Makin' their way the only way they know how, that's just a little bit more than the law will allow:

Profit and drug addiction - not terrorism - probably drove the recent theft of hundreds of pounds of powerful explosives from rural Bernalillo County, according to people who know the main suspects.

Federal authorities Friday afternoon arrested brothers David Kendrick Brown, 49, and Leslie F. Brown, 44, both from the northwestern New Mexico town of Bloomfield. Two other men were being held for questioning Friday night.

Bloomfield residents who know the Brown family but asked not to be identified say the brothers were not anti-government and did not have a terrorist agenda - only a drug problem that would benefit from the sale of the explosives.

Weary-eyed federal and local authorities looked relieved at FBI headquarters in Albuquerque when they announced Friday night that all of the stolen items - enough to level a large building, they say - were recovered safely from a barn 12 miles south of Bloomfield in rural San Juan County.

No moonshine was found on the premises, and none of the explosives had yet been attached to arrows.

Thanks to Scott.

Oh... Before the typical trolls scream "You don't care about criminals unless they have swarthy skin!" no, dude, I think these guys should be locked up for a long, long time.

I wrote a jokey headline and link because there was a great deal of suspicion that this was terrorist-related, which I never figured it was.

I do not, in fact, imagine they're just "a two modern-day Robin Hoods," with a hot cousin in short-short cut-offs that lets all her fine junk hang out.

My point is just they're typical crimial lowlifes, not Al Qaedaists. They're just the sort of dudes you see on Cops all the time, congenitally incapable of wearing shirts, usually trying to hide underneath the overturned and rusty dinghy in the back yard when Johnny Law comes a-knockin'.

Posted by: Ace at 09:36 AM | Comments (13)
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The header of the Democratic Party blog:

Again, the theory seems to be that if you can't actually give the unhinged left all they want in terms of policy pronouncements, you can appease them by mimicking their juvenile, fight-fight-fight tough-guy-pussy tone.

Thanks to Kevin.

Posted by: Ace at 09:27 AM | Comments (181)
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From Allah, a few more details about the supposed strike planning:

According to the report, CIA chief Porter Gus, in his last visit to Turkey on December 12, requested Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide military bases to the United States in 2006 from where they would be able to launch an assault.

...

Although Der Spiegel could not say that these plans were concrete, they did note that according to a January 2005 New Yorker report American forces had entered Iran in 2005 in order to mark possible targets for an aerial assault.

Posted by: Ace at 09:17 AM | Comments (6)
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When even the Germans think you're behaving bizarrely, you might want to reconsider your fashion choices:

If former hostage Susanne Osthoff had been better advised, she probably would have opted against appearing on German television entirely covered in a black headscarf. The hijab, which left only a pair of slits for her eyes, made the freed hostage look like a disturbing cross between a Chechen Black Widow suicide bomber and a ninja.

By the way, Patty Heart just called, and she wants her mental stability back.

Posted by: Ace at 09:11 AM | Comments (16)
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That's interesting. But this is one of the most absurdly biased articles I've ever read.

Eastwood says he wants to tell the story from "both sides" and apparently views the battle largely through the prism of tragedy. Well, certainly, all those American deaths were tragic (as were those of the Japanese); but again, it seems that this will largely be an anti-war war movie.

That's not really all that surprising, even from Clint Eastwood. Maybe Eastwood is just saying all this because he wants to shoot on location and needs to appease the island's anti-American governor; and of course it's hard to do a movie about a battle which took the lives of 7000 Marines and not sound a mournful note. You really make a movie about the violent deaths of 7000 Marines the feel-good roller-coaster ride of the summer.

I don't know.

But I do know this is the most absurdly, cartoonishly anti-American article I've read in some time.

Eastwood, the gung-ho star of prime slabs of Americana such as Heartbreak Ridge and Dirty Harry, is known for his right-wing political persuasions.

Wouldn't Eastwood's effort - tentatively titled Lamps Before the Wind - be a replay of the infamous Sands of Iwo Jima, starring another Hollywood tough guy, John Wayne?

Sands, made four years after the soldiers returned home, was as shrill and jingoistic as a piece of Stalinist propaganda, and became a recruiting poster for a generation of Marines, inspiring, among others, Ron Kovic, the paraplegic Vietnam veteran whose story was dramatised in Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July.

With its bighearted US grunts pitted against fanatical, Banzai-screaming "Nips" and "Japs", the movie has few fans in Japan, where many old soldiers know that John Wayne never served a day in the forces.

...

Eastwood no doubt hope that the tragic tale of the rise and fall of ordinary American heroes - used then discarded by forces beyond their control - will resonate with contemporary US audiences weary of war in Iraq.

...

The determined [Japanese] general, imbued with the spirit of the quasi-religious Bushido cult, is a standard feature of countless Japanese war movies, as much a cliche as the bug-eyed scarf-wearing Arabs that populate US movies about the Middle East.

