Comments are fun and and a vital part of this site, but I'm simply not going to expose myself to lawsuits or public contempt so that some jackasses can peddle libelous rumors or Hitleresque hatred.

Just so everyone knows: It's a two second process to ban an IP.

Enough with gay speculations about this person or that.

And please don't quote the libel in a subsequent post, even to argue with it. Just ignore it. I can delete fewer posts that way.

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Comments (44)
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Yes, Orrin Hatch invoked Rule 61(b) of the Senate to invoke his right to label a line of questioning "dumbass."

And who was asking the dumbass questions? Who else? Senator "Dumbass" Schumer.

TreyJackson has links to the audio and video of the exchange. That's the link at the top of the post, dumbasses.

I have to say our political discourse is getting more uncivil and profane by the day.

You're welcome.

Yeah, that's a Jimmy Fallon joke. So sue me.

Posted by: Ace at 10:33 AM | Comments (9)
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Again, Michelle:

Sky News earlier reported that a memo had been sent to hospital staff, at the request of the Metropolitan police, asking them to be on the lookout for a black or possibly Asian man, 6ft 2in tall, wearing a blue top with wires protruding from a hole in the rear.

Brak wondered if "Asian" could mean Muslim. In Britain, it does, or rather it tends to mean Pakistani. Well, it could mean Pakistani or what we in America think of Asian (geishas, moo goo gai pan, Drunken Master martial arts), but given he's either "black or Asian," that sounds like a darker-skinned Pakistani to me.

I know of few black Chinese.

Anyway, back in 2000, shortly before 9-11, there were riots between white hooligans and "Asians," by which the British press meant Pakistanis.

Two men of "Asian appearance" have been arrrested as well, although their complicity in the attacks has not been established. It could very well be that they are completely innocent and arrested on grounds of... well, sorry to say this, but on grounds of simple prudence. It's easier to let an innocent man go after detaining him and questioning him than to track down a guilty man you never arrested in the first place.

But, based on the description of the one 6 ft 2 inch "Asian or black" man being pursued at the moment, I would say the "white supremacists doing copycat crimes to stir racial unrest" speculation is looking a bit, um, premature.

Update/Correction: Not sure if this is right, but he says it in an authoritative manner.

David says that in Britain, "Asian" refers exclusively to Subcontinentals -- Pakistanis, Indians, etc. He says the term isn't used (for reasons I don't know) for Far-East/Pacific Rim Asians.

'Asian' in the UK sense means exclusively somebody from the Indian subcontinent, i.e. Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan. You'd never call a Chinese or a Japanese 'Asian'. I'm not even sure that most Afghans, being relatively light-skinned Caucasians, would be so described.

What term is used for the folks we think of "Asians"? I dunno. Can't imagine they still say "Oriental," which, I'm reliably informed, refers to a rug, not a person.

Maybe they call them what my pappy calls 'em -- "Crafty yella sneaky kick-fighters with magical powers, like elves."

Posted by: Ace at 10:15 AM | Comments (13)
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Boy, I certainly have a bad case of it. I haven't been this excited by a story since I heard Rosie O'Donnell was backing Boy George's semi-autobiographical pop-rock musical Taboo.

Walter Pincus, reliably unreliable, states that the State Dept. memo getting a lot of scrutiny in this non-scandal mentioned that Plame was Wilson's wife, with the paragraph marked (S) for "secret."

He says that that designation is typically used for noting agents working under cover.

Well... who knows what in the paragraph was actually (S). Further, the fact is that the classification regime is notoriously eager to slap (Secret) on any old thing, since it's a lot easier (and safer) to claim something is secret rather than do a real analysis and determine that it's not, in fact, secret at all.

I should note that "secret" is just about the lowest, if not the lowest, level of classified information. Not sure, but I think only "confidential" is lower on the scale. And the three classic categories -- Confidential, Secret, Top Secret -- don't even cover real secrets. Those are bullshit classifications. Real secret stuff is protected by codeword-clearance, where only a limited number of folks are allowed to see the information, and you have to be cleared specifically to view information designated by a particular codeword.

