Another nail in the well-secured coffin for file-sharing.

I haven't, ummm, "shared" files since they shut down Napster. What a wonderful, felonious time that was.

Also more SC decisions: Ten Commandments on courthouse wall in Kentucky ruled unconstantional, as religiously motivated; but no problem with a monument containing the Ten Commandments by the statehouse in Austin, Texas.

The Supreme Court seems to be slicing the baloney sort of thin.

I blame Sandra Day O'Connor, personally. Not sure if her previous decisions were referenced (though they probably were), but her whole style of decision making-- or rather decision-delaying-- causes a great deal of confusion. And litigation.

Scalia always had a strong preference for bright-line rules. Bright line rules had the wonderful benefit of letting people actually know what the law was, is, and will be. This not only informed people, it reduced litigation, because a Scalia-authored decision would tend to let any future litigants know if they'd win or lose a case. So they wouldn't bother going to court at all. Both sides (usually) could tell who would prevail.

Isn't it nice to know what the law is?

Sandy, on the other hand, could very rarely lower herself to joining a black-and-white decisions, particularly on hot-button issues. And, being a swing vote, you'd need to enlist her to have your side win, and that seems to often come at the expense of making the law into dogfood.

She almost always favors "balancing tests" in which a litany of "factors" to be considered would be enumerated. Sometimes there'd be like ten such factors, and she wouldn't make it clear even as to what priority they'd be considered.

So in any future litigation, you'd have her precious laundry list of "factors" to be "balanced" splitting 6-4 or even 5-5 between parties, a lot of them arguably going either way anyhow, and no one would know who would prevail in a lawsuit, until actually suing.

And even then you wouldn't know, because the lower court could see the factors balancing one way and an appeals court another way and really you wouldn't know the law until Sandy had a chance to check each lawsuit personally on the Supreme Court.

Lawyers must love her. She's a cash cow. With people never knowing what the law actually it, it creates a lot of lawsuits.

Posted by: Ace at 08:08 AM | Comments (15)
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Eh. They're both okay. Not sure if they'll change any minds.

From Joe: An ad about Dick Durbin and the "America can do no right" contingent.

From Karol, this ad making the point that this isn't your parents' Democratic Party anymore.

I think there's some potential in that sort of take. The Democratic Party retains a lot of goodwill created by its previous icons and heroes... but do today's Democrats really have much in common at all with JFK?

Can that be persuasive? Well, at one point I loved Woody Allen, then I suffered through a lot of his horrific eighties and nineties films still trying to believe I loved him, and then one day I just decided he sucked and I wouldn't see another one of his pictures for the rest of my life. (I made an exception for Manhattan Murder Mystery, as it sounded cute and funny, and goshdarnit, so it was.)

How long can the Democrats ride JFK? Especially given the lack of anyone even close to JFK in its ranks?

You know, when Ritchie left Happy Days, the show was never the same. Indeed, just before he left was when the show (quite literally) jumped the shark.

Posted by: Ace at 01:10 PM | Comments (13)
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Does it matter anymore?

Well, See-Dubya, guest-blogging at My Pet Jawa, is sorta defensive about that, and admits, ten times, that maybe it doesn't.

Still, I figure most of the readers here are definitely in the kick-a-man-when-he's-down camp, and so it's worth posting, and worth reading, if you're into that sort of sadism.

Kerry's most widely-known story is that he went to Cambodia to drop off Navy SEALS and the like conducting covert missions.

In a Senate hearing, he said he had gone there to drop off weapons.

Maybe there's not even a contradiction; maybe he's claiming he did both. Maybe the SEALs and CIA guys were also ferrying weapons to indigenous forces.

Still, this guy has had so many different stories about this alleged mission it's hard to credit any of it as true.

Posted by: Ace at 12:53 PM | Comments (7)
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What the hell else is there to say? Even upon that sacred ground, as part of a memorial to the dead in the greatest single-day mass-slaughter in recent history, they just can't help themselves from injecting a bit of "sophisticated" anti-Americanism.