Oh? Could you point these movies out to me? US movies avoid the subject matter entirely or else bend over backwards (sometimes too far) to depict even terrorists as having a point.

Japan is the world's second-biggest market for Hollywood movies, one reason why the buck-toothed stereotype of yore has disappeared from movies such as Pearl Harbor, which showed clean-cut Japanese pilots warning American children to flee the bombing.
...

Ishihara's anti-American politics were formed during the war. He remembers being strafed "for fun" by US planes "with pictures of naked women and Mickey Mouse painted on the fuselage".

Etc.

By the way: definitely rent The Great Raid. A very good movie, and you'll be shocked at the un-PC, accurate depiction of Japanese brutality against American POWs and conquered civilian populations (here, the Filipinos).

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (56)
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He only decided to seek medical attention when his head wouldn't stop bleeding.

His girlfriend apparently shot herself to death later. She presumably gave him a slug in the brainbox while he was sleeping.

Political angle: More evidence we must not put women into combat positions in the military.

I know "Maybe I've been shot in the head" doesn't often pop into your mind, particularly, I guess, if you have been shot in the head, which might make you a little less on-the-ball than usual, but still, I would think that if I were shot in the head I'd either know it, or not know anything at all, as I'd be dead.

Thanks to Allah.

Posted by: Ace at 04:57 PM | Comments (37)
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Yeah, they sure do prove our point over and over (though I thought perhaps the site owner might be a little different... guess I was wrong). But these guys almost make me want to believe in God and a Judgement Day... 'cause I know exactly where they would all be when it comes. Taking it in the ass next to Mohammed Atta... cause the only difference between those 9/11 cocksuckers and these My World Is The Only World cocksuckers is the 9/11 cocksuckers actually resorted to violence to protect their closed-minds. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky the cocksuckers on this site are only attempted to use words... and not particularly well-crafted ones at that.

But sadly... we don't HAVE to wait for Judgement Day for the shit to hit the fan. It's already been hitting it - and hard. So who cares if these morons don't understand why.... The only real sad part is the sane people are getting sucked down with them. Oh well... such is the peril of a democracy.

AND:

anyone with half a brain would have understood I was referring to the METHODOLOGY of how one deals with contrary viewpoints when I compared some posters on this board to Atta.

Atta didn't care about a higher truth. He only cared about HIS truth. That describes many of you to a tee.

Thanks to Blinded. He would have written more, but he had to get back to his important work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory-- splitting atoms.

With his mind.

I like that joke, so I'm using it again. If Atrios can start six bazillion open threads, I can use the "with his mind" gag two or three times.

Posted by: Ace at 03:36 PM | Comments (97)
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The whiff of freedom?

ONE of ChinaÂ’s most outspoken newspapers was plunged into chaos after 100 reporters took the rare step of walking out in protest against the dismissal of their Editor-in-Chief [for "political reasons"].

...

His departure and the journalists’ defiance are part of a long struggle between Communist Party censors intent on controlling public access to information, and newspapers and magazines keen to attract readers. Party officials singled out the Beijing News for criticism at a meeting on December 6, when they decided to strengthen the party’s control over tabloid papers. The Beijing News had “committed errors in the orientation of opinion” and was a “recidivist”, officials said.

But you know, things are hardly any better here. Bush denies "access" to reporters. So, in my book, if you won't talk to David Gregory, that's pretty much the equivalent of seizing the nation's media and firing "recidivist" editors.

Thanks to Allah.

Related: Controversial death-sentence carried out secretly; debate about it censored. Only now is news that a murderer (he does appear to have been a criminal murderer) was put to death after a rigged trial.

The article notes that the Chinese are beginning to suspect that the Chinese death-chambers, killing more than 10,000 people per year, might be killing a good number of innocent people.

I don't want to prejudge the program before all the facts are in, but I think they might be on to something with that suspicion.

Posted by: Ace at 02:47 PM | Comments (3)
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The MSM, of course, is always the last to know. Or at least about sharing it with us, if they do know.

Ever notice the MSM is pretty good about keeping the secrets they want to be kept secret? Isn't that funny.

Thanks to Traffic Psuedo-Santa, who thinks impeachment hearings against Bush are a pretty cool idea.

Posted by: Ace at 01:59 PM | Comments (4)
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In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy is told that the Staff of Ra should be "six Kaddams high" -- "that's about six feet," Sullah says -- but then he should "take one Kaddam back to honor the Hebrew God whose ark this is."

And yet when he gets to the map room, the staff is at least two feet taller than him.

So, either Indiana Jones is three feet tall, or he completely botched the instructions for the Staff he was so keen on. And, like the Germans, he should be "digging in the wrong place!"

I'm just sayin'. A commenter mentioned the "Kaddam" thing for no reason, and it just started bugging me all over again.

Posted by: Ace at 01:15 PM | Comments (23)
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