A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my recent return to the poker tournament ring.

Since then, nothing much has changed – I've been playing better with each tournament, but still not cashing.

Until Wednesday night, that is. On Wednesday, my streak finally ended.

I played a bad tournament. But on the bright side, I still didn't cash.

The Las Vegas City Council is persecuting patriots:

The council's vote last week to order a Hummer dealership to take down a 100-foot flag pole flying the Stars and Stripes has garnered attention across the country and overseas, inundating the city with e-mails and phone calls.

Almost all the writers vehemently disagreed with the council's decision, and some declared boycotts on Las Vegas.

"No more messing around with people who order flags removed. No more Vegas for me!" wrote Terrill Groetken, a Minnesota resident. "Our family reunion will have to be held elsewhere, Reno, Laughlin or at a Indian casino somewhere."

A writer identifying himself as Art Wallace of Escondido Calif., wrote: "I just cancelled my reservations at New York-New York and I told them why. I don't want to stay in a city that will not let a business fly the USA flag. I find you all disgusting."

The city had received more than 100 e-mail messages by Tuesday afternoon and scores of phone calls, all protesting the order that would have Towbin Hummer remove the flag and flagpole within 60 days.

Some of those unhappy with the city's decision changed their minds after the city responded to their messages.

"Have the good people of Las Vegas lost their collective minds?" asked Robert Paterniti in his first e-mail. He said he and his wife were canceling a fall vacation.

But after the city wrote back with its side of the story, he responded: "See you in September."

In its response, city officials stated their patriotic pride and love for the U.S. flag. The response also pointed out that some had said Towbin Hummer was exploiting the flag for commercial purposes because the dealership had not built a memorial as promised.

Well I'll show that car dealership how to be really patriotic. I'm gonna' build a 500 foot tall flag poll!

A bird took a dump on President Bush today during his news conference warning Americans about the growing terrorist threat (from Crooks and Liars):

The latest NYT poll has 53% of Americans with a positive view of Democrats and 38% with a positive view of Republicans.

These will be interesting numbers to remember over the next few months as the Democrats continued support for the war in Iraq sinks in with the general public.

Do you think their numbers will get better or worse?

p.s.: Here's another benchmark to remember by Rasmussen.

These are some pretty bleak numbers for the housing market (I think).

The hero of my novel worked for a U.S. Senator from Nevada loosely based on Paul Wellstone. I had initially named the fictional senator David Paul, but that didn't sound right. Monday night, I decided to name him Paul Davidson.

Wellstone was killed in a plane crash a little less than five years ago. It was October, 2002, and he was in the closing days of a tough re-election battle.

Before Wellstone's death, he had begun to pull away from his opponent, Norm Coleman, in the polls. This came as a surprise to many because Wellstone had voted against the Iraq War Resolution, a vote which many assumed would cost him his election. Instead, it appeared to rally his campaign, even though at that time the war was popular with both Republicans and Democrats alike.

Wellstone was and will probably always be my political hero because he was not only capable of speaking truth to power, but he was capable of gaining -- and using -- power to advance the causes he believed to be true.

I still remember the day he died. My boss -- one of Wellstone's senatorial colleagues -- called me. It was a Friday and I was working from home. My boss was at home as well and had just seen the news on the television. She was in tears. I was speechless. After we ended our conversation, I called my Uncle Roger, who had taken a course from Wellstone at Carleton years ago, to tell him the news. I started crying. I don't cry very often. In fact, I can only think of five times that I have cried in the last fifteen years. I certainly can't think of another political leader who has in life or death moved me to tears. Fortunately, I managed to hear Roger invite me to his house for dinner, and that evening we reminisced about Wellstone's career.

I think of Paul Wellstone often. His death is still one of the saddest events in our nation's political history, but his life and career and is one of its most uplifting and encouraging stories.

This is a perilous time for our nation; our current leadership has weakened our country in ways that I never could have imagined possible. Whenever I start to think that things are just so screwed up that there's no way out, whenever I start to think that there is no way that we can ever overcome the powerful inertia of our political system, I try to think about Paul Wellstone and his career.

It can be done.

Mark Kleiman:

If you think, as I do, that the #1 problem is the existence of a large undocumented population, then the proposed bill is probably a good solution. Since we're not in fact going to expel 10 million people, the alternative is to give them documents.

Matthew Yglesias on how to stop illegal employers:

all you need to do is establish a hefty incentive for illegal immigrants to rat out people who illegally employ them. Mark Kleiman has proposed a "poetic justice" version of this where an illegal who rats his employer out gets a green card in exchange. More prosaically, a ratter out could get a one-way ticket back to his home country plus a big fat check financed through employer fines. An enforcement system like this would be cheap to administer since you mostly wouldn't need to administer it at all -- illegal immigrants looking for a bonus, and potential employers of illegal immigrants afraid of being caught in a sting, would do the vast majority of the work.

I'm no expert on immigration policy, but it seems like these two comments would form the basis of a pretty damn good policy. There's no way in hell that we're going to expel everybody who isn't a legal resident, nor should we. And going forward, we need to stop illegal employers from their rampant lawlessness.

The focus of the immigration debate has largely been on immigrants and the cultural impact of their presence in the United States. Yet those immigrants moved here because American citizens have offered them jobs.

It's hard to fathom that we forget this obvious fact: without illegal employers, there would be no undocumented workers in the United States.

