I wish Andrew Sullivan were still blogging, so that he could bring the requisite amount of outrage to bear for this, uhhm, outrage:

A militant described by police as one of al Qaeda's top leaders in Kuwait has died in custody after being arrested in connection with a wave of violence in the Gulf state, officials said on Wednesday.

Amer al-Enezi, arrested late last month, died overnight at a military hospital due to a "collapse in blood circulation," Lieutenant Colonel Adel al-Hashash of the Interior Ministry told the state news agency KUNA.

Gob-smackingly vile.

Enezi had been interrogated by police since his capture on January 31 after a gunbattle in which five militants and a policeman were killed, and was suspected of involvement in other deadly clashes between militants and security forces last month.

Surely Albert Gonzalez' "terror memo" encouraged and "set the conditions" for a brutal interrogation. I'm appalled, horrified, shocked, chagrined, and filled with "heart-ache."

Security sources said Enezi, a Kuwaiti, had confessed that militants were planning to attack U.S. military convoys and other American targets as well as Kuwaiti security forces in suicide bombings using booby-trapped vehicles.

The sources told Reuters police were still interrogating about 15 suspected militants, including Enezi's wife. Police are still searching for two other key militants, they said.

Crown Prince Sheikh Saad al-Abdulla al-Sabah, whose government has vowed to eradicate the militants, has ordered the Interior Ministry to set up a special anti-terror unit.

Kuwait has rounded up scores of suspected militants since the first clash in January. On Saturday, five people surrendered after police surrounded their hideout, but at least three were released later after investigations showed they had no link to the violence, security sources said.

In related news, Kuwait still does not allow gay marriage.

Hmmf. Some "allies."

And in not-so-related news... The important issue of same-person marriage is about to be debated in this country:

For centuries, the stigma attached to self-love has been a shameful and oppressive one, causing the self-centered, self-absorbed and self-satisfied to lead lives of quiet desperation. But not any more.

No longer intimidated by, or fearful of, public scorn and ridicule, narcissexuals - or smugs, as they prefer to be called - are, at last, stepping out from the shadows to claim their rightful place in society; to reveal the light that shines within, and to bask in the warmth of their own radiance.

...

Byron, 35, an openly smug trapeze artist/actor who lives in Manhattan, believes this is a civil rights issue.

"I'm smug, I've always been smug, and I'll always be smug," said Byron, adding, "I knew by age five that I was extremely attracted to myself...I knew I was special. I don't see why I can't express my romantic feelings, like other people can.

"Why should I have to go around pretending that I'm looking for Mr. Right when Mr. Right is right here, right under my nose?"

Hmmmm... Is this what Sullivan has been after all along?

Self-love, hells yeah.

Self-marriage? I don't know. Seems like you'd be really screwing yourself as far as gifts.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (10)
Post contains 528 words, total size 4 kb.

Brutal and weird:

A 16-year-old girl was allegedly tied up and scalped with a 4-inch knife....

The girl, who had a punk-style mohawk haircut before the attack, is recovering at home. Doctors could not reattach her scalp, which was found near a hot spring.

...

"When I say this gal was scalped, she was truly scalped," said Chief Deputy Bill Braddock. "The top of her head, her hair, was completely cut off."

...

"The motive, as near as we've been told by witnesses, was retaliation for acting in a way that the adult perceived as being offensive to women as a gender," Braddock said. "According to their creed, if you disrespect women you are not allowed to wear a mohawk."

All righty then.

Update: The scalper has surrendered to the police. And it gets a little weirder:

"It was an act of revenge. I view this as a case where an adult female is using predatory control — both psychological and sexual — toward juvenile victims. There are definitely sexual overtones to this crime," Braddock said.

Thanks to SarahW at BlueMerle.

Posted by: Ace at 10:18 AM | Comments (18)
Post contains 193 words, total size 1 kb.

Funny, I was just going to post this Internet Mystic Ball I found when I checked a trackback to Electrolicious when I saw Jonah Goldberg posting a near-identical site on NRO.

Well, either one is fun.

Math-heads will surely figure out how it works lickedy-split. As a matter of fact, so will the parents of grade-school kids, I'm thinking-- it relies on an old "numbers magic" trick I learned in third grade or so. The other part of it relies on just slipping something past you real fast.

Hint to Figuring Out the Trick: (highlight the below to make white-fonted text appear)

Step one to figuring out the trick is watching the symbols and numbers carefully as you "reset" the game from one try to another. You'll notice that the legend is not constant.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 AM | Comments (7)
Post contains 140 words, total size 1 kb.