Karol's hoppin' mad:

Surely the memorial wouldn't be used as a hodge-podge of various criticisms on American history. Right? I mean, that would be crazy. What does our sad history of slavery have to do with 19 maniacs killing 3000 of our people in one horrible day? Or, aside from even America-bashing, what would raising the discussion of Ukrainian democracy or on the history of World War II add to our understanding or experience of 9/11? ...

The Museum of Natural History doesn't have exhibits on space rockets or other scientific marvels. The Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn't hold laser light shows that explain to children about astronomy (or Pink Floyd). The Vietnam memorial in DC didn't tag on a few names of war dead from the Korean war. There's a time and a place for everything. The museum at Ground Zero should have one purpose and one focus: to remember the people that we lost that sad day.

I don't get mad easily. Beyond just being a generally calm, happy person, I'm pretty used to arguing or disagreeing with people and maintaining a happy disposition. Whatever the argument, whether over Iraq or Chimpy McHalliburton, I don't feel that adrenaline rush that I once might've. I don't get angry. Well, this story is the first in a while that made my blood rush. How dare they want to use this place for this idiocy? How could it even be up for debate that some anti-American propaganda should be included?

For some, there's just never an inappropriate time to castigate America as evil.

See, that's how they show their "love" of country and patriotism. It's a higher love, you understand-- one that we couldn't hope to comprehend. The sort of love that expresses itself through constant vitriol.

Eh... A lot of guys, I'm told, do say that they show their love through smacking around their wives, just because they burned a casserole. How else they gonna learn?

But We Need "Perspective" and "Nuance" Update: Perspective and nuance are nice enough, I guess, but I notice liberals only seem to call for them in some situations.

Did any liberals call for "perspective" and "nuance" in response to the racist dragging death of James Byrd, for example? No they did not, and rightly so. It was a horror. There was no "perpsective" necessary to "contextualize" that horror.

Liberals did not recoil from calling that act by its proper name-- evil.

So spare me the claims that liberals are just such amazing thinkers and so supremely objective that they refuse to call evil by its name as a general matter. They can call evil by its name.

In some cases, however, they choose not to, and in fact recoil from attempts to elicit that word from their mouths.

Why the distinction?

I need it explained to me why the racist murder of one man is "evil" (PS, I agree with that assessment) but the racist/religious-maniacal mass-murder of 2800 calls for "context" and "balance."

I need that explained, and I need it explained pretty fucking quickly. I've been asking this question since 9-11 and no one is willing to tell me why it is, precisely, that we should despise James Byrd's killers but "understand the root causes" of Islamofascist rage at the West and its concommitant mass-slaughters.

Suppose we put up a memorial to James Byrd. (We probably have.) Now suppose I wanted a so-called "Tolerance Museum" to stand right next to it, in which I would display exhibits meant to explain the racist hatred of some whites against blacks-- the general animosity towards race-based quotas, the (sorry to bring it up, I know it's touchy) much-higher per-capita rates of ciminality among blacks, etc.

Liberals would scream. In fact, many conservatives would scream, too, and rightly so, as such an "Tolerance Museum" is either by design or by happenstance an apologia to some extent for the murder.

Racial tensions do need to be discussed... but not at a memorial for a man slain due to racist hatred.

Why is this such a difficult proposition for some on the left to comprehend?

Posted by: Ace at 12:23 PM | Comments (12)
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Weird. I was just watching VH-1's 100 Greatest Hard Rock Bands, and I was really digging Alice Cooper (whose music I don't know at all, apart from the fun "School's Out" and lame "I'm Eighteen," which didn't even appeal to me when I was about to turn eighteen).

I'm always surprised by rock guys who are 1) smart 2) articulate 3) actually polite and nice-seeming. Dave Navarro is another guy like this. Actually, he's sickeningly nice, but still, likeable enough.

And now Alice Cooper, generous and interesting in his praise for other rock acts, says he enjoys the heavy metal thunder we're delivering to terrorists:

INTERVIEWER: A lot of people in rock and roll, it's very fashionable to despise George W. Bush. That's not a view you subscribe to, is it?

