Well, it will give the MFM something other than Richard "I was in the shit" Blumenthal to talk about today.

Eight-term Indiana Rep. Mark Souder was announcing his resignation Tuesday after admitting to an affair with a female aide who worked in his district office.

Souder, a Republican, will will step down on Friday. He said in remarks obtained by Fox News that he "sinned against God, my wife and my family by having a mutual relationship with a part-time member of my staff."

"I wish I could have been a better example," he was to say. "In this poisonous environment of Washington, D.C., any personal failing is seized upon, often twisted, for political gain. I am resigning rather than to put my family through that painful, drawn-out process. ... We are a committed family but the error is mine and I should bear the responsibility. Not only am I thankful for a loving family but for a loving God."

Expect Souder to become the poster boy for the Republican Party in the media. You know, the same media who dropped Eric 'the tickler' Massa down the memory hole as soon as possible.

Update: It's about TEH Hypocrisy!!!11!111!!!

Souder was apparently a longtime advocate for abstinence education. TPM Muckraker even found him and the staffer he is alleged to have the affair with talking about his feelings on the issue as some sort of campaign or issue oriented video.

Jake Tapper, who will hold Obama to task but is still a member in good standing of the MFM jumped on it as well.

This seems to prove...er, I'm not sure what. I get that liberals love to bash Republicans caught up in personal scandals but how the hell does this have anything to do with the value of abstinence education?

There are a lot of things that adults do that they teach kids not to, not always because the thing itself is bad but because kids are not able to handle them (either emotionally, physically or what have you).

I know this can be shocking to liberals but kids are not simply miniature adults. Just because an adult engages in a certain behavior doesn't meant they forfeit their right and responsibility to counsel children not to do those same things.

That said, this video is painful on many levels.

Quick question for the ladies....um, is abstinence education a topic I'm overlooking when it comes to landing a woman? Seriously, I hadn't considered it before but it seems to have worked for this guy.
more...

Posted by: DrewM at 06:54 AM | Comments (224)
Post contains 447 words, total size 3 kb.

While I have your attention...are there any Vegas morons? I'm going to be out there at some point this summer (mmmm....Vegas in the summer). Maybe we can schedule an event or something.

Posted by: DrewM at 04:12 AM | Comments (163)
Post contains 40 words, total size 1 kb.

I've got multiple deadlines going on at work so all I can offer you tonight is this semi-sucky ONT. Sorry. :-(

Your Dirty Mind
Why do you keep seeing dirty things in these perfectly innocent drawings? Freud would have a field day and God knows what you see in Rorschach images. SFW if you watch the entire thing.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:49 PM | Comments (876)
Post contains 417 words, total size 5 kb.

Service records say "no". (NYT link).

“We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,” Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. “And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support.”

There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.

There's a video embedded with the story, and his language is unambiguous.

"We have learned something very important since the days that I served in Vietnam".

The article notes times when he is fuzzier with his language, but also times like the 2008 talk in Norwalk, when it's really not all that ambigous.

This is stupid on steriods. It's boggles the mind (and a boggled mind is of absolutely no use to anyone).

Also it will kill his Senate bid.

Dummy.

via Andy Levy on Twitter.

UPDATE: Blumenthal remembers the last mission.

"Hartford... shit; I'm still only in Hartford... Every time I think I'm gonna wake up back in the jungle. "

Posted by: Richard Blumenthal at May 17, 2010 09:31 PM (asRwH)

UPDATE2: Slublog has this fertile mind with the p-shops, doesn't he?

UPDATE3: The spin begins. Focus is on the deferments, not the lie about having served in VietNam. [link via DrewM.]

Lame. Look at the video again. It isn't about his deferments, it's his lie about having served in VietNam. more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:28 PM | Comments (259)
Post contains 306 words, total size 2 kb.

Apparently there's this show called "The Naked Office", which will air over in Blighty on -- get this -- the Virgin network. And this is sort of an advertisement to get people to watch the show. I admit that I'm intrigued.

How come we never get ad campaigns like this over here? I think the best one I've come across this year involved some coupons you could trade in for ten cents off a bottle of steak-sauce or something. In fact, a lot of the ad campaigns have become kind of passive-aggressive. Stuff like: "Buy our product and we won't send a guy over to beat the shit out of you" or "All of your smart friends are buying this overpriced piece of shit product. If you don't buy one too, they're going to think you're retarded and smell bad."

Via Drudge.

Posted by: Monty at 05:12 PM | Comments (65)
Post contains 162 words, total size 1 kb.

Obviously so, but I didn't expect Nice-Girl Laura to say so.

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” if the press would have been howling over the White House’s reaction to the BP oil spill even louder if it happened on George Bosh’s watch, the ex-First Lady said, “I think that’s right, probably.” And she didn’t think anyone should be surprised. “But you know, it’s just — that’s just how it is.”

It’s not just just President Obama who’s getting a break from the media, she said. Michelle Obama has escaped being stereotyped the way Laura was as “mumsy” staying home baking cookies.

