Roman Polanski 'overwhelmed by . . . messages of support and sympathy'

Mostly from Charlie Sheen I'd guess:

My dear Bernard-Henri Lévy, what you have said in the Swiss press is true -- I have been overwhelmed by the number of messages of support and sympathy I have received in Winterthur prison, and that I continue to receive here, in my chalet in Gstaad, where I am spending the holidays with my wife and my children. . . .

Nick Gillespie -- whose libertarianism evidently doesn't encompass the right of award-winning film directors to anally rape Qaalude-dosed 13-year-olds -- notes the reaction of the Feminist Majority Foundation: "It's bad a person was raped. But . . ."

Radical dangers and Ashley the whore

Andrew Sullivan Michelle Malkin was right about those right-wing left-wing mobs in Kentucky Berkeley:

Eight people were in custody Saturday after a crowd of angry protesters broke windows and threw burning torches at UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's campus residence in protest of fee hikes and budget cuts, authorities said. . . .
The crowd, including a man taken into custody in a university protest a day earlier, chanted, "No justice, no peace," and began smashing planters, windows and lights.

Just as no sane person would take political advice from Andrew Sullivan, no one should take romantic advice from a hooker who does Democrats:

Sure, she's made some mistakes. But now Ashley Dupre, the former escort who brought down Gov. Eliot Spitzer, is sharing what she's learned in her new sex, love and relationship column -- exclusively in the New York Post.

(Hat-tip: Newsbusters.) Wonder if the New York Post would give me an advice column to balance the Ashley Dupre column? I'd call it, "Shut Up, You Stupid Whore."

Now, if only the Atlantic Monthly would give me a blog to balance Sully . . . well, let the reader imagine what I'd call that.

UPDATE: "Forget effigy . . . just go for straight-up martydom," says one blogger of the angry mob at Berkeley.

Understand that I have nothing against angry mobs, per se. Heck, I nearly got trampled when I was front of the line to buy tickets for Prince's "Purple Rain" tour, so I understand both mobs and anger.

However, it matters very much what you're angry about, and what your mob actually does. University of Alabama fans once burnt Bear Bryant in effigy after the coach benched Joe Namath for the Orange Bowl. That was understandable.

But "no justice, no peace" and attempted arson because of a tuition increase? Where's the Ohio National Guard when we really need them?

Best. Fisting. Blog. Evah!

Ed Morrissey finds himself forced to go there:

I’ve received a lot of e-mail asking why I haven't written about the controversy over Kevin Jennings, Barack Obama's "safe schools" czar. To be honest, the story is so shocking that I haven't quite grasped how to approach it.

Ed includes YouTube audio of the infamous "FistGate" episode, where GLSEN activists discussed fisting methodology with 14-year-olds:

He also includes video of The Boss on Hannity:

And, finally, the infamous "stampeding toward the clitoris" scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life:

Instapundit makes note of the fact that a discussion of the Obama administration's Safe Schools Czar is NSFW. Think about that.

Via Memeorandum, with more commentary from Gateway Pundit, Stop The ACLU, The Lonely Conservative, And So it Goes in Shreveport, Real Barack Obama and Big Government

You should have killed him, Jenny

No South Carolina grand jury would have indicted you:

First Lady Jenny Sanford issued a statement this morning saying she is filing for divorce from Gov. Mark Sanford.
In a two-page filing made this morning in Charleston County family court, Jenny Sanford asked for a divorce on grounds of adultery.

Well, duh! Anyway, her should-have-been-shot scumbag of a soon-to-be-ex-husband remains clueless:

Sanford had told reporters on Wednesday that he was still trying to reconcile with his wife.
"Jenny is a great person, and has been a remarkable wife, mother and first lady. She has been more than gracious these last six months and gone above and beyond in her patience and commitment to put the needs of others in front of her own. While our family structure may change, I know that we will both work earnestly to be the best mom and dad we can be to four of the finest boys on earth," the governor said Friday.

Forgive me for exposing myself to the accusation of "inciting violence," but if Jenny would have shot that two-timing lowdown polecat the minute she found out he'd hiked the Appalachian Trail all the way to Argentina, she'd be more popular among conservative women than Sarah Palin.

