Moron Nation, I need your help.

For far too long Tom Friedman has used his perch on the Op-Ed page of the NY Times to slap America and build up China. He must be confronted before he wins another Pulitzer for it.

I'm issuing a challenge to Friedman to debate me anytime, anywhere, but I'm going to need your help. We need to get him to see it and then badger him into accepting the challenge.

Why am I doing this? Because sometimes a really stupid and foolish gesture is required! Who is with me?

Here's the challenge:

Dear Mr. Friedman,

Let me say upfront, IÂ’m not a fan (though I can be complimentary when it's deserved).

IÂ’ve written several times in response to your recurring flirtations with the various advantages you see in China and the relative weaknesses of America. We have an honest and profound disagreement on these topics and quite frankly, I think they need to be aired. Am I, a part-time, hobbyist blogger the ideal candidate to take on a multiple Pulitzer Prize winner such as you? Honestly, only my mom, God love her, would say yes. Still, it comes down to the man willing to step into the arena and at the moment, thatÂ’s me.

What prompted this David to challenge an editorial Goliath such as you to a debate?

Your December 1, 2010 column which imagined a WikiLeak cable from the Chinese Embassy in DC to the home office in Beijing was just a bridge too far for me. Another blog post Fisking you simply wasnÂ’t good enough to satisfy me. I, well someone, really needs to have a sit down debate complete with an audience to hash this out with you.

Just to make it fair, let me run through in bullet point form some of the issues I have with your latest column and where I think we could find interesting ground for a debate.
more...

Posted by: DrewM at 11:57 AM | Comments (36)
Post contains 954 words, total size 6 kb.

I think these are (some) the would-be challengers: Gentry Collins, Chris Healy, Saul Anuzis, and Ann Wagner. Michael Steele and Maria Coco (another candidate) aren't there.

So here are some of the guys running for the post, in a forum sponsored by FreedomWorks.

Posted by: Ace at 11:19 AM | Comments (29)
Post contains 53 words, total size 1 kb.

Have to mention it.

We liveblogged the first show and it was pretty clear that Kathleen Parker 1, had nothing much to say except about her One Big Topic of Sarah Palin (and nothing new there, either), and, even if you're whoring for ratings, you can't talk about her every night, can you?, and 2, was a wallflower without any command of the studio and without the sort of aggressive confidence needed to be a broadcaster.

She wilted on stage. She was a ghost. A big nothing. As bad as the show was, I have to agree with (I think) S.E. Cupp who said that Spitzer seemed more like a natural broadcaster, someone firmly in his element of talkin' on TV bark-bark-bark.

Parker seemed like, well, a second-rate writer doing her best work with her keyboard (and not very good work there, either).

The NY Post claims she stormed off the set, angry about her second banana role.

Well, dear, you have to talk to be heard, don't you? This isn't third-grade math class. The teachers aren't there to spend extra effort trying to cajole the girls to raise their hands and answer questions.

You're a big girl now, aren't you? Either get off TV or start talking on TV but don't whine that the guy doing what he's supposed to do on TV (fill up the air with words) is doing his job properly.

You need to bring a little more to the table than "dead air," darlin'.

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker actually stormed off the set of the "Parker Spitzer" show during a pre-taping a few weeks ago -- furious that her co-host is continually allowed to take charge of their nightly CNN chat-fest, the insiders said.

Although still fuming, Parker did return to wrap up the segment, they said.
But she's angry that the show's producers are allegedly doing nothing to play up her strengths on the ailing show, the sources said.

Her "strengths," from that first show I saw, seem to be limited to asking sorority-girl party-game questions of her guests, like "When did you lose your virginity?" She didn't ask that one -- but it was that type of irrelevant, let's-have-a-giggle-party sort of question.

She wants the show to have more of that sort of thing, I guess. Sure. That'll save the show. An aging den mother asking people what color underwear they hope they'll be wearing when they die. Ratings gold.

Some staffers said Spitzer -- the hard-charging, former state attorney general who resigned as governor in 2008 after admitting to patronizing prostitutes -- thrust himself up front and center right out of the gate, leaving Parker without a chance.

Right, he should have been a wallflower and quiet as a mouse to let the other wallflower get in her wallflower mumblings.

But other insiders said the Pulitzer Prize-winning Parker has only herself to blame.

While Parker -- a conservative, nationally syndicated newspaper journalist -- is widely respected, she's no TV personality, critics said.

