I've busted the Mercurial Martinet for changing his position more frequently than an F-16 with a missile locked on its exhaust, but he's quite consistent on three points.

1, Torture is very very bad, and so is "rough treatment," even though he used to be a big fan, and it's a moral outrage that terrorists are humiliated by having their sisters and mothers called "whores."

Got news for ya, Andy-- I went through a lot of such torture in grade school. And high school. And college. And, um, the adult years, too. Last week, as a matter of fact.

2, He doesn't mind praising himself: Five years and counting here at this blog. Not many big blogs are as independent and non-partisan as this one.

Uh-huh.

3, You'll be super Zeta-Chi Psyched! to know that he's still taking contributions for the bandwidth fund: If you've enjoyed it for years and want to support this kind of forum, please consider throwing a donation into the tip-jar.

Notice... he doesn't say whose tip-jar. Catch my drift?

I saw this yesterday myself, and Kaus mentions it today, but I'll hat-tip NickS for being nice enough to send it along to me.

Posted by: Ace at 08:56 AM | Comments (2)
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Their headline, not mine:

Brazilian bandits pull off big boob job

More than 400 breast implants nipped from postal service van

Yeahp. "Nipped."

H/t to Craig.

Yeah, I Know: The story actually comes from Reuters. But I think that re-publishers of stories make up their own headlines when they want.

And I don't think there's much question that Reuters has no sense of humor.

Posted by: Ace at 08:51 AM | Comments (12)
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Off of Drudge, a CIA agent says that Plames neighbors knew she worked for the agency.

If true, game over.

On Brit Hume a lawyer said there's no possible breach of the law here. To be a "covert agent," one needs to take "affirmative action" to conceal the agent's identity, and he pointed out, quite rightly I think, that driving to the main gates of CIA headquarters at Langley every day for five years is simply not compatible with such concealment of identity.

Real covert agents almost never go to Langley. They work exclusively out of a front office.

She was also teaching a lot of other agents/analysts, thus revealing her identity to a lot more people. True, she was revealing her identity to CIA agents, but real covert agents don't expose themselves to a great number of even fellow CIA agents.

And also, the act requires the agent to have been deployed overseas within five years. According to Joe Wilson's own book, they had been living and working stateside for six years before this "outing."

There's wiggle room there. Just because Plame was based in DC doesn't mean, I guess, she didn't take one or two short missions overseas, which would satisfy that requirement of the law.

But the other stuff still makes this question moot. The lawyer on Brit Hume said: You can go from being a real clandestine operative to a Langley-based analyst or manager, but you can never go back.

Believe it or not, foreign intelligence services actually, get this, try to snap pictures of people making their way to Langley every day.

A lot of people like this story a lot, a CNN interview in which Wilson says his wife wasn't clandestine when "outed" by Novak, so I guess that's another blow to the theory that a law was broken. To be covert, again, one must be, well, covert, and maintaining that cover, and if even Wilson concedes she wasn't anymore, game over.

And Mickey Kaus is on f'n' fire on this story (read today's and yesterday's stuff). Both Rove and "Scooter" Libby have said now that they got their information from someone in the media, for example. Making the theory that Judith Miller started this all more plausible (although of course not close to proven!).

But more interesting is the rather obvious statement -- someonone has to say the obvious -- that if Joe Wilson really wanted to safeguard his wife's identity, he shouldn't have become involved in such a matter of high political interest (and he shouldn't have lied about it, gone on Meet the Press, etc.)

And even more interesting is the first Plame item from yesterday. The media continues to insinuate that there was no possible reason to link Wilson to Plame, except for political payback. Not so, of course-- Wilson lied and claimed that Dick Cheney's office sent him to Africa, so putting the actual facts of how he came to have this assignment both refutes that he was Cheney's personal emissary and discredits the rest of his tale of sipping sweet mint tea.

But what is usually unmentioned is what we all know-- there was a big, liberal-leaning, anti-war, "leave-Saddam-in-place" contingent in the CIA. The CIA was split, and parts of it were actively feuding with the Administration. Under those circumstances, it becomes quite important to note that this mission was not authorized or requested by Cheney or Tenet, but by a little clique of lower-level CIA agents. And if a group of anti-war, anti-Administration agents want to tank the case for war, who better to send than one of those agent's husband, a liberal Democratic operative who surely must have known which way the clique wanted the report to skew?

Interesting bits of the story, which actually add drama, context, nuance and details to it all.

