Funny! Watch the original post -- lambasting Imam Rauf as an extremist -- get changed without notice.

Thanks to JustKarl.

Transparent? An commenter says I'm using this to distract from the bitter internecine warfare in Delaware. Not true! I'm just babysitting and damn is hard to think straight here with kids.

But I have done this sort of thing before. Also, at BlogCon, this did seem to be a topic that would unify everyone after a Delaware fight.

I described Charles Johnson's site as a "Cult of Personality without the Personality," which I thought was pretty on the money.

Posted by: Ace at 03:02 PM | Comments (129)
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Because there's a lot of real anger. Maybe it can be dissipated with fake anger.

Posted by: Ace at 12:22 PM | Comments (1005)
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...because the horse ain't dead yet, we've got this neat whackin' stick.....and what else are you gonna do on a Tuesday in September anyway?

Trust me here, morons: This should be a post that ALL of you can agree upon. more...

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 11:23 AM | Comments (181)
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At Hot Air's headlines:

Top Delaware Republicans are cautiously confident that Rep. Mike Castle will beat back the hard-charging GOP Senate primary challenge of Christine O'Donnell Tuesday night, despite a public poll that has unsettled nerves among the establishment.

Republican National Committeewoman Priscilla Rakestraw, who has been working the phones on CastleÂ’s behalf, and who spoke to 300 potential voters at the Academy of Life-Long Learning Thursday, said she believed O'Donnell's momentum has sputtered over the past few days due to the heightened scrutiny surrounding her record.

In politics, we call this "saying things which just aren't true," which is what we also call it outside of politics.

O'Donnell by 6. And they know it.

On the other hand... it's time. more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (345)
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16 points ahead, 43 Rubio, 27 Crist, 21 Meek.

Here's a cool thing: If Rubio gets 45% I think it's virtually mathematically impossible for him to lose. Citation: Shit I just made up but it sounds close to the mark.

Now, the problem here is that GOP candidate Scott trails Sink for governor, 49 to 41... but, well, here's hoping.

Posted by: Ace at 10:25 AM | Comments (88)
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The Castle/O'Donnell race, and, maybe more importantly, how that race is discussed between conservatives. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:06 AM | Comments (107)
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This is a liberal justice on the Supreme Court. I mention "liberal" because they tend to be First Amendment absolutists -- and yeah, they are chiefly absolutists about pornography and so on, but usually they have enough sense of shame to extend (grudgingly) that absolutism to speech they don't like.

Not any more. Even a Justice on the Supreme Court is now ready to revive blasphemy laws, at least for the nation's de facto state religion.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told me on "GMA" that he's not prepared to conclude that -- in the internet age -- the First Amendment condones Koran burning.

“Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theater,” Breyer told me. “Well, what is it? Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?”

...

For Breyer, that right is not a foregone conclusion.

“It will be answered over time in a series of cases which force people to think carefully. That’s the virtue of cases,” Breyer told me. “And not just cases. Cases produce briefs, briefs produce thought. Arguments are made. The judges sit back and think. And most importantly, when they decide, they have to write an opinion, and that opinion has to be based on reason. It isn’t a fake.”

Deciders.

Oh my God.

Let the word go out: In America, your right to be free of religious critiques is dependent on how willing you are to kill for it.

Thunderdome. A nation of the law of shrapnel and box-cutters, not men.

Not men. Definitely not men.

Posted by: Ace at 09:16 AM | Comments (279)
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Tough stuff.

In the interest of not spreading claims (because apparently if a blogger doesn't mention it, it didn't happen, as AoS Pirate believes), I'll just link it without repeating anything there.

This is a very ugly race.

Thanks to DrewM.

Posted by: Ace at 09:10 AM | Comments (191)
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There's a primary in New Hampshire, too, and one poll (and we really need confirmation) says that Ovide Lamontange is doing as well as (former?) frontrunner Kelly Ayotte.

Kelly Ayotte does only one point better against Paul Hodes than Ovide Lamontagne. That's quite a shift from our 2 previous polls in the state this cycle. Ayotte did 12 points better than Lamontagne in April and 8 points better as recently as July. And beyond that Lamontagne's net favorability is actually 15 points higher than Ayotte's, suggesting he might have more room to grow if he was indeed able to pull a last second upset tomorrow night.

On the other hand, Coons now does 26 points better against O'Donnell than Castle, up from 20 points.