She's also no conservative, NY Post.

"Her weaknesses are felt internally," a source said.

Anyway, she's whining to the show's executive producer that the format has to be changed to allow the quiet, uncomfortable-on-camera mumbler more of the spotlight. Like maybe she could do a cooking segment or something.

By the way, I am writing a big, super-long post. I'm not slacking. I'm just fixated on this one post.

Posted by: Ace at 11:05 AM | Comments (88)
Post contains 588 words, total size 4 kb.

Excellent.

Senate Republicans are vowing to block all legislative business until Democrats hold votes on bills to extend the Bush-era tax cuts and keep the government funded through the new year.

In a letter signed by all 42 Republicans, Republicans warn they will filibuster any attempt to bring forward any bill besides those two measures. That could further complicate Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's desire to complete a laundry list of other bills in the final weeks of the 111th Congress.

It's not like the year-end tax hike is a surprise. It's only been sneaking up on us for most of a decade now. And it is the duty of Congress to pass a budget every year, so that isn't a surprise either. Nevertheless, the Democrats simply let these two critical issues slide because they were too hard.

Now we're running out of time, but the Democrats would rather pass out goodies to constituent groups. I'm impressed (and sadly, a little surprised) that the Senate GOP managed to pull together to tell Democrats that some things are actually more important.

More: Ed has details on a massive omnibus environmental bill that Reid promised his Senate buddies he'd move during the lame duck. Reid agreed to push the environmental bill on Monday night. Perhaps he was heartened by how easily he got Republicans on board his food safety bill?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:42 AM | Comments (251)
Post contains 262 words, total size 2 kb.

Dri had this in the sidebar; I just read about it a bit on Hot Air.

Cover is of course critical in a firefight. Hunker down behind a berm, duck under a window's frame, peek out behind a corner -- your opponents will have a hell of a time hitting you.

I'm just making this crap up but I bet it's right -- 90% of the military's firefight tactics are about finding, exploiting, and defeating cover.

The XM-25 has a laser-rangefinder. The soldier using it points it at his target, and pushes a button to register that range. Then he adds in a + or - to note whether he wants the grenade to explode just before that distance or just after.

Then he fires a grenade, up to 2300 feet (longer than most carbine/AK-47 ranges), and a the gun instructs the grenade when to blow up.

Long story short: If a guy is hiding behind the cover of the corner of a brick building, point the gun at the corner, click in "+" (meaning, explode just beyond this distance), and aim just past the corner into the open air, and fire -- the grenade will launch and will detonate just as it passes the corner, killing the guy hiding behind it.

Which means that the most critical tactic in a firefight simply no longer exists for our enemies.

If it works as they're selling it -- and they are really selling it big, not lowering expectations -- it literally, I think, could end the war.

Because you can't have a war if all of the opposing forces are dead.

Lt. Col. Christopher Lehner, project manager for the semi-automatic, shoulder-fired weapon system for the U.S. Army's Program Executive Office Soldier, said that the XM25's capability alone is such a "game-changer" that it'll lead to new ways of fighting on the battlefield, beginning this month in Afghanistan.

"With this weapon system, we take away cover from [enemy targets] forever," Lehner told FoxNews.com on Wednesday. "Tactics are going to have to be rewritten. The only thing we can see [enemies] being able to do is run away."

I don't know if it's going to work quite as well as anticipated, but again, they are not taking a "hopeful" stance -- they seem convinced that this thing is just absolutely lethal.

One way to think about it, I guess, is in movies the heroes always get behind cover (and don't get shot) while the idiot villains' minions run out in the open (and get shot to shit). Basically this gun, if it works as well as they think it will work, turns opponents into idiot movie minions, with movie-like results.

Change In Tactics: Assuming this works as brilliantly as advertised:

In cases where our guys have planned an assault on stronghold, this weapon will only marginally improve our fighting power, because in those cases we already are bringing so many advantages to the table, like Spooky gunships and Apaches and mortars and rocket launchers. Even there, though, we'll kill a lot more guys, and have more surrenders, and have fewer escapees. Maybe a lot fewer, as those designated to stay behind and lay covering fire while the higher-ups escape will balk, given that their odds of surviving the encounter are a lot lower now.

