Way too early to get one's hopes up, but Byrd draws 46-43 against a relatively obscure Republican who hasn't even announced her intention to run yet.

Posted by: Ace at 11:40 AM | Comments (22)
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Yeah, I liked when Rudy Guilliani cleaned the city up. Reduced crime, got the transexual streetwalkers to be a bit more subtle, or at least not ply the most-travelled or touristy streets.

But enough is enough. New York is not f'n' San Diego, for the love of God. First this insipid smoking ban in bars -- a ban now being widely flouted after 11 pm (1 pm on weekends), thank goodness -- and now they're even shutting down our prized underground poker houses.

And I never even got to go to one.

Thanks to Chickpea.

Posted by: Ace at 09:16 AM | Comments (14)
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Simple theory: Get 100 hot chicks to show up at a rally and you'll bring in 10,000 men.

Which just makes you wonder: when will the left get smart again and start having "Ladies' Rallies" where the girls get their drinks half-price? That seems to work sometimes.

Or maybe offer a rose to each hot chick that shows up? Cheesy, but the chicks, they likes da roses.

And enough of the insipid chanting. If you want chicks at your rallies, play Just Can't Get Enough and maybe Shoop by Salt-N-Pepper.

Thanks again to NickS.

Update: Melted-down link fixed.

Posted by: Ace at 09:10 AM | Comments (26)
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And he'll be taking on -- wait for it -- White Supremacists!

Jeeze, that's never been done six billion times already.

It's too bad that we're not actually at war or something, with ready-made real-world enemies of the United States. If we were, one could imagine a whole pack of action films dealing with such threats, and boosting domestic and military morale.

Thanks to Christopher.

Posted by: Ace at 09:02 AM | Comments (20)
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It's nice to see the Washington Post acknoweldge it.

I don't imagine there'll be much follow-up, but at least it's on the record.

Does this make the DeLay donations right?

Well, it's not quite right, I guess, if you're a goo-goo (good government) type. But it does seem to be the ordinary course of business. You may not like that sort of business, but you can't claim that DeLay is breaking "rules."

The "rules," such as they are, is that you can take a whole lot of money from lobbyists so long as you never expressly promise them a favor in return for it. Not a difficult rule to follow, and one that invites corruption through winking, but it is the rule.

And it's the rule that Mssrs. Reid, Daschle, and Gephardt followed as well.

Posted by: Ace at 08:07 AM | Comments (6)
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Very long essay at Eject! Eject! Eject! attempting to explain, for the billionth time, why unlawful combatants are not Prisoners of War.

Worth reading, even if you already get it.

What is the obvious difference between an enemy Prisoner of War, and an Unlawful Combatant? Suppose two of them were standing in a line-up. What one glaringly obvious thing sets them apart?

ThatÂ’s right! One is wearing a uniform, and the other isnÂ’t.

And why do soldiers wear uniforms?

It certainly is not to protect the soldier. As a matter of fact, a soldierÂ’s uniform is actually a big flashing neon arrow pointing to some kid that says to the enemy, SHOOT ME!

And thatÂ’s exactly what a uniform is for. It makes the soldier into a target to be killed.

Now if that’s all there was to it, you might say that the whole uniform thing is not such a groovy idea. BUT! What a uniform also does -- the corollary to the whole idea of a uniformed person – is to say that if the individual wearing a uniform is a legitimate target, then the person standing next to him in civilian clothes is not.

By wearing uniforms, soldiers differentiate themselves to the enemy. They assume additional risk in order to protect the civilian population. In other words, by identifying themselves as targets with their uniforms, the fighters provide a Sanctuary to the unarmed civilian population.

And this Sanctuary is as old as human history. The first civilized people on Earth, these very same Iraqis, who had cities and agriculture and arts and letters when my ancestors were living in caves, wore uniforms as soldiers of Babylon. This is an ancient covenant, and willfully breaking it is unspeakably dishonorable.

...

Worse – worse by far – than the artificial safety given to enemies not wearing a uniform is the additional horror such behavior will inevitably inflict upon their own civilian population.

And it doesn’t hurt to point out – repeatedly – that the people they are putting at infinitely greater risk are supposedly the very people these so-called Muslim Warriors claim be trying to protect: their own women and children.

...