Sounds like a big number, but it's manageable:

The U.S. military faces between 13,000 and 17,000 insurgents in Iraq, the large majority of them backers of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party, a senior military official said Tuesday.

...

The senior military official told CNN the bulk of the insurgency is made up of 12,000 to 15,000 Arab Sunni followers of Saddam's party. The Baath Party was overthrown by a U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

Of those, the source said 5,000 to 7,000 are considered "committed" fighters, with the rest considered "fence-sitters," criminals or "facilitators" who contribute material support or sanctuary to the guerrillas.

The official, who is familiar with the region, said about 500 other fighters have come from other countries to battle the U.S.-led forces in Iraq, while another group of fewer than 1,000 are believed to be followers of Jordanian-born Islamic terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

That's a lot of terrorists that need killin'. But it's a lot better than that 200,000 number which was tossed around a few weeks ago-- a number which you won't be surprised to hear caused Andrew Sullivan to hyperventilate quite a bit before absconding to Europe with your blog-donations.

Posted by: Ace at 12:24 AM | Comments (7)
Post contains 212 words, total size 1 kb.

Victims of 9-11 Were "Little Eichmanns," But Eichmann Himself Was Just Misunderstood

If there's one good thing about anti-semitism, it's that it makes the cretins, cranks, and crazies that much easier to spot.

Jew-hatin' is like catnip to moonbats. They just can't keep away from it.

Case in point, our academic paragon of the moment, Ward Churchill:

Amid a glare of nationwide publicity,University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill has been asked to resign as chairman of that school’s Ethnic Studies Department because he published an essay in which he likened the 3,000 people massacred at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, to “little Eichmanns.”

For good measure, he added that their killers had made “gallant sacrifices” to achieve noble ends. Prior to this incident, Mr. Churchill’s scholarly reputation was based mainly on a squalid tract called “A Little Matter of Genocide” (1997), in which he argued that the murder of European Jews was not at all a “fixed policy objective of the Nazis” and accused Jews of seeking to monopolize for themselves all that beautiful Holocaust suffering that other groups would very much like, ex post facto, to share.

As a general matter, any time you think it's a good idea to title a piece about the Holocaust "A Little Matter of Genocide," it's probably best to put away the hootch and think things through from the beginning with a clear head.

He argued that Jewish “exclusivism” had nearly erased from history the victims of other genocidal campaigns, and that Jewish scholars stressed the Holocaust in order to “construct a conceptual screen behind which to hide the realities of Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population.”

Ehhh... this is pretty common. Pretty much everyone who hates Jews accuses them, at one point or another, of "using" "a little matter of genocide" to advance their racial agenda.

This dickbag can't even be original as regards his anti-semitism. He's just cribbing from the latest edition of the Lyndon LaRouche newspaper.

He not only likened Jewish scholars who have argued for the unique character of the Holocaust to neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers, he said that the Jews are worse than the latter-day Nazis because “those who deny the Holocaust, after all, focus their distortion upon one target. Those [Jewish scholars] who deny all holocausts other than that of the Jews have the same effect upon many.”

Jeff Goldstein and I have sparred on this issue. And he's said to me that I should understand the impulse to use hyperbolic language to make a point, as I do so myself. (I think he admitted similar impulses in himself.)

But come on, Jeff. It's time to throw in the towel here, isn't it?

I asked Jeff if an extreme right-winger would get to keep his job if he made hardcore racist statements. Jeff told me that was different from the statements Churchill made about 9-11, though he didn't explain why.

Well, whether it's "different" or not, it seems that Churchill is also engaging in some rather odious racism.

If a right-wing professor can't get away with this sort of poision, why are left-wingers allowed to engage in it freely? Is it once again a case of special rules for special people?

I like the writer's Ann-Coulter-esque crack:

What the poverty of the English language compels me to call the ideas in these professorial fulminations are pretty uniform: anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and tenacious attachment to the motto: “The other country, right or wrong.”

Almost perfect. Change it to "The enemy country, right or wrong," and you've got yourself a bumper sticker for the Volvo-and-Birkenstocks set.

Thanks to "Someone" for the tip.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 AM | Comments (27)
Post contains 613 words, total size 4 kb.

Heard this song a while ago, but only got around to buying it recently.

Kind of fun. You can preview it if you haven't heard it before.

Posted by: Ace at 04:10 PM | Comments (11)
Post contains 35 words, total size 1 kb.

Jim Geraghty has a post urging readers to demand the release of the Easongate tape. It's the only way to resolve this he said/they said dispute.

But there's a quicker way. And Geraghty noted it the other day.

Where. The Hell. Is Drudge?

