But watch the media continue debating Winterset vs. Waterloo as John Wayne's birthplace.

So, Obama is fighting one illegal war (claiming that bombing a foreign country does not constitute "hostilities," and rejecting his AG's advice that "Oh yes it does") and so he's also lying about having his "plan" presented to him by the military brass, when in fact it was cooked up by he himself or his political strategy people.

The important thing is Paul Revere's ride and John Wayne's birthplace.

n response to questioning from Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Allen testified that Obama’s decision on the pace and size of Afghanistan withdrawals was “a more aggressive option than that which was presented.”

Graham pressed him. “My question is: Was that a option?”

Allen: “It was not.”

Allen’s claim, which came under oath, contradicts the line the White House had been providing reporters over the past week—that Obama simply chose one option among several presented by General David Petraeus. In a conference call last Wednesday, June 22, a reporter asked senior Obama administration officials about those options. “Did General Petraeus specifically endorse this plan, or was it one of the options that General Petraeus gave to the president?”

The senior administration official twice claimed that the Obama decision was within the range of options the military presented to Obama.

Posted by: Ace at 05:30 PM | Comments (133)
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That burned up my TiVo today: more...

Posted by: CAC at 03:46 PM | Comments (340)
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For the record, no, I do not buy this.

But I also have to post it, don't I?

There is no way this could be a light-amplification technology. You'd need a battery, and you couldn't fit a battery into a lens, obviously, The only way to power such tech would be some kind of bio-energetic power, who knows, consuming the body's own sugar/ATP to power the system (far-fetched) or broadcast power (also far-fetched).

But even assuming you could power the thing, you'd have, by physical necessity, a great deal of heat as a waste product, and no one wants Hot Eyeballs Syndrome. You can't use the cornea as your heat sink.

There is some possibility that some kind of lens could force the eye open, or irritate/stimulate the eye with a protein to cause the iris to open wider than normal and hence pull in more visible light than typically possible, I guess.

I guess that's possible. (Possible and eye doctors do it to you every visit. But if your eye were doped to be hyper-sensitive to low light levels, aren't you in danger of being blinded/light-dazed by your own gun flashes?)

But I don't buy this "Night Vision Lens" stuff.

Still, gotta link it.

Thanks to JonathanE.

Powered by Blinking? So, here's the power-source work-around, it's claimed. A "rare earth metal" in gel form is applied to the eyelid, which creates a magnetic field, and the lens in the eye is presumably magnetized, and then the natural blinking of the eyelid disturbs that magnetic field, which in turn drives electrons (I suppose) and anything that drives electrons is a potential power source.

Eh... sure, I guess.

I like this more for a movie than real life.

Posted by: Ace at 02:29 PM | Comments (200)
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The good news: He'll testify.

The bad news: Leahy is agreeing that he should testify (after extorting a political concession from Charles Grassley), so Leahy probably thinks it's already been fixed.

We'll see.

Don't get your hopes up too high because Leahy wouldn't agree to this if it was going to wipe out Eric Holder.

But...

As head of the agency that conducted the controversial sting, Melson has faced calls for his resignation. But in private conversations with congressional investigators in recent days, Melson has indicated he does not believe he did anything wrong because he carried out his bossesÂ’ wishes and is eager to testify to describe the full picture, according to sources familiar with those conversations.

Bob Owens games out various outcomes of the testimony.

Of course eyes will be drawn to Scenario 3...

3. Breuer isnÂ’t the highest link in the chain: Melson implicates Attorney General Eric Holder.

Chairman Issa states that AG Holder “absolutely” knew about Gunwalker earlier than he testified that he did, and if Issa has the evidence to prove that the attorney general is part of a cover-up, then there is every reason to suspect Holder will be forced to resign, or will face impeachment.

This is a far more likely scenario than many think.

Well, we'll see. Pat Leahy is many things, but he's not stupid.

Tell a lie, he is stupid. Okay, so he's stupid. But he probably has people who aren't stupid telling him what to do.

BTW: The ATF Fired the Whistleblower Here. Sure that's a coincidence.

The Obama Administration would never fire a whistleblower, because that's illegal.

Posted by: Ace at 01:35 PM | Comments (106)
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Ever wonder why we have the political class we do? Given that their surface capabilities are so obviously lacking?

Yeah, well, maybe there's stuff going on you don't see.

In related news, Ari Fleischer just emailed me to say "FIRST! In before Will Folks."

Update: Would You? A commenter pointed out that I really fell down on the job here by not linking a picture.

Well, here's one.

She shopped the book in 2009 under the working title, "My Burning Bush."

Subtle.

One of the things editors do is give titles to books. I think "Life of the Party" is an editor doing a decent job.

Here's another pic:

Eh. Glamour shots are extremely unreliable evidence. And it's meh anyway.