Do those protesters ever wonder why prisoners of war in World War II movies – soldiers -- trying to escape in civilian clothes would be shot as spies? A soldier out of uniform, a soldier trying to hide in the civilian population is gaining a one-time personal advantage, but that not the real sin. The real sin is that he is endangering the non-combatants. He is using civilians as cover. He is breaking down the barrier between the armed and the unarmed, the threat and the non-threat. He is trying to have it both ways.

Whenever there is war and invasion, there will be terrified civilians trying to get from one place to another. In the very early hours of Operation Iraqi Freedom, when we expected to be fighting the same Army that in the Gulf War fully honored the idea of uniformed troops, our soldiers discovered large numbers of unarmed, military-aged men in civilian clothes making for the rear. Many of these men were let through, and promptly took up arms and caused immeasurable damage before blending back into the population.

But they did much worse. Because after a few suicide bombers in civilian vehicles drove up to checkpoints and blew themselves and honor-abiding Coalition soldiers to bits, we have found ourselves having to treat all speeding civilian vehicles as hostile. We simply have no choice anymore. We did not simply decide to open fire on civilians; rather the enemy, in a cold and calculated decision repeated many, many times over, decided to violate the Sanctuary given to civilians to wage war on an American and British Army playing by the rules. They have made the line between civilian and soldier nonexistent. They did this, not us. They did it. They gained the benefits from it, and it has cost us dear. And so perhaps, in a world with less ignorance and more honesty, Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena – who sped at a US roadblock, weaving, at more than 60 mph and in violation of warning shots -- would be pointing her finger at the people who violated this Covenant of Civilization, and not those being forced to make terrible decisions in order to preserve it.

You know, I've said a thousand time to lefties: When you see a WWII movie, and a Nazi announces to our covert ops that they will be hanged as spies because they're out of uniform, did you think the screenwriters were just making that shit up?

No, they weren't. A soldier wears a uniform to announce to the enemy that he is a combatant (and, of course, that those out of uniforms are not). A combatant out of uniform is, legally, a "spy" or "saboteur," and hence a common criminal, to be dealt with by criminal justice (including hanging or the firing squad), and not to be afforded the protections and privileges of soldiers actually in uniform.

Now, of course, it will be pointed out by the ninnies that our covert soldiers and actual spies don't wear uniforms all the time either. True enough-- and that's part of what makes them such gutsy motherfuckers, because they know they could be tortured or killed if captured out of uniform, but they're courageous and dedicated enough to run that risk to accomplish an objective that couldn't be accomplished in uniform.

The US has largely abandoned the practice of killing "spies" and "saboteurs." But we still have that right, were we not such pussified sissified twats to exercise it. But we sure as shit have the right to jail these people, and no, we don't have to afford them the full panoply of protections offered to POW's under the Geneva Conventions.

Why do leftists continue to insist that these unlawful combatants be treated precisely as legal soldiers, despite the fact that they are breaking the rules deliberately in a way as to disadvantage our soldiers and greatly increase the chances of civilian deaths? Do they not comprehend -- or, perhaps, do they refuse to admit -- that legal soldiers should be given POW rights as an inducement to obey the Rules of War, and that illegal combatants should be denied such rights, also as an inducement to obey the Rules of War?

Whittle then examines the mindset of such "progressives:"

Why then, do so many people – most of them on the far left – so fundamentally hate humanity?

I think it must be the constant frictions between what they hope people are and what they really are.

...

Here they sit, surrounded by laws and medicine and art and culture: despising themselves. Remarkable, isnÂ’t it? These people, who pride themselves on nuance, see no difference between a naked human pyramid of ten prisoners lasting two minutes and piles of corpses six million deep. Both shameful, therefore, both equal in their eyes. And we are the ones who only see things in black and white?

...

So why -- someone? anyone? – why do otherwise intelligent and educated people so despise and detest American society, which has achieved more in the way of individual rights, science, arts, medicine, diversity, cooperation and prosperity than any other in history? Why would they oppose such a society when it is trying to bring these blessings to people who have spent thirty years cowering in dark places, fearful of letting the slightest word slip, or betraying their entire family with an askew glance or unguarded moment? Why would someone so viciously oppose freeing a People who have lived for a generation in total, abject fear?