Blogs can make noise, and a precious few can have an impact, but it's only Drudge -- with his millions of readers -- that can actually force the MSM to cover a story it doesn't want to.

This is a Drudge-perfect story. It's about big media (or NBCCBSABCMSNBCCNNAOLTIMEWARNER, in Drudge parlance), it's about scandal, it's about "keeping an eye on the rascals," as his catch-phrase on his old Fox show had it.

Where the hell is he? Why hasn't he posted anything at all on this?

Is it simply because he doesn't think this is newsworthy? On what planet? Right now he's running a headline-above-the-banner about Donovan McNabb being nauseated in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. I guess that's a story, but it's not as if his page is crowded with big, juicy items.

Is it because he's late to the game? If so, so what? There are some recent news hooks he could hang a mention on, like Howie Kurtz breaking his silence on the matter to play country lawyer for Jordan.

What the hell is going on, exactly?

If you want to push this story into the forefront, contact Drudge or his helpy helperton Andrew Breitbart and ask them why, exactly, they're chosing to embargo this story just as the dreaded NBCCBSABCMSNBCCNNAOLTIMEWARNER is embargoing it.

Posted by: Ace at 03:23 PM | Comments (15)
Post contains 268 words, total size 2 kb.

The original ad is about landmines, and it's not funny at all, but deadly serious and harrowing.

But the parody is funny, so long as you can look past the original subject matter it's spoofing.

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (11)
Post contains 45 words, total size 1 kb.

Pardon the constant linking to Instapundit today, but the man is on fire.

Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom strongly defended Churchill's purported right to say whatever he likes about the usefulness of terrorism; but he also suggested that there may be other reasons to can Churchill, and that we ought to be looking very closely at such reasons.

Well, looks like we have such reasons after all. And I'm not just talking about his very debatable status as Native American.

Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar University, has written a paper that outlines what looks like a more conventional form of academic fraud on Churchill's part. According to Brown, Churchill fabricated a story about the U.S. Army intentionally creating a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan tribe in 1837, by simply inventing almost all of the story's most crucial facts, and then attributing these "facts" to sources that say nothing of the kind.

"One has only to read the sources that Churchill cites to realize the magnitude of his fraudulent claims for them," Brown writes. "We are not dealing with a few minor errors here. We are dealing with a story that Churchill has fabricated almost entirely from scratch. The lack of rationality on Churchill's part is mind-boggling." (Brown's essay can be read here.)

Well! That ought to do it, then!

We can get rid of this seditious bastard and still protect the left's "right" to make perfect jackasses out of itself, without academic consequences, at every available opportunity.

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (19)
Post contains 256 words, total size 2 kb.

Instapundit has a great round-up, scroll up, scroll down. Geraghty is especially worth reading.

And a special shout-out to Slublog, who found another CNN big strongly suggesting that journalists were being deliberately targeted.

He didn't get the fabled Instalanche, but he did get a Captainlanche. (And, I guess, an Instalanche by proxy.)

And Hugh Hewitt remains indispensible, as always.

Slicing the Baloney, Again, Update: The Boston Globe deigns to report on the story:

Representative Barney Frank, who was on the panel, told The Boston Globe yesterday that attendees ''perked up" after Jordan made remarks that ''sounded like accusing the military of deliberate targeting." Frank said Jordan then backed off a bit, saying he wasn't indicating that such targeting represented US military policy.

But just because he backed off from saying it didn't represent "US military policy" does not mean he's backed off from saying that individual soldiers are targeting journalists deliberately, does it?

And another witness -- a French journalist named Justin Vaisse -- says that's precisely what Eason Jordan suggested:

Eason Jordan made it clear that it was in no case the policy of the Army or the Pentagon or any institution to target journalists; he said that incidents were due to individuals. But he said that it happens in a certain environment, in a climate of tension vis-à-vis the journalists because of the war, where "Rumsfeld sets the tone" in his public comments. "That is unhelpful," he commented. He also said that some in the journalist community think that some in the armed forces deliberately target journalists. He didn't think that himself but did notice a very high level of animosity of some soldiers, esp. young one, towards the journalists, including American ones (not to speak of Al Jazeera reporters).

So Howie Kurtz' claim of a "walkback" -- a walkback he suggests fully exonerates Eason Jordan -- seems perfectly dishonest. Jordan may have walked back the idea that this was officially sanctioned US policy, but he then went on to say that individual US soldiers were deliberately and knowingly killing journalists.

This is a "walk-back"? This is the "clarification" that's supposed to put the story to rest?

Posted by: Ace at 12:49 PM | Comments (6)
Post contains 363 words, total size 3 kb.