The media claims to be interested in such things.

But here these little bits of interest are in conflict with the media's partisan and dumbed-down telling of the tale, so no one except the consevative press and blogosphere mentions them.

Correction! What the hell is this investigation even about?

I bloviated above that a few overseas missions of short duration might still satisfy the requirement that the covert op be assigned overseas.

Not so, says Hubris. He cites this
op-ed written by some of the drafters of the act in question stating that a few brief overseas jaunts will not satisfy the "based overseas" requirement:

Her status as undercover must be classified, and she must have been assigned to duty outside the United States currently or in the past five years. This requirement does not mean jetting to Berlin or Taipei for a week's work. It means permanent assignment in a foreign country.

As Hicks would say -- "No, I'm Hicks, he's Hudson" -- my apologies, as Hudson would say: "Game over, man! Game over!"

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (21)
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With the world tearing itself apart, and the nasty partisanship even turning American on American, I always remember my dad reading me Yeats:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"Son," he told me, closing the well dog-eared tome of poetry, "what I read you right there is what we call pussy-shit, and if I ever hear you talking that kind of faggity let's-just-get-along loser-talk I will take you out to the shed and split your fucking head wide-open sideways. Now go out there and win, win, win, you stupid Sally-ass pansy!"

He was a true inspiration. And he will be missed.

Not that he's gone. I just don't talk to him. You try dealing with that kind of fucking maniac on a daily basis.

One day I told him that I'd learned from physics class there might be more dimensions in physical space than we are capable of detecting by ordinary means, and he just screamed at me, "Great! More fuckin' dimensions! Just what I needed! Now get me a another damn-bastard Ballantine Ale, Nancyboy!"

Still, he's right. The poem sucks.

Posted by: Ace at 10:20 PM | Comments (36)
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Rove heard the rumor from Novak, not the other way around.

Well, Rove had heard it too, as he told Novak. But Novak brought it up first.

Look, it seems a lot of reporters knew about the very non-covert Ms. Plame. Andrea Mitchell admitted this.

Absurd.

Lorie links Captain Ed, too, who wonders, as I have: How come we know all this? Isn't grand jury testimony supposed to be confidential, and illegal to disclose?

Proof positive of our partisan press. Remember when there were grand jury leaks during the Ken Starr investigation of Clinton, and we never heard the end about that? How such leaks rendered the entire investigation corrupt and Clinton thereby innocent?

Funny the press doesn't question grand jury leaks when a Republican is being investigated, innit it?

Posted by: Ace at 09:59 PM | Comments (67)
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Ask:

Would you agree that the current state of support for terrorism in the world is due to George Bush's policies and his invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan?

After they answer "Yes" -- which of course they will -- read them this:

Support for Osama bin Laden and suicide bombings have fallen sharply in much of the Muslim world, according to a multicountry poll released on Thursday.

The survey by the Pew Research Center examined public opinion in six predominantly Muslim nations: Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Jordan and Lebanon. It also examined views in nine North American and European countries as well as in India and China. In all, more than 17,000 people were questioned either by telephone of face-to-face.

"There's declining support for terrorism in the Muslim countries and support for Osama bin Laden is declining. There's also less support for suicide bombings," said Pew Center director Andrew Kohut.

"This is good news, but still there are substantial numbers who support bin Laden in some of these countries," he told a news conference.

In Morocco, 26 percent of the public now say they have a lot or some confidence in bin Laden, down from 49 percent in a similar poll two years ago.

In Lebanon, where both Muslims and Christians took part in the survey, only 2 percent expressed some confidence in the Saudi-born al Qaeda leader, down from 14 percent in 2003.

In Turkey, bin Laden's support has fallen to 7 percent from 15 percent in the past two years. In Indonesia, it has dropped to 35 percent from 58 percent.

...

A similar picture emerged when respondents were asked whether suicide bombings were justifiable. In Morocco, 13 percent said they often or sometimes could be justified, down from 40 percent in 2004.

In Indonesia, 15 percent expressed that view, down from 27 percent in the summer of 2002. Support for suicide bombings also fell in Pakistan and dropped dramatically in Lebanon.

And then watch them splutter.

Bush's fault? Fair enough, sir.

Add insult to injury by mentioning this quote from a world-renown expert on gaining or losing support from masses of people:

When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse. -- Osama bin Ladin

PS: It spoils the fun a bit, but in the interests of accuracy, it should be noted that support for sucide bombings increased in Jordan (and only Jordan among the surveyed nations), rising from 43 to 57%.