UPDATE: Guess which blogger habitually refers to Mark Sanford as "philandering creationist governor"? Hint: Notoriously Discredited Douchebag.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Don't try this at home, kids!

Before you shove your entire fist into an uncomfortable place, remember that this man is a professional educator:

Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings founded the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) in 1990. In 2007 Kevin Jennings was paid $273,573.96 as the executive director of GLSEN. Recently he was appointed by the Obama administration to run the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools in the US Department of Education. . . .
If Gay Straight Alliances are not about sex, why are the people who run Gay Straight Alliances telling students about fisting? . . .

Read the whole thing. Of course, GLSEN was teaching 14-year-olds about fisting in 2000, before the full-fledged development of Internet porn videos made such educational efforts redundant.

Nowaday -- Progress! -- any teenager's curiosity can be satisfied by a simple Google search, provided they can spell the words right, that is. How much random traffic does First Things get from misspelled Google searches?

Schools should spend more time teaching kids how to spell and less time teaching them how to fornicate. When I was a teenager, we managed to figure out fornication without any help from professional educators. Well, not much help.

There was an English teacher at Douglas County High -- greetings, Ms. Dowd, wherever you are -- who left the school under a cloud of suspicion. Although I never learned the name of her alleged victim, I envied him nonetheless. I'd been in smitten with Ms. Dowd since she'd been my teacher in sixth grade, when she was fresh out of college.

She had long, straight hair and wore wire-rimmed "granny glasses," as they were called circa 1970. Her husband had been our fifth-grade English teacher and read aloud to our class Orwell's Animal Farm, explaining it as a metaphor for the Bolshevik Revolution. His wife attended our class for a few weeks while doing her student teaching. At the time, I never imagined that, a few years later, she'd be teaching high school and accused of improper association with a student.

Back then, such accusations were handled administratively and rarely resulted in criminal charges, so I have no way of knowing whether Ms. Dowd was innocent or guilty. However, she was one of the first teachers who ever saw me as anything other than an incorrigible discipline problem, and for that I am still grateful.

Speaking of gratitude, thanks to all those who have already pitched in to send me to Pasadena to cover Alabama in the Jan. 7 BCS championship game. Keep hitting the tip jar, folks.

And kids: Keep your hands (and fists) to yourself!

Associated Press goes there

And you know where "there" is:

Amid all the headlines generated by Tiger Woods' troubles -- little attention has been given to the race of the women linked with the world's greatest golfer. Except in the black community.
When three white women were said to be romantically involved with Woods in addition to his blonde, Swedish wife, blogs, airwaves and barbershops started humming, and Woods' already tenuous standing among many blacks took a beating.
On the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner radio show, Woods was the butt of jokes all week. . . .
"We've discussed this for years among black women," said Denene Millner, author of several books on black relationships. "Why is it when they get to this level . . . they tend to go directly for the nearest blonde?" . . .
[A] study published this year in Sociological Quarterly showed that blacks are less likely to actually date outside their race than are other groups.
"There is a call for loyalty that is stronger in some ways than in other racial communities," said the author of the study, George Yancey, a sociology professor at the University of North Texas and author of the book "Just Don't Marry One."

Read the rest. A different version of the story was linked by Fire Andrea Mitchell on a post with the headline, "Associated Press is racist," which is kind of unfair to the AP.

If there is indeed a cultural phenomenon of black people criticizing Tiger Woods for his (alleged) preference in mistresses, then this is a legitimate subject of news coverage. You can criticize Tom Joyner, or Joyner's listeners, for making a racial issue out of this, but the AP isn't racist merely for reporting what other people are saying.

Imagine the media uproar if white people had made a race issue about Tiger Woods' affairs. Therefore, if Associated Press had ignored the (evidently) widespread criticism from blacks, they might have been accused of bias, as if black criticism of Woods was not newsworthy.

Meanwhile, on a slightly related tangent, the Huffington Post, Sam Tanenhaus and the New Republic are playing racial "gotcha" with Sarah Palin. And, on a very distant tangent, more evidence that Charles Johnson is crazy. As if we needed more evidence.