Still, technically, "secret" information is classified information.

The left is going all ape-shit over this, as can be expected. But Pincus knows -- as I'm sure he's complained before -- that bureaucrats routinely and thoughtlessly stamp things "secret" or "top secret" just to cover their asses. No one ever got fired for marking non-classified information as classified; but heads roll if you fail to mark true classified information as such.

He doesn't point that out, of course, though I'm sure he's complained about that a thousand times before.

Long story short: whatever was marked on the memo, Valerie Plame was not a covert agent.

But... there is the possibility that, while she was known by her neighbors as being a CIA officer (and of course known to every foreign intelligence service worth a damn, since she drove to Langely every day for the last five years), her identinty was still technically classified, owing to bureaucratic inertia and incompetence, and so it's possible that someone is technically guilty of revealing classified information.

Assuming they read the memo at all, and did not in fact simply hear this from reporters.

Outside the Beltway thinks it unlikely that someone in the Administration read the memo.

I don't know about "unlikely" -- somebody, somewhere, reads this crap -- but it's hardly proven that Karl Rove or Scooter Libby did.

How Bullshit Classified Information Is So Classified: PiZero provides this link about Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential information.

But, once again, "Top Secret" is nothing of the sort. Low-level FBI agents have Top Secret classification.

Genuine secret information is not allowed to be so broadly read. The real secret classification system is codeword-clearance.

Pat Moynihan talked about this on 60 Minutes, complaining about the overclassification bias in the government. He said, flat out, that Top Secret information was nothing of the sort; real secrets were classified by codewords.

What are those codewords?, he was asked.

"I can't tell you," he said. "The codewords themselves are secret."

PS: The stuff Sandy Berger stole from the archives? Codeword-clearance. The press didn't seem particularly interested in his theft (and admitted DESTRUCTION!) of original copies of genuine secret documents from the archives.

But some State Department memo has an (S) on it and Walter Pincus gets a dangerous erection lasting more than four hours.

A Secret Paragraph? Commenters Russ and BrewFan, who had Top Secret clearance previously, both rather doubt that a paragraph would be labeled "Secret." They seem to think the entire document gets rated according to the highest-confidentiality rating of any information disclosed within it.

If that's right, then Walter Pincus is just making shit up out of whole cloth, or allowing himself to be played. To sex up his report, he needs the (S) in specific reference to Valerie Plame, and he's claiming that the paragraph in question was specifically labled (S).

Rather than the entire document.

I don't know myself. But I will say I trust Russ and BrewFan more than Walter Pincus.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (50)
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I don't have much to say. I could link stuff, but Michelle Malkin has it all as usual.

As you may have heard, London's Mayor, "Red Ken" Livingston, recently blamed the 7/7 attacks on, well, Britain, and also decried terrorism, unless the victims of terrorism were Israelis, for such terrorism he made a special exception.

This is going to be bad. Those who are going to be harmed the most are Britain's Muslims. I say this without any happiness. But these lunatics are going to cause all sorts of problems -- from police scrutiny to random attacks by hoodlums -- on their fellow Muslims they claim to love so much.

It has long been the stated ambition of Islamicists to provoke an all out war of all of the West against all of Islam. More Muslims need to speak out -- and act -- more forcefully against this nihilist psychopathy unless they're comfortable being drafted against their will into this war of all against all.

How Many Times...? One idiot just made a possibly libelous statement about Matt Drudge.

If anyone wants to indulge in a bit of libel or hatemongering, please, start your own blog, and rant to your heart's content. Don't pollute my blog with that kind of crap.

Copycat/Agent Provocateur Attack? There's a lot of speculation about this, given the less deadly nature of this attack and the fact that one detonation was a detonation of, well, just a detonator, without explosives.

The speculation then goes: Perhaps this is the IRA, or perhaps this attack was perpetrated by right-wing ultranationalist terrorists hoping to provoke an additional backlash against Muslim immigrants.