Of course, as George Carlin observed, one sentence which has never been spoken in the history of the universe is "Stop s***ing my d*** immediately or I will call the police."

Posted by: Ace at 01:03 PM | Comments (222)
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Breaking. A swarm of vermin laden with suicide vests.

Why target the hotel? Multiple possible reasons. One: As noted by CNN, thereÂ’s a presser scheduled there tomorrow to announce a handover of security duties from NATO to the Afghan army. Preempting that by running wild in the hotel carries symbolic value. Two: ItÂ’s a soft target in Kabul, KarzaiÂ’s stronghold, not a military outpost in some far-flung eastern or southern province. ThatÂ’s a message to NATO commanders that the battlefield this year might be a lot bigger than they think. And three, obviously: They want to capitalize on ObamaÂ’s withdrawal announcement to show that not only havenÂ’t they been defeated, theyÂ’re still strong enough to wreak havoc right under NATOÂ’s nose in a supposedly heavily guarded tourist spot. Just as IÂ’m writing this, NBCÂ’s claiming that three attackers have blown themselves up; no word on where the other three are or how many people in the hotel are dead. Stand by for updates.

Also, the Intercontinental chain is a brand name. They like going after things with brand names.

Posted by: Ace at 12:23 PM | Comments (114)
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Allah gets from context that he thinks Bristol is saying Sarah Palin has made up her mind to run for office.

He gets this from Bristol's statement that she's "absolutely" supportive of a run, plus, maybe more suggestive, that since the media would be talking (nastily) about the Palin's even if they lived in a cabin in remotest Alaska, they might as well do something good.

I don't take that as Allah does. It seems to me that Bristol could just be expressing her basic supportive stance towards her mother -- I will support my mom no matter what she decides, and sure, I'm willing to be go through the media nastiness if that's what mom's decided.

Although I do think that bit about might-as-well-do-something-good-if-we're-going-to-be-treated-this-way-anyway puts the weight more on the "Run" side of the scale.

Posted by: Ace at 12:08 PM | Comments (236)
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Mickey Kaus had a little neeneeneenee psychic vibe about Tina Brown's Newsweek:

Tina Brown’s Newsweek has a bold new business plan for reining in losses from publishing: Stop! It will skip four issues this summer. Only 48 more to go. … Why does this approach remind my of Bob Newhart’s theraputic technique … Newsweek, however, promised readers they will get an actual magazine “each and every time there is a royal wedding.” …

Hm, an actual magazine each and every time there is a royal wedding?

Well, geeze, those don't come up very often.

What about royal birthdays? What about catching up with the most popular royal of all? And seeing what she's up to, what charities she's involved in, what celebrities she might be twittering to?

Well that could be interesting.

And if the popular royal in question has been dead for ten years, no problem, we'll just do a ghouish "But maybe if she were... a zombie?" Marvel Comics What If episode.

In honor of Princess Diana’s would-be 50th birthday (if not for, you know, her death) Tina Brown wrote an article called, “Diana at 50: Chilling with the Middletons. Tweeting from Davos. And still the people’s princess. If not for that tragic night, what her life might look like now.” And yeah, that about sums it up.

...

For me, the pictures are what makes the article the creepiest. Almost every news outlet that covered the royal wedding posed the inevitable “what would it be like if Diana were here” question. But they didn’t create a hologram of her to include her in the proceedings. The cover image of Diana and Kate Middleton really is impressive photoshopping, but I almost expect Diana to have white zombie-esque eyes.

Similarly, photos of her with an iPhone are borderline disturbing. You can almost imagine the Newsweek people contemplating whether they should try to digitally age her to make the article more real. Oh, but according to Brown, Diana would have kept herself up: “Fashionwise, Diana would have gone the J.Crew and Galliano route à la Michelle Obama, always knowing how to mix the casual with the glam. There is no doubt she would have kept her chin taut with strategic Botox shots and her bare arms buff from the gym.”

ThatÂ’s probably the worst part of the article, which generally speculates the direction DianaÂ’s life would have headed in if not for the car crash. Brown thinks that Diana would have married again twice, that she would have continued her charity work and that she would have whole heartedly embraced the Middletons, although she would have been just a little bit jealous of Kate.

Tina Brown is generally created as some kind of magazine superstar. Why, she revitalized the moribund New Yorker.

Yeah, and since then, what's the score? I seem to hear about a lot of Tina Brown magazines (Talk) and TV shows (Topic A) debuting.

How can she keep debuting new things and keep on taking on new editor-in-chief positions when she's got all these other projects which are big money-makers?

Oh right, they're not, they all failed.

And Newsweek, which had been a laughingstock, is now an even worse laughingstock.

By the way, check out Kaus' disclosure of a conflict of interest in making fun of Newsweek, here.