Max Baucus joke contest

Da Tech Guy: "He must be familiar with her briefs and vice versa." Yes, the jokes do write themselves:

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus’ office confirmed late Friday night that the Montana Democrat was carrying on an affair with his state office director, Melodee Hanes, when he nominated her to be U.S. attorney in Montana.
According to a source familiar with their relationship, Hanes and Baucus began their relationship in the summer of 2008 – nearly a year before Baucus and his wife, Wanda, divorced in April 2009. The Senator had informally separated from his wife in March 2008 and they were living apart when he began dating Hanes, according to Baucus’ office.

(Via Memeorandum.) Baucus had Melodee on his staff.

What was Melodee's position? Sometimes missionary, sometimes cowgirl, sometimes doggie . . .

One of Max's Senate colleagues was frustrated that a committee investigation was not producing results. "Why can't we get to the bottom of this?" the colleague asked, which prompted Baucus to reply, "That's what Melodee said to me last night!"

Add your own jokes.

UPDATE: Left Coast Rebels has photos of Melodee Hanes and . . . Dude. She's not even that hot.

She's not bad if you've got a middle-aged lawyer lady festish, I guess. But for crying out loud, you're a United States Senator, sir!

You are not only bringing shame on your office, Senator Baucus, but you're a disagrace to the adulterous traditions of the Democratic Party. You're only supposed to have affairs with idealistic young aides who care so much for the progressive cause that they don't mind signing false affidavits to protect you from scandal, or being left to die when you get drunk and drive a car off a bridge.

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

A cocktail waitress? Dude.

The Tiger Woods saga continues:

A Los Angeles cocktail waitress tells the new Us Weekly (on newsstands Wednesday) that she had a steamy 31-month fling with Tiger Woods and has a voicemail recording and text messages to prove it.
Jaimee Grubbs, now 24, tells Us Weekly she began having an affair with Woods, 33, in April 2007.

How can this possibly be true? Tiger is married to Swedish super-model Elin Nordegren. An affair with a mere cocktail waitress presents a problem explained Saturday:

The Rod Stewart Celebrity Cheating Rule applies here: If you're going to cheat on a Swedish super-model, it's got to be at least an equal exchange . . .

Jaimee Grubbs is obviously no Elin Nordegren. My advice to Tiger remains: Plead insanity.

UPDATE: He issues a press release. (Also at his official Web site.) Alas, no insanity plea. Michelle Malkin puts it bluntly: "Tiger Woods is an idiot."

The lameness of Adam Lambert

Let's face it, he's boring -- which my latest column at The American Spectator is certainly not:

At some point, reasonable people might expect an end to these épater les bourgeoisie gestures, as the bourgeoisie have long since ceased to be shocked by such routine public exhibitions. . . .
More than four decades have gone by since Philip Larkin poetically joked about sex having been invented in 1963, "Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles' first LP." Nevertheless, there stubbornly persists within the self-styled "artistic community" the assumption that middle-class Americans are a bunch of repressed puritanical hypocrites badly in need of the liberating influence that only pelvic thrusts, gay kissing and the choreographed simulation of sadomasochism can provide. . . .

Read the whole thing.

(Cross-posted at Right Wing News.)

Say it ain't so, Tiger!

Doug Ross alerts us to this sad rumor from TMZ: Before his car accident, Tiger Woods argued with his wife about reports by the National Enquirer that Tiger had an affair with notorious floozy, Rachel Uchitel.

For the record, the floozy has denied the Enquirer story, but who can trust a floozy to tell the truth? More disturbing is the possibility that the golf champion took a mulligan on his wedding vows to Swedish beauty Elin Nordegren.

My advice to you, Tiger? Plead insanity. Because you'd have to be crazy to cheat on her.

Even though those nude photos turned out to be a hoax (we pride ourselves on careful research here), Elin's still a genuine Swedish super-model, not to mention the mother of your children.

The Rod Stewart Celebrity Cheating Rule applies here: If you're going to cheat on a Swedish super-model, it's got to be at least an equal exchange, and a notorious floozy is way below the acceptable exhange rate for Swedish super-models.

Stick with the insanity defense, Tiger. Your car accident? That was obviously a cry for help. This is a good time to reference one of the most inspirational scenes in American motion picture history:

Otter: I'll tell you what. We'll tell Fred you were doing a great job taking care of his car, but you parked it out back last night and in the morning, it was gone. We report it to the police, your brother's insurance company buys him a new car. D-Day takes care of the wreck.
Flounder: Will that work?
Otter: Hey, it's gotta work better than the truth.
Bluto: My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.
Otter: Better listen to him, Flounder, he's in pre-med.

