A diversity hire, because the Guardian considered itself too "pale and male;" and they're standing by their little jihadi journalist, despite his membership in the most radical Muslim organization in Britain.

Posted by: Ace at 10:02 AM | Comments (7)
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At least according to the left.

Rick Santorum, famous gay-hater, has a gay (and black) spokesman.

The left of course despises the spokesman for being a traitor to his race and sexuality, and so has outed him as gay. (They would have outed him as black, too, but his skin's high concentration of melanin already gave that away.)

Remember: Everyone's private sexual conduct is their own business... so long as you're liberal.

Thanks to The Blogometer, which has further quotes and links, including a response from a furious Santorum.

Posted by: Ace at 09:10 AM | Comments (9)
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DO NOT CLICK ON THIS IF YOU'RE READING THE BOOK AND CARE ABOUT THE ENDING. The link gives away the ending.

I'm not into Harry Potter... but this is just assholery of the first order.

Some people just need attention. And they don't much care if it's good attention or bad attention.

And yeah, okay, Boston Irish and I did sort of the same thing for a week when The Crying Game came out. But one, no kids were involved (I hope no kids were seeing it, anyhow) and two, the producers and studios were so annoying about not giving away the "suprise twist" (which most people knew about) it seemed justified.

Thanks to Evan.

Posted by: Ace at 09:01 AM | Comments (24)
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Libertarian-leaning John Tierney wants to know what all this is about, and (by implication) why his own employer won't shut the f' up about it.

Via BizzyBlog, which takes us through a guided tour of the Decline and Fall of the New York Times.

Posted by: Ace at 08:52 AM | Comments (9)
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So says David Koepp, in an interview given to an obscure Canadian horror mag, thinking no one would notice in our wired world.

Too bad... Koepp is actually a pretty talented writer, a real pro who can deliver a decent script.

John Leo runs down Hollywood for its bitterness at the rest of country, which "just can't be educated" about the real nature of the world:

Hollywood has grown eye-poppingly angry with the rest of the country, mostly over Bush and Iraq, but partly, at least, because the left coasters apparently thought they were somehow entitled to a string of Democratic presidents after Clinton. The upshot is that even mild-mannered nonpropagandists like George Lucas have come under pressure to display their lefty credentials with silly political touches. The first three, brilliant Star Wars had no such touches, but the last three, nonbrilliant ones surely do. In the last of the epics, two anti-Bush lines showed up, “Only a Sith [a dark lord] thinks in absolutes” and “If you’re not with me, you are my enemy.” Lucas said the “enemy” sentence had been written before Bush’s similar words after 9/11. Maybe so, but Lucas had three years or so to figure out the political impact of the line but left it in anyway. Last May, at the Cannes film festival, natural breeding ground for excitedly anti-American prose, Lucas apparently said that his final Star Wars movie, featuring the rise of Darth Vader and the sinister empire, is a wake-up call to Americans about the erosion of freedoms under President Bush. (I say “apparently” because Cannes news reports, appearing only in various Canadian papers, had no direct quotes about a wake-up call, only paraphrases.) Paul Jackson of the Calgary Sun wrote: “Now [Lucas] says the Star War movies a political message: Fight to free Americans from the ever more frightening dictatorial tyranny of the Bush administration.”

...

“There is a tremendous drive in Hollywood to exculpate Islamofascist terrorists,” Michael Medved says. No movie has been made about the terrorists since 9/11, nothing on al Qaeda, the Taliban, Daniel Pearl, Saddam Hussein, the USS Cole, the embassy attacks, the daring and impressive attempts to track down terrorists. Nothing. Not even a movie about heroic action after 9/11—the firemen who ran upstairs to their deaths to save others in the twin towers, the people who drove all night from Texas and the South to help New Yorkers cope with the disaster.

But wait. Help is on the way. Hollywood is still reluctant to irritate terrorists, but a few movies about 9/11 heroes are on the way. And whom did Paramount pick for the highest-profile one? Oliver Stone, the unhinged director/screenwriter who refers to 9/11 as a justified “revolt” against the established order and the six companies he thinks control the world. At a panel after 9/11, Stone said that the Palestinians who danced at the news of the attack were reacting just as people responded after the revolutions in France and Russia. He thinks 9/11 may have unleashed as much creative energy as the birth of Einstein. Internet commentators are going berserk over the idea of a wacky pro-terrorist paranoid directing the first big 9/11 movie.

You know who would be a good guest for our show tomorrow? A screenwriter in Hollywood with Republican credentials who's pretty annoyed at the studios' reluctance to portray the real world we're living in, with real terrorists and real evil.

Someone like Bridget Johnson, a.k.a. "GOPVixen," a journalist and screenwriter in LA, who just wrote about Hollywood's PC attitudes towards psychopathic Islamofascism in her most recent Opinion Journal essay.

