Congratulations to Jon Henke, the new netroots coordinator for Senator George Allen.

Anwyn takes the Ass. Press to task for wrongly assigning too much blame to Comair 5191 survivor James Polehinke, and too little to the flight’s captain, Jeffrey Clay, for making the fatal wrong turn, and to the controllers for apparently violating an FAR requiring two controllers in the tower specifically to prevent accidents like this one. There’s plenty of blame go around here, and I don’t see anyone coming out of this looking very good.

And we feel fine. Pics of all 8 pounds 13.8 ounces and 19.5 inches of him to follow soon. Bonus points for the first commenter who can correctly guess the county of Xrlq 3.0′s birth.

UPDATE: It was a trick question, but commenter AMac nailed it.

UPDATE x2: A commenter at Patterico questions the timing of this announcement. Heh.

OK, it looks like my self-nomination was a bust. No one from the campaign has even called. Apparently, my ability to humiliate my opponents isn’t enough; they actually expect their blogger to help Senator Allen get votes, too. Who knew?

Given that, I withdraw my self-nomination, and hereby second Captain Ed’s nomination of Jon Henke. Anyone care to third it?

UPDATE: Good news, he got the gig.

If you don’t like someone else’s opinions, ask nosy, irrelevant questions and take cheap shots at him over his profession.

UPDATE: This doesn’t exactly hurt, either.

UPDATE x2: Uncle demonstrates his fondness for irony by taking a commenter to task for agreeing with a post making a substantially identical point to the one Uncle himself made about Bill Hobbs a mere three months ago (or not?). I guess gratuitous swipes at somebody’s profession are OK, after all – if that profession happens to be as a prosecutor.

Until recently, Virginia Senator George Allen was a shoo-in for easy reelection in November. All this changed at an August 11 campaign event, in which he mouthed off to tracker/stalker S.R. Sidarth. Allen said a few really dumb things in that exchange, and reports conflict as to which one sparked the greatest outrage. No one’s really sure which statement sparked the most outrage, but possible contenders include:

• “Hey Darky, welcome to Jesusland.”
• “Yo, Fairfax-boy. Welcome to real America, and the parts of Virginia where we say y’all and write ya’ll.
• “Dude, you are soooo a newcomer. Welcome to the state that you’ve live in all your life, but which I only moved to as an adult!”
• “¡Oye, vato! You the delivery man for Paco’s Taco’s, ¿sí? I’ll have the machaca.”

The smart money says that last quote was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Aside from the fact that Sidarth is of Indian rather than Mexican descent, and that he works for opponent James Webb’s campaign rather than for Paco’s Tacos, Allen didn’t even pronounce machaca correctly. He mumbled the rest, so most observers, including Sidarth himself, heard little more than “blah blah blah … mi caca,” which is Spanish for “my crap.” This is a problem becuase, believe it or not, Senators really do have rules of decorum, one of which prohibits them from talking crap. Of course they do it all the time, but generaly in a semi-discreet way. To openly advertise mi caca is as unseemly as inadvertently farting in other people’s presence at a formal event, and then asking everyone present if they enjoyed a good whiff of mi pedo rather than playing it off like nothing happened. To be sure, the no-crap rule of the Senate does have an unwritten exception for lobbyists, major donors and advocates of major political causes, the gentleman’s understanding being that anyone who hopes to re-elected must talk crap for these guys every once in a while. Depending on how close a Senator is to his donor or lobbyist, such accepted crap is known alternatively as su caca or tu caca, both of which are generally accepted as a necessary evil. Talk crap if you must to keep a major donor happy, but talking crap for yourself? That’s just tawdry.

Anyway, between his regional, national and ethnic insults and his newfound ability to get in touch with his inner feces, Allen now appears appears to be in trouble in the polls. While earlier polls had Allen trouncing Webb by an ungodly margin, more recent polls show him beating Webb by a margin almost narrow enough to leave Webb’s personal dignity intact. To avoid such a horrible event from materializing in November, Allen is looking to hire a right-wing Virginia blogger, with a probable assist from Chad Dotson, to do for him what all the ‘bats have long been doing for Webb.

I think Senator Allen should hire me. We’re both California transplants, and we both have long histories of really, really, really pissing off our opponents and even alienating some of our potential allies. Enlisting me in his campaign won’t win Allen any actual votes, of course, and might even lose a few, but so what? As long as the polls stay anywhere in the ballpark of where they are now, Allen will still win. He doesn’t need more votes, he just needs to make his supporters feel better and his opponents feel worse. I can do both. A nuclear fisking or two from the Xrlqmeister, and Webb and his minions will be reduced to tears and in need of therapy in no time flat. By Election Day, their self-esteem will be so horribly battered they won’t even have the nerve to spin their 52-48 loss as a “moral victory.” They’ll be far more humiliated that way than they would by the 60-40 trouncing they likely would have gotten if Mr. Allen had not made the embarassing statements in the first place, let alone by the 55-45 loss which is the best any blogger could accomplish for him now. I won’t win him any votes, but I will make him feel better when I fisk his more vocal opponents to a pulp. With or without my help or that of any other blogger, Allen will win unless he does something else that’s just as dumb as mi caca between now and November. If he does do something that dumb, all the blogging in the world won’t save him. So why waste campaign dollars, ones and zeroes to convert a decent victory into a landslide, when you can have a fisk-for-all instead?

And I feel fine. Well, as fine as I could be, anyway, while mostly recovered from strep I picked up a couple of weeks ago while visiting some old friends in the perfectly-named Fauquier County.

Q: If you have a lot of money in your car and act a little funny when the police pull you over for speeding, does that make you a drug dealer?

A: Yes, if you are in the Eighth Circuit.

Lordy. Double-hat tip: Mona (yes, that Mona) and Radley Balko (yes, that Radley Balko).

UPDATE: Walter Olson has more. Mike Cernovich discusses why the case may be as flawed legally as it is morally. This assumes, of course, that the standard for appealing factual determinations in the Eighth Circuit is “clearly erroneous,” and not “clearly err… aw hell, we just don’t like it.” Meanwhile, commenter Nels Nelson points out that the two bad judges in this case, Morris S. Arnold and Steven M. Colloton, were appointed by Presidents Bush I and Bush II, while the dissenting good guy, Hon. Donald P. Lay, was appointed by President Johnson. It’s good to know that even today, not all judicial activists are liberals.

Some really smart guy wrote a brilliant letter to the Richmond Times-Dispatch on the popular myth of alcohol as truth serum. Money quote:

Does anyone really believe that every person who has ever gotten drunk and had a one-night stand with an unattractive member of the opposite sex must have privately harbored a fetish for the uglies while sober?

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

I haven’t seen Snakes on a Plane yet (unless you count the first time they ran it, when it was called When Cobras Attack), and probably never will, but I’m going to review the movie anyway. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it -2.3. My recommendation for Samuel L. Jackson fans: wait for this one to come out on DVD, and then, don’t rent it.