Get well soon, Tiger! Meanwhile, we will continue to investigate rumors that people are doing Google searches for Rachel Uchitel photos. These reports can not yet be confirmed or denied, although if Rachel Uchitel topless or Rachel Uchitel sex video becomes available, we promise to keep our readers informed of the latest breaking developments.

UPDATE: David Frum laments that cable TV news doesn't talk about serious issues. As if the possibility of Tiger Woods cheating on sexy Elin Nordegren wasn't a serious issue. And as if cable TV news could survive without celebrity sex scandals.

Hey, Dave: We can't all be on the AEI payroll, OK? There's this thing called the "private sector," where we greedy capitalists have to figure out a way to pay for our wives' Black Friday shopping sprees.

Professor Donald Douglas ca n explain how this "capitalism" thing works. Supply, demand, yadda yadda.

UPDATE II: Dan Riehl knows the news value of this story. Dan's traffic was through the roof back during the Natalie Holloway heyday.

It is elitism to suppose that political news is the only news worth reporting. As a professional journalist, I've always appreciated the New York Post, which mixes real political reporting with garish celebrity tabloid news. Why does that work? Rule 5(B) explains it:

All politics all the time gets boring after a while. . . . Even a stone political junkie cannot subsist on a 24/7 diet of politics. The occasional joke, the occasional hot babe, the occasional joke about a hot babe -- it's a safety valve to make sure we don't become humorless right-wing clones of those Democratic Underground moonbats.

Relax and have fun.

UPDATE III: Professor Jacobson's speculation was right on target, and Carol at No Sheeples Here exposes the conspiracy against Tiger Woods.

UPDATE IV: Left Coast Rebel tries to cash in on the Google-bomb action. He raises an important question: Did the pressures of fame cause Tiger to stray? I doubt it. Tiger had been world-famous for several years when he married Elin in 2004.

A more likely scenario: The routine of marriage began to feel uncomfortably repetitive to the popular bachelor who had become accustomed to swinging his club freely on the world's finest courses. IYKWIMAITYD.

Tiger Woods certainly wouldn't be the first hubby who, after a few years of golfing the same par-4 over and over, couldn't resist an invitation to tee off on another fairway. At which point, Mrs. Woods decided to remind him of that "death do us part" vow by going upside his head with a 5 iron.

Let's hope this attitude adjustment had the desired effect. Remember, Tiger: She's got a kitchen full of knives, and you've got to sleep sometime.

IG-Gate: The Sacramento Sex Scandal Obama and MSM Want You to Ignore

Yeah, this kind of stuff could get embarrassing:

About 11:00 p.m., Mr. Johnson arrived at St. Hope and instructed [her] to gather her things and come with him. Mr. Johnson drove to [her] apartment, which is managed by St. Hope Development and houses its AmeriCorps members, purportedly so that they could review the students' grades. While in [her] apartment, in which another AmeriCorps member had a separate bedroom, Mr. Johnson laid down on [her] bed. [The woman] sat on the edge of the bed to show him the grades, at which time Mr. Johnson "layed [sic] down behind me, cupping his body around mine like the letter C. After about 2-3 minutes or so, I felt his hand on my left side where my hip bone is."

That's from WorldNetDaily, digging up more gold from the motherlode Grassley-Issa report (PDF) on the firing of AmeriCorps IG Gerald Walpin. The Democratic mayor of Sacramento seemed to think he could use the federally-funded St. HOPE program the way Eliot Spitzer used the Emperor's Club VIP call-girl agency.

Kevin Johnson's fiancee -- who just happens to be the boss of D.C. public schools -- tried to sweet-talk Walpin out of blowing the whistle on her sweetie and, when Walpin wouldn't play ball for Obama's buddies, the White House fired Walpin and lied about it. And then there are those magic words: "Hush money."

All of which adds up to one heckuva sex scandal, but you're not seeing much about this in the MSM, are you? The New York Times buried the story inside Saturday's paper with the bland headline, "G.O.P. Report Connects Official to Fiancé’s Case."

