O'Reilly brings his pugilistic interrogation style to IHOP:

Bill O'Reilly

Talking Points has always been a big supporter of IHOP's "pot of coffee at the table" policy as well, and we've never shied away from saying so, so you can imagine how disappointed we were to find that this morning's pot was not only cold, it was also bitter.

Now, what say you?

Waitress
Oh sorry, we've been really busy this morning.

Bill O'Reilly
You're spinning, madam, you're spinning. Listen, we at The Factor have done our own investigation, and according to my information this is happening at every single table. So if what you're saying to me is that this is just some isolated an isolated incident, I gotta tell you - the folks at home; they're not buyin' it. They're not buyin' it.

Waitress
What folks at home?

Bill O'Reilly
All right, so let's move on to the menu. Now there's no question in my mind that Jacques Chriraq and his buddy Schroeder are not helping our efforts in the war on terror, and in fact, Chiraq is in my opinion supporting terrorism by refusing to designate Hezbollah as a terrorist group. He may not see it that way, but he is. Tell me where I'm wrong.

Read the whole thing at the link.

John, you get one point deducted for failing to have O'Reilly tell the waitress "we've got thirty seconds, you've got the last word," and then, you know, not actually give her the last word.

Posted by: Ace at 08:02 AM | Comments (2)
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While Dick Durban frets about the lack of central air at Gitmo, he's oddly silent about genuine prison brutality closer to home.

In one incident, an elite squad of 40 guards took over a maximum-security [unit] ... for the sole purpose of beating and terrorizing the prisoners. A jail investigator determined that the guards' misconduct was covered up by ... medical personnel, who filed false reports and refused or delayed treatment to the prisoners, and by the ... inspector general, who refused to cooperate with the investigation. In the other incident, five inmates in a special incarceration unit ... alleged that they were beaten by 20 or more ... as they lay cuffed and shackled on the floor.

Gitmo? No, Chicago.

I'm sure the fact that the prison in question is run by a political ally who is not George Bush has nothing at all to do with this.

Thanks to NickS.

Posted by: Ace at 07:52 AM | Comments (15)
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Damnit, Night Ranger was supposed to do Sister Christian on Hit Me Baby One More Time, but apparently they backed out at the last minute.

Michele live-blogged the whole dumb/sorta entertaining show.

Confessions:

I still love Everybody Have Fun Tonight. And Word Up.

I hated the song Howard Jones did, but I betcha I can remember all the words to Things Can Only Get Better. Not a difficult trick; the song has like eight words total, and five of them are right there in the title.

Posted by: Ace at 10:14 PM | Comments (11)
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Nice political party you had there, fellers. Sorry to see it go so soon:

The Senate's No. 2 Democrat has compared the U.S. military's treatment of a suspected al Qaeda terrorist at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay with the regimes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Pol Pot, three of history's most heinous dictators, whose regimes killed millions.

In a speech on the Senate floor late Tuesday, Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, castigated the American military's actions by reading an e-mail from an FBI agent.

The agent complained to higher-ups that one al Qaeda suspect was chained to the floor, kept in an extremely cold air-conditioned cell and forced to hear loud rap music. The Justice Department is investigating.

About 9 million persons, including 6 million Jews, died in Hitler's death camps, 2.7 million persons died in Stalin's gulags and 1.7 million Cambodians died in Pol Pot's scourge of his country.

No prisoners have died at Guantanamo, and the Pentagon has acknowledged five instances of abuse or irreverent handling of the Koran, the holy book of Muslims.

After reading the e-mail, Mr. Durbin said, "If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or others -- that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners."

Mr. Durbin also likened the treatment of terror suspects at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to authorize the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

And he's refusing to retract his remarks:

Mr. Durbin did not back off his characterization in a statement to The Times last night.

"No one, including the White House, can deny the statement I read on the Senate floor was made by an FBI agent describing the torture of a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay," he said. "That torture was reprehensible and totally inconsistent with the values we hold dear in America.

"This administration should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions and authorizing torture techniques that put our troops at risk and make Americans less secure."

...

In using such stark language Tuesday night, Mr. Durbin was repeating a theme that the political left has used in recent months: making "torture" the defining issue in how Mr. Bush is waging the war against Islamic terrorism.

Today's Democratic Party

We're self-loathing, but we'd love to have company in that.

Click on the pic to call him a dick.

Posted by: Ace at 09:57 PM | Comments (39)
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And yet they were not included in the Volcker report.

They protect their own.

More... Again, from Roger L. Simon, 'cause he's got a cool hat:

UNITED NATIONS_Investigators of the U.N. oil-for-food program said Tuesday they are "urgently reviewing" new information suggesting U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan may have known more about a contract awarded to the company that employed his son.

