I know the Brits put pressure on Pakistan after it was discovered three of the 7/7 bombers went to Pakistan terror camps for training; but how could such a shift possibly come now, after the 7/7 attacks, when no such crackdown came after 9/11?

What sort of pressure did the Brits (and US, presumably) apply?

And is this a real crackdown or an Arafat-like series of revoloving door "arrests"?

I have no idea about what this means, if anything:

After a blitz of detentions of suspected militants and Islamists, Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf called for a holy war against preachers of hate and announced steps to curb militant Islamic schools and groups.

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Musharraf spoke on Thursday in a televised address to the nation, which was awaited with keen anticipation both at home and in Britain after revelations of Pakistani links to the July 7 bomb attacks on London that killed at least 56 people.

"I urge you, my nation, to stand up and wage a jihad (holy war) against extremism and to stand up against those who spread hatred and chaos in the society," Musharraf said.

But he had a message for Britain too, saying it had plenty to address on the homefront in the war against terrorism without getting into a blame game with Pakistan.

In the last week, Pakistani security forces have detained close to 300 people, prompting Pakistan's Islamist opposition parties to call for nationwide protests on Friday against the authorities' crackdown.

The vast majority of those detained were picked up in countrywide raids on private houses and madrasas, or Muslim religious schools, during the past two days.

This makes it seem like a real dragnet and not a PR ploy:

As Musharraf spoke, security forces raided the house of Hakeem Ehsan Jigranwi, president of the Punjab chapter of the Pakistani wing of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the eastern city of Lahore, detaining him and another man.

Musharraf addressed some British anxieties by announcing steps to rein in militant Islamic schools and organizations seen as having influenced the bombers. He said all madrasas would have to register with authorities by December.

He also said banned militant groups would not be allowed to re-form under new names or to raise funds, unauthorized arms would be strictly prohibited and action would be taken against the distribution of literature designed to spread hatred.

Some of the 50 suspects rounded up in the eastern province of Punjab this week were members of the outlawed Jaish-e-Mohammad and a splinter group allied with foreign al Qaeda operatives hiding in Pakistan.

In the southern province of Sindh, police have arrested 45 people, including Maulana Ali Sher Hyderi, a top leader of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a Sunni extremist group with a record of attacks on minority Shi'ite Muslims.

But in Karachi, Sindh's capital, Deputy Inspector General of police Mushtaq Shah said no arrests were made during overnight raids on several madrasas and mosques. "It appears that they have gone underground, but we are chasing them," he said.

Hmm... I didn't think we could ratchet up the pressure on Musharraf much more than we had been doing, but maybe I was wrong.

Of course, if this results in the destabilization of Pakistan and the takeover of the country by now nuclear-armed terrorists, that's trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P that stands for preemtive nuclear strike.

Posted by: Ace at 03:22 PM | Comments (8)
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Wow. His remarks are even more abhorrent than I realized.

I don't support terrorism, but...

And man, does he follow that "but" with some real corkers.

The anti-war, anti-violence left sure seems to applaud some kinds of war and violence.

Posted by: Ace at 02:57 PM | Comments (9)
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How could the MSM write these articles, if not with helpful quotes from left-wing scientists who fret about all new weapons systems?

Ignore the asshole scientists; there is a danger of people being hurt by a less-lethal weapon (that's why they call them less lethal weapons, and not, say, "Completely Safe To Shoot At A Child's Eye Weapons"), but it seems a safer response than opening up .50 caliber machineguns into a crowd:

Scientists are questioning the safety of a Star Wars-style riot control ray gun due to be deployed in Iraq next year.

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The Active Denial System weapon, classified as "less lethal" by the Pentagon, fires a 95-gigahertz microwave beam at rioters to cause heating and intolerable pain in less than five seconds.

The idea is people caught in the beam will rapidly try to move out of it and therefore break up the crowd.

...

"What happens if someone in a crowd is unable for whatever reason to move away from the beam," asked Neil Davison, coordinator of the non-lethal weapons research project at Britain's Bradford University.

I don't know, Neil. What happens if the microwave radiation triggers a genetic mutation turning the crowd into slavering mutant man-boars? I guess someone will wind up getting hurt.

But, again, what happens when someone in the crowd does not possess the super-martial-arts ability to dodge machinegun fire? I guess they end up getting hurt, too, Neil.