ItÂ’s because they have never lived it. That is what I mean when I say reality has left their building. How many people would be opposing the war in Iraq if they had to watch, actually witness, three or four hundred thousand people being shot in the head in front of their families? At the rate of one life taken every single second, with one unique and irreplaceable person being extinguished every tick of the 60 Minutes stopwatch, going without sleep or rest, you would be at it for three and a half days. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Every face unique, every one someoneÂ’s son or mother or precious grandchild. Bang. Bang. Bang. All night and all day, every second for three and a half days. How long to wipe out your entire family? Four seconds? Eight? Thirteen? We have found that many in Iraq, more will follow, believe me.

How many children – four or five year old boys and girls – do you need to see raped in front of you before you change your mind about Iraq? Fifty? Fifty thousand? Will that make a dent in your stainless steel belief system? How many cries for mercy in the muffled corridors of prison basements? Ten thousand? Ten times ten thousand? They were there. They happened.

They just didnÂ’t happen to you. Not in Berkeley. Not in Manhattan. Not in Santa Monica, or at Columbia University. Not in your Sanctuary. If they did we wouldnÂ’t be having this discussion, would we? YouÂ’d be dead, and it would be your relatives begging for good and powerful people to come to their rescue to stop this horror.

There’s nothing “progressive” about what these people believe. It is refined selfishness and moral cowardice. I can understand not wanting to go overseas and lose blood and treasure to solve other people’s problems. I can at least understand that. But these “progressives” should be thanking whatever they take to be sacred – which is nothing – and hit their knees in gratitude that better, braver people have built them the kind of Sanctuary where torture and state-sponsored murder are so far from their closed eyes that even the act of imagining such horrors is beyond them.

How far from the reality of human nature do you have to be to see our culture as a curse on the Earth, rather than being the only ones willing to roll up our sleeves, shoot the wolves that are eating our kids, go out into the blizzard to collect some firewood and then paint the goddam house?

A long excerpt, and I hope he doesn't mind. Worth reading in full.

Thanks to TomM.

Update: Why We Need Gitmo: Unclassified report on Gitmo-- who's there and why.

For all the talk about innocents being wrongly imprisoned there, it is odd that so many of the detainees were caught with the exact sort of watch preferred by Al Qaeda bomb-makers, as the watch has an alarm function allowing a 24 hour countdown.

I guess maybe it's just a popular timepiece.

H/T to NickS.

Posted by: Ace at 08:02 AM | Comments (12)
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After allowing that his own "shortcomings" contributed to his errors, he goes on to accuse his critics of bias, and suggests (shock!) yet again that those documents may be real after all:

Rather was accused by the investigators -- retired Associated Press chief Louis Boccardi and former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh -- of erring by staunchly defending the segment after the authenticity of the documents came under fire.

The veteran newsman told King that he considered both men conservative, and therefore not totally unbiased, in the probe. However, when asked whether Republicans set him up, Rather declined to respond.

"I've always tried to be an independent reporter. If you do that, not everyone's going to like you," he said.

"I won't say that anybody was out to get us. Clearly, there are some people -- for their own partisan, political and ideological reasons -- who want to jump on people who they perceive to be not with them."

Hmmmm... I think George Bush must've been thinking the same thing when these ridiculous forgeries were run on 60 Minutes II.

And still he clings to the "they might be real" out permitted him by the "conservatively biased" Boccardi-Thornburgh report's cowardly failure to state definitively what every one else knows (i.e., they were fake):

"The situation we had and still have is the last line of this hasn't been written. I've acknowledged that we didn't do it perfectly. I wish we had."

The last line was written, Dan. They're frauds, and so are you.

Thanks for the tip to Chickpea.

Great Point: RCL notes that the MSM is forever claiming their professional bona fides as trained journalists allow them to repress any biases they may have and deliver the news straight and fair and balanced.

Okay-- but Boccardi is a professional journalist. How come Dan Rather thinks that this one journalist can't similarly put aside his biases?

Well, I guess, 1, because he's "conservative" (ha, ha, ha) and 2, because he scolded Dan Rather.

Posted by: Ace at 06:26 AM | Comments (11)
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Over at the Corner, they've begun a running discussion on "bad" movies that are actually good.