The December 1998 memo from Michael Wilson, then a vice president of Cotecna Inspections S.A., mentions brief discussions with Annan "and his entourage" during a summit in Paris in late 1998. "We could count on their support," the memo said.

If accurate, the memo could contradict a major finding of the Independent Inquiry Committee _ that there wasn't enough evidence to show that Annan knew about efforts by Cotecna, which employed his son Kojo, to win a contract under oil-for-food. Cotecna learned it won the contract on Dec. 11, 1998.

On yesterday's Brit Hume show, he noted that the Times had covered this story... on Page 6.

When the story picked up juice and seemed to have more important implications, the Times noted that fact too... on page 10.

And the occasionally-sane Washington Post? Page 12.

They. Protect. Their own.

Posted by: Ace at 01:00 PM | Comments (6)
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Powerline, again.

A compromise has been reached as to the number of Sunnis who will be involved in drafting the new, permanent Iraqi constitution. They don't deserve it, but peace is made with one's enemies, not friends, and it's important to bring these bastards into the political process.

And a high-ranking aide to al-Zarqawi has been captured.

I can't wait until Time Magazine and Amnesty International expose the "harsh" treatment he'll soon be getting.

I say leave him for an hour in a room with these ladies:

He'll talk.

Posted by: Ace at 12:57 PM | Comments (5)
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Powerline:

Below, John writes: "The mildness with which terrorist detainees have been treated stands as an imperishable monument to the greatness of the American spirit and the moderation of the Bush administration." I agree, but can't help wondering whether, spiritual greatness and moderation aside, it would be better policy to treat terrorist detainees less mildly.

Meanwhile, the Senate hearing on Gitmo that C-SPAN has been re-broadcasting tonight stands as a monument to the wisdom of al Qaeda, which advises its terrorists to complain, if captured, about torture and mistreatment in order, presumably, to take advantage of folks like many members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Democratic members, and several Republicans as well, can't seem to accept the notion that detainees captured while fighting Americans during our campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban deserve anything less than the full blown due process we accord our citizens, including access to federal court. Never mind that ordinary prisoners of war captured by us on the battle field during, say, World War II, never received such "due process." Why should we be more solicitous of unlawful combatants than we were of legitimate soldiers who abided by the rules of war?

The fig leaf for all this concern with the rights of probable terrorists is the claim that not treating them better hurts us in the war against terror. When I turned off the television in disgust to write this, some professor at NYU law school was asserting that mantra. The proposition that what happens at Gitmo impedes our ability to fight terrorism appears to be an a priori one, untested by empirical inquiry, and derived entirely from a desire to advance a civil liberties agenda and/or attack the Bush administration.

Is there evidence that anyone ever became a terrorist because we treat prisioners too harshly? Does it make any sense to suppose that someone prepared to take up arms against the U.S. will abandon that quest if only we provide prisioners with access to federal district court?

...

If these folks want to assert the primacy of civil liberties for suspected terrorists, that's fine. But don't insult our intelligence by claiming that there are no trade-offs between defending those liberties and thwarting terrorists.

Lotta bolding there. It's all good.

On Brit Hume yesterday, Bill Samuelson (I think) posed a question: To what political end are these Democrats driving? Do they really imagine that the American public is clamoring for better treatment of self-made monsters who have vowed to slaughter innocent Americans, Jews, and "non-righteous" Muslims?

What are they thinking?

If you say they're taking a principled stance, I'll laugh at you.

They are playing to the worst segment of their constituensty, the fire-breathers, the professional protestors, the San Francisco Democrats, the America-haters.

This is around 10 or 15% of the electorate, tops.

Yes, these guys will donate money when they hear this sort of nonsense and venom, but at what cost?

Are they aware the 2006 midterms will be held in America, as usual, and not in the tonier & more bohemian arrondisements of Paris?

Update: A lot of liberals ask the following questions:

1) Why are their no trials for these fuckers?

2) When will they be released?

Here are the answers, which have been patiently explained to you a THOUSAND TIMES, but maybe one more time will be helpful to your comprehension.

1) There are no trials because trials are costly things which reveal a lot of confidential information to the enemy. But, more importantly, one does not typically "try" soldiers caught during wartime. Soldiers are imprisoned without trial during wartime -- see, that's what happens when you get captured but not killed by the enemy. You are imprisoned. Hence the term, "Prisoner of War."

Most soldiers are never tried as criminals, because most soldiers are NOT criminals. And yet they remain in military prisons throughout the duration of the war.

The thing is, we COULD try many of these plainly unlawful combatants as criminals -- if we chose to do so. Or, we can simply continuing holding them as enemies captured on the battlefield, as has been done since time immemorial.