I love that every MSM headline about a new weapon has to contain a mention of the "worries" of "scientists" about possible "harm."

They could mention the "hopes" of "engineers" about possible "fewer deaths," but they never seem to, do they?

No bias, of course.

Posted by: Ace at 02:22 PM | Comments (19)
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Seems to be entirely in error. See correction at end.

A radio spot actually points that out, KKKids:

If youÂ’ve ever doubted that the DemocratsÂ’ luminaries are either A) loopy and/or B) convinced that their constituents are total morons, then listening to George SorosÂ’ commercial detailing the evils of Karl Rove will forever erase any doubts. I first heard it last week while driving through New York State and listening to talk radio, and my first impression was that it was a clever and very funny spoof on the DemocratsÂ’ feelings about Karl Rove.

A very lugubrious voice starts by telling the audience that Karl Rove, Like George W. Bush is from Texas and therefore, like Bush, heÂ’s a liar. In the background a whispering second voice echoes what the first voice is saying, "he liesÂ…" Then the voice goes on to say that Rove leaked the name of a secret CIA agent to the press, all the while accompanied by the whispering voice echoing "CIA agent to the pressÂ…" Finally the voice says that Karl RoveÂ’s name starts with the letter K, just like the Klan. Then to make sure that no one would think this was a clever spoof, a tag at the end of the commercial informs the listener that the commercial was paid for by George Soros.

The next shoe to drop: "Rove," much like "Hitler," contains the letter "e," long known to be the "power-mad cryptofascist of the Latin alphabet" and the "sexually deviant Caligula of the alphanumeric family."

Can't make this stuff up.

Well, you could, but that would be senseless.

Correction/Retraction: Damn, I wish I could just delete this post, but some stupid "rule" about "openness" says I have to keep this embarassing post here.

A commenter tells me that the writer of the linked piece got this 100% wrong, and that this ad IS a spoof, one from Rush Limbaugh's show.

I don't know for sure, but it sure does seem too ridiculous to be real.

Sorry.

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (23)
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The video. H/t to Traffic Non-Santa.

A quickie transcript:

PRIME MIN. HOWARD: Could I start by saying the prime minister and I were having a discussion when we heard about it. My first reaction was to get some more information. And I really don't want to add to what the prime minister has said. It's a matter for the police and a matter for the British authorities to talk in detail about what has happened here.

Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor. Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq -- a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations -- when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

Now I don't know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I've cited. The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

PRIME MIN. BLAIR: And I agree 100 percent with that. (Laughter.)

Thanks to K-Lo at The Corner.

The left hates the term "appeasement." But the definition of appeasement is giving in to the demands of your enemy in order to placate him.

And the left is urging just that -- mollifying the Islamofascist enemy -- which I'm getting around to calling worse than even the Nazis -- in the hope that doing so will make them less angry with us.

When will they get it?

The Islamofascists do not need fresh provocations for their mass murders. They have 1400 years of greivances they want payback for.

And, by the way, the ideology is expansionist, imperialist, and colonialist-- they want to control all territory they once held, and they want to controll all territory which Muslims have, through immigration, "colonized." They believe it against the demands of Allah for any Muslim to subjugate himself to any authority except a strict Islamic one.

Do you really think they just want Israel and Iraq?

What about the disputed areas of Kashmir? What about Muslim-heavy areas of the Balkans? What about East Timor? What about non-Muslim parts of Lebanon? What about Africa?

What about the scores of smoldering little civil wars going on all over the world, the majority of which involve Muslims fighting non-Muslims?

Why does the left insist on believing that actual diagnosable psychopaths -- and I am NOT using that term hyperbolically; Islamofascists are true psychopathic murderers -- are somehow "reasonable" and if we just give them a little they'll be satisfied with that?

Does a shark stop eating after its third fish?

You can appease to your heart's content, ladies. But they want Spain back too.

So please write out a list of all the territory of the world you are willing to cede to viciously medieval thugocratic rule in the interests of buying "peace" from people who have told you, out of their own mouths and with no equivocation, they simply want to eradicate you and there's nothing you can give them that will change their minds.

Worse Than Neville Chamberlain? Hitler at least promised peace if he was appeased.

Smart people knew he was lying. But at least he claimed he would live in peace with the world if his demands are met.

So, Neville Chamberlain was a naive sap of a punk-assed chump bitch, but at least he had, on paper, a "peace" agreement.

