For the love of Saint Cindy, Our Lady of Perpetual Publicity.

The media is so determined to make news out of Saint Cindy's daily ranting/tanning regimen that they're actually now publishing photos of protestors taking pictures of media photographers.

Coming Soon: A Comso article titled The Barking Moonbat's Guide To Better Orgasms.

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Comments (5)
Post contains 74 words, total size 1 kb.

Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt, two great bloggers/authors, have been making hay over the deaths associated with RU-486.

Bill from INDC points out that that rate of death is extraodinarily small. Far less than the death-rate for anti-depressants, for example.

One thing that I don't like about liberal argumentation is their tendency to avoid addressing issues head-on. They instead, rather deceitfully, choose to argue around the edges, to make proxy arguments while avoiding their real arguments.

I think that Michelle Malkin and Hugh Hewitt are both much more concerned about the 100% death rate for the embryo than they are about the 0.00108% death rate for the women taking the drug.

I just don't think this is a very compelling line of argument. If abortion is wrong, argue that. If the wide availability of RU-486 will increase abortions, which one believes to be a bad thing, say so.

But making back-door kind of arguments about a very low risk of death for the woman taking the drug (a risk that she is of course informed of)... that doesn't seem to really address the central issue.

These risks should be publicized, of course. And let's be honest, it's not like Brian Williams is going to tell you about them. So Michelle and Hugh are performing a service here.

But such a small mortality rate hardly justifies taking a drug off the market. Unless you're talking about the very high mortality rate for the embryo, but that's not the argument that's explicitly made here.

Posted by: Ace at 09:31 AM | Comments (38)
Post contains 264 words, total size 2 kb.

But the media will continue to portray her as a "normal American everymom," reverse-Dowdifying the quotes most likely to alienate the moderate middle of the country.

She's a left-liberal ultra-pacifist conspiracy theorist, trafficking in the looniest and most discredited of sinestrophere ravings. Which is her right; this is America (or, as I prefer to call it, "Amerikkka," because it just looks nicer that way).

But a media that was truly interested in reporting "just the facts" would not continue to sugar-coat and reverse-Dowdify her foolishness and vitriol.

Posted by: Ace at 09:20 AM | Comments (6)
Post contains 99 words, total size 1 kb.

Captain Ed reported this before, but now he has a Weekly Standard column on it.

The media and the 9/11 Commission both made a lot of hay about Bush's failure to "connect the dots." But there seem to be a number of dots they themselves are not terribly eager to connect up.

And... Tenative confirmation of Captain Ed appearing on next week's show. This just might come up.

Posted by: Ace at 09:13 AM | Comments (1)
Post contains 104 words, total size 1 kb.

And by "age," I mean the last seven or eight months.

Michael Wolff, a thoroughly useless media vamp and basically a long-form blogger (in the sense that he makes off-the-cuff silly speculations, and seems to write primarily to provoke), made this claim.

They say politics is show-business for ugly people. Breathless media hype opinionizing seems to be politics for people even uglier than politicians.

Oddly enough, Richard Cohen, a liberal but more professional and less interested in self-promoting soundbites than Wolff, slammed him for his remark:

You guess, and then you write!" Cohen blasted later at Wolff. "This is a crappy little crime, and it may not be a crime at all."

Wolff is basically an Attitude Artiste. His writing (I'm told, by people who bother to read him) is fairly good, but he just doesn't have a lot to report or anything approaching substantive analysis, so he gets by on snark and Big Grabby Opening Paragraphs that are never quite supported by the drivel that follows.

Nothing wrong with that, I guess. Just not sure why he's making a lot of money and I can't even sell a hundred tee-shirts.

Must be his smoldering Freddy-Mercury-esque looks. Minus the moustache and wifebeater tee's, of course.

Posted by: Ace at 08:15 AM | Comments (22)
Post contains 221 words, total size 1 kb.

As usual: I did not see this one coming:

The United Nations bankrolled the production of thousands of banners, bumper stickers, mugs, and T-shirts bearing the slogan "Today Gaza and Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem," which have been widely distributed to Palestinian Arabs in the Gaza Strip, according to a U.N. official.

The U.N. support of the Palestinian Authority's propaganda operation in the midst of the Israeli evacuation of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip has provoked outrage from Israeli and Jewish leaders, who are blaming Turtle Bay for propagating an inflammatory message that they say encourages Palestinian Arab violence.
...

The Arabic slogan, which refers to disputed territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, has become ubiquitous in Gaza, where Israeli soldiers this week are evacuating 21 settlements. It's served as the central message of a Palestinian Arab effort to spin the withdrawal as a victory.

A special representative of the United Nations Development Program in the Gaza Strip, Timothy Rothermel, told Fox News that his office provided financial support for the production of materials that make up the Palestinian Authority's propaganda campaign, timed to coincide with the Gaza pullout. The Palestinian Authority's withdrawal committee developed and produced the posters and other items using U.N. money, Mr. Rothermel said.

In addition to the slogan "Today Gaza and Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem," many of the materials displayed the logo of the United Nations Development Program, which operates in 166 countries and spends about half a billion dollars a year.

