The Christianist threat.

Where is Andrew Sulivan (patron saint: The Madonna (Louise Ciccone)) when we most need him?

It should be noted that a fair number of Democrats opposed the corrupt judge's elevation to the charimanship, too. Presumably, they're haters too.

Posted by: Ace at 01:46 PM | Comments (145)
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But wait -- I've been assured countless times that fighting terrorism in Iraq is precisely what our enemies want us to do. Greatest recruiting tool for terrorism and all that.

So why does Iran want us out so badly?

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Tuesday that security would not be restored in Iraq until US- led forces quit the country.

"The first step to solve the security issue in Iraq is the exit of the occupiers from this country and leaving the security issues to the people-based Iraqi government," Khamenei said during a meeting in Teheran with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

"Americans will absolutely not succeed in Iraq, and the continuation of Iraq's occupation is not a mouthful that Americans can swallow."

He put the blame for Iraq's insecurity on "some US agents in the region, who are mediators of these policies," and said that "inflaming the wave of insecurity and killings in Iraq will be very dangerous for the US agents and the region."

He also pledged that the Islamic republic would go to Iraq's assistance if requested. "If the Iraqi government asks, Iran will not refrain from any action to establish stability and security," he said.

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (25)
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The mainstreaming of transgenderism continues unabated. Even in our forests.

When Carmen Erickson dropped a deer with a single shot in a cattail slough south of here, he thought he'd downed a nice buck. Unlike his shot, he was a little off. The deer was a doe.

"It's got no male utilities," said Erickson, who lives in Minot. "It has teats ... it was pretty unusual."

Six hunting partners with Erickson witnessed the doe with a 4-by-4 rack.

,,,

"We couldn't find any male genitals on the deer," he said.

"We turned it over, and I got a lot of heat over that. Like I was supposed to know," Erickson joked.

Gary Rankin, district game warden in Larimore, said he has seen a couple of antlered does over the years, but for a doe to have a well-developed rack is unusual.

But welcome.

Thanks to Blacksheep.

Posted by: Ace at 01:26 PM | Comments (41)
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Which should be like every three or four lines.

Spruiell writes:

Let's cut right to what this "civil war" fanfare in the media is really all about: It has nothing to do with the ongoing violence in Iraq, and everything to do with the fact that these media organizations, which are struggling to maintain their relevance in a rapidly changing industry, feel the need to assert themselves and remind the public of their importance, and what better way than by calling the war for the insurgents and starting a push to solidify public opinion in favor of immediate withdrawal?

Indeed. And with their influence greatly diminished, they have to resort to more transparent stunts and shrilly partisan "announcements" to push their agenda.

If no one's paying attention to you, scream louder.

I don't know if that will work. People tend to tune out shrieking after a time.

More: Newsbuster's notes the MSM's failure to "consult experts" in order to officially deem Hezbollah a "terrorist" group.

Guess the jury's still out on that one.

Posted by: Ace at 01:06 PM | Comments (95)
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On FoxNow. Alcee Hastings made the statement himself, so apparently he was told it just wasn't in the cards.

Nancy Pelosi announced she would begin the hard work in finding a sufficiently ethical and qualified replacement for Hastings. First name on her list? William "Cold Cash" Jefferson.

(Not really.)

Posted by: Ace at 12:45 PM | Comments (10)
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A safe for work report on the public pooteration, from ABCNews, which cynically suggests it's a publicity ploy.

Spears is the latest star to give people a glimpse of what's usually covered up, a trend that asks the question: What value, if any, does culture place on modesty today?

On Nov. 22, cameras caught Spears, the recently separated pop star and mother of two, in a leopard-print minidress so short it revealed her underwear.

Two days later, Spears was photographed getting out of a car in a hiked-up miniskirt. This time, her underwear was nowhere to be found.

According to celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, Spears' up-skirt shots are no mistake — they're a classic cry for attention.

"She wants the picture taken. She wants the publicity. She wants people talking about her," Hilton said of Spears. "That's what people love to see more than anything. Why do you think celebrity sex tapes sell so well?"

The photos, which spread virally across the Internet, gained Spears entry to a club ruled by repeat flashers Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Cameras have caught Lohan panty-less four times over the last two months.

"You'd think she'd either wear pants or panties, or be more careful about how she exits a car," blogger Hilton said. "Four times. That's no accident. That's deliberate."

Nonsense. Sometimes, when you're doing six-dimensional matrix multiplication in your head, you just forget to wear your underwear.

Below are the links, which are, of course, not safe for work.