Well, maybe. All things are possible, especially before there's much evidence in.

But once again, those Big Brother cameras that some are so worried about will almost certainly have caught one or more or all of the terrorists boarding the buses. We will have a pretty good idea about the perpetrators, and their likely motives, soon enough.

And even if this is some sort of coypcat attack, it seems a bit early to say the copycatters weren't, in fact, jihadis. They may simply have been Al Qaeda wannabees, inspired by the 7/7 attacks but not having the training at Pakistan terror bases that the 7/7 murderers had.

Sorry, but violent thuggish Islamicists remain the most obvious culprits. The most obvious culprit sometimes isn't the culprit at all, but it seems a bit early to too eagerly chase other culprits before we have more information.

Why Do They Hate Us? Update: Rightwingsparkle goes a-traipsing through an Enlgish language jihadi site and gets the chills.

In the interests of intellectual honesty, I will admit that the left is right-- the action in Iraq, and our support of Israel, does in fact contribute to "why they hate us."

Those who say Iraq and Israel have nothing to do with this are being rhetorically excessive, or a little naive, or just telling what they think is a white lie in the service of a bigger truth.

However-- the reality is that "why they hate us" is, as they say, overdetermined. Meaning: there are so many reasons they hate us that it's glib and stupid to attempt to say they bomb us for this or that reason. They have hundreds of reasons.

If not for Iraq, then for Afghanistan.

If not for Afghanistan, then for Palestine.

If not for Palestine, then for our military presence in the Gulf.

If not for our military presence in the Gulf, then the simple fact that we dominate the world miltiarily, technologically, and culturally, which is an affront to radical Islamicists who believe that Muslims must rule the world, and to follow Allah's teachings righteously, they must fight us to claim world dominion as dictated by the Prophet.

Etc.

And changing our behavior won't change any of this. We risked blood and treasure to save Muslims in Serbia; that won us no fans whatsoever. They're still screaming about the Andalusia and thousand-year-old grievances. Those who believe a charm offensive is going to win the hearts and minds of people still nursing grudges from a frickin' thousand years ago are simply delusional.

They just hate us. Perhaps hate isn't a strong enough word. I use "hate" to express my feelings from time to time, but that hate does not imply anything like the desire to murder people.

They view us, as the Nazis did their foes -- Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs -- as subhuman, dehumanized, nonhuman, and not deserving of the normal compassion and empathy one human feels for another.

Those who speak of reaching an "understanding" with these sorts of viciously racist psychopaths have to be a little more honest with themselves. Yes, the military solution is bound to take a long time and take a lot of lives.

But how long will the "understanding" route take? When your enemies don't even view you with the sort of empathy they feel for a dog, how long, precisely, will it take simply to convince them that you are just as entitled to live a life free of random violence and maimings as a dog is?

And how many lives will be lost pursuing this naive and quixotic dream of "educating" moral monsters in the most basic precepts of shared humanity?

If left-liberals want to pursue the "understanding" route with the self-made monsters of Islam, let me ask: Do you similary support the "understanding" route when dealing with gay-bashers/gay-killers, lynchers, and abortion clinic bombers?

Why the difference in approach? Why do you urge coercive action (jailing for life) for some monsters and endless compassion and leniency for others?

Posted by: Ace at 07:39 AM | Comments (47)
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I know the feeling.

Posted by: Ace at 07:16 AM | Comments (9)
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Not sure what to say about this.

Important bloggers don't give stupid answers about who they "hate."

Real bloggers write powerful, poignant elegies to James "Scotty" Doohan.

True blogging, like true mastery of the Jedi code, requires an abandoment of all hate.

A non-hateful haiku about Wonkette:

Who Gives A Wet Shit About Who You Hate, You Dumb Overexposed Whore?

The Career Fairy is about
to take your fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame
and leave you a nice shiny quarter.

Update! "A Classic Diss": Andrew Sullivan wrongly attributes this "classic diss" to Wonkette, when in fact it was posted by one of her myriad Wonklegangers.