The UN

Let's be honest: If we actually bring peace to the world, that's the end of our Caviar Wishes and Champagne Dreams lifestyle. Once you've gotten a taste of $1000-a-night call-girls, it's really hard to go back to economy class.

Thanks to OgreGunner.

Posted by: Ace at 07:47 AM | Comments (6)
Post contains 305 words, total size 2 kb.

Thrice, as a matter of fact. I love saying that. Thrice. It just feels so satisfying.

military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly.

The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the bureau.

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview on Monday night that the small, highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 attacks were still being planned.

"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.

He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.

"It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.

The Defense Department did not dispute the account from Colonel Shaffer, a 42-year-old native of Kansas City, Mo., who is the first military officer associated with the program to acknowledge his role publicly.

Jim Geraghty of TKS is invaluable, of course, but honestly, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, this is no time to go all wobbly.

The intelligence officer and Able Danger team-member who's come forward -- a Lt. Col. Schaeffer -- gave CNN an interview and suggested the 9/11 Commission didn't seem very interested in getting the documents from the DOD; or at least they weren't interested enough to submit their request to the agency actually running Able Danger:

S. O'BRIEN: But I was essentially asking you if they were lying, which is sort of a yes or no answer there.

SHAFFER: I can't — I'm just letting you know what I — what I said. I said, specifically, that we, as through the Able Danger process, discovered two of the three cells which conducted 9/11, to include Atta. Now — and I — that was, to me, significant, in that they actually pulled me aside after the meeting and said, "Please come talk to us and give us more details."

Now, back to the information that DOD passed to them. DOD passed two containers, approximately briefcase-sized containers over to them in the February-March time frame of '04. That is not one-twentieth of the information which was available out there on Able Danger and the project.

And plus, they asked DIA for it. It was not a DIA project. And I think they asked the wrong questions of DOD in some cases. And I know for a fact right not DOD is trying to get to the bottom of this.

State Department Warned Clinton Too: When even the milquetoast ninnies at State are warning you, it's probably a good idea to listen:

State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.

In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.

BONUS! Judicial Watch got a hold of this document through a FOIA request.

As per the NY Times stylebook, when Judicial Watch nettles the Bush Administration, they're just a public-policy watchdog.

But, as usual, when they go after the Clintons or Democrats, they're a

conservative legal advocacy group

Dang, they're clever. They've made themselves impossible to parodize.

Posted by: Ace at 07:42 AM | Comments (13)
Post contains 826 words, total size 5 kb.

If whoever has been doing these can remember where they were, could ya copy and repost them here? Funny stuff.

Revealed! Written by SluBlog.

I love SluBlog because he's so dumb. He sends me tips before he blogs them himself. And he contributes content in my comments that really should be posts on his site.

God love his blessed retardheart.

Posted by: Ace at 07:09 AM | Comments (67)
Post contains 66 words, total size 1 kb.

Well, this changes everything!

It was criminal for Cindy SheehanÂ’s son to die for Israel rather than for the true interests of America.

From the beginning, this war was orchestrated from top to bottom by Jewish Neocons that saw the war as one for IsraelÂ’s strategic objectives. They ramped up the war through Jews such as Perle and Wolfowitz, the false intelligence through CIA analyst Stuart Cohen and by IsraelÂ’s Mossad, and had a compliant Jewish-dominated media to cheer on the war. The truth is the Iraq War has inflicted incredible damage on America and the American people. It is war against America rather than in defense of America.

Not really unfair guilt-by-association; after all, she allies with people who say the same sort of thing. In fact, she tends to say the the same sort of things, including the same sort of things about Israel:

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel.

Thanks to Irwin.

Posted by: Ace at 06:51 AM | Comments (14)
Post contains 202 words, total size 1 kb.

Hmmm... didn't I just cover the Mary Jo White memo last week? And how she pled to tear down Jamie Gorelick's Wall of Silence, and warned it would end in tragedy?

For some reason this story seems to be getting a second round of play... by the conservative-leaning press only, of course. I guess the NY Post actually obtained the memo it had previously only heard about.

At the risk of hearing "That's old"....

August 17, 2005 -- PRESIDENT Bill Clinton's team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was "very dangerous" and could have "deadly results," according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post.
Then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote the memo as she pleaded in vain with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to tear down the wall between intelligence and prosecutors, a wall that went beyond legal requirements.

Looking back after 9/11, the memo makes for eerie reading — because White's team foresaw, years in advance, that the Clinton-era wall would make it tougher to stop mass murder.

"This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities," wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.

"The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results."

She added: "We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous."

White must have felt like Cassandra, foreseeing dangers that proved all too real while no one at Clinton's Justice Department would listen. Team Clinton put up the "wall" in 1995 and it stayed up until after the 9/11 attacks.

Sandy Berger's Pants Are Nicely Packed Update: The American Thinker wonders what's going on "down there."

Posted by: Ace at 06:33 AM | Comments (7)
Post contains 340 words, total size 2 kb.