So says the Unpopulist, recounting the heartwarming story of Iraqi civilians slaughtering the terrorists who presumed to threaten them.

Don't make a maniac out of the Iraqi civilians. That's Just. The Way. It Fucking. Is.

Mixing References Update: "Mujahideen - IT'S A TRAP!" says Admiral Ackbar in the comments.

Let's hope so.

Posted by: Ace at 12:47 PM | Comments (4)
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First Amish, who comments a lot here, posted this post about Glenn Reynolds at Fat Kid's site -- calling him the Super-Antichrist -- and got himself linked by both Frank J of IMAO and the man himself.

Then Amish put up a Top Ten Most Embarassing Moments in Star Trek (my favorite: Number 6). And got himself linked by Jonah Goldberg at NRO's Corner.

What happens when you get linked by three major players in two days?

You get sick traffic, baby.

Absolutely sick.

Not quite Cheese-and-Crackers Tsunami-video sick, but sick nonetheless.

I'd also like to compliment John From WuzzaDem for his Hardball parody (first linked here, I think), which also garnered the coveted Instalanche.

Congratulations, guys. I think that crazy blog-money is going to start rolling in for you.

And I just couldn't be happier.

Unless, of course, it was happening to me. But I think that's obvious.

If you'll excuse me now, I'm going to apply a shard of glass to my throat.*

* Who?

And, In Other Inside-Blogosphere News... The HundredPercenter declares the Jordan-Margolis-Austin dispute effectively over.

Thank goodness. I hate having to deal with blog-on-blog crimes.

(Please! No more anger about this issue! Can't we all just get along? Fat Kid-- you especially. What the heck can you feel angry about when you just got 2000+ visits in the past hour?)

Posted by: Ace at 12:42 PM | Comments (19)
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Very rant-ish, but very good:

If the American Left is furious over the loss of most of the nation's governorships and legislatures, the U.S. House, the Senate, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court, the Europeans themselves are furious over America's power — as if Red America is to Blue America as America is to Europe itself. Thus how can a mongrel culture of Taco Bell, Bud Light, and Desperate Housewives project such military and political influence abroad when the soft, subtle triangulation of far more cultured diplomats and sophisticated intellectuals from France, Germany, and Scandinavia is ignored by thugs from Iran, North Korea, and most of the Middle East?

Why would the world listen to a stumbling George Bush when it could be mesmerized by a poet, biographer, aristocrat, and metrosexual of the caliber of a Monsieur Dominique de Villepin?

Thanks to JimW.

Posted by: Ace at 11:42 AM | Comments (2)
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That's Bush's total number of jobs created over the past four years (as most of you know already!). Not that great, but at least it's not negative.

PS: Sorry for these late starts... I have become nothing but a nose-blowing, Claritin-popping, Robitussin-chugging, sneezing and sleeping and napping machine. This cold just isn't going away.

More... Sundries Snack Shack accuses of Reuters of reverse-cherry-picking the bad news from the good.

Posted by: Ace at 11:32 AM | Comments (6)
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By tomorrow, we should know for certain that Bush was not in fact "the first President since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs."

Analysts expect 190,000 jobs created in January... let's hope we beat expectataions.

(No cowbell and/or Vinny Falcone for analysts' consensus estimates... need real numbers for such a display.)

Posted by: Ace at 01:54 PM | Comments (15)
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It gets better and better.

After claiming his remarks were "taken out of context" (the only lamer excuses would be that he was being "ironic" or "just playing a character," a la Ice-T or Eminem), Captain's Quarters discovers Eason Jordan previously claiming that the American military has tortured or killed ten journalists.

Great batch of links at Hugh Hewitt.

Glenn Reynolds asked a good question the other day. Rather than the media asking "are bloggers really journalists," maybe they should start asking if journalists are really journalists.

Eason Jordan seemed very, very careful not to say anything mean about his sponsor Saddam Hussein. However, when it comes to America and the American military, he seems perfectly willing to traffic in the sort of absurd conspiratorial gossip that passes for "news" on Al Jazeera.

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (8)
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Well, he's taken all those tens of thousands of of donated dollars previously earmarked for "site improvements" and "more expensive bandwidth costs" and decided instead to take himself a little European vacation and maybe write a novel.

And he just had a pledge drive, too. Those who donated recently are less than happy.

At some times I do feel like giving this site up. But I'm also mindful, when I feel that way, of the last donation-drive I had, and the reasonble expectations of those generous enough to give money to keep me in beer & tacos that I will, in fact, continue blogging for a long while after the donation-drive ends.

The best part of Malkin's essay is her noting the fact that Sullivan has briefly returned to blogging... in order to post fawning emails from his fans.

Priorities, priorities.

Posted by: Ace at 12:59 PM | Comments (17)
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On MSNBC's After Hours last night, Jeneane "I'm Just Not Funny" Garofalo and some other idiot from Air America continued to claim that Bush was lying-- in this case, about Social Security.

This is a complicated issue that I don't really entirely understand, but I think I get this one part of the dispute. If I'm wrong about it, I'd appreciate corrections from those who know better.

Part of the dispute is the left's insistence that Social Security is "solvent" -- at least for a long time -- because the Social Security Trust Fund contains a lot of "assets" which can be used to pay future benefits.

