Donald Luskin notes that Al Gore's buzzword-- "the lohhhckbohhhx" -- ought to be employed to sell Bush's Social Security reform.

After all, Al Gore was proposing we strengthen SS by putting real tangible assets into the SS trust fund. (Well, actually, he was propsing we dedicate the suprlus to retiring debt now so we could borrow later, but close enough.)

How is that different, in principle, than giving someone personal accounts -- privately owned personal accounts -- filled with tangile, real assets? (More real, in fact, than the ability to borrow later more easily.)

When you have your own money -- money the government can't take away without just compensation, same as it can't (in, um, theory) seize your land without paying you fair market value -- in your own personal account, isn't that just you having your own private Al-Gore-endorsed lohhhhckbohhhhx?

Posted by: Ace at 03:56 PM | Comments (2)
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Beautiful Atrocities documents Ms. Rodham-Clinton's contradictory moderate/liberal pandering-type behavior.

Thanks to Bill from InDC, who looks at the historical record and decides it's not terribly shocking at all that the captured BTK killer should suddenly be suffering from "depression."

Posted by: Ace at 02:33 PM | Add Comment
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Football Fans and Beyond has Lexis/Nexis, and they're just crazy enough to use it.

Regarding the Chicago Tribune's coverage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, versus its coverage of the ginned-up "Bush AWOL" story:

Here is the Tribune's complete substantive treatment of the allegations of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004. On May 5, 2004, Stephen Braun wrote of the criticisms leveled by the group. There was not another mention for 3 months. On August 6, 2004, Jill Zuckman and Jeff Zeleny wrote a blurb on the 527. It was entitled "McCain denounces Vietnam vets' anti-Kerry ad; Commercial says Democrat lied about combat role."

The Tribune did not run another substantive article on the charges of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for the entire campaign....

Perhaps the paper deemed the story all in the past, choosing instead to focus on the future, as opposed to the Vietnam-era actions of the two candidates.

Not quite.

In 2004, The Tribune ran substantive stories on Bush and his National Guard service... [numerous citations of Tribute stories on this "issue" deleted]

By mid-September, the forged CBS documents took over the discussion and somehat muted The Tribune's full-court press on the story. Still, the Tribune's fascination with the president's Guard service was not entirely diluted: [more citations deleted].

Lemann isn't interested in such a factual analysis. Instead, his piece relies on the "gee wiz" viewpoint of the mainstream media. The piece is advertising cloaked as inquiry, where the poor, professional, unbiased reporter is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't by the unreasonable readers who have been captured by Reed Irvine, the blogs and FOX News (Lemann finds examples of conservative reader complaints deemed "paranoid," "wacky," "beyond any evil imagining," and "bewildering" by his mainstream media interviewees).

Read the whole thing.

Instead of examining fully documentable and proveable instances of media bias, Lehman chooses to cite examples of photographs of Arabs with their soles turned towards Bush.

Posted by: Ace at 01:22 PM | Add Comment
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It's long, boring, tells you nothing you didn't know, and furthermore is defensive to a fault.

One of the author's tricks -- used multiple times -- is to present the silliest possible examples of conservatives' complaints about the media as represenatative of our real objections. For example:

During a day I spent there last month, Ann Marie Lipinski, the Tribune’s editor-in-chief, handed me a copy of a large, ostentatiously grand, and dignified color photograph of President Reagan’s funeral service that the paper had run, showing President Bush speaking from the pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral to a big audience. She asked me if I could figure out what someone might find objectionable about it; I tried for a minute and gave up. “Think!” Lipinski said. “Keep trying. You’re not being paranoid enough here.” I thought some more, and I still couldn’t figure it out. “So, Don Wycliff, our public editor”—whose job is to deal directly with reader complaints—“received five phone calls saying that the Arab sitting in the front row”—indeed, there was a man in a burnous visible in the audience—“is sitting with his legs crossed so that his foot is pointing at Bush, which is a sign of disrespect in the Middle East. These readers interpreted the photo to mean that the Tribune is anti-Bush. Do you know any editor who, upon seeing that picture, in a million years—I mean, look at that picture! There’s a sweep, a unity. It’s a newsworthy photo, and also beautiful. The notion that we’re sitting here looking for that kind of detail is so beyond any evil imagining of mine! I don’t want to suggest that’s the daily level of complaint, but not a week goes by that we don’t get something like that.”