The fact that we COULD try them as criminals does not OBLIGATE us to do so. And the fact that we largely pass on trying them as criminals does not obligate us to simply release them-- the same as we didn't just release Nazi soldiers during WWII who had committed no crime until the war was actually over.

2, which leads us to when we will release them. We will release them when the war is over, or until we decide to do so, if we want to release them sooner for some reason. Again, the rules of war say you can hold enemy prisioners until the cessation of hostilities. Hostilities have not ceased; ergo, we will hold them until they do.

Liberals will whine that this could be a very long period of imprisonment. So fucking what? Our POW's were tortured in Hanoi for eight or more years in some cases. It sucks, but not all wars are short affairs, and to some extent captured enemy combatants are at the mercy of their leadership, who can arrange for their release, the moment they surrender and sign an armistice.

Does that answer these questions, finally?

Oh, and... Liberals are fond of saying three things repeatedly:

1) We haven't won in Afghanistan. The Taliban is still killing, and the "warlords" control the country and assist the Taliban.

2) Al Qaeda remains a threat and Bush has done little or nothing to reduce that threat.

3) The war in Iraq is going worse than ever. We're losing.

Okay. Let's take you at your word.

Given the fact that by your own admission that not only is the Global War on Terrorism not over, but we are actually losing this war, why the fuck are you constantly agitating to release enemy combatants so that they may rejoin their allies and kill more of our soldiers and citizens?

One Last Point: Liberals seem to have a curious position here.

Were these lawful combatants -- good soldiers, legal soldiers, honorable soldiers who'd just been captured as part of war -- they could of course not object to holding them for the duration of the war, as that would just be ridiculous. They know damn well we didn't just release good, honorable Nazi and Japanese soldiers until the war was over. (And neither did those countries release our boys, except for hardship cases and in prisoner exchanges.)

So... the weird thing is:

They are insisting we treat unlawful combatants and actual terrorists BETTER than we'd treat lawful soldiers.

Lawful soldiers stay imprisoned until an armistice. Illegal combatants and mass-murderers get trials, and if you can't convict them of an actual crime, they go free.

Why shouldn't we extend that same benefit to lawful soldiers? We could NEVER convict them of a crime (having not committed one, or even having been alleged to have committed one) and thus they would go free two or three months after capture.

To join their former army, of course. And kill Americans.

Posted by: Ace at 12:22 PM | Comments (115)
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Interesting:

The backlash against Hirsi Ali [a Dutch Muslim woman who has spoken out against radical Islam, and the documentary about whom is what got Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh slaughtered] has astonished and disappointed many Dutch feminists, who continue to count themselves among her biggest fans. Margreet Fogteloo, editor of the weekly De Groene Amsterdammer, said flatly that Mak is crazy. 'People like him feel guilty because they were closing their eyes for such a long time to what was going on,' she said. In what appears to be a Europe-wide pattern, some feminists are aligning themselves with the anti-immigrant right against their former multiculturalist allies on the left. Joining them in this exodus to the right are gay activists, who blame Muslim immigrants for the rising number of attacks on gay couples.

Stranger still... that quote's from The Nation, of all places.

Posted by: Ace at 12:07 PM | Comments (4)
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You know the preamble. Let's cut to the good part:

Arming themselves with curling irons, chairs, a wooden table leg and clenched fists, the women attacked.

Blood and urine splattered from the victim; stains adorned the white paints worn by many of the beauty school students.

Crying in pain, the robber tried to crawl away from the students, Mitchell said.

"I grabbed his legs and wouldn't let him go. I pulled him back. He wasn't going to get up out of here and tell everyone he robbed us. When he came in here, he knocked down a beehive and sent the bees flying all over."

Sharon Blalock, owner of the school, said she couldn't be prouder of her students and employees. "They just whooped the hell out of him."

As a final humiliation, they gave him a very unappealing Caesar haircut.

Blood's one thing. But when you're beating the literal piss out of a thug, goddamnit, you're doing something right.

Left to Right: an unknown beauty-school student; The Batman.

Posted by: Ace at 11:59 AM | Comments (9)
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Glad that American Barbarian wrote me, because going over to his site gave me a look at this juicy morsel of sweet bias:

Nope no bias here. NPR reported on the “release” or “freeing” of an Australian hostage today. Their language is purposefully vague because this man was rescued by Iraqi and American forces. Let’s repeat that he was rescued by Iraqi and American forces. Certainly saying that in a report doesn’t fit NPR’s editorial point of view so they use the word “released” or “freed” so they can remain ambiguous.

Defund them. We get the same stuff from Al Jazeera at no cost to the American taxpayer.

Posted by: Ace at 11:48 AM | Comments (5)
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