This is pretty deceptive. Yes, the trust fund does contain a lot of "assets." Lots and lot of assets. But of what sort?

In fact, the trust fund is actually stuffed full of I.O.U.'s from the federal government, in the form (I assume) of Treasury bills.

But Treasury bills aren't money. Treasury bills aren't bricks of gold that can be sold when actual cash is needed.

Treasury bills are debt-instruments issued by the United States Government. Debt-instruments that need to be paid by the US Government when they mature.

So, to say that the trust fund still has plenty of "assets" in it is, in fact, so deceptive as to constitute a lie. The "assets" it possesses are simply piles of debt owed to it by the US Government.

The trust fund can convert these "assets" into cash... as soon as the Government makes good on the debt and and pays off all the I.O.U.'s stuffed in the trust fund.

But how can the government pay off this debt?

Well, there are only a couple of ways, of course. The government can either increase taxes, payroll taxes or income taxes or some new Double-Secret Probation tax, and therefore increase its revenue stream so that it can continue paying out SS benefits as the I.O.U's in the trust fund become due.

Or, the government can simply issue new debt -- i.e., deficit-spend still further -- and replace the trust fund debts with new obligations, new borrowing, new deficits to be passed on to future generations.

The trouble with the latter option is that this is a problem that's getting worse, not better, and as time goes on we'll need to issue so much debt that there may be some question as to whether investors, foreign or domestic, want to risk purchasing a glut of T-bills which are increasingly unlikely to actually be paid off.

Which means that T-bills will have to offer higher rates of return -- making all this deficit-financing more expensive, perhaps to the point of unsustainability.

So back to option one-- raise taxes in order to cover the increasingly-large shortfalls between what the government owes the trust fund and what the government is bringing in as regards fresh (actual) revenue.

A week ago, the nation's "paper of record" published this egregiously deceptive op-ed (you must pay to read) suggesting that the trust fund was in fact stuffed full of genuine assets that merely needed to be sold off in order to pay for future Social Security benefits. The op-ed actually made it sound like this mountain of debt owed to the trust fund by the US government was a genuine hard asset, just sitting their waiting to be cashed in.

So:

Who's "lying" about Social Security?

Posted by: Ace at 12:02 PM | Comments (44)
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Well, first the Democratic Party developed an extreme case of collective amnesia regarding their prior declarations about Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Now they seem to have come down with another bout of forgetfulness. Anyone who watched the commentary or Democratic response yesterday now knows that the Democrats are taking their talking points directly from Paul Krugman -- and Lord knows, that's scary in itself.

And their new mantra is that there is no crisis in Social Security.

Despite the fact that they've been talking about just such a crisis for going on twenty years now.

Ace's Assignment Desk: Someone with Lexis/Nexis and some free time should compile various statements from leading Democrats calling the Social Security insolvency problem a "crisis," at least before it became politically expedient to deny that characterization.

Not that it will help, of course. We did this for two years with their statements on WMD and they showed absolutely no embarassment whatsoever about simply disowning previously announced statements. And the media showed no interest in probing their sudden changes of heart.

A Start: My Two Common Cents notes that the NYT and WP sounded much different notes when Clinton proposed "saving" Social Security than they do when Bush suggests the same.

Q and O rounds up a lot of quotes from Clinton advisors and Clinton himself using the word "crisis."

Where oh where did the "crisis" go? It seems that in 1999 we were facing "the evident financial crisis which will be imposed on Social Security when the baby boomers retire," according to President Clinton, but nowadays Clinton-fanista Paul Krugman writes confidently:

"Today let's focus on one piece of those scare tactics: the claim that Social Security faces an imminent crisis. That claim is simply false."

Thanks, Q and O. You've done a man's job.

More... My super-secret government conact "Deep Stoat" sends along this PDF of Democrats flip-flopping on the Social Security crisis.

Or "non-crisis, perfectly managable glitch" as they now prefer to term it.

Posted by: Ace at 11:19 AM | Comments (11)
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Yes, you heard that right. The Boston Globe has assigned two ace reporters to dig up dirt on a reporter who shows a distinctly partisan bias.

Thank goodness they're finally on the case, right?

Riiiiiiiight.

The target of the Boston Globe's extensive investigation? Jeff Gannon of TalonNews.com-- basically a blog, or a magazine that's a step or two above a blog (no offense meant, Jeff!)

His "crimes"?:

The Bush administration has provided White House media credentials to a man who has virtually no journalistic background, asks softball questions to the president and his spokesman in the midst of contentious news conferences, and routinely reprints long passages verbatim from official press releases as original news articles on his website.

Hmmmmm... I don't suppose that there are any liberal reporters who ask softball questions to, say, Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, or routinely rewrite Democratic Party and/or liberal advocacy group press releases and publish it as original reporting?

Funny how the liberal media is only interested in "bias" when it's the wrong sort of bias.

Thanks to Richard.

You might want to let the Boston Globe know about other potential targets of future investigations (Katie Couric, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Helen Thomas, etc.) by writing them at letter@globe.com.

Posted by: Ace at 11:03 AM | Comments (4)
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