Lech Kaczynski, the President of Poland, appears to be a gaffe machine on par with Joe Biden. His greatest hits include showing up late for a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, snubbing Lech Walesa and claiming President-elect Obama had given him assurances he apparently hadn’t. Nice.

Meanwhile, their foreign minister Radek Sikorski denies having made a joke that Barack Obama’s grandfather ate a Polish sausage missionary. Technically, Mr. Sikorski doesn’t deny having made the comment; however, his spokesholes insist it was really just a meta-joke, not a joke in its own right.

There’s a dumb Polack joke in there somewhere.

Via Instapundit, here’s an invention that came two years too late for Sr. Xrlq, who was paralyzed in a low-speed bicycling accident in early ’07 while wearing the old fashioned kind. If you ride, it’s not too late for you.

Former KFI talk show host John Ziegler has repeated Howard Stern’s experiment under more scientific conditions, first by having his people select the 12 Obama supporters who appeared the most likely to be well-informed rather than the cherry-picking the least informed (as I presume Stern did to maximize entertainment value, although I don’t know), and then sponsoring a Zogby poll to back it up. Yes, I know Zogby polls have been famous for being comically wrong, but I don’t think any national pollster, Zogby included, has been as colossally wrong as this poll would have to be for Ziegler’s basic conclusions not to stick.

As indicated by the subject line, I think the implications of Ziegler’s documentary go far beyond this particular election. At a minimum they go beyond Obama himself. For example, knowing that most Obama supporters think Republicans currently control Congress may go a long way toward explaining why voters who are mad as hell at the Democrat Congress (whose poll ratings are much worse than Bush’s), saw fit to punish that hated Democrat Congress by electing even more Democrats.

My question to readers: if every ballot had a few questions like Ziegler’s, and the ballot was voided if fewer than half of these questions had been answered correctly, would we ever see another Democrat in the White House?

Clue to the terminally geeky: if people tell you to “get a life,” they don’t mean to get a virtual one.

We have met the PUMAs, and they are us.

Amanda Carpenter reports that a group of gay artists are threatening to boycott California Music Theater because its artistic director, Scott Eckern, donated $1,000 of his own friggin’ money to the Yes on Prop 8 campaign. In response, the executive producer, Richard Lewis, told reporters that the board of directors had held an emergency meeting in which the artists in question were urged to “mind their own fucking business” and discouraged from “letting the door hit their asses on the way out” if they coudln’t handle dissent, “as if a measure that passed handily in the bluest fucking state in the union could reasonably be called ‘dissent’ anyway.”

Sorry, I goofed. That wasn’t what Lewis said, it was what he should have said. What he actually said was that it was “too early to tell” how Mr. Eckern’s support of Proposition 8 would affect his employment at that institution. In other words, it was “too early to tell” whether CMT should obey Sections 1101(b) and 1102 of the California Labor Code like the rest of us, or whether laws are for little people.

UPDATE: The terrorists win.

UPDATE x2: Just for the record, the answer is no, I’m not happy with how the Cooper fiasco played out, either. Cooper Firearms should have put out a press release clarifying that Dan Cooper speaks for himself, not for the company, and that should have been the end of it.

I rarely make mistakes, but as Fiorello La Guardia was wont to say, when I do make one it’s a beaut. Three and a half years ago, when the prospects of a Democrat President and Senate seemed remote, and the likelihood of Republicans needing to filibuster a nominee seemed remoter, I was furious at John McCain and six other Republicans (yes, it was the Gang of Fourteen, but I didn’t hold it against the other seven, who were Democrats and were therefore supposed to be wrong) for scuttling what some called the nuclear option and others called the constitutional one. After all, I thought, Republicans never filibuster Democrat nominations, so what on earth are these “extraordinary circumstances” in which that Democrat ratchet known as the filibuster should rightfully be employed?

Now, per the New York Times (h/t: Beldar) I may just have my answer. According to the Times, one of the leading candidates for Attorney General is Jamie Gorelick, the single most culpable non-al-Qaeda member in enabling the September 11, 2001 attacks. Between her infamous “wall,” her inexcusable decision to serve on the very 9/11 Commission she should have appeared before, and her five-year stint at Fannie Mae, is there anything that has gone catastrophically wrong over the past decade that Gorelick hasn’t had a hand in? Maybe Gorelick’s not really in the running for the job, and the paper with a record is just throwing random ideas out there, kinda like CNN did a few years ago when they suggested that Bill Clinton could be John Kerry’s Vice President. That’s the Hope^TM. But if she actually gets the nomination, then we get Change^TM and the only thing left to say will be thank God for John McCain and his fellow gangsters for seeing in 2005 what most Real Conservatives^TM, myself included, couldn’t. And if the few Republicans remaining in the Senate won’t filibuster a nomination like that, then I’ll have to reluctantly agree with many of my fellow conservatives that the Republicans really did deserve to lose.