ALICE COOPER: Well, I think if you're in a war, you don't want a poodle in there, you want a pit bull. I don't think that you want a guy in there going, "Gee, I don't know. Maybe. Could be." I think you want a guy in there who's either going to win it or lose it.

...

INTERVIEWER: It doesn't worry you, the false connection that was made between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein, all that stuff that's been shown?

ALICE COOPER: No. It doesn't bother me because I honestly think it's all connected.

INTERVIEWER: The one thing we do know about 9/11 is that nobody involved in it actually came from Iraq. That's probably the one thing we absolutely know.

ALICE COOPER: Well, it's probably true, but I can't see them going, "Oh, gosh." The guys in Iraq going, "Gee, how horrible for America." I think there's a general feeling in that world that if America falls they'll be in a much better state, so we have to view those people in the same boat. I don't see much difference between the al-Qaeda and Iraq - not the people, I'm talking about the governments. The people, the poor people, are the victims.

INTERVIEWER: Saddam and Osama bin Laden actually hated each other.

ALICE COOPER: Hated each other a lot, I'll bet. They traded Rolls Royces. You don't think there was a cigar going around when that happened at 9/11. I'll bet you there was.

For a dunderheaded genre of music, there seem to be a lot of fairly intelligent people in heavy metal/hard rock. (And an awful lot of ninnies in more "sophisticated" genres.)

And hard-rockers/heavy metal-ists skew more conservative than any other performers (outside of country music, of course).

Bonus: He's a Christian?

Not being religious, that doesn't mean I appreciate his words more (or less), I just think it's interesting.

Wasn't this guy vaguely Satanic or something? If not Satanic per se (as other hard rock bands were overtly), he was definitely macabre, anti-social, and into shocking the straights.

Ah well. I guess you can justify a lot under the pretext of "showmanship."

Posted by: Ace at 11:55 AM | Comments (38)
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Unbelievable:

"I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas WoodÂ’s use of the a---hole word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through and I think demeans the man and is one of the reasons why people are slightly sceptical of his motives and everything else.

"The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."

Let me repeat:

"The issue really is largely, speaking as I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."

He was "treated well"? Fed "every day"? Well, yes, except that he had been kidnapped.

And he calls his tormetors "assholes," and this fucking Mary thinks he's "insensitive."

Bear in mind, this is not some idiot on a website. This guy is a writer for a mainstream Australin publication.

It is a fact that many left-liberals openly sympethize with the terrorists. This is undeniable.

If liberals want to remove any questions about their patriotism, then they should be patrolling their viciously anti-American brethren for these sorts of unhinged remarks, and calling them out for them.

You cannot let such comments slip past with silent semi-approval and not expect people to read into that. If you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.

Stop lying down with dogs. Better yet, pull a (metaphorical) Old Yeller on these rabid sonsabitches.

Little bonus: Douglas Wood's co-hostage wants to pay bounty hunters to track down and kill these, yes, assholes. A Swede, of all things.

I can't wait for our super-sensitive-but-also-super-patriotic left-liberals to start having the vapors about that.

Posted by: Ace at 11:51 AM | Comments (17)
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The sort of review that puts me off of a movie.

You know how some reviewers trash a movie, but in a way that makes you distrust them? Or else their criticisms are of the sort that you don't sweat?

This isn't one of those pans. The stuff he talks about makes me hesitant about seeing this, except maybe on DVD or Pay Per View.

Not happy about the central premise-- that zombies have begun to form a rudimentary intelligence, engaging in primitive communication and basic military strategy.

I didn't mind the "fast zombie" alteration to the basic zombie rules. But I'm afraid I must draw the line at semi-intelligent zombies.

Guilding the lily ruins it sometimes.

And the obligatory social commentary? Class is stratified between the haves and have-nots and gated communities are bad and the people who smugly live in them are bad, etc.

Um, isn't that bit of social commentary better suited for a film coming out in 1991 or so? And didn't they already make the movie, under the title "They Live"?