If Kevin Johnson and Michelle Rhee weren't Democrats, the New York Times would be running 72-point headlines on Page One: REPUBLICANS ROCKED BY TEEN SEX 'HUSH MONEY' CHARGES!

But like Professor Glenn Reynolds says, "When the press can ignore a sex scandal, you know it's covering for politicians, not covering them."

More at Memeorandum and the IG-Gate blog.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! What offends me about this is that the newspaper business is in meltdown mode and, hey, sex sells, right? This story is a headline-writer's dream:

SACRAMENTO SEX SCANDAL!
Hizzoner's Hush-Money Teen Tango
Watchdog Whistle-Blower Claims
White House Arranged Cover-Up

Watever happened to selling newspapers, people? Dibs on the "Michelle Rhee sex video" Google-bomb, BTW. Now, somebody needs to hit my tip jar. My wife wants to go holiday shopping Friday.

That sound you just heard . . .

. . . was my head exploding:

On June 27, 2008, Michelle Rhee, head of the Washington, D.C., school system, paid a visit to Gerald Walpin, who was inspector general of the government volunteer organization AmeriCorps. . . .
Rhee, who later became engaged to marry Johnson, had been on St. Hope’s board of directors before taking over as chief of the District of Columbia system. Her apparent goal, as she visited Walpin, was to vouch for Johnson.
"The basic point of her meeting with me was to tell me what a great guy he was," Walpin recalls, "and what wonderful work he has done, and that maybe he had made mistakes administratively, but that she thought I should give as much consideration as possible to his good work in deciding what to do."

OK, my head exploded not merely because Byron York scooped me again -- he's a good reporter -- but because the sex-scandal angle in the IG-Gate story is being ignored by the MSM.

Here you've got Johnson, accused of sexual misconduct by three different St. HOPE students, and one of the St. HOPE board members -- who also happens to be Johnson's fiancee -- is trying to get the Inspector General to drop his investigation, in the middle of Johnson's 2008 campaign for mayor. The accused sexual predador is a close friend of the president, and Little Miss Predator-Enabler is the head of D.C. public schools?

On what planet is this not front-page news?

Carrie Prejean sex video?

Oh, this is not going to be good for her:

Sean Hannity . . . had the 22-year-old author on his Fox News Channel program last night.
As he so succinctly put it, "We might as well go right to it." . . .
Prejean replied . . . yes, there was a tape she had done as a teenager. She made it for a distant boyfriend whom she loved at the time. She said TMZ can call it a "sex tape" if it wants. But she was alone on the video, and no one else was in the room.

Groan. Bad for Carrie. Good for "Carrie Prejean sex video" Google-bombers. Even I hate to have to troll for that kind of traffic, but if conservative bloggers don't do it, the Perez Hiltons will monopolize it. And that would be wrong.

Mamas Don't Let Your Daughters Grow Up to Be Downloads.

UPDATE: Among the conservative bloggers joining the Google-bomb bonanza: Ann Althouse, Doug Mataconis, the BlogProf and Professor Donald Douglas. This shouldn't have to be explained, but you shouldn't actually post the Carrie Prejean sex video when (and if) it ever actually comes out.

The whole point here is to prevent the Left and sleazy celeb-tabloid blogs from getting all the Google-search traffic. Every time a porn-freak Googles "Carrie Prejean sex video," there should be at least a 50% chance he'll click onto a blog that makes him ask himself, "Don't you have anything better to do with your life, you sick freak?"

Maybe it will change their life, maybe not. But either way, I'm figuring that a good percentage of those sick freaks aren't down for the whole deficit-spending Obama/Pelosi liberal agenda.

Even sick freaks can vote, you know. I'm figuring there's probably enough recovering porn addicts in Nevada to beat Harry Reid, if we can just find a way to reach them. So maybe this Carrie Prejean sex video is a blessing in disguise.

Lemons = lemonade?

UPDATE II: Jimmie Bise looks on the bright side.

UPDATE III: Turns out Monique Stuart beat me -- no pun intended -- to this story last week:

Carrie Prejean demanded more than a million dollars during her settlement negotiations with Miss California USA Pageant officials -- that is, until the lawyer for the Pageant showed Carrie an XXX home video of her handiwork. . . .
Let’s just say, Carrie has a promising solo career.

Not good for Carrie.