Note to the left: Osama bin Ladin, Al Zarqawi, and the rest of the Islamofascist killers aren't even offering you an armistice. Quite the opposite. They have said, multiple times, that they intend to kill you or subjugate you and you cannot buy their peace simply by giving into their demands.

They're not even trying to lie to you. They are telling you upfront: The world will be under Islamofascist rule or there will be murders until that point.

On that score, they're more honest than Hitler.

But that makes those on the left worse than Chamberlain.

At least the left has found one sort of imperialism, and one sort of viciously anti-modern religious lunacy, it really can get behind. I guess that shows a certain amount of open-mindedness.

Posted by: Ace at 01:39 PM | Comments (19)
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Almost Incomprehensibly, A Yoko Ono Effort At Making Music Fails Disastrously; Experts Stunned

She's doing a musical, allegedly about John Lennon, that almost entirely omits any mention of the Beatles and in fact contains almost none of even John Lennon's own solo-career songs, in order to trick the public into seeing a musical which is actually about her own damn-important self.

One of the only songs in the piece is The Ballad of John and Yoko.
Because, you know, it mentions her.

At what point will Yoko realize that, like, no one likes her? Or that she's untalented? Or that she just plain sucks?

Thanks to Allah for reminding me that I hate Yoko Ono.

The Ballad of John and Yoko

What a stupid fucking whore
She makes Wonkette look like a saint
like Heather Graham, or someone like that.

Posted by: Ace at 12:57 PM | Comments (14)
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For those who want to blame the the London bombings on Iraq, The Anchoress reminds of us previous "sass" by Islamofascist murder-cultists, back before Iraq was even a gleam in George Bush's eye.

Posted by: Ace at 12:29 PM | Comments (9)
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Not a partisan gunslinger himself, Maguire lays out the case that Rove certainly could have, and likely did, have access to the State Dept. memo mentioning Plame.

A commeter who worked for the CIA says that it not unusual for (S) to mark a paragraph. So, according to this anonymous commenter, Pincus' report may be accurate.

On the other hand, it's been pointed out that real NOC's -- real covert agents -- are not protected by "Secret" classification, which most people working in government are cleared to read. Real NOC's are codeword-clearance.

Still, even if Plame's cover was so thin, so transparent, and so ineffectual that they donwgraded this "secret" to the non-secret "Secret" level, that would still mean the information is classified (barely, but still classified), and that anyone disclosing it, knowing that it was classified (or who reasonably could be said to have ought to have known) would be in violation of the law.

Maybe not the IIPA, which is the law most have focused on, but a more general law about disseminating classified information.

To be honest, I've sort of thought Karl Rove would be pinned on this since Lawrence O'Donnell first hyped it. No particular reason, except my general belief that most rumors are true, or nearly true.

While the right should continue to insist the left prove its claims, and patrol them for going beyond what the evidence actually says, it may be time to consider the possibility that Rove will be caught dirty on this one, and may have to be cut loose at some point.

And, you know, condemned for breaking the law.

I'll give Valerie Plame one thing-- she knows her tradecraft. She and her husband peddled lies and arranged it so that the only way to expose them was to break the law.

On The Other Hand... Joel Mowbray says that Cooper's further statements vindicate Rove and Libby.

I don't know. Mowbray puts a lot of weight on the fact that Rove and Libby weren't "shopping" the story, but merely responding to a reporter's questions.

Okay... but the law doesn't prohibit "shopping" classified information. It prohibits revealing it, whether one pushes the story or merely answers a question.

Mowbray scores points as far as the politics of this go, but not necessarily as far as the legalities of it all.

Posted by: Ace at 12:11 PM | Comments (24)
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Because this dirty little bastard writes cool pieces and gets them published by the Weekly Standard.

Mocking the left's self-designation as "the reality-based community," SoxBlog rejoins with an article about actual American voters called "The Electoral-Based Community," and notes that the goofball left of the Democratic Party is actually taking bloggers quite seriously.

And that's, you know, not a good thing. Sure, I'd love the ego-stroke of a conservative politician asking for my political advice, but I don't think he's going to get too far with the Ace of Spades go-to plan of calling an opponent a "douche-tool" or "stupid fucking bitchwhore."