Civilian casualties should decline, generally, since heavier, less descriminate explosive attacks will be less frequently needed. Plus the bad guys won't be firing as long (and they probably shoot up most of the civilians themselves with their poor fire discipline). This not only helps in that (cliche warning) hearts and minds thing but it increases our lethal potential: If we are more precise about killin' them that needs killin', we can take the shackles off and do more of it.

It will make ambush attacks on small patrols a much riskier proposition -- here it will have big impact. Unless the enemy is in force and thinks it can all but wipe out a patrol in the first barrage of gunfire, the enemy will know that attacking a patrol, even a small one, is essentially suicide. Such ambushes will be less common (and there will be many more enemy kills during the transition period).

Even snipers will have to change their tactics some -- they will have to learn to take one or two or maybe three shots, before fleeing and trying to blend into a civilian crowd. They will have to scoot very quickly after the shoot.

Cover isn't just a defensive advantage; it's an offensive advantage, too, as a guy who has some security in his position will generally take better-aimed shots and fire more aimed rounds (and not just stick his gun out and fire blindly, or just cower and hide). If the gun works as well as it's said to, enemy fighters won't just be defensively disadvantaged, but offensively too, as a lot more of their time and mind-share is devoted to mere survival.

The Taliban (and Al Qaeda in Iraq) will generally have to rely more on roadside bombs. They rely on that stuff a lot as it is, but we've gotten better at defeating these tactics; they will have to go back to that sort of thing mostly exclusively.

This could have an impressive effect on enemy morale, perhaps catastrophic. There is a big difference between going into battle with a belief that there is a 20% chance you'll be killed (or maimed) and going into battle with the belief that there is a 90% chance you will be killed (or maimed). A lot of fighters will balk once you get past the 60% mark.

I don't know if this thing works as well as advertised. And I don't want to get silly about it and claim a revolution. But there have been truly revolutionary weapons in the past (longbow, rifle) and those weapons did change the face of warfare (and make the early-adopters of such then-cutting-edge tech the masters of the battlefield). It does sound to me like a weapon that defeats, decisively, the chief defense against gunfire -- cover -- could very well be that sort of longbow/rifle revolutionary weapon.

Vid: Little bonus: the reporter is Rick "Manslaughter" Sanchez.

Jean objects to my overselling this:

The ability to compromise cover is a little oversold, visually identifying those situations will be hard. What this does in tactical terms is it significantly increases the probability of a hit beyond basic rifleman range for the untrained masses. No longer do you need that kid from Kentucky or Idaho on the DMR to engage at a extended ranges; it may also reduce the need to hump the mortar. It is also a direct fire weapon under local control - no need to ask higher to start pop stuff at 2K out. So it reduces training and strain on a limited set of personnel, cuts JAG time, shortens the C2 "span of control" and may reduce pack weight. All wins, if it works.

XBradTC agrees:

This!

I'm sure the XM25 will bring something to the fight. But really, ever since the M79 was introduced, we've had a fair ability to engage troops in defilade out to about 300-400m. This is a more accurate round, and an interesting technical achievement, but one of the very great difficulties in the fight is determining EXACTLY where the enemy is. Once you determine his position, killing isn't that hard, and hasn't been for a long time.

Well, point taken, and I respect that these guys are offering military-informed opinions, but so is the guy mentioned in the Fox article, and he thinks it will make a much bigger impact than Jean and XBradTC do.

"Rewriting tactics" and "the enemy will have no choice but to run away" are pretty big statements. Even discounting for this guy being in love with the product, it seems like the weapon will have more of an impact than Jean and XBradTC guess.

Old Top Ten: This weapon began as the under part of the over-under XM-8, a combined advanced assault rifle and grenade launcher. The advanced assault rifle part didn't work all that great, and it was heavy anyway to do the two-weapons-in-one thing, so they separated out the grenade launcher, which seemed to be working, and made it the stand-alone XM-25.

I did this Top Ten for the XM-8, back in the very early days of the blog.

(Actually, commenters seem to be telling me the XM-25 was not derived from the XM-8, but rather the XM-8 and the XM-25 together made up the OICW (objective infantry combat weapon or something). Anyway, look, this is an old top ten. It's about cool weapons.)

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:08 AM | Comments (236)
Post contains 1697 words, total size 11 kb.

Blue bloods = the aristocracy, my poor sweet dumb babboo.

Read on as she Googles the term... and still gets it wrong.

Welcome to the echo chamber! This week's (or possibly month's) latest rhetorical talking point is "blue bloods." And guess what? In the way it has been used I am probably considered one and so is the entire Bush family, not to mention countless others.