PREEMPTIVE UPDATE: Yes, I know the original Gang of Fourteen deal was about judicial nominations, not attorneys general. No, I don’t think that makes a tinker’s damn of a difference. If the Senate had abolished the judicial filibuster on the theory that it was unconstitutional, what on earth basis would there have been for treating filibusters of other appointments any differently?

From Adriane, at Patterico:

Paul Krugman is a good source of information in economics. He predicted 9 out of the last 3 recessions.

Not really; actually Jamie Gorelick was its principal architect, and now it seems she’s on track to be our next Attorney General. In the bad old days, AG Ashcroft operated under the principle of “don’t let it happen again, John.” Now, courtesy of Change, we get the very person whose infamous “wall” helped it happen in the first place.

Now there is Change you can believe in!

Nancy Pelosi argues that Californians who voted for Proposition 8 were too dumb to know that a “Yes” vote on Proposition 8 was a vote against gay marriage rather than a vote for it. Somehow, that doesn’t translate into any Californians who voted against 8 having been equally uninformed and assuming that a “No” vote was a vote against gay marriage as opposed to a vote in favor of it. It’s always my side that was enlightened, and your side that was too dumb to know what they were doing, not vice-versa.

In reality, every initiative in California (and by that, I mean every law on which voters are asked to vote “Yes” or “No” on anything, which strictly speaking includes not only voter initiatives but also referenda, constitutional amendments, constitutional revisions and recalls) is heavily biased in favor of “no.” The Meathead Tax on cigarettes passed by a razor-thin 50.5%-49.5% in November, 1998, only to have the measure to repeal it go down in flames less than a year and a half later. One possible explanation is that 21.5% of California’s population changed their minds in 16 months’ time. Another is that 21.5% of the population hated the Meathead tax, but was even more offended by the mere fact that someone was trying to repeal it so soon after it had been passed, and therefore voted against the repeal of the very measure they had previously opposed, just to spite their fellow opponents. A third is that no matter what the issue is, at least 21.5% of the population can be trusted to vote “no” on almost anything.

To test the third hypothesis, let’s take a gander at Proposition 48, a November, 2002 constitutional revision no Californian with an IQ above room temperature should have considered voting against. First, a little background. Four and half years earlier, in June, 1998, Californians had voted 2-1 in favor of another constitutional revision, Proposition 220, which abolished municipal courts. Maybe that was a good idea, maybe it was a great one, maybe it was a crappy one, maybe it was the worst idea since the New Deal. I don’t know. I don’t care. The point is that since June, 1998, it was a done deal. Municipal courts Did. Not. Exist. As a matter of constitutional law, they Could. Not. Exist. without another amendment. So Prop. 48 had zero/zip/nada to do with the question of whether or not to bring back municipal courts. All it meant was, given that municipal courts no longer existed, should Californians update all the sections of the Constitution that they forgot to update in 1998, which continued to reference courts that no longer existed? The people spoke, and the answer was yes, but by a margin of less than 73%-27%, and less than a nine point difference over the substantive amendment that preceded it.

In other words, for every initiative that makes the ballot in California, the “no” crowd gets a built-in 20%+ advantage. With this in mind, it’s no wonder Leno et al. thought it better to pass two patently unconstitutional gay marriage bills that sought to wish Proposition 22 away rather than passing one that repealed it outright. A bill to repeal would have required gay marriage proponents to vote “yes,” and opponents to vote “no.” Exactly what Nancy Pelosi disingenuously claims they thought they were voting on Prop 8. Given that proponents of traditional marriage overcame the “no” advantage to win by a 5% margin, how do you suppose gay marriage would have fared if “yes” and “no” had been reversed, with “yes” meaning “I support gay marriage and “no” meaning “I oppose it?”

Now, at least three lawsuits are pending, all alleging that the constitution is unconstitutional (a not-retarded allegation if they meant that the state constitution violates the federal one, but in fact they are deliberately steering clear of the federal issues as they have in years past). And Attorney General Jerry Moonbeam is arguing that Prop 8 won’t invalidate gay marriages conducted between Gay Juneteenth and November 4, as it merely reads:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Rather than:

Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California, and no, dumbass, we don’t care when or where such marriage was conducted. WTF part of “valid or recognized” don’t you understand?

The bad news is that when the AG “agrees” that black means white, up means down and “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized” means “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized unless it was conducted between the day Bi-Curious George and three of his associates went apeshit and the next intervening election,” it may be difficult to challenge that position later. The good news is that if you’re a business in California wondering whether or not to treat so-and-so as married, you’re probably better off treating domestic partnerships as marriages, so this distinction won’t matter to you, anyway. The worse news is that California law doesn’t allow anyone to be married and domestic partnered at the same time, so gay couples who were previously domestic partnered, and then became married, may well be neither married nor domestic partnered now. If you fall into this category, my free non-legal advice is to talk to a family law attorney, pronto.