But lefty politicians are taking just that sort of advice from, let's face it, blithering idiots from the sinistrosphere, and SoxBlog doesn't think these attempts to court the 600,000 goofiest and angriest and most left-wing dipshits in America are likely to produce any W's on the scoreboard:

The Democratic party, on the other hand, errs in precisely the opposite fashion as Trudeau. While Moulitsas recognizes that the left-wing blogosphere is a world unto itself, if establishment Democrats have any awareness of that fact they have yet to betray it. Where Trudeau feels bloggers are a bunch of shut-in half-wits, the Democratic party seems to be under the impression that bloggers are an enormous, important constituency--and that it must go to whatever lengths necessary to win the hearts and minds of this virtual community.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A MAJOR MISCALCULATION, because the politics of the left-wing blogs are far out of the American mainstream. Where most of the 120 million Americans who voted in the last election bear a benign indifference to political matters, the left half of the blogosphere seethes with hatred for George W. Bush and his supporters. What's more, the blogs take numerous positions that would strike all but the most passionate Democratic partisans as patently preposterous. For example, several of the left-wing blogs recently ran an advertisement that referred to West Virginia Senator and former Ku Klux Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd as an "American Hero."

Also, the level of discourse on the Daily Kos and other prominent liberal blogs is not something that would be attractive to the majority of the American public. The writings are often obscene and usually relentlessly hostile and negative. Crude personal attacks, whether aimed at right-wing bloggers or politicians, are the order of the day.

...

And yet mainstream Democratic politicians are desperately trying to ingratiate themselves with Kos and his audience. A Who's Who of top tier Democrats have written "diaries" for the site, including Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and Ted Kennedy. The above listed politicians, and their less mainstream colleagues (think the John Conyers/Louise Slaughter variety), are constantly romancing the Kossacks.

More ominously--and more to the party's detriment--its leaders have adopted the blog's hysterically shrill style as their own. For instance, Ted Kennedy's diary for the Daily Kos adamantly demanded "accountability" for Iraq. When you've entered a realm where Ted Kennedy is a straight-faced champion of accountability, you know for sure you're in "a different world." [NOTE: this term is in quotes because it's one of Kos' pet phrases.]

...

Yet the kowtowing continues. What makes the endeavor ridiculous is that Moulitsas and other left-wing bloggers want substance: They don't want their rhetorical style aped--they want a politician to champion their far-left views. And yet the Democratic party has adopted the juvenile patois of the left-wing blogs without any corresponding shift in position, so they continue to pitch their woo in vain. These stylistic makeovers are transparent and therefore unsuccessful; the left-wing blog readers presumably see as clearly as anyone else that Harry Reid is an unconvincing firebrand, Ted Kennedy is not a credible champion of accountability, and Robert Byrd is a preposterous nominee for American hero.

As I've said before: the GOP has well-earned its nickname "The Stupid Party" through the years, but it appears that the Democrats have begun coveting that designation.

Eh. Democrats are naturally more faddish than Republicans, and always more clumsy about trying to seem "hip to what those crazy kids are doing these days."

Howard Dean just couldn't contain his pride at saying his favorite song was "one you never heard of" by Wycliffe Jean, whoever the fuck that is, John Kerry thought he was pretty cool miming smoking a doobie at a Peter, Paul, & Mary-fronted fundraiser, Al Gore wore Dockers and a inadvertant fifth-grade unruly erection for the cover of Rolling Stone.

And Harry Reid & Co. now think it's cool to traffic with people who call US contractors "mercenaries" ("screw them... I feel nothing" about their murders) and everyone to the right of Adlai Stevenson a "Nazi."

They can sort of get away with it, because the Mainstream Media, ever on guard against "extremism," just isn't very interested in left-liberal extremism, for some odd reason about which I wouldn't even dare to speculate.

They can sort of get away with it... for now.

Posted by: Ace at 11:50 AM | Comments (6)
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A tunnel crossing the US-Canada border discovered and shut down; five arrested.

The tunnel was of course for smuggling drugs (pot, I guess), although the article doesn't actually say so. It just says it was for "smuggling." I doubt they're talking about maple syrup or vintage Wayne Gretzky jerseys.

I'm sure drug-runners would never stoop to taking a nice fat stack of cash to let a foreign-born Muslim with a strong interest in US foreign policy and a big backpack use their drug-tunnels.

Incidentally, twelves such tunnels have been discovered between the US and Mexico. This is the first one found beneath the Canadian frontier.

Thanks to LauraW.

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (20)
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