And... 63% of Maine Republicans want to replace Olympia Snowe with someone "more conservative."

That of course won't happen until 2012. Interestingly, these numbers have gotten worse for Snowe -- during the health care debate, when she supported the bill in committee, only 59% wanted to boot her for someone better.

And... At Hot Air, Qunnippiac says McMahon is within 6 of Blumenthal. Confirming a previous poll (basically) that put her 5 behind.

I think if she's within 3 or 4 she's actually ahead. I'm thinking right now she is a little bit behind.

Erick Erickson of RedState Compares Ayotte and Lamontagne... It appears this falls into the typical RINO v. conservative dynamic, with Lamontagne grabbing the conservative title.

Another Lamontagne Endorsement... From the RightOSphere.

Sarah Palin actually endorsed Ayotte a long time back. But, well, Palin seems to dig endorsing girls, but also at that time Ayotte's chief opponent was a businessman named Binnie who was, to most conservatives, clearly unacceptable. So the endorsement is being read by some Palin fans not as an endorsement of Ayotte per se, but of Ayotte specifically over Binnie.

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (174)
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Yes, there's some obligatory Palin and Gingrich bashing but credit where credit it due, a WaPo columnist reminds his liberal readers that the First Amendment isn't just a good idea, it's who we are.

Jones is neither a great man nor the leader of a great cause. But what he wanted to do was both permissible under our system and, in a sense, valued. He was attempting to make a statement. It was chaotic and bigoted, but it was a political statement nonetheless, and he had every right to make it. Still, President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Afghanistan War commander Gen. David Petraeus urged him to stand down -- the lives of American soldiers were at stake. Jones stood down.

This was not the first time the threat of violence in the Islamic world has had a chastening effect here -- nor will it be the last. I have yet to see the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published originally in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The one drawn by Kurt Westergaard and considered particularly objectionable generated riots and, ultimately, an attack on Westergaard himself. The violence, actual or threatened, intimidated the Western media.

Westergaard survived the attack, a horrific home invasion, summoning the police from his panic room. As the novelist Salman Rushdie once did, he lives under police protection. Rushdie, of course, had his life threatened for his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses," which was characterized as insulting to Islam. As with Westergaard, Rushdie was condemned both by certain Muslims and by certain non-Muslims. More frequently, the fatwa was greeted by a studied indifference -- a pox on both their houses, that of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who ordered Rushdie's death and the insensitive Rushdie who did not understand that post-colonial peoples are always right.

Into this maelstrom of conflicting values has stepped German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Just this month she honored Westergaard with a media prize. She did so even though Germany has about 4,600 troops in Afghanistan, the third-largest NATO contingent. "The secret to freedom is courage," she said at the awards ceremony, citing the role a free press had played in freeing her native East Germany. It turns out that some values are more valuable than others.

I still think Obama was wrong to go after Jones in a public way. He and his administration should be explaining to peaceful (unless they aren't) Muslims around the world that this is what America is all about. We hash these things out amongst ourselves and the government only gets involved to keep the participants safe. If they don't like it, that's their business but we aren't changing who we are and the US Government is not in the business of enforcing Islamic (or any religion's) blasphemy laws.

You may think I'm giving Cohen too much credit for stating the obvious but it's important to note that not everyone is on board with this basic notion of freedom. Justice Breyer might actually be willing to enforce religious limitation on speech.

Breyer is working really hard to be one of the worst Justices ever (read his book Active Liberty and you'll see how hard he works at it). The only thing that keeps him from being at the top of that list is he's never really written anything of consequence. He's got no Roe or Lawrence or Hamdan to his name.

I have qualms about the idea that the safety of the troops is a consideration in regulating speech. Mostly because I don't think terrorists need excuses or provocations to kill American servicemen and women, it's what they do.

Still, that's a somewhat minor quibble considering it's probably the first time most of Cohen's readers will have heard about the attack on Westergaard, let alone a direct attack on the cowardice of the west's reaction to the Islamic world's response to the cartoons.

Cohen, also gets credit for 'connecting the dots' between the speech he cites and the thing they all have in common...Islam*. Add all of that to a full throated defense of speech and that's a good day's work for your average WaPo columnist not named Will, Krauthammer or Thiessen.

*I corrected that sentence because Cohen did cite the common thread "the Islamic world". My apologies for the mistake.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:05 AM | Comments (77)
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