And in both Jordan and Pakistan support for bin Ladin increased:

However, in Jordan, confidence in bin Laden, who took responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and many other attacks, rose to 60 percent from 55 percent. In Pakistan, it went to 51 percent from 45 percent.

That's margin-of-error type stuff, though.

Liberal baiting aside... have Muslims finally begun recoiling from the horrors that many have been supporting? One can only hope.

Posted by: Ace at 04:03 PM | Comments (12)
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The French -- who, Dennis Miller said, he would call scumbags, but that would be a disservice to bags filled with scum -- really seemed to want to vote for the ultra-Gallic John Kerry in the 2004 election.

I'm beginning to understand this whole cross-national voting thing:

M Chirac’s biggest needling is coming from within his own camp, in the person of Nicolas Sarkozy, the cabinet minister and leader of the President’s UMP party who is campaigning to take the Élysée Palace in 2007.

M Sarkozy, 50, is using Britain as a weapon. He said: “Who would have thought that in 30 years, Great Britain would become a leading light in the world ? They have modernised the country, fundamentally revised their values, abandoned taboos and achieved a great ambition.”

M Sarkozy infuriated M Chirac by dismissing his “policies of 50 years ago” and saying that there was no point in his Bastille Day show since he had nothing new to say. Such insubordination underlined M Chirac’s declining authority as he sought to explain his latest recipe for cutting unemployment yesterday.

M Sarkozy is known to be pro-American, too... or at least as pro-American as is politically permissible in France.

And, yeah, I know not all Frenchmen -- or "Frogs," as my pappy calls 'em -- are scumbags. Merely 55-65%.

Posted by: Ace at 03:24 PM | Comments (3)
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Current TV's target audience?

Our target consumer is authentic, a person who really cares about what's going on in their world. They are 18-34-year-old young adults, both male and female who have graduated from MTV and are looking for more depth, reality and lifestyle appeal in their media.

More depth and reality than can be found on MTV? The duece you say!

This is going to be a disaster.

By the way... the target consumer is "authentic"? First of all, who doesn't consider themselves "authentic"?

But more importantly-- those who place the most emphasis on being "authentic" are the most inauthentic people in the world. It's a derangement of the young (and many baby boomers, who never grew out of the quixotic and sophormoric seventeen-year-old mindset), the need to adopt some new "deep" persona that isn't actually one's own but borrowed from a mentor or celebrity or a book or a political theory. Those who strive most for "authenticity" subvert their own authentic personalities, desires, and preferences in order to emulate the persona of someone they deem "authentic."

Al Gore: the very model of "authenticity."

Can't wait. Cannot wait.

Thanks to Charles.

Correction: The newsletter forwarded to me said the interviewee's name was "Karl Marx," but that was later corrected. It's just Carl Carter. Not sure how they messed that one up.

Loose shit on my part.

Posted by: Ace at 11:55 AM | Comments (36)
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Shocker.

These murderous bastards are permitted to preach murder on campuses and recruit unformed-but-searching retarded little minds into the ranks of Al Qaeda.

Does freedom of academic expression actually embrace conspiracy to commit murder?

When the hell are we going to get serious about these things? How many more people have to die before something more than 40% of our country (and Europe, and the world) decide that enough is just goddamned enough?

Your Patriotic Academy

We'll expel students for posting flyers for Republican guest speakers, but we'll be damned before we cast out professors who agitate for actual mass-murder. You can't make an omlette without fragging a few officers or decapitating a few commuters.

Meanwhile... In San Fransisco... City supervisors vote 8-3 to reject hosting historic WWII battleship USS Iowa as tourist attraction and floating museum.

In order to protest, you know, war and associated boy-stuff, as well as the military's mistreatment of gays and lesbians, and also, maybe, something to do with shade-grown coffee.

Uhhhh... I'm starting to think that Star Trek lied to me by claiming that San Francisco would wind up as the Federation's galactic headquarters.

Posted by: Ace at 11:00 AM | Comments (49)
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Today is apparently random link day.

With a Martin Sheen-sounding ominous narrative, and music by turn martial and tragic, giant hornets invade and slaughter a nest of bees.

I don't know why I'm behaving this way. I don't don't do this for a living.

Thanks to Nathan.

Posted by: Ace at 10:47 AM | Comments (18)
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