But seriously-- read this weak, barely-makes-any-sense rambling "slam" and decide for yourself if it's a "classic diss."

Does Excitable Andy have any genuine sense of humor at all? Or is he one of those Margaret Cho sorts of comedy-fans, the ones who clap and pretend to laugh at insults they agree with?

There have been "classic disses" on Coulter. I find it gob-smackingly vile that this lame put-down should be one called one of them.

F'n' idiot.

Here's another "classic diss:"

I wouldn't fuck Andrew Sullivan with Andrew Sullivan's dick.

Okay, not really good either. Took me like two seconds to think of that one, and half of that time was spent scratching my balls and staring into space like a thorazine casualty.

Let's see if Excitable Andy also terms it "classic."

"Classic Diss" Of The Day: Log Cabin, who by the way is some kind of homo or somethin', has a much more classic diss on the Humorless Harridan:

I wouldn't fuck Andrew Sullivan with Hillary Clinton's dick.

And just for the record, I believe her dick is named Bill.

Although, actually, I think her dick is named Howard Wolfson. I'm not even sure Bill returns her calls anymore. They communicate primarily through the newspaper, like that guy and Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, except Hillary keeps responding to his various "Miss You, Want You, Need You" classifieds and Bill keeps saying "Sorry, hon, I meant someone else. I swear we'll get together in Nantucket one of these days."

Posted by: Ace at 01:27 PM | Comments (54)
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Oh Scotty, Montgomery Scott,
Master of Transporter Controls.
How we loved you.
They didn't let you command the ship very often,
but we know that's because Kirk knew you were
the fuckin' balls
and so he bitch-rapped you
like McCartney did to Pete Best
who was too good-looking
and so he got Ringo Starr
who was not.
Although he did bang Barbara Bach.

Of all the crewmen
not named Kirk, Spock, or McCoy
You were the only one who mattered
And you knew it.
Uhura was a glorified switchboard operator
and a fucking whore, too, if you ask me.
Sulu was a freaking idiot
who really thought he should have his own command
not realizing that getting one would take him off the show.
And the mop-top Russian
who said "wessels" instead of "vessels"
didn't do a goddamned thing.
At least Sulu got to take evasive action.
What the hell did Chekov do?
Nothing, that's what.
When he got killed
by the Earps
in Spectre of the Gun
no one cried
and no one seemed really to notice.
Three seconds after he died
and McCoy is yukking it up with Doc Holliday.
I was so fuckin' pissed off when that stupid little shit
came back to life.
I'm sure you were too.

But Scotty, O Captain, My Captain,
of the Engineering Deck, of course
Not of the full ship
You really busted some Klingon skulls in
The Trouble With Tribbles
because they called the Enterprise a garbage scow
and not because they said bad things about Kirk.
Who was, as I'm sure you know,
a bit of douche.
A cool douche, to be sure,
kind of like a star quarterback who's kind of likable
but a douche nevertheless.
You know what I'm sayin'.
You wrote a whole book about it.
I think it was called "Captain Kirk Can Suck My Fat One."

You're gone now
reporting for duty in that big Starfleet Academy in the Sky
I mean heaven
Not the actual Starfleet Academy, which is also in the sky
floating above the earth in geosynchronous orbit over San Francisco.
Sorry for the confusing analogy
But I'm sure you understand
you're in Heaven now
and probably enlightened and shit
and had your intelligence score raised to 22.

The only man in the history of Star Fleet
to wear a Red Shirt and live tell the tale
You're now wearing a white uniform
kind of like those queer uniforms in the first Star Trek movie
Only with a insignia in the shape of a Jesus Fish
and a phaser set to "love."
And you're not fat anymore
Cripes, did you blow up between Star Trek I and Wrath of Kahn
What the hell were you eating?
Buffets at Star Trek conventions are for snacking
not for saving money on food costs.