"In the way it has been used" she "probably" would be considered one.

In the way it has been used, as opposed to... the way it's otherwise used?

Dearie, it's only used in one way. It means aristocracy. Not new money, old money (and "old money" in America usually means somewhat new money, in comparison to old money in Europe).

And who else would deliver such a catchy media talking point than, yes, Sarah Palin.

Um, anyone who ever heard the term before, which is 98% of us.

The reference to "blue bloods" was made after former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara said in an interview that they thought Mitt Romney was essentially the man to watch in 2012, followed by an extra zinger from the notorious straight talking former first lady Barbara Bush who said she thinks "Sarah Palin should stay in Alaska." Sarah Palin responded on the Laura Ingraham radio show saying "of course they think that, the Bush's are blue bloods."

I actually had to Google what the meaning of "blue bloods" was, although I could surmise that it was some kind of knock against education and coming from a family of some success. Yes, in essence that is what this statement meant.

No, that is not "in essence" what this statement meant. It has nothing to do with education (although the rich, of course, do send their kids to Ivy League schools or, lately, since Ivy League schools are harder to get into just based on cash-money background, into expensive private schools like Bennington. But that's an incident of wealth.)

The term means "old money aristocracy," period.

"Blue blood" has a variety of tones to it. Blue bloods think of it as a good term. Often it's used in a purely descriptive, neutral way -- people are objectively "blue bloods." Same as saying they're wealthy. Not really open to much debate.

And sometimes it's used derisively, as in "entitled little beer-empire princesses who supposedly go into Columbia based on nothing but academic potential (wink, wink) and yet never read a single book in which the very common term 'blue blood' was used."

What is that common put-down of Sarah Palin? Oh yes: "She doesn't know what she doesn't know." Meghan McCain obviously doesn't know what she doesn't know, or she'd be too embarrassed to note that she had to Google a term that is not only common, but is part of any educated (or semi-educated) person's active vocabulary.

This isn't some obscure term like, I don't know, petit bourgeoisie. (Which isn't all that obscure, either.) I mean: Come on.

The rap on "blue bloods" is that they rule by happenstance of lucky birth with little objective, personal qualification or merit or accomplishment to recommend them.

Sort of like an entitled beer empire princess who presumes to be a professional writer and political analyst but still has to Google terms from a seventh-grade vocabulary list.

Oh, but she's not done. She's still complaining about this term which she never heard before in her entire life.

Families that work hard and achieve a long line of successful people are "blue bloods" and thus, she implied the opinions of said people are jaded and elitist, even if that family lineage has a long history of public service and leadership within Republican Party.

Yes, Meghan, families that work hard and create a long line of successful wealthy descendants are "blue bloods." Note the distinction here: Your family -- that is, people not you -- worked hard and had success. They were successful, whereas you are merely rich.

But Meghan's not done.

Of course, Sarah Palin is also living the American dream, albeit a different one without the help of any kind of family lineage. She has a successful career that probably most Americans would want by earning millions for her reality show, appearances on Fox, and getting paid to go places and speak her mind. Both of these narratives exemplify why this country is still as Ronald Reagan famously put it "a shining city upon a hill." America is a place where people can create their own success so their children can have more opportunities than they did. Neither the Bush family's success nor Sarah Palin's are relevant to the political conversation regarding who is best suited to be the next GOP leader. Both stories are simply the American dream and taking issue with one kind of path towards success versus another is very dangerous. Lest we forget, Sarah Palin herself is now a multi-millionaire.

In this incoherent passage, this supposedly Columbia-educated paid professional author argues, I think, that "some people earn it themselves through their own sweat and toil, some people have it handed to them as an infant for no better reason than winning the birth lottery, who's to say which is a prouder tradition?"

Um, one doesn't have to be an anti-aristocratic extremist to say the former is better, Meghan. McCain here equates her own "success" and "accomplishment" -- which principally consists of, um, surviving the birthing process -- with Sarah Palin's.

I'm not a particular fan of Sarah Palin's anymore but, you know: F A I L.

Okay, one more thing: Meghan McCain is an idiot, and has had everything handed to her, and is such an idiot she never even realized there was a word for this. So, in other words, she just discovered, within the past week, that there is an entirely new (to her) personal insult that applies to her.