I'm not quite sure what this means-- if a movie is really actually good, in that it's entertaining and acheives its purposes, how can it also be "bad"? I suppose the eggheads over there mean that they're "bad" in that they're genre movies of little (if any) ambition, and yet manage to be enjoyable entertainments despite, say, having nothing of interest to say about Apartheid or adult-onset diabetes.

Now, they've nominated some good ones -- Diggstown, the Blade series (BTW, Blade 3/Blade: Trinity is the best of the bunch), Tommy Boy, Happy Gilmore -- and some vile ones (Roadhouse). I really don't know who the hell on the face of the earth thinks Roadhouse was an enjoyable or clever movie on any level; oh, wait, yes I do, some goofball named Jonah Goldberg.

At any rate, here are some of mine. You probably know 'em, 'cuzzin' I mention them all the time.

Streets of Fire-- Kicks ass. Kicks ALL the ass.

Big Trouble in Little China -- Almost even better than Streets of Fire.

The Quick and the Dead -- Take Sharon Stone out of this movie and replace her with... well, anyone not named Sharon Stone and you have one of the best westerns of all time. Very sad to find out that "Ace" was such a clownish dipshit, though.

Robocop -- such a good movie I'm not even sure it's fair to name it here.

Mad Max & Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome -- both are kinda sucky movies, but they both have... something. Road Warrior is NOT on this list, because it's one of the best movies in the infinitely-recursive history of the 13-dimensional multiverse, if I can slip into James Lipton/Kip Thorne speak for a moment.

Blast From the Past -- Just a great movie, and one of the most archiest of arch-conservative movies ever made. Not even sure it should be on a list of "bad" movies, but it wasn't reviewed very well, and few of you out there have seen it. Check it out.

The Lost Boys -- Any movie that contains the line "She's a vampire! And don't say that doesn't make her a bad person!" is automatically a great movie, even if of the bad sort.

Overboard -- such a bubbly and infectious (if dunderheaded) comedy.

Executive Decision -- Kurt Russell is a repeat offender on any list of badly-received/B-picture movies that are actually much better than they have a right to be. Hell, this movie even coaxes a good performance out of Steven Seagal, and that's no small feat. Pretty much the last movie you'll ever see featuring, get this, Muslims as terrorists, if you can imagine such a thing.

They Live -- well, the first hour is there to kick ass and chew bubble gum, but it's all out of bubble gum, but then it finds the bubble gum in the hiddeously disappointing last half hour. Still-- that very, very padded-to-make-the-film-longer-than-90-minutes fight between Keith David and Rowdy Roddy Piper is lots of fun. So are the glasses. So is the interdimensional interstellar stardock.

Tin Cup -- The best golf movie ever.

Wyatt Earp -- if you like Westerns, you should rent this. Yes, it's overly long, but don't believe the critics; this is a great movie that just sort of forgot people don't want to spend three and three quarters watching a shoot-em-up. Better than Tombstone released the same year (which is also a bad-good movie, and again stars Kurt Russell).

Any I'm forgetting?

Update: HT reminds me of yet ANOTHER great Kurt Russell B-picture-- Soldier. Just a terrific movie on all levels -- including, get this, that interpersonal/emotional/dramatic level that men aren't supposed to care about. Yeah, the premise of an entire planet being used as a waste facility is fuckin' dumb as shit (why not just dump the shit in space?), but get past that, and it rocks.

Alternate Question: Ever see a movie you loved and then, years later, saw it again, and decided it was horrible?

I had loved 48 Hours. Best action movie ever, I thought, and freakin' hilarious too. I was talking with someone years later who'd just seen it and told me it was awful.

"You're crazy," I told him. "It's the best."

"Have you seen it lately?" he asked.

"No, but I remember almost all of it. It's great."

"Try watching it again," he advised me. "Then get back to me."

About a year later I did watch it again... and he was 100% right. The movie actually did suck. I couldn't see why I'd thought it was such a great movie the first eight thousand times I'd seen it on HBO. The only marginally interesting thing about it remains its frank -- and almost unheard of -- depiction of casual white racism (and it's can't-get-away-with-that-today suggestion that really Nick Nolte's casual racism isn't so bad, all things considered).

But otherwise-- a horrible move. And if you want to argue about that-- watch it again, and then get back to me.

