Friends were telling me for a while this was a funny show. Have you ever resisted watching something just because a friend oversold you on it? And then you sort of watch it with him, but you only begrudgingly say, "Yeah, that was okay," because he's sold it so hard you're just not in the mood to buy?

Well, anyway, my friends were right. It's a really good show. But I'm sure most of you know that. It borrows a lot from The Simpsons, but that's okay, because The Simpsons is now unwatchable; a watchable ripoff of that show is welcome.

And it gets a little silly, using that sort of humor that turned me off from The Critic. Every other scene is someone saying, "Yeah, that was as bad as when X did Y," and then there's this absurd (and usually unfunny) flashback, usually involving some pop-culture reference. I hate those.

Although they can be funny sometimes. The son remarks, "I'm as confused now as I was after watching No Way Out," and then there's a flashback to the kid leaving the theater, wondering, "How the hell does Kevin Costner still get work?"

But the rest of the show is pretty funny.

My favorite part is how they treat the daughter Megan. She seems to be a ripoff of Lisa from The Simpsons. Lisa is, and will always be, the lamest cartoon character in the history of the universe, worse even than Grape Ape or Jabberjaws. And Family Guy seems to get that, and they make their own Lisa really, really lame, and generally ignore her as a character, except to make nasty fun of her and make her life a living hell.

Very satisfying for those of us who've had to sit through that obligatory one-in-five Simpson's stories focusing on Lisa.

Anyway. Don't mean to oversell the show. It's Just Shoot Me funny, not, say, Seinfeld funny, or Simpsons-at-its-peak funny. But it is one of the few comedies on TV worth watching at all.

A little trivia (from Jon Favreau's Dinner For Five): Show creator and voice-actor Seth MacFarlane was scheduled to be on the first plane that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, but missed it due to his assistant's error as well as the fact that he was hung over from drinking.

Posted by: Ace at 10:43 AM | Comments (32)
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Andrew McCarthy (Class, Wild Horses) bugs his eyes out on the verge of tears over Gorelicks's absurd defense of her policy, and the Commission's refusal to call her as a witness.

The wall generally forbidding intelligence agents from communicating with their criminal counterparts was a suicidally excessive way to ensure that what little information intelligence agents were permitted to pass would be admissible in court. This is the product of a mindset that insists, beyond all reason and common sense, that terrorism is just a law-enforcement problem. The object of a rational counterterrorism approach is to prevent mass murder from happening in the first place, not to improve your litigating posture for the indictment you return after thousands of people have been slaughtered.

Ummm... what Blaine said.

For the more conspiratorially-minded, some speculation that the Gorelick Wall helped Clinton by preventing intelligence sharing in the Chicom Donations scandal.

Now, I don't usually buy those triple-bank-shot "who benefits?" sort of Internet Detective manifestos. But I guess if the other side can scream Halliburton, Halliburton 24/7, I can at least post that link, while noting my skepticism about the theory.

Much more likely it was the usual liberal urge to overprotect civil liberties at work. There is certainly some benefit to that urge -- protecting civil liberties at the expense of state power is not exactly a crazy idea, after all; a lot of conservatives agree with that idea in principle -- but, with the clear and very present danger of Al Qaeda operatives attempting to blow up the WTC (remember? first happened in 1993? ring any bells), perhaps this wasn't the best time to so severely choke off interagency communication.

As Burke from Aliens would say, "It was a bad call, Ripley."

Thanks to Sue Donhim.

Posted by: Ace at 10:27 AM | Comments (14)
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Vows by next week they'll have a full twenty protestors!

Isn't it funny our fair and balanced media provides 30 cameras for coverage of a dozen left-wing protestors, and not a single camera for thousands of anti-abortion protestors, for example?

Posted by: Ace at 10:19 AM | Comments (5)
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Michelle Malkin with a blizzard of links.

Jim Geraghty has a really good what we don't know/what we need to know summary.

And yes, he asks the question that commenters have: Was Sandy Berger reading documents related to Able Danger when he walked out with a passel of them in his panties?

I have to admit I've been a little worried that this story would end up cutting conservatives politically. After all, while this discovery was made on Clinton's watch, and the info wasn't shared due to Jamie Gorelick's now-infamous wall of separation, Bush still could have done something.