This of course accounts for her hysterical, defensive whining, and attempting to equate the accomplishments of J.P. Morgan with his great-grandson J.P. "Johnny Chugs" Morgan, one man who built a banking empire, and one man who knows all the rules to Mexican.

So this is all very personal to her.

Will she admit that? No, of course not, she has to claim her hysterical ignorance is all in the service of country or something.

I take particular issue with the "blue blood" rhetoric because in case Republicans haven't realized, we are still losing a public relations battle. Instead of sitting around and opining about who is too much of an elitist or a "blue blood" within our own party, our leaders need to start educating this country about the shortcomings of the Obama administration and why smaller government is a fundamentally more effective way of governing.

Right, you're screaming like an infant because you're worried that this exciting neologism "blue blood" may distract from the effort to thwart Obama. Okay.

By the way, for what it's worth: I know playing the "elitist" card (and the "blue blood" variation) is like catnip to some people, and it explains everything (that is, politics is for some less about specific policy outcomes and more about a generalized assertion of primacy over the "elite"), but I'm really tired of it myself, and am especially tired of Sarah Palin's use of it to explain practically everything, and explain away every knock on her.

That is, every knock on her is dismissed as "elitist" impulse, which frankly fails to address the real reasons often offered for doubting her capacity to serve as president. Which is the point. By constantly claiming that all (and I do mean all) criticism of her is essentially illegitimate as it is born of nothing but "elitist" disdain for the common man (or woman), she never actually has to rebut such criticisms.

I'm really not digging what I find to be a crudely reductivist, single-dimensional model of politics that many have seized on (Palin most prominently), that politics currently consists of almost nothing at all but "elitists" vs. the common.

What about ideas? Why is every dispute being turned into a personal one, a dispute in which the power of ideas matter far less than the personal credentials of the person offering the idea?

Do the elite engage in the fallacy of the argument to authority, offering their status as the credentialed elite as a reason to support their ideas? Yes, they do. But what bothers me about this whole damn anti-elitist panic is that it replacing one appeal to authority with another appeal to authority which is nearly as odious, and actually a bit more when you add in the hypocrisy factor.

The old appeal to authority is rotten and horrible, you should not credit anyone who says "listen to me because I hail from the credentialed elite;" that's why we need to replace it with a new appeal to authority: "Listen to me because I hail from the striving low-to-middle class."

What?

I do not see the great benefit of replacing one regime of sneering dismissiveness based on happenstance of birth with an opposite regime of sneering dismissiveness based on happenstance of birth.

Well that's not entirely true-- I do find the latter regime, Palin's preferred regime, preferable to the former. I would rather that regime of sneering dismisiveness to the older one. But I don't much like either.

And another thing I'll just put out there: I rarely post on Sarah Palin anymore because everything with her seems excessively personal. Do we have arguments about ideas when it comes to Sarah Palin? No, we only have arguments about her as a person. It's like high school. Political "coverage" consists largely of hit-trolling by engaging in the never-ending and childish reportage of "This person talked smack about Sarah Palin" and "Sarah Palin dissed this person right back!"

To some limited extent, this isn't Palin's fault, but her critics on the left (and in the nastier corners of the supposedly-"civil" "moderate" wing of the Republican Party, like Frumj and Scarborough) who personalize every attack on Palin.

On the other hand, I have to say that Palin is largely responding in personal terms, which I find less than presidential. It's all this "elitist" sort of stuff -- you call me a name, I'll call you a name -- and there just doesn't seem to be a criticism that Palin can let go unanswered. So while I'd like my presidential nominee to be an expert on one field of government policy or maybe a couple, I am finding that Palin is creating her own personal field of expertise which consists chiefly of defending the good name of Sarah Palin and snarking her critics.

I don't really care about this "expertise." At all. And I am just tired of this never-ending, highly-personal high-school sort of smack-talk and disses.

From both sides, yeah. I've always been pissed off that the left, and Palin's supposedly more conservative critics too, have engaged in this sort of childish personal taunting. But now I've really had as much I can take of it from Team Palin, too.

This isn't the Delgrassi Junior High or even the Godfather. Not everything is about personal status and standing. Politics isn't just about people. When it descends to just being about nothing but people and personalities, it ceases to be politics, and become simply a different form of Extra/TMZ/Perez Hilton celebrity gossip show.

I know Palin didn't start this. But if I, personally, am ever going to be able to support Palin, I need her to stop this, and start addressing policy questions in policy terms -- not personal terms -- and put away her go-to "I Win" cards of "elitist" and the like.