Or:

Jim Kelly, the managing editor, told me that he’d bumped into a reader who complained about a Time cover with a photograph of Osama bin Laden, and then a smaller photograph in the corner, to advertise a different story, about Al Gore. In the picture Gore was smiling—at the Bush Administration’s misfortune in failing to find bin Laden, the reader thought. “This is so wacky to me,” Kelly said. “But it’s weirdly compelling to listen to."

No mention of something that tends to demonstrate serious press bias, like Rathergate.

Don't bother reading it. Spend your time reading the AAR from Fallujah.

If there's one interesting thing about the piece -- and here I strain to conjure something up -- it's that it might indicate where the press is in the famous "five steps" of dealing with loss. In this case, loss of credibility, prestige, and, perhaps most important, power.

Although prestige is neck-and-neck with power. Credibility is distant third.

For a long time they were in denial; in fact, most of them still are.

Then came anger. Again, many are still angry; not everyone proceeds through the steps at the same pace.

For many in the press, we now seem to be at the bargaining phase ("What if we cover religion better? What if we cover NASCAR?") and, to go by the sad-sack liberal reporters interviewd in the New Yorker piece, the first stages of depression.

Eventually -- like, maybe, in 2057 -- we might get to acceptance.

Posted by: Ace at 09:58 AM | Comments (4)
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Long but very interesting after-action report written by one Marine sergeant and his corporals.

A couple of takeaways. First, it's one thing to have a vague impression of the difficulty of fighting in a dense and very randomly-built city, but the little details about the houses and streets make it more vivid. And give the reader a better understanding of what our boys are confronting.

Second: What a well-written report! It's been said that sergeants in the American military are the equivalent, in terms of responsibility and intelligence and training, to colonels in many other armies, where enlisted men and even mid-level officers just aren't trusted to do much of anything except follow orders. This report would seem to demonstrate that; it reads like the product of a military intelligence workgroup, rather than that of a seargeant and his corporals reporting from the field.

Very long... you may have to read, stop reading, and come back to it later. But very interesting.

Thanks to NickS.

Posted by: Ace at 09:37 AM | Comments (13)
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Almost inconceivable, but amputees are rejoining their comrades to finish the fight:

The same grit that drew many of these vets to the military in the first place helps push them back into combat. Army Pfc. George Perez, 21, who lost a leg to a roadside bomb in Fallujah, wanted to stay in the service as soon as he found out he could walk again. "Ultimately, I want to do what makes me happy. It's also love of country, but I've got goals. I'm hard to keep down," he says.

Something of an understatement.

Some wounded soldiers are willing to do almost anything to get back into uniform. After Senior Airman Anthony Pizzifred, 20, lost his leg just above the ankle in Afghanistan last March, surgeons told him that the best prosthetic leg—one that would allow him to walk, run and wade in the ocean—was designed for those with more severe amputations. Pizzifred wanted maximum mobility as fast as possible. So he told his doctors to take off as much as they needed. They wheeled him back into the operating room and cut off his leg almost to the knee.

And one more bit of understatement:

"Top Pentagon officials were at first reluctant. But after hearing personal pleas from wounded vets—and seeing the soldiers' astonishing recoveries firsthand—they reconsidered. The first Marine amputee found fit for duty has just returned from seven months in Iraq. "We realize that a soldier's strong mental and emotional outlook can more than compensate for a changed body," says Lt. Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck, the Army's deputy chief of staff for personnel.