Any others like that?

Posted by: Ace at 03:12 PM | Comments (196)
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Still too high, dagammit. We must do better.

And Lorie Byrd reminds us that France's new Prime Minister and former James Bond villain Dominique De Villepain (all he fuggin' needs is an eyepatch and a metal arm) has never been elected to anything. He just keeps getting appointed by higher-ranking douchebags.

In Germany they call it schadenfreude. Actually, they call it that here, too. Gerald Schroeder's at 28% approval.

I don't know if those skullduggerous snap-elections are going to help him. Then again, it's a parliamentary system, where getting 1.3% of the vote plus support from a bunch of other idiots can get you a new term of rule.

Europe's Political Leadership

We may be corrupt, arrogant, and out-of-touch, but we make up for it by being incompetent. All we need to do is say "America sucks" every other speech to keep our popularity above 60%, and we can't even get that right.

Posted by: Ace at 02:36 PM | Comments (3)
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The answer to Europe's woes is right in front of them, or at least across the Atlantic. Or, closer to home, coming through on their televisions and computers every night.

But they keep looking for ways to avoid the obvious solution.

No one will ever admit they were wrong-- unless they have no other choice. And, felicitiously enough, Europe is running out of choices faster than Alec Baldwin is running out of job-offers in which he doesn't play comic foil to a six foot tall talking cat.

Victor Davis Hanson:

The E.U. constitution — and its promise of a new Europe — supposedly offered a corrective to the Anglo-American strain of Western civilization. More government, higher taxes, richer entitlements, pacifism, statism and atheism would make a more humane and powerful new continent of over 400 million to outpace a retrograde United States.

Instead, Europe faces a declining population, unassimilated minorities, low growth, high unemployment and an inability to defend itself, either militarily or morally. Somehow the directorate of the European Union has figured out how to have too few citizens while having too many of them out of work.

...

Why all these upheavals?

Global communications now reveal hourly to people abroad how much better life is in Europe than in the Middle East and Asia — and how in America, Australia and Britain the standard of living is even better than in most of Europe.

...

The mass mourning of the pope's death revealed a renewed desire for spirituality. Two billion in India and China quietly keep copying the West. Car bombs, fist-shaking mobs and beheadings dispel all the old romance about the Third-World postcolonial "other."

What are we left with then?

Democracy, open markets, personal freedom, individual rights, pride in national traditions, worry about big government — about what we see in the United States, Britain, Australia and their allies in Japan and the breakaway countries in Europe. Elections in Ethiopia, France, Iraq, Lebanon and Ukraine all point to a desire for more freedom from central state control.

The end of history, redux? Maybe. But Europe has been clinging to that bit of time just before the end of history for 50 years now.

Max Boot:

The lives of ordinary French people are not dominated by dreams of lost glory; they simply want a decent job and public services that work. It was telling that only professionals and senior executives — i.e., France's top occupational rung — voted for the constitution last week. Everyone else opted for "non."

The only way to dispel the current climate of gloom on the continent is to get economies moving again. Margaret Thatcher showed how it can be done: Reduce the size of the state and break the power of the labor unions. But neither Chirac nor his hapless counterpart in Berlin, Gerhard Schroeder, has the guts to do that. Instead, like most European leaders in recent decades, they have thrown their energies into EU integration in the vain hope that this would deliver a shot of Viagra to a moribund continent.

The bankruptcy of that strategy has now been exposed. The question is whether European leaders will face up to their real problems. The fact that Chirac has reacted to the failure of the constitutional referendum by appointing as premier Dominique de Villepin, a haughty intellectual who thinks Napoleon was the ne plus ultra of good governance, is a bad sign.

The good news is that in the wings in France and Germany are conservative leaders Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, respectively, who just might have the gumption to cure their countries' real woes rather than continuing to administer an anti-American analgesic.

The BBC Are Idiots Update: Breaking news. Must credit Ace.

Blogging gets blamed for a lot of crap, and apparently the BBC is blaming the failure of the EU treaty (which it must after all support; after all, the French do) on bloggers.

Well, I'd like to take credit, but seriously, that's just f'n' stupid.

People don't make political decisions based on the say-so of guys who proudly display pictures of their Planet of the Apes action figure collection.

Or... do they?

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (22)
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