Very busy and now very tired so few words and no pics for you tonight. It's sorta like braille for high-functioning morons.

Obama Losing the Coveted Free-range Hobo Vote

But mostly they just vote in their pants so it's not like you're killing and skinning an actual Romney supporter.

The Third Time as a Farcical Clusterfuck

Greek Neo-Nazis are being given 'police powers' over immigrants and starting to handle crime reports. This will not end well.

Quote of the Day

Based on his immense collection quotes I'm thinking Winston Churchill pretty much had the Middle East figured out a 100 years ago and we're just re-learning everything the hard way.

The Middle East is one of the hardest-hearted areas in the world.  It has always been fought over, and peace has only reigned when a major power has established firm influence and shown that it will maintain its will.  Your friends must be supported with every vigour and if necessary they must be avenged.  Force, or perhaps force and bribery, are the only things that will be respected.  It is very sad, but we had all better recognize it.  At present our friendship is not valued, and our enmity is not feared.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:09 PM | Comments (680)
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Keepin it real. Giants and the Eagles. I could not hate them both more than I do already with my white hot hateyness.

I could date her.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 05:05 PM | Comments (211)
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Today a US Army Soldier and an American contractor were killed in an attack by our "allies" in the Afghan National Army. The fallen soldier is the 2,000 American killed in the war.

What seems to make this attack different is a report of a firefight between an entire Afghan National Army unit and an America convoy.

We can't get out of that shit-hole fast enough.

Our men and women accomplished the mission they were sent there to do long ago. Helping to make that Godforsaken place part of the civilized world isn't a job for the military. Quite frankly, I'm more than happy to let them roll around in their squalor.

I hope our exit plan is accelerated and mostly I hope if involves arming every tribe with enough weapons to keep them busy killing each other for a long, long time.

Posted by: DrewM at 04:14 PM | Comments (148)
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Homestretch time. You know what to do.

"The Roman Republic fell, not because of the ambition of Caesar or Augustus, but because it had already long ceased to be in any real sense a republic at all. When the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, who voted without reward according to his own convictions, and who with his fellows formed in war the terrible Roman legion, had been changed into an idle creature who craved nothing in life save the gratification of a thirst for vapid excitement, who was fed by the state, and directly or indirectly sold his vote to the highest bidder, then the end of the republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing."
- President Theodore Roosevelt

Get involved.

Important fundraising deadline at midnight. Donate $15 mi.tt/QE0fgC

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) September 30, 2012

Posted by: JohnE. at 03:24 PM | Comments (162)
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Might want to consult your cable guide now to find which channel Univision is.

It'll have English subtitles. Apparently It Doesn't Have Subtitles: Ah, well.

Posted by: Ace at 02:11 PM | Comments (540)
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A.O. Scott detects a political agenda in the drama about trying to improve schools and gain escape from a corrupt and failing school system.

He's especially rankled at how Hollywood -- get this! -- uses a "for the children" hook to sell a message.

Even though in this case it is undeniably for the children.

Meanwhile, another reviewer detects no such partisan edge to a documentary about Occupy.

"Won't Back Down" appears to deserve some box office.

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (58)
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If you haven't seen this -- or emailed it to others -- then watch it, and then email it to others.

Especially noteworthy is Ayaman Al-Zawahiri, the current "Spiritual Leader" of Al Qaeda, calling for vengeance in Libya for the death of one of its operatives there, just days before the vengeance occurred.

And the administration didn't evacuate the embassy, or send Marines, or even give it security more effective than door locks.

Krauthammer calls out his liberal colleagues, including Nina Totenberg and Mark Sheids, to their faces, and Nina Totenberg literally chuckles it off.

Let me explain why this is different than previous bias.

Previously, the press has been both biased in a partisan way and an in an ideological way, but usually the partisanship was driven by ideology. As you may have noticed, the press are great fans of gay marriage and abortion, and they shape their coverage to put the best possible face on these positions, and the worst possible face on opponents. (To the extent they feature contrary voices at all.)

That's bias, of course. We've gotten used to that.

But in the Benghazi debacle, there is no possible ideological grounding to explain their bias. There is, I trust, no ideological movement that advocates for intelligence failures and the deaths of good-guy diplomats. There is no ideological movement in favor of reckless incompetence bordering on malice in providing security for consulates abroad (which, as a legal matter, are considered US territory).

There is no ideological movement -- or at least there was not before -- championing the government's right to lie to the public about its failures in order to avoid accountability.

There is no room here where one can say, "Ah well, they can't help but be pulled a bit to the left by their own beliefs." Because no one champions the right of government to let people be murdered and then lie about it.

This isn't ideological bias, then. This is pure advocacy for a political party. Obama's embarrassment is not an ideological issue -- or should not be. I hope we can all agree that a president should attend security briefings -- especially as 9/11 approaches -- and provide adequate warning and security for US government personnel. I hope we can all agree that the government does not suddenly gain a Right To Shamelessly Lie about its failures, simply because it finds it politically advantageous to do so.

But, as Nina Totenberg's chuckle indicates, the press now in fact believes exactly these things -- so long as the president we're talking about is Democrat, and Obama in particular.