Seriously, not safe for work.

All I know is that Paris Hilton is right there in upskirt beaver shot. She just seems to bring distasteful public displays of sexuality with her wherever she goes.

Okay, once again: Not safe for work.

And more (not safe for work).

I'm only posting this horrid filth to cushion the blow over the claim, from PerezHilton, that there is no Jessica Simpson sex tape. No link; that's all he says. He doesn't link to anything and he doesn't say how he knows this.

Thanks to the Portly Pirate.

Posted by: Ace at 12:43 PM | Comments (105)
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No, not really. Just trying to make a point.

As everyone knows, NBCNews decided to make itself part of the story, and manufacture news, by claiming they had, in their Solomonic wisdom, divined that the violence in Iraq is in fact a "civil war." Which Bush and CENTCOM deny, of course.

Now, one could, without straining definitions, easily categorize the violence as a "civil war." It's not implausible to say we are looking at a sort of low-intensity civil war.

But neither is it implausible to say a true civil war is a higher-intensity sort of affair, not merely abushes and terror attacks here or there, but something resembling open armed combat with battlelines and areas controlled by one faction or the other -- you know, what we usually require for the purposes of calling a conflict a "civil war."

NBCNews violated three major principles of journalism here. More, depending on how you count them.

1) Editorial Bias. Obviously, their claim is designed to cast Bush and CENTCOM as liars, or at least as detached from reality. The media claims to avoid resolving, of their own "expertise," contentious issues such as this (especially purely semantic ones), preferring a he said/she said version of reportage. Note how the media is unwilling to call the Iraqi terrorists "terrorists." Bush and CENTCOM call them terrorists, the terrorists say they're f reedom fighters, the media declines to weigh in on the sematic argument and instead opts for the neutral "insurgents."

There is a lot more clear-cut evidence to call these people "terrorists" than to call the conflict a "civil war." Why is NBCNews so eager to editorialize on one semantic argument but not another?

2) Making themselves the story. "We Report, You Decide." Not for NBCNews. They've decided to report and decide, and, rather than the usual convention of quoting experts for one claim or another, have announced that they themselves are a repository of sufficient expertise to begin rendering judgments.

3) Manufacturing news. There's no new "news" here, except for the fact that NBCNews has decided that it is now a newsworthy player in the conflict itself, and its thinking on this matter is as important -- nay, more so -- than, say, CENTCOM's.

Now, as for my headline: Obviously any plan that involves our troops "redepolying" out of theater -- usually called "retreating" -- is a "cut and run" plan. It is at least a retreat, and a surrender.

This is clear. There is a semantic argument about it, but it is an absurd one -- when you retreat and surrender, well, you're retreating and surrendering. Words have meanings, and "fleeing from the enemy" is a definition of "retreat."

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that retreating isn't our best option; one can still make a case that such a retreat is in our best interests, and may leave us in a better position to attack our enemies than continuing to fight. And one can claim that the war is unwinnable, making a retreat the preferrable choice.

But one thing you cannot claim is that a retreat is anything other than a retreat. The Democrats continue insisting that their plan to cut and run is really a "tough, strong" "aggressive redeployment" to Okinawa. This is a far sillier semantic claim that maintaining that Iraq is not in civil war. Any number of experts can tell you that in standard military terminology, conceding a theater of battle to an enemy and retracting away from it is a "retreat."

And yet NBCNews feels no particular compunction to settle this fairly-easily resolved semantic debate.

Why the difference?

Note that NBCNews, like all other media organizations, has barely any personnel in Iraq at all, and what few they do have are largely stationed in the Green Zone.

But actually going out there and getting into the sand and blood to report on a war is expensive, nevermind dangerous. Far easier to "report" from the safety of the New York offices, with a hundred liberals calling a dozen liberal "experts" to make up some "news" that they already all knew, at least in their hearts.

I anxiously await NBCNews convening a panel of experts to finally resolve the semantic argument over the definition of "retreat." I imagine it's coming any day now.

And then they can get right on deciding if a living human fetus -- undeniably both "human" and "life" -- is a "human life" or not.

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (27)
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The map and timeline, though the latter seems fuzzy. Note that this timeline now claims that the sushi bar meeting with Prof. Scaramello was well before the Millenium Bar meeting with the Russian agents, making the nuke expert seem to be a pretty good candidate for the poisoning in my mind.

Why are all of these traces of the toxin showing up in different places? I don't know, but it seems possible that Litvinenko was slipped something he would continue to ingest throughout the day -- say, a pack of poisoned cigