This is an extremely awful story:

According to WTAE’s news exchange partners the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Ashley Todd, of College Station, Texas, was using an ATM at Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street in Bloomfield just before 9 p.m. on Wednesday when a man approached her and put a knife to her throat.

Police spokeswoman Diane Richard said the robber took $60 from Todd, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim’s car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter “B” into her face, Richard said.

But I don’t get how Instapundit can equate it to this. Perhaps Reynolds believes that Barack Obama was standing on the side of the street, urging the mugger on: “Hey, c’mon man, she’s a white chick trying to keep a brother down! Give her a carve we can believe in!” (Somewhat surprisingly Michelle Malkin doesn’t think the story is true.)

Back to Ashley: assuming her story is true (because I’m all for giving the benefit of the doubt), I hope they find the guy, and I hope they give him a nice long prison sentence.

Assuming Todd was mugged and made up the part about being mutilated because she was voting for McCain, I hope her mugger gets a nice long prison sentence and that she gets more than just a slap on the wrist for giving a false statement to the Police.

UPDATE: A commenter on Malkin’s post thinks he’s getting flicked off more on his DC commute because he has a “less government” bumpersticker on his car and is, thus, a McCain supporter. What he fails to understand is that he’s driving in Washington, DC, that alone accounting for the one-fingered salutes.

UPDATE II: She lied.

Ashley Todd — who has a backward letter “B” scratched into her right cheek — confessed to faking the story and will be charged with filing a false report, Assistant Police Chief Maurita Bryant said at a news conference Friday.

Todd, of College Station, Texas, admitted there was no robbery or attacker and said she had prior mental health problems, according to Bryant.

Well, clearly she has a mental health problem — look who she’s voting for! *rim*

You can’t go wrong with this.

If you are a trekkie that likes a beer now and again then this is a perfect gift for you. Styled on the original Enterprise (no not the NX-01, the NCC-1701), not even Kirk or Picard had a bottle opener this cool, although, Lieutenant Wharfs was pretty impressive but that’s not really what a bat’leth should be used for!

Yeah, it’s actually spelled Worf? Just so you know.

(Other Christmas ideas: an iPod — *hint*Mom & Dad*hint*).

This didn’t really both me before, but now that I’m living only a very short distance from the Big Cats at the National Zoo, that moat keeping them in is seeming to be less of a deterrent than I’d previously considered it.

I’ll never tire of posting pictures of Odin, The Swimming Tiger. (There used to be a photo on that post … but everytime WP gets upgraded my pictures don’t make it through…)

CNN wants to know if birth order determine your career. Whole article here, and my response to some of their specifics after the jump:

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I’m not voting for John McCain, but I’m not voting for him because I believe Barack Obama to be the better of the two candidates. Anyone who decides not to vote for McCain because an Al Qaeda website appears to be endorsing him should be taken out and slapped around a bit.

I’m not a big fan of pointing fingers at foreigners and saying, “Look, this is who they endorse, so we should or shouldn’t vote for this person based on their input.” I do feel it’s important to build and maintain our friendships with the world-wide community of nations, but in the end, an American election has to be about what’s right for America, and that’s what we determine by voting. Don’t let your vote be determined by terrorists.

I’m a somewhat recovering Star Trek dork. Somewhat recovering? Umm. I’ve actually got Classic Trek, TNG, DS9, and even Enterprise all on DVD. And all the movies (even Nemesis). And a diecast Enterprise. Okay, and action figures, buried somewhere in my closet. There might be a phaser somewhere too. And, on my bookshelves, if you can find them (because, seriously? I’ve got a literal shit-ton of bookshelves, most of them overflowing with, y’know, books), I’ve got William Shatner’s and George Takei’s auto-biographies (ghost written, I’m sure, although it’s been many years since I’ve actually read either one).

So, I’m a Star Trek dork, but despite the possibly misleading title, I’m not sad that I’m a Star Trek dork. It was probably the flashy effects and crazy adventures of The Next Generation which lured me in as a nine year old kid in ’87. As an adult, it’s the optimistic outlook for humanity, and the parallels to modern society that keep me hooked. Every episode of Star Trek is a morality play, okay, with Klingons and androids and spaceships instead of Shakespearean actors (well, Star Trek has those too).

Especially when I was younger, I was very interested in the behind-the-scenes stuff of Trek. Like, y’know, how Roddenberry started selling out the show in the third season to pimp his assorted product lines (which is how we got the Vulcan slogan, “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”), or how William Shatner was such a dick that most of his coworkers fucking hated him. And not just when they were filming the show, either.

There was a scene written and filmed for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Kirks tells Sulu that he’s been promoted to captain and will have his own command after they return from what turns out to be a pretty disastrous training mission. But Shatner was a dick and pretty wooden about his part in the scene, and so it was taken out of the film (Sulu eventually got his promotion — four movies later).

Given that Takei had a fairly large bit in the Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner a couple of years ago, I sort of figured that they’d patched things up.

So this article makes me sad.

In a video posted on Shatner’s Web site Wednesday, he lashed out at Takei for not inviting him to his wedding last month. The 77-year-old Kirk said Takei, who played Enterprise helmsman Sulu, apparently harbors a grudge against him that kept him from being invited to Takei’s nuptials.

“The whole thing makes me feel badly,” Shatner said in the video. “Poor man. There is such a sickness there. It’s so patently obvious that there is a psychosis there. I don’t know what his original thing about me was. I have no idea.”

“It is unfortunate that Bill was unable to join us for our wedding as he indeed was invited to attend,” Takei responded.

Because Star Trek is, essentially, exactly what Martin Lawrence meant when he lamented, “Can’t we just get along?” Regardless of skin color or national (well, planetary) origin, regardless of whether you’ve got pointy ears or a bumpy forehead or mottled blue skin, getting along if you’re a bloodthirty warrior or a sentient rock: you’d think Bill Shatner could be a bit more gracious to his former co-star (or maybe Shatner’s just laying it on thick and the article writer had the wrong impression of the bit).

My own thoughts on the specific cause of this new rift is that invitation probably got lost in the mail. It has, in fact, been known to happen.

To a point, I think this whole up-cry about ACORN is a little silly: there’s a difference between voter registration fraud, and voter fraud. Which is to say that it’s a lot easier to register fraudulent people to vote than to actually get said fraudulent people to cast a vote. That said, I think this whole scandal is ACORN’s fault. This article on CNN.com caught my eye.

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