Why not do a biting satire about the Eisenhower Administration instead? That would be equally topical and "edgy."

Oh, well. The master of zombie survival horror seems to be a master no more.

(Actually, his color remake of Night of the Living Dead was pretty sucky, too. Let's face it, he peaked with Dawn of the Dead, and that was from the early eighties.)

Allah Says It's Even Worse Than That: Apparently George A. Romero casts the film as an America vs. terrorists analogy, and, of course, he's not quite with the WoT program:

His zombie sagas, which also include the critically lauded 1979 masterpiece "Dawn of the Dead" (the remake of which was a hit last year), are splatter-happy and sweat-inducing survival dramas, but, as Romero says modestly, he likes "to throw in some observations about what's going on in the world."

"Night" evoked Vietnam-era bloodshed and, with its black male lead trapped in a farmhouse, echoed civil rights hysteria. "Dawn" poked fun at soul-deadening consumerism. And "Day" addressed ethics in science. With "Land," Romero tackles issues of safety and boundaries, showing a community fortifying itself against a murderous horde while its wealthiest keep alive class divisions separating them from the powerless.

"It's the folly of saying, 'Everything's OK, don't worry about it,' " says Romero, who wrote "Land" before the events of Sept. 11. Its focus then was about "ignoring social ills, setting up a synthetic sense of comfort."

He says he didn't have to tweak it much to reflect new fears of terrorism. When told that it's hard not to think of Iraq watching an armored car of trigger-happy humans roll through a zombiefied suburb shooting anything they see, Romero smiles. "That's one of the things I put in there afterward."

One of the mistakes these dopes keep making is that they set up a film with an inarguably real threat but then attempt to suggest the threat is fictitious-- a dramatized version of Michael Moore's famous "fictitious war" Oscar screed.

But... see, guys? Even if that's what you believe is going on in the real world, in the fantasy world you've set up, the threat is genuine. So the political point you're making is in direct contradiction of the dramatic situation you've constructed.

Was there a real threat in the Star Wars sequels? Well, there ought to have been; Lucas never really seems to be able to decide if the menace is a phantom one (his political take on the real world) or a genuine one (which is what the movies require if we're to care about who wins or who dies at all).

It's pretty tough to make an anti-war fantasy war movie. It's much easier to make an anti-war movie about real war, because there's obviously so much horror in war.

But these sci-fi/fantasy guys really ought to give up trying to make "complex" points in movies with rayguns and flesh-eating shambling dead.

Posted by: Ace at 10:27 AM | Comments (26)
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Supposedly Hillary! said something like that.

I had a whole big-ass post on this a while ago, but Geoff in the comments says it tersely:

The problem with the liberal concept of "patriotism" is that they are patriotic only to their personal conception of what the country should be. This renders the idea of patriotism meaningless - it is trivial to say that one has a loyalty to one's own world views. Their unbridled criticism results, then, from the failure of the country to satisfy their individual tenets about what it should be.

The conservative idea of patriotism is more externalized - love of country as it is, even when it doesn't match up to our notions of what it should be. This tempers the criticism from the right, and provides a natural unity and cohesion (called "marching in lockstep" by our friends on the left).

The left is like the naive bride who marries a guy presuming that she can change him into someone she can love. The right is the bride who decides that she loves him, warts and all.

My post (I'll have to find it) noted that any husband who tells his wife "I kinda-sorta love you, in a way, but I hate almost all of your entire past history, and I despise your current values, but if you change all that, then I will unequivocally declare my love for you" is a guy who's looking to sleep in the garage.

But again and again this is what the left tells us constitutes their "love of country." They show their love by obsessing over the flaws of the supposed object of their affection.

Again-- hey, I'm as annoyed by this country as any liberal. Doesn't mean I have any hesitancy about being a patriot.

I guess the difference between a conservative's and a liberal's love for America is this:

Warts and all, conservatives are smart enough to realize this is the most beautiful wife we'll ever get.

Liberals, on the other hand, still have their eyes fixed firmly on the real object of their true affections-- Europe.