Posted by: Ace at 07:16 AM | Comments (541)
Post contains 2031 words, total size 13 kb.

Yesterday, the dummies in the Senate, including 14 Republicans, voted to pass the "FDA Food Safety Modernization Act", a bill that will raise the price of food.

Today, Majority Leader Reid and his retarded fellows are getting a lesson in civics:

A food safety bill that has burned up precious days of the SenateÂ’s lame-duck session appears headed back to the chamber because Democrats violated a constitutional provision requiring that tax provisions originate in the House.

By pre-empting the House’s tax-writing authority, Senate Democrats appear to have touched off a power struggle with members of their own party in the House. The Senate passed the bill Tuesday, sending it to the House, but House Democrats are expected to use a procedure known as “blue slipping” to block the bill, according to House and Senate GOP aides.

The bill included several "fees" (aka "taxes") on businesses to pay for new federal food inspectors and other bureaucratic expansion. Roll Call speculates that Reid will have to drop the bill until next year, since Republicans led by Senator Coburn won't agree to change the lame duck schedule now.

One word of caution: the source for this story appears to be Republican staffers in the House and the Senate, who expect House Democrats to not let the Senate usurp the House's constitutional prerogative. Let's just say my expectation that House Democrats will "do the right thing" is not very high. It could happen, but I'm not going to put big money on it.

Update: Just so you know who the 14 Republican retards who voted for this thing are:

Alexander (R-TN)
Brown (R-MA)
Burr (R-NC)
Collins (R-ME)
Enzi (R-WY)
Grassley (R-IA)
Gregg (R-NH)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kirk (R-IL)
LeMieux (R-FL)
Lugar (R-IN)
Murkowski (R-AK)
Snowe (R-ME)
Vitter (R-LA)

Idiots.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:26 AM | Comments (156)
Post contains 314 words, total size 2 kb.

Not sure as to the freshness date of this as these things move quickly, but here was the situation as of last night and as reported by Seattle station KIRO:

”ISSAQUAH, Wash. -- An Issaquah grandmother of two American soldiers said she's outraged at Amazon for providing web hosting to WikiLeaks, the organization that has leaked thousands of classified government documents. Nadine Gulit had two grandsons deploy to Iraq and founded Operation Support Our Troops. She isn't very diplomatic about Amazon helping out WikiLeaks. "That shocked me and it surprises me that Amazon went that route," she said.”

And how did this come to be?

”WikiLeaks came under fresh criticism recently for publicizing 250,000 confidential diplomatic cables that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said endangered innocent lives. Hours before WikiLeaks published those cables, it was hacked and moved its home page to Amazon's servers for what some believe were security reasons.”

Emphasis mine. Let that last sentence sink in for a moment. IÂ’m told that irony has a somewhat sweet, yet salty, flavor. Similar to chocolate-covered pretzels maybe?

An interesting, and probably accurate point (at least to some degree) is made in the article:

University of Washington communications professor Phil Howard wasn't surprised by WikiLeaks' move and concurred that it was likely made to avoid further hacks. He said he thought Amazon's participation might reflect an internet ideology. "This case is evidence that Amazon still has that kind of libertarian information-must-be-free ethic," he said.

Perhaps, but a public relations crisis manager quoted later in the article notes that it seems bizarre for Amazon to do something like this, particularly during the holiday shopping season. As for Grandma Gulit? LetÂ’s just say sheÂ’s a little pissed off about the whole affair.

No statement yet from Amazon, at least that I can find.

Posted by: Genghis at 04:49 AM | Comments (128)
Post contains 321 words, total size 2 kb.

A "Red Notice" is Interpol's way of notifying participating countries that a warrant has been issued and that the issuing country is seeking extradition.

This Red Notice relates to the rape and sexual harassment investigations that started in August.

Assange's details were also added to Interpol's worldwide wanted list. Dated 30 November, the entry reads: "sex crimes" and says the warrant has been issued by the international public prosecution office in Gothenburg, Sweden. "If you have any information contact your national or local police." It reads: "Wanted: Assange, Julian Paul," and gives his birthplace as Townsville, Australia.

Assange is supposedly in a "secret location" outside London.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:24 AM | Comments (54)
Post contains 120 words, total size 1 kb.

December? Already? Ack.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:47 AM | Comments (47)
Post contains 11 words, total size 1 kb.