The LLama Butchers

INDC BILL Exposed!

INDCent Bill: prom queen drama fiend? You make the call.

Swift Vet #6: Don't Forget Paris

According to the ever reliable Wizbang! Coming soon.....think Forget Paris, starring John Kerry and Ho Chi Minh instead of Billy Crystal and Debra Winger...

What the....?

Someone visited our site by googling "Jennifer Millerwise naked"

Huh? Rusty, you're our resident porn expert--can you fill us in on this?

Pajama Party Update

Michele at Letters from New York City has the latest in blogging fashion tips.

Frankly, as far as the clothing goes, I'm pretty broad-minded. Suit. Jammies. Naked. Whatever. To me, the key is the right accessories:

Bridezilla

Since Rob's created the all things skanky upload strategy, here's my addition:

Ohhhh no, there goes Tokyo, watch out BRIDEZILLA!

Holy crap!

Rusty's strategy to get major linkety-bling-bling by being your one stop shop for all things Islamic beheading snuff films is paying off with a serious hate-a-lanche from the Democratic Underground.

As one great Amerikan said: "BRING.IT.ON!" (That is before yelping "Mommy make the mean men STOP!"

My sense is that early next week, there's going to be a whole lot of new-to-you used droids for sale out by the Sandcrawler....

Tradesports Presidential futures market in the WSJ

A long write-up in the Wall Street Journal looks at Tradesports.com and its presidential elections futures market. We've been following this since January, and our contention that the futures market run there would be more accurate than polls has been borne out so far. The idea is that markets are more accurate than polls because they are measurements of what a large group of people believe is going to happen, rather than a measure of a small selected group of people want to happen. Precisely because anyone can participate (and therefore add their information to the market), and precisely because they can do so making a large amount of money if they are correct, it's been my hunch that this would give a more reliable and creditable sense of the trends in the election than watching the polls, which are plagued with methodological problems driven primarily by technology which interferes with the ability to get a truly random sample of the population.

And where is the market at today? The "Bush reelected" contract is trading at $71, only $4 below its all-time high after the capture of Saddam.

UPDATE: Vodkapundit has the roundup of the polls and the electoral markets. It's not quite "Party like it's 1984" but we're getting there.....

Been there, done that

Somehow, this story was much more amusing when it featured George Clooney, Ice Cube, and Mark Wahlberg; but since it features the French military peacekeepers stealing money from desparately poor countries, you know somehow the US rejection of the ICC and Kyoto are somehow to blame...

Checkmate!

Howard Kurtz writes the mainstream media account of how the blogs beat CBS. I've always liked Howard Kurtz's reporting, and I think his reporting on this story over the past two weeks has been fair and objective.

Let me tell you, the mood in the campus faculty lunch place (conveniently named "Le Bistro") was grimmer than the siting of Paris Hilton in a convention of epidemilogists: let's just say the "huff" factor (the "well...hmmpph..Bush is still the bigger liar!") was rampant. I was quite diplomatic and saved the "Neener!" for later.

UPDATE: It's official! Here's Kurtz's account.

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a 60 MINUTES WEDNESDAY story about President Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, CBS News vowed to re-examine the documents in question -- and their source -- vigorously. And we promised that we would let the American public know what this examination turned up, whatever the outcome.

Now, after extensive additional interviews, I no longer have the confidence in these documents that would allow us to continue vouching for them journalistically. I find we have been misled on the key question of how our source for the documents came into possession of these papers. That, combined with some of the questions that have been raised in public and in the press, leads me to a point where -- if I knew then what I know now -- I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question.

But we did use the documents. We made a mistake in judgment, and for that I am sorry. It was an error that was made, however, in good faith and in the spirit of trying to carry on a CBS News tradition of investigative reporting without fear or favoritism.

Please know that nothing is more important to us than people's trust in our ability and our commitment to report fairly and truthfully.

I'm at work and I don't have pshop on this machine, otherwise I would do a evacuation of the Saigon embassy as CBS HQ-esque thing. In the meantime, I think this is a great time to launch the Llamabutcher line of TShirts with the picture of Dan Rather's head stuffed and mounted on a nice wall plack.

UPDATE: The Commissar has the leads on where the story goes next. Because this aint over yet....

Also, I haven't been able to link into INDC Journal yet. Congrats to Bill, I hope he's getting beaucoup traffic out of this, which he completely deserves. And I hope that mounting the head of a liberal icon on your cubicle wall isn't a career no-no in Bill's neck of the woods....

Ace of Spades has a new Top Ten Mottos for CBS News, plus the latest from Teh-RAYY-zah "Lovey" Heinz Kerry Howell III (note to Rob's mom: don't follow the link, as T-Ice calls your son a "scumbag").

DIGITAL LYNCH-MOB UPDATE: Annika has the all the linkety about how to contact CBS affiliates to demand Dan's head on a platter.

I think this is what they invented "tar and feathering" for...

Speak That I May See Thee

Not to be a complete Brit-Lit nerd about it, but this is really more Augustan that Restoration.

Yips! to Lawren.

Llama Yips!

Thanks muchly again to Sparky the Unclimber and Mr. Sparky for a very pleasant evening Saturday night.

If you will direct your attention to the "Hot 'n Spicy" column, you will see that I have added Sparky to our blogroll. As I mentioned at one point during dinner when the tide of our combined five daughters had ebbed, I've been meaning to do this for some time. Her blog mostly concerns home-schooling and religious matters, with occassional forays into other fields, and is well worth a read. Sparky doesn't have sitemeter at the moment, so if you go over be sure to leave a calling card in the comments.

Yip! Yip! Yip!

Tom Clancy Watch

The American Daughter has fascinating video of a tactical missile attack in Fallujah as recorded by a fighter-jock's camera. Go read her description of the attack and then check out the film.

To quote the radio voice at the end, "Oh, Dude."

Yips! to the New England Republican.

Haasenpfeffer Watch Update

I meant to mention over the weekend that I had a go at trying this anti-rabbit suggestion. Perhaps I used too heavy a concentration of the stuff because I wound up burning most of the leaves I put it on.

Eh.

I am starting to get itchy fingers for transplanting things - perhaps as the result of the gloriously cool weather that rolled into Dee Cee over the weekend once the remnants of Ivan blew out. One of the things I plan to do is move the oregano and parsley I have in pots on the porch out into the garden. I've already got a very large clump of thyme - the sole survivor of my first year's planting - and I figured I would put the other herbs in along side.

Needless to say, I'm really going to have to crack down on securing the fence once and for all. The furry little bastards nibble at the black eye susans and purple magnus. But I think they would absolutely devastate the parsley.

Floundering 'Fins

We're doomed. Doomed. 0-2 after losing to the Bungles, fer cryin' out loud! Oh, the pain....the pain!

New To Me Music

Had an interesting little nugget of enlightenment in Church yesterday morning - the offertory anthem was by one Alexander Gretchaninov, a Russian-born composer who studied under Rimsky-Korsokov and later came to the West.

I'd never even heard of the man. But the anthem - "Adore Almighty God" - was really rather nice. Surprisingly conservative and very Western in form, except that it had a curious little flare every now and again that gave it a slightly exotic feel. Not Russian per se, but just a bit different from what you'd expect from something out of the standard canon.