WaPo: Security Was Lax. Welcome to two weeks ago, WaPo. But kudos for finally starting to do your job.

Pat Caddell: The Media Has Become The Enemy Of the Public. @johnekdahl posted this last night; it's worth a repost too.

This is absolutely true. Obama is empowered to lie -- and worse -- because he knows the media will spin for him.

This is dangerous. This is how democracies die.
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Posted by: Ace at 12:16 PM | Comments (298)
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Afternoon My friends, Zakn leading the way. I'm gonna be pretty shameless in my section recruiting from the Horde. My leadership has been extremely impressed by the Morons and 'Ettes that have come on board, and they have asked me to re-double my efforts. I promise this will be the last time I'm going to shamelessly recruit.

If you are a bored PC (or Mac) gamer and are looking for something deep, this is your shot to jump in with both feet. We'll help you out with ships, fits, and mentors.

Anyways Videos and walls of text, below the fold more...

Posted by: Gang of Gaming Morons! at 11:40 AM | Comments (85)
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Last day of September and time for footballs. If you're a picker then git to pickin morons.

I like her and want to date her. Date date date.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:30 AM | Comments (546)
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All the Experts Agree: This Sort of Thing Simply Ought Not To Be Allowed

Good morning morons and moronettes and welcome to the slanderous, but not-yet beheaded Sunday Morning Book Thread.

Islam and Free Speech

Following ace's brilliant and insightful post earlier this week on the normative power of law , I went to look for books that extolled the virtues of not fapping. No, not really. But it brought to mind the time when I tried it, and we're talking back when I was a much younger man, 30-35 years ago. I put myself on a strict "no pr0n/no fap" regimen and it lasted about a month. Toward the end, I found myself writing letters to women I used to know in college, nothing sexual or propositioning or anything like that, the letters were just hi, how are you, haven't seen you for awhile, I'd like to see you again, etc. And then I couldn't hold out any more and then afterwards, I felt silly for having written those letters, even though at the time, it seemed like a perfectly healthy and natural thing to do. It was very unsettling when I realized that what I had thought was a purely physical act could have such a profound effect on my thought processes.

But, I digress. That's probably way too much information for a book thread. But if ace really has been "exercising a little restraint" all month long, I think I know what he's going through.

I didn't look for books about the evils of fapping, but rather books that explored the collision between the religion of Islam and American traditions of free speech and 1st Amendment rights, that have lately been under assault. There's lots of books about the Islamic concept of jihad itself, but not so much specifically on this sub-topic, which is relatively new (although if I were a Christian evangelist in Dearborn, Michigan, I suppose I might disagree). I am afraid that there have been many similiar incidents, where some aspect of Islamic law gets enforced by proxy, that have flown under the radar and so I an unaware of.

And I think those evangelists eventually sued the city of Dearborn for constitutional rights violations and won a crap ton of money

Robert Spencer's Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs may be as close as we have right now on this issue.

The Al Qaeda Reader: The Essential Texts of Osama Bin Laden's Terrorist Organization by Raymond Ibrahim (Forward by Victor Davis Hanson) is a good way to get it directly from the horse's mouth, so to speak. B&N has used copies for $0.79, so this may be the deal of the year.

Of course, if you really want it from the horse's mouth, try Milestones by Seyyid Qutb. Qutb was an Egyptian academic who vusited the United States in 1948-50 and was scandalized and appalled by the American way of life, and by that I mean unchaperoned females, sock hops and jazz music. These things spurred him on to become one the architects of jihad. He never personally planted any bombs or murdered any innocent civilians, but his books provided the theoretical background for those that did and do. He is said to be the main influences on Osama bin Laden. Qutb was jailed and eventually executed by Nasser's government in 1966. The Kindle edition of Milestones is < $7, so I'm kind of tempted to pick this one up myself.

And for promoting jihad, there's nothing like having a bloated Saudi oil tic sue your ass for libel in a British Court to stop your book about the sources of jihad funding from continuing to be published -- and succeeding.

Of course, how could I forget the indispensible Mark Steyn, whose book America Alone got his ass sued in Canada, or rather, the usual stooges of political correctness, allied with Canadian Islamic Congress, tried to get it declared a "hate crime". Hell, they probably wanted to get Mark Steyn declared a hate crime, but I don't suppose they were able to. Steyn is selling it along with a pamphlet by the New Criterion called, appropriately enough, Free Speech In An Age Of Jihad which includes contributions from a variety of authors such as Stanley Kurtz, Andy McCarthy, Ezra Levant and Ibn Warraq. This is from 2008, and I can't seem to find it on the New Criterion website. Although audio from the conference upon which it is based on is available here.

On a side note, it is grimly amusing to me that the same rat bastard commies, and commie stooges, and commie lickspittles who spent the entire Cold War justifying and running interference for Soviet Union (and its various "mini-me" regimes in Cuba, North Vietnam, Nicaragua, etc.) are doing pretty much same thing even now -- only this time the knobs they're fervently gobbling belong to jihadi thug terrorists. Gee, it's like they hate the West or something.

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Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:02 AM | Comments (193)
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