But the fact that former terrorism-denier and the Democrats' new favorite ex-CIA agent is trying to throw cold water on the story reassures me.

More On Sandy "Docs In His Socs" Berger: Dr. Sanity notes that this gives Berger motive. Or, as Columbo would say, motive, means, and opportunity.

The biggest defense of Berger has been the claim that there was nothing in those National Archives sufficiently sensitive or embarrassing to justify a deliberate theft of original memos... and their subsequent illegal destruction.

Of course there wasn't any nefarious intent, Berger's defenders argued; there just wasn't anything sufficiently compromising to cause him to act in such a bizarre fashion.

That defense has just been rendered inoperative.

Posted by: Ace at 08:59 AM | Comments (56)
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By advancing the story not an inch. Boy, I'm glad we have such a magnificent institution with so many resources at its disposal.

They also alter a Franken quote to make it seem like less of an admission. Actually, this is Radio Equalizer's find (the link above), but Michelle Malkin boldfaces the altered words and runs them next to the actual quote.

Posted by: Ace at 08:52 AM | Comments (3)
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Let Phinn provide a brief recap:

I think the Able Danger story is going to be the biggest of the year.

A. A SOCOM unit, run by Gen. Shelton himself, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, identifies Atta and the Brooklyn cell as a threat as early as 1999. (It doesn't hurt that the unit has a cool sounding name, too.)

B. A year before 9/11, they recommend that that the FBI close down the cell. (Who was president a year before 9/11 again?)

C. DOD lawyers (lawyers!) overrule this recommendation, and refuse to allow the Able Danger guys to pass this information on to the FBI, because Atta has a legal immigration status, and they are worried about political fallout after Waco. They put Post-It notes over Atta's face so that all reference to him is kept secret (a nice touch, dont' you think?).

D. The 9/11 Commission chose to omit any reference to it or investigate. This is inexcusible, regardless of how accurate the story is. It clearly deserves to be addressed and the facts explored, to be proved or disproved.

Oh, and, by the way? The lawyers wouldn't okay passing that info on to the FBI almost certainly because of the wall of separation erected between intelligence services... by none other than 9/11 Commissioner, and Clinton hack, Jamie Gorelick.

Gee, you don't think that might have played a role in the deicision to omit this tidbit, do you?

Posted by: Ace at 06:03 PM | Comments (56)
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Yes, that's right. They're now publishing op-eds by the man who bought one of the cell phones used to detonate the explosives at the US Embassy in Nairobi.

The terrorist cocksucker's Al-Guardian piece is headlined:

Give up your freedoms-- or change tack

Blair's anti-terror measures are exactly what Bin Laden wants

Well, he'd be the one to know, wouldn't he?

Via the guest-bloggin' gang over at Instapundit.

Ace of Spades HQ

Not really all that good of a blog, but at least he's MAN ENOUGH to blog in August without calling on Michael Totten and Megan McArdle for help.

Posted by: Ace at 05:56 PM | Comments (7)
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They suppressed the information because it ruined their Atta timeline-- and left open the possibility of that meeting in Prague with an Iraqi Intelligence Service officer.

Word to the sinistrosphere: This is a big story, with major ramifications. Not that somewhere in America there's a woman who lost her son in war and is upset over that fact.

More: The 9/11 Commission -- that Smorgestborg of Saints -- claims it was never told of the Able Danger intelligence. Curt Weldon calls them on the carpet on this lie-- they were briefed twice by AD team members.

They simply "forgot" to mention AD at all, because it conflicted with their preconceived timeline. They didn't even mention it. They ignored it. And, called on ignoring it, they lied.

Weldon implies that commission staffers refused to pass the information up to the actual commissioners. Well, we'll see. We will definitely see.

Posted by: Ace at 05:15 PM | Comments (16)
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What's the worst that could possibly happen?

Ummm, okay, legal disclaimer, because this is going to end in tragedy for someone out there: Don't. Just don't.

Cool pics, though.

Thanks to GeorgeG.

Posted by: Ace at 01:53 PM | Comments (41)
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It's so dumb it's actually... well, it's still dumb. But it's better than Q-Bert, at least.

Thanks to Bill.

Aw, Come On: All that and I don't even get to move on to the next chick. There is no next chick.

Posted by: Ace at 01:50 PM | Comments (8)
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