Conservatives may compare America to an unreal idealized version of what a country could be. A bit of harmless, nonthreatening fantasy.

Whereas liberals are always checking out the hot hootchie that lives across the pond called "Sweden."

Posted by: Ace at 10:57 PM | Comments (114)
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Lorie sums it up nicely.

Look, after the attacks by Dean, Reid, and of course Dickie Durbin, you can't really whine about Karl Rove.

Notice the right rose up in anger to repudiate attacks made on our troops. The left seems only capable of stirring itself into outrage as regards made on the left itself.

Anyone notice that distinction? I think the American public just might.

Posted by: Ace at 08:26 AM | Comments (75)
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Bush is, of course, standing by Rove's statement.

Look, his statement has the unfortunate property of being true. After 9-11, many liberals, though not all, reflexively went into "why do they hate us?" mode and speculated upon the myriad ways America could change its behavior and dole out international welfare to pay terrorists off.

They were also pretty down on the whole "war" thing, and in fact often recoiled from using that word. They were in favor of a "response" to mega-terrorism, but not a "war" on mega-terrorism.

All? Of course not. Not all. Peter Beinert of TNR is and was strongly patriotic and favored a muscular military response. Christopher Hitchens -- a contrarian of the left, and yet still of the left in most ways -- was eloquent in championing America and calling for the obliteration of its enemies.

And of course not all (or even most) liberals are unpatriotic. Although it pains me to say it, I have little doubt, for example, that Aaron Sorkin, producer and writer of the West Wing and screenwriter of A Few Good Men, is quite patriotic about America. A love of America drips from his writing, even though, of course, that is love of America's potential as a liberal bastion. He's a dickhead and a crackhead, but he does love America.

And there are many, many liberals who feel similarly.

But not all. A large number of liberals -- or perhaps left-liberals, more accurately -- view America with disdain sometimes bordering on contempt sometimes bordering on outright hatred. They see America as a positive force for evil in the world, and they're not shy about saying so.

And the Democratic Party, while not endorsing such sentiments exactly, uses anti-American "code words" (you know, like those racist "code words" conservatives are chaged with using) to communicate their broad sympathy with the America-hatin' left while retaining plausible deniability.

Witness Dick Durbin. Durbin could have made his point using language that left little doubt about his love for America -- he could have simply said that America is the greatest moral force in the world, and that we should not taint ourselves by being anything less than that, even dealing with those who frankly deserve it -- but he didn't. He compared our troops to the Nazis, Soviets, and the Khmer Rouge.

I think liberals often believe there's a tension between patriotism and the capacity for an intelligent critique and healthy sketpicism about one's country. They don't feel comfortable praising America, because, they think, such praise undermines their central complaints about the American system. Many liberals feel they cannot simply say "America is the greatest country in the history of the world" without hurting their agenda for change and "progressive social justice."

But that's nonsense. Conservatives have all sorts of gripes about America -- indeed, on some days, after some Supreme Court decisions, we seem to do little else but grouse about this country -- but we have no problem declaring, as full-throatedly as possible, that despite this country's problems, it remains a beacon of freedom and hope. No matter how annoyed we might become at our government or by the PC regime which seems to run the country, we do not hesitate to praise America.

Why can't the entire left do the same? As I've said, there are many on the left who are strong patriots (even if they love a different version of an idealized America than conservatives do). Without doubt, they have what they consider to be strong complaints about America, but why is it they are so shy about declaring their love for this country, warts and all?

Until they're able to overcome this reflexive anti-patriotism, this rather hair-triggered response to perceived "jingoism," they can continue expecting conservatives -- and the voting public at large -- to question their love of country. If many liberals choke on any words of praise for America, it can hardly be surprising to them that people seem to notice this, and guess (quite rightly) that maybe many liberals despise this nation.

And they can expect some vicious parodies, too. Like The Therapist's mock-news article, in which Democrats complain that Karl Rove didn't temper his remarks by slamming American troops.

Posted by: Ace at 08:07 AM | Comments (58)
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