Posted by: Ace at 11:44 AM | Comments (99)
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I wrote about Time's embarrassing "Let us smartie-smarts explain the Constitution to you dum-dums" earlier. But I criticized it broadly, on basic misunderstanding of the document, focusing on the first four paragraphs, and I did so for three reasons:

1. I could see the basic broad-stroke error the writer was making in just the first four paragraphs.

2. Ummm... I only actually read the first four paragraphs.

3. Life is too short for stupid.

See, what I thought is that this guy was going to launch into the Standard Liberal Law Professor claim about a "living document." That's, what's the right word?, completely made up, but at least it was made up 30 years ago, so this bit of bullshit is at least graced by the decades.

How wrong I was.

Aaron Worthing did not stop there, and kept reading, discovered to his horror/to his humor (related emotions, those), that this guy, who was apparently the head of the National Constitution Center for a couple of years, knew practically nothing at all about the Constitution.

The more he read, the more flagrant errors he found. Not even the broad-strokes difference in idea about interpretation I went on about -- No, he found this "Richard Stengel" simply making errors, factual errors, about what the document says and the history of its writing, left and right.

Again: Not differences of opinion. Errors of fact.

Aaron Worthing collects up now these thirteen factual errors, and wants your help in securing a retraction/correction.

But Time can't retract. Their whole authority rests upon the claim that they are smarter than other people. If they retracted an entire article, by a credentialed head of the National Constitution Center, as entirely wrong in almost every claim it made, they'd look, what's the word?, pretty stupid and uneducated.

But you can still try.

Here's Richard Stengel, former head of the National Constitution Center, explaining federalism and limited powers of the federal government to you wingnuts.

No, I'm not making this up. This is the beginning of the Comedy of Errors/Social Horror of Ignorance.

If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesnÂ’t say so.

Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

I'm not sure where you're goin' with this, but I sure want to join you on this crazy ride. Sounds excitin'.

Why Is The Media So Dumb? I don't know. I gotta tell ya, a lot of mediocre minds are attracted to it, because the mental effort for media-work is so low.

I actually exclude the creative side of the media from this -- they may be dumb, but top-flight talent on that side has crushed a huge, huge pile of competition to get where they've gotten to. Some of that is just sleeping with the right people, but most of it isn't.

But otherwise, the media is basically like (sorry to slam, gotta make this comparison) teachers, generally considered barely one of the learned professions, and, when named as one, really it's just people being nice and inclusive.

The media's the same. Not a lot of intellectual firepower decides to go into a job which mostly consists of asking questions and doing light stenography.

But who knows, maybe there's another reason. David Carr -- he of the Nazi phrenology references -- was a crack addict, for example.

Posted by: Ace at 10:56 AM | Comments (185)
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Washington D.C. police placed a GPS tracking device on the vehicle of suspected drug dealer. The police tracked the movements of the vehicle for a month and were able to use that information to obtain a conviction. An appeals court in Washington overturned the conviction, holding that the evidence obtained in the GPS surveillance cannot be used since there was no search warrant.

From the Washington Examiner:

Two other courts have ruled that police can use GPS monitoring without a warrant.

The Virginia Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the tactic when Fairfax County Police put a GPS device on the van of a convicted rapist suspected in a series of attacks. The court said he had no expectation of privacy on a public street.

California's 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling that installing a GPS to track a suspect is no different than having an officer tail him, also authorized the use of warrantless GPS tracking.

The Supreme Court will answer two questions regarding the high-tech surveillance, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center: the constitutionality of installing a warrantless GPS device, and then using one to track a vehicle's movements.

Rotenberg said that allowing GPS surveillance without a warrant could have far-reaching implications.

"If the court does not establish constitutional safeguards, the police will have unrestricted authority to monitor the travels of virtually anyone they want," he said.

As most know, the Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. For a search to be lawful, a warrant must be issued. Some may not know that the only teeth the Fourth Amendment has is the exclusion of evidence obtained in violation of its provisions. This is meant to discourage law enforcement.

There are exceptions to the warrant requirement. One of those has to do with whether a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy that a certain location or activity is private. If there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, no warrant is necessary.

This is a general description. Be aware that every word in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is a mine in a minefield, and lawyers and judges strive to be exact at all times.

The appeals court said that the government must obtain a warrant for such prolonged electronic monitoring. The government argues that placing the device on the car is no different from having an officer tail the vehicle in public. Certainly, the police can do that. But 24/7 for a whole month? It is the intensity and duration of that surveillance that is likely to push this set of facts into the unreasonable search category.

The government will also argue that this form of surveillance is very valuable to law enforcement. "Gee, we like it a whole lot" is a silly argument, though, since any form of unlimited search would grow to become valuable to law enforcement.

I think the appeals court will be upheld. more...

Posted by: rdbrewer at 10:35 AM | Comments (129)
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