We will miss you.
You said "I donna have the power, Cap'n"
but you've got the power now
the power to descend down to earth and make people's lives turn out right
especially jealous and miserable bloggers
who really want to get a script read.
Do me a solid, buddy.
I owned your action figure
and I never made you have sex with another dude
like I did with Spock and the butt-headed alien
from The Menagerie.
Sick shit.
I made Spock pork his cerebellum.
I brought the Gorn in on the hot gay alien sex too
three-way skull-porking man-on-man-on-lizard action.
But not with you.
With you--
always with the respect.

So sit
Be comfortable
Have some tranya
and have some tranya for me.

Energize.
And Energize for Eternity.

(C) by Ace of Spades. Ace of Spades is the author of a critically-praised volume of Star Trek themed poetics, titled I Swear To God I Think I Saw A Flash of Yeoman Rand's Pooter in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday".

"Distracting Us From Rove-a-mania" Update! Lapsed Leftist wonders if Scotty's death is just yet another "coincidence" benefiting the Bush regime.

I, too, question the timing.

Loose Shit On You: I had to argue with you geeks about the proper title for the episode at the OK Corral. But no one seemed to pick up that I originally wrote, Sit, Be Well, Have Some Tranya.

Isn't it Sit, Be COMFORTABLE, Have some Tranya?

I think so. I could look it up, but I'm lazy. I'm going with it.

Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (50)
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Not sure how I feel about him, really. Not a big fan, but some say he gets a bad rap.

And of course that he corrupts politicians and bureaucrats with lucrative jobs-in-waiting as Saudi apologists, after they retire from government.

As far as I know, he hasn't made such an offer to a blogger, but I'd like to see how that might go... just as a little experiment.

Via The Corner's Andrew Stuttaford, who has little reservation about saying "Good Riddance."

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (3)
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Last entry in Ruffini's rundown of reactions; posted over at (where else?) Kos, but then deleted.

Occasionally I play net-nanny and ask commenters to be restrained in their rhetoric. I guess I will do so again.

Please refrain from nasty homophobic attacks, racist attacks on Muslims (please differentiate between Islamofascists and just plain Muslims), suggesting that "maybe Hitler went after the wrong people," suggesting that liberals (as opposed to liberalISM) be "eradicated," etc.

Comments like that make this site, and the entire conservative movement, look pretty bad. They reflect poorly on me and don't do much to convince moderates to side with us.

And, if we're busily patrolling the Kosmonauts for their unhinged and nasty rhetoric, it's a bit hypocritical to engage in it ourselves.

So... you can make your points in less heated and hateful terms, and it's both more polite and politic to do so as well.

None of this applies to Cedarford, of course. Quite frankly, I've come to appreciate his anti-Jew screeds. It's amusing to me that 2% of the American population (and much less of the world population) can be responsible for so much evil.

Jews are like the Drow ("Dark Elves"), I guess, except with yarmulkes instead of those cool one-handed poisoned crossbows.

Wait-- no, not the Drow. They're not evil or crafty enough. Mind flayers!

Magical Powers: Psionic blast, Suggestion, Hypnotism, Power Word: Stun.

Magic Items: A blessed dreidl; the phone number for Dr. Stanley Kornbluth, the best damn internist in Manhattan.

Funny Exchange... On Roberts' nomination:

"Felonious:" Sounds like he'll be another corporate lapdog like all of bushes appointments. Just what the country needs, another suit.

LauraW: Yeah, he should have put a cool hippy type in the HIGHEST FUCKING COURT IN THE LAND, you drooling halfwit.
Shouldn't you be cleaning your bong?

Note to Felonious: Lawyers wear suits. Let me cite L.A. Law, seasons 1 through 8.

One time I hired a lawyer who wore an old ratty Ocean Pacific long-sleeved tee-shirt (I think it had a picture of a guy surfing on a shark's back) and tie-dyed culottes.

I spent the next three years in the joint.

So, you know: You can't judge a book by its cover, but if your attorney takes his fashion cues from Delgrassi Junior High, you might want to seek alternative representation.

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (38)
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