“The press in general typecasts every woman that lives in the White House, the other first ladies, because always our first ladies have been a lot more interesting, a lot more complicated, than their box that they’re sort of put in,” Bush said.

But not Michelle.

...

But itÂ’s her husband who ws really the victim of liberal bias.

“I think that, you know, one of the things that happened when George was president was that everything, including the weather, became his fault,” she said. “And it’s just an unrealistic, really, expectation of our president.”

During the Bush years, conservative defenders of Bush said many times, "You know, the President doesn't control everything."

Pish-posh, the media and Democrats (BIRM) said; if a sparrow dies of tuberculosis, that's on your boy.

Since January 20, 2009, so much has changed. Now the President can't be blamed for anything that happens on his watch; everything is simply beyond his control and/or legacies of evil from the Bush Administration.

Now, only the President's nice intentions matter.

Posted by: Ace at 01:24 PM | Comments (522)
Post contains 289 words, total size 2 kb.

Daniel Pipes calls it Affirmative Action in beauty contests, noticing a trend of recent Muslim winners in the US and Europe. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing -- there may be some benefit to empowering, and, frankly, sexualizing Muslim women.

Debbie Schlussel notes, however, that very pointed questions could have been posed to this woman-- for example, would she denounce Hezbollah, which controls the area of Lebanon her family hails fromf?

A high-profile Muslim woman denouncing Hezbollah, or, more broadly, terrorism generally, would be such a thing of beauty I'd giver her eight crowns if I could. But she didn't denounce them; the judges were too cowardly to even ask her about it.

I can't vouch for Schlussel's sources, and I don't, actually, assume this to be true -- not without independent confirmation.

But still: it would have been a good question to ask.

She was born in the Hezbollah stronghold of Srifa in South Lebanon, which Israel was forced to attack in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war because it was a site of Hezbollah weaponry. Her devout Muslim family comes from the Hezbollah-controlled South Lebanon. Intelligence sources confirm that at least three of Fakih’s relatives are currently top officials in Hezbollah and that at least eight Fakih family members were Hezbollah terrorists killed by the Israelis in past Israel-Lebanese wars and interventions. Some of her family members were originally in Harakat Amal [the Shi'ite Amal militia], which is now essentially a part of Hezbollah. There’s a reason that even Al-Manar TV–Hezbollah’s official TV network–is high on Fakih in the Miss USA pageant.

Again, I don't mind a Muslim woman winning this; I think it could be kinda-sorta a good message, and I don't give a fig otherwise about who should "really win" or who was most deserving. I know these women work hard, but the whole pageant is a PR exercise in the first place, so I don't mind PR being part of the criteria for selecting a winner.

But, if messaging is going to count in these contests, let's make sure it's good messaging.

Why on earth was a Muslim woman not asked to perform the useful function of denouncing violence and championing liberal Enlightenment values?

Was it because they feared her answer? Well, if they feared her answer -- then she shouldn't win. If Carrie Prejean can't win for expressing support of traditional marriage -- if that's too religious-nutty for these people -- then how can we have a winner who can't be asked to affirm peace and nonviolence?

But perhaps they simply avoided difficult political questions altogether, you might think. Perhaps they are avoiding last year's Perez Hilton controversy, and want to keep the questions inoffensive and apolitical, the way it used to be.

Nope.

Miss Oklahoma is asked about that hot-button -- and her answer counted against her, of course; it's not a "pretty" answer, as Perez Hilton said last year of Carrie Prejean -- but we can't have a Muslim woman asked about terrorism?

I don't know if Schlussel is right about this woman's family being Hezballah-connected. Could be true, could be false, could be very distant family relations that count for little in her life.

But if we're going to hash out questions of public policy and shared values in these contests -- as we are, it seems -- then why can we not ask a Muslim woman about the most important question of the decade? Why can we not enlist her on our side as a public-relations princess affirming the value of human life and denouncing terrorist murder?

Or is that too controversial? Arizona's law isn't too controversial to ask about; but it's somehow wrong to ask someone to denounce terrorist murder?

I really do think it's kind of a cool thing that a Muslim woman should win this. I think it's kind of nice for plurality and diversity and blahblahbleeblahblah and I also think it could be useful, in a small way, in the culture war for the Islamic soul. A culture war that, by the way, is an actual war, with bombings and bullets and death.

I don't think she should be "picked on" just because she's Arabic or Muslim.

But this is an important question. And if a Southern, conservative Christian woman can be asked about the hot-button issue of immigration, on pain of forfeiting the contest for failure to echo the PC answer the judges want, is it too much to ask this woman to take a stand on a much more important question?

Correction: I originally wrote this half-assuming Schlussel's charges about Miss USA being connected, by family, to Hezballah to be true, at least in a provisional sort of way.

I have rewritten it to be much more dubious about that charge, for a couple of reasons.

First, it's a big charge, and it's not fair to level without real evidence.

Second, apart from Schlussel's assertion that "intelligence sources" confirm this, I have no evidence at all -- and Michelle Malkin, for one, avoids that claim herself. If Malkin winds up affirming that charge, I'll believe it.