Yeahp. That would be a good, timely guest to have.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (6)
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Silly because it's true. Really only for people watching Rock Star: INXS, but funny if you do.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (3)
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Osama bin Ladin and a lipstick lesbian in the same story. Honestly, I'd have to link it even if it wasn't very good. But it is pretty interesting:

No wonder Irshad Manji has received death threats since appearing on British television: she is a lipstick lesbian, a Muslim and scourge of Islamic leaders, whom she accuses of making excuses about the terror attacks on London. Oh, and she tells ordinary Muslims to “crawl out of their narcissistic shell”. Ouch.

Manji is a glamorous Canadian television presenter whose book, The Trouble with Islam, has made her so famous in America that she won something called the Oprah Winfrey Chutzpah award. Even at a conference in Oxford last week she felt unsafe — despite extra security — with police sifting through “disgusting e-mails” and threats after her appearance on Newsnight.

Doesn’t the violent Muslim minority show Islam is flawed? “I ask myself the same question,” she grimaces. Far from regarding Muslims as oppressed they have a “supremacy complex — and that’s dangerous”. This, she contends, is true even among moderates. “Literalists” who consider the Koran the “perfect manifesto of God” have taken over the mainstream; and far from misreading Islam, as Tony Blair and the Muslim Council of Britain insist, terrorists can find encouragement for murder in the Koran.

Perfect point. One sad irony I've noticed is that Muslim terror-apologists have two main talking points: 1) the US is "arrogant," and 2) "What you don't understand is..."

I've heard "What you don't understand is..." so many times I could vomit. I'm tired of people simultaneously calling me arrogant and then arrogantly explaining to me what I don't know (which, by the way, I've heard before; I just disagree).

A large part of this insanity is fueled by pathological chauvanism and pan-national cultural jingoism... but not on our side, on theirs. They really do believe they are fated to be the inheritors of the earth, and the fact that the US sits as the 400 pound gorilla in the room that won't give up the banana drives them nuts. They're supposed to be the Masters of the Universe; how can it be that infidels seem to be in that position?

As it would take too long to build up the Islamic world economically and technologically to take the world primacy Islamicists have wet dreams about it, they've decided to take a short-cut: just destroy the people, spirit, and economy of the West. They can't bring themselves up, but they have a chance of bringing us down.

All nations or cultures are infected with chauvanism or jingoism. As a proud American, I don't think that's a bad thing. I feel I have more in common with, say, a chauvanistic German than an American who doesn't like being an American and considers himself a "global citizen." The German and I can spar on whose culture or nation is superior (and I always have those three trump cards of Hitler, the Holocaust, and Dresden), whereas I can't say a damn thing to my nominally-American global citizen pal.

However, when one's racial/ethnic/religious jingoism starts taking the form of bombings and terrorism, you've taken it too far.

The underlying problem with Islam, observes Manji, is that far from spiritualising Arabia, it has been infected with the reactionary prejudices of the Middle East: “Colonialism is not the preserve of people with pink skin. What about Islamic imperialism? Eighty per cent of Muslims live outside the Arab world yet all Muslims must bow to Mecca.” Fresh thinking, she contends, is suppressed by ignorant imams; you can see why she has been dubbed “Osama’s worst nightmare ”.

“The good news,” she insists, “is it doesn’t have to be like this.” She wants a reformation in Islam, returning it to its clever, fun-loving roots. “The world’s first ‘feminist’ was an 11th-century Muslim man. Baghdad had one of the first universities in the 9th century; the Spanish ‘Ole!’ comes from ‘Allah’; Islam even gave us the guitar.”

...

If we are at fault for not encouraging Muslims, they fail to “celebrate the precious gift” of British freedom: “Why do they protest against France for making it illegal to wear hijabs, but not against Saudi Arabia for making it illegal not to wear them?”; more Muslims, she contends, have been killed in recent years by fellow Muslims than by westerners.

...

She excuses Blair glossing over violent aspects of Islam as “he is only trying to divert a backlash against Muslims, bless him” but she despises the Muslim Council for not coming clean. “Even if Muslims are only interested in slick PR, it would be a great move to recognise the problem; it would spread trust. And I am not asking them to do anything Jews and Christians haven’t done.”

....

She denounces terrorism and the response to terrorism, which is not sufficiently robust. It is no good, she argues, for respectable Muslims to say “violence is not the Islamic ideal” if violence has become Islamic practice. And she attacks the proposed religious hatred laws, saying: “Society needs people who offend, otherwise there will be no progress.”

Indeed. But can Manji and her followers provoke Muslims into progress?

I say "Yes."

Lipstick lesbians. Is there anything they can't do?

Posted by: Ace at 10:38 AM | Comments (38)
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Stop those eyes from glazing over. A terrific recap of the evidence about Saddam's interest in buying uranium from Niger and the Congo -- all based on official government reports, both US and British -- and all pretty much embargoed by the MSM.

And-- bonus points -- he deems Josh Marshal to be flat-out lying on this issue. The word "hackery" makes an appearance, too.

Posted by: Ace at 10:21 AM | Comments (6)
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Good satire over at The Therapist.

Posted by: Ace at 08:06 AM | Comments (2)
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Kinda cool. The winner of a Japanese talent show.

I'd say more, but I wouldn't want to give anything away.

No nudity, no Yakuza finger-severing.

Posted by: Ace at 08:41 PM | Comments (8)
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