Illegal employers are the problem -- undocumented workers are the symptom.

So let's figure out a way to document the workers who are here and rationalize the system going forward, beginning with illegal employers.

National Review's John Derbyshire offers his immigration plan at The Corner. My favorite part?

(2d) Impose draconian penalties on visa overstayers, including lifetime exclusion from the U.S.

If Derbyshire gets his way, we'll have to deport the Englishman. Sad (sic), but true.

You see, in the 1970s, Derbyshire overstayed his B-2 visa. In 2003, he wrote:

In spite of having committed gross and wilful violation of U.S. immigration laws, I had paid no penalty, done no time, suffered no inconvenience.  None of the various Americans to whom I had confessed had conveyed the faintest disapproval, none had told me I ought to be ashamed of myself.  In the 1970s, I can report, the normal reaction of an American on learning that the person sitting across from him was “undocumented,” was puzzlement.  They knew, of course, that there was such a thing as illegal immigration.  The word “wetback” was then current.  It was just that they didn’t associate the phenomenon with well-spoken middle-class types with office-worker skill sets.

I am bound to report that I see little difference in attitude between the native-born Americans of today and those of thirty years ago.  Nations, like individuals, have their own ineradicable quirks of personality.  It is a peculiarity of Americans that they cannot be brought to think seriously about immigration.  The two best immigration-restrictionist books of recent years have been by Peter Brimelow, who is an immigrant from England, and Michelle Malkin, daughter of recent Filipino immigrants.  If you have been through, or sufficiently close to, the immigration experience, you think about it a lot.  Otherwise, you don’t think about it at all, and can’t be made to.  Take it from me, a sometime illegal immigrant:  getting this nation to concentrate on immigration reform is going to be hard work all the way.

So forty years ago, Derbyshire was an undocumented worker -- an "illegal alien" as he would say. Now he not only proposes a lifetime ban on travel to the U.S. by visa overstayers, but he also suggests hiring more cops to hunt down and deport people in this counary who are not here legally. Can you say pogrom?

Here's what I say to Mr. Derbyshire: you and your white nationalist buddy Peter Brimelow can take your British attitudes about immigration and shove 'em where the sun don't shine! This is America, damn it, and we don't roll like you do. If you don't like it, you and your boy can swim back to England for all I care. I hear the water's cold. Hypocrisy sucks, especially when it bites you in the ass.

For years, it was well-known that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich engaged in vaginal intercourse with one of his assistants while he led the impeachment of President Clinton for lying about oral sex.

At the time, Gingrich was married to his second wife, who he had married in 1981, a few months after divorcing his first wife -- his high school geometry teacher.

In March, he admitted that the rumors were true. The 63 year-old Gingrich began sowing his fertile oats with the assistant when she was in her 20s. To his credit, I suppose, she is now his third wife.

I guess Newt Gingrich just can't get enough of that whole marriage thing.

Now he's claiming that "a growing culture of radical secularism" is causing discrimination against people of faith.

What the in the hell is he talking about?

Is he still upset that evolution is taught in schools instead of creationism?

The strange thing is that Newt Gingrich is considering a run for the President, hoping to position himself as a the standard bearer or conservative values.

I guess Newt Gingrich has lost his mind. Or maybe he's always been delusional?

You ever see that bit on Jay Leno's show called Jay-walking? He cruises L.A. asking random people easy questions about geography, history, current affairs, and then plays the stupidest answers on tv. (For example, Q: Where is Paris? A: London.)

Well, I just stumbled across an especially hilarious example of Leno himself doing a bit of Jay-walking.

You might remember that earlier this year, comedian George Lopez took a swipe at Leno, calling him "two-faced" and "the worst interviewer on TV." Then this happened:

Leno hadn't forgotten Lopez's attack when he walked into the recent Laugh Factory memorial for comic Richard Jeni. Spotting comedian Paul Rodriguez, Leno brought up the dig.

"He said, 'Listen, maybe you and I should sit down and work this out,'" Rodriguez recalled when we phoned him yesterday. "He said, 'We shouldn't be airing this stuff in public.' He was going on like that. At first, I thought he was putting me on. Finally, I said, 'Jay, It's Paul! I'm not George! I'm the other Beatle.'

"Jay apologized. He said, 'I'm sorry. I don't have my contacts in.' I said, 'Hey, it's understandable. We Mexicans all look alike."

Kinda' sheds light on Leno's propensity towards making offensive jokes about Mexicans, doesn't it?

100% of Republicans choose spouses capable of bringing a child into the world, while a full 25% of Democrats choose spouses incapable of bearing children. Moreover, Republicans understand the importance of a younger, fertile spouse: the average Republican spouse is younger than the average Democratic spouse even though the average Republican is 10 years older!

As you can see from this table, Republicans are far more likely to get remarried than Democrats! In fact, no Democrats get remarried at all, but 80% of Republicans get remarried! And even though the Democrats commitment index is higher, all that means is that the Republicans have given their commitment to more people!

As you can see, Republicans love marriage much more than Democrats. In fact, for every one marriage the Democrats have, the Republicans have 2.2. That means Republicans are 120% more likely to get married than Democrats!

Until today, I thought that the configuring Windows Vista Media Center to watch networked locations required going into the registry and manually setting the WatchedFolders key to point to the UNC path of the share.

It turns out there's an easier way to accomplish the same thing -- and you don't have to muck around in the registry at all!