But I don't have to believe this woman to be a terrorist or terrorist-supporter to believe that if we're going to be asking difficult questions of beauty pageant contests, we can and should be asking them if they support murder or not.

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (214)
Post contains 905 words, total size 6 kb.

Frustrated! Well that's one way to put it.

If only Tea Partiers had a PR firm with the major networks' ear like radical Islamic terrorists do. Tea Partiers would kill to be merely deemed frustrated.

Actually, they wouldn't kill at all, which is why I suppose the cowards of the media have decide to brand them would-be murderers and lynchers without any violent acts yet attributable to them at all.

On the other hand....

E-mails paint Times Square suspect as frustrated Muslim

By Susan Candiotti, CNN
May 17, 2010 12:38 p.m. EDT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Two e-mails may shed light on what motivated suspect in failed Times Square bombing

May shed light? May?

Shed light? Are his motives still cloaked in darkness?

CNN obtained e-mails from Connecticut physician, who provided copies to FBI
E-mail: "It is with no doubt that we ... are attacked and occupied by foreign infidel forces"

This email -- "no doubt that we... are attacked and occupied by foreign infidel forces" --- may, apparently, provide some obscure clue to Shahzad's otherwise-incomprehensible mind.

New York (CNN) -- Faisal Shahzad, the suspect in the failed car bombing in New York's Times Square, was frustrated with the state of the Muslim world and sought a way to "fight back."

Two e-mails obtained by CNN help piece together a portrait of the Pakistani-born naturalized U.S. citizen. They also may shed some light on what propelled his failed terror plot.

"Everyone knows the current situation of Muslim World," he wrote in an e-mail he sent to a large group of recipients in February 2006....

"Everyone knows how the Muslim country bows down to pressure from the west. Everyone knows the kind of humiliation we are faced with around the globe."

The e-mail continues: "It is with no doubt that we today Muslim, followers of Islam are attacked and occupied by foreign infidel forces. The crusade has already started against Islam and Muslims with cartoons of our beloved Prophet PBUH (peace be upon him) as War drums."

Shahzad keeps saying "everyone knows."

If only CNN could mimic his attitude about what "everyone knows."

So what does that actually mean? Hm, that's a puzzler. But I suppose it may shed light on his Byzantine, inscrutable motivations. But we need to dig further to solve this funky mystery, as Shaggy might say.

Oh, and here's what had him in such a state:

Shahzad was referring to the 2005 controversy in which a Danish newspaper published satirical cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed that many Muslims found offensive.

"Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed," Shahzad asked. "And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows? In Palestine, Afghan, Iraq, Chechnya and elsewhere."

The second e-mail was sent in April 2009 to a smaller group of recipients. By then, Shahzad was an American citizen. In that e-mail, Shahzad ridicules an article written by a Muslim who took a more moderate view than him.

He felt "oppressed" by a cartoon enough to wish to murder over it.

I hope we find some more clues about this International Man of Mystery. So far, even with these tiny, fragmentary hints, he remains shrouded, a living cipher, a mystery in a riddle wrapped in an enigma.

You know who's really frustrated? Non-Muslims who keep getting killed by Muslims.

Posted by: Ace at 11:55 AM | Comments (155)
Post contains 571 words, total size 4 kb.

I'm not happy about it.

CBS chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer is now saying that he has it on good authority that the White House is privately bracing for Arlen Specter to lose tomorrow.

Schieffer, to my knowledge, has not said this on national TV yet. But he made the claim in an interview with the local CBS affiliate in Philadelphia. "I have been told on background that the White House is preparing for a Specter loss here, and that the president doesn't want to be associated with that," Schieffer said.

I've also learned that Veep Joe Biden will not be doing any campaign events for Specter in the final stretch, though it's not immediately clear how significant this is. Last week, Biden said he'd be doing events for Specter "as needed."

But a Biden aide confirms for me that no campaign events are scheduled, even though Biden will be in Pennsylvania tonight speaking at his daughter's graduation.

The primary is, as Dan Rather says, tight as a tick, 42% Sestak 41% Specter.

The Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary goes down to the wire with U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak taking 42 percent of likely primary voters to Sen. Arlen Specter's 41 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted through Sunday night and released today.

With 16 percent undecided and 25 percent of those who do back a candidate saying they might change their mind, the race is too close to call.

Specter strikes me as a very dispiriting candidate for Democrats (just as he had formerly been a dispiriting candidate for us). Specter would lose in the general. Sestak has a much better chance of winning.

Can we get Rush Limbaugh to re-activate those Operation: Chaos agents -- Republicans who'd declared Democratic to vote for Hillary over the stronger Obama -- and get this alte kacher nominated so we can trounce him?

Posted by: Ace at 10:38 AM | Comments (209)
Post contains 324 words, total size 2 kb.

The USA and Europe are both completely farkled, but apparently we're farkled slightly less than Europe?

China boosted its holdings of U.S. Treasury debt for the first time in six months. That development could ease concerns that lagging foreign demand will force the U.S. government to pay higher interest rates to finance its debt...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 09:04 AM | Comments (184)
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.