record number of comments, many,
even most of them, pretty angry. And as I predicted, the positions are
very much reversed from the normal take on such things. Conservatives
are explaining how bias can be subtle and yet insidious; and liberal,
many of them academics are saying that you can’t simply infer bias from
statistical underrepresentation, and sarcastically demanding to know
whether I really think that people are asking candidates for physics professorships who they voted for in the last election.They’re
all right, of course: you can’t simply infer bias from statistical
underrepresentation, and yet bias can be subtle and yet insidious. I
thought it might clarify the argument a bit to outline how I think bias
works in institutions, even though much of it should be old hat,
particularly for social scientists.Most
people, when they are accused of being a member of an in-group that is
excluding some other set of people, immediately define bias in the
narrowest possible terms: conscious, direct personal discrimination.
Did we make an explicit rule that no person of that persuasion could be
hired? No we didn’t. Well, then, no bias!Those people offered their own alternate theories, which boiled down to:
- Smart people are almost always liberal
- Curiousity and interest in ideas is a liberal trait
- Conservatives are too rigid and authoritarian to maintain the open mind required of a professor
- Education erases false conservative ideas and turns people into liberals
- Conservatives don’t want to be professors because they’re more interested in something else (money, the military)
- Conservatives don’t want to be professors because they’re anti-intellectual
- Conservatives hold false beliefs that make them ineligible to be professors
…
So while in theory, it’s true that you can’t simply reason from
disparity to bias, I have to say that when you’ve identified a
statistical disparity, and the members of the in-group immediately rush
to assure you that this isn’t because of bias, but because the people
they’ve excluded are all a bunch of raging assholes with lukewarm IQ’s .
. . well, I confess, discrimination starts sounding pretty plausible.
AVClub describes the disturbing details of the world’s most famous [and gross] bachelor’s pad.
The Playboy Mansion has definitely lost some of its luster of late, with reports that the sprawling estate has fallen into a crumbling state of disrepair—monkey
carcasses floating in the Grotto, every surface blanketed by the fine
ash of octogenarian dead skin cells, and the carpets worn threadbare by
the constant worrying pacing of Hugh Hefner as he contemplates all those
future 21-year-old girls he won’t get to marry, like a horny Miss
Havisham. And not only has the once-exclusive house been forced to throw open its doors to germ-ridden commoners, now it’s possibly become tainted with disease—legionellosis,
or Legionnaires’ disease, to be exact, which seems to have affected
some 170 people who attended a recent fundraiser there.
VIA NRO
NYU accepts resignation of Nir Rosen for his unbelievably callous remarks:
Nir Rosen is always provocative, but he crossed the line yesterday with his comments about Lara Logan. I am deeply distressed by what he wrote about Ms. Logan and strongly denounce his comments. They were cruel and insensitive and completely unacceptable. Mr. Rosen tells me that he misunderstood the severity of the attack on her in Cairo. He has apologized, withdrawn his remarks, and submitted his resignation as a fellow, which I have accepted. However, this in no way compensates for the harm his comments have inflicted. We are all horrified by what happened to Ms. Logan, and our thoughts are with her during this difficult time.
Nir Rosen testifies in front of Congress about Iraq