I'd say. A guy who loses a limb and demands to come back to fight more is probably not the sort of guy a terrorist wants to meet in an alley.

Posted by: Ace at 11:23 PM | Comments (37)
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All right, this one even bothers me. It's from CBS News, so you would think it's safe for work.

But it's really not.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:03 PM | Comments (33)
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Michele at A Small Victory tells the story of a friendship/e-romance that began on AOL and wound up in marriage.

Their first face to face (or, um, f2f, I guess) meeting:

He looked up. I knew right away it was him and my first instinct was to just stand there like an idiot and stare at him. Which I did. And his first instinct was to just stand there like an idiot and stare at me. Which he did. IÂ’m not sure what happened next. He insists that I made the first move an practically tackled him with a bear hug and shoved my tongue down his throat. I think he made that up, because I remember him walking towards me. Either way, it wasnÂ’t quite the romantic moment I thought it would be and frankly, it was kind of awkward. For just a few moments, though. When we regained our composure and he smiled and I smiled and he reached for my hand, I knew. He knew. Yes, we could take that intensity and urgency and those deep conversations and carry them over into the flesh.

And I'm not doing too shabbily myself, I'm happy to say. I'm proud to announce that I've developed quite the budding friendship with the tech-support staff at DirtyFootedHighSchoolHarlots.com.

A swell bunch of guys. We're thinking of joining a bowling league the minute Stinky's mom lets him off his grounding and lets him drive the station wagon again.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 PM | Comments (9)
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It seems Bashar Assad is a bit more impressed by the invasion of Iraq and capture of Saddam Hussein than is, say, Robert Fisk:

At the end of the interview, which was conducted last week, Assad said: "Please send this message: I am not Saddam Hussein. I want to cooperate."

Ah-hem. No, you're not Saddam Hussein. We had to eject Saddam from Kuwait using a massive ground invasion, and we had to capture him by the same method.

You're turning tail and running because some chicks with nice racks painted the Lebanese flag on their cheeks.

Hooters girls-- is there anything they can't do?

And, Bashar, I don't think we'll have to invade Syria to secure your exit from office... I have a feeling that you're going to be knocked off by your own buddies. Hate to be the one to tell you that. Seriously.

Hmmm... you don't look like the sort of guy who'd get the vapors and go all to pieces over a bit of international pressure.

"Don't worry about me! I'm a big fat pussy!"

This guy makes the Bill Paxton character from True Lies -- or, hell, the Bill Paxton character from Aliens -- look like Audie F'n' Murphy.

And speaking of Robert Fisk, check out the cover of the Independent, the rag that pays Fisk to write the same column week after week:

The article is here, but it's really not worth reading -- sam-old, same-old -- except for this jaw-dropper:

Then the man who insisted on elections in Iraq when the US wanted to postpone or dilute them was Ayatollah Ali al- Sistani, leader of Iraq's majority Shia community.

Huh?

I suppose there was a time -- a year or more ago -- when al-Sistani was more insistent on elections ASAP than Bush was, but after Bush announced the January 30 election date -- sometime in May 2004, right? -- wasn't, um, the US pretty much the only country with the balls to say "the elections will go forward no matter what"?

That egregious error aside-- gotta love that cover.

Thanks to The Corner, Little Green Footballs, and SlantPoint.

Posted by: Ace at 08:43 PM | Comments (11)
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"Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me."

Yeah, so, this weisenheimer Iblis thought he'd make all funny-like and claim that was my theme song, in the comments.

But now it's his theme song. Says so in a big font-size 4 headline and everything. How ya like them apples, Jokester McJokerton? Now all the dozens of people who read this site are gonna know you get no play from the ladies, and they are all gonna laugh at you.

Iblis, don't start a fight with someone who buys pixels by the barrel.

Who's laughing now, smart-guy. Who's laughing now.

Posted by: Ace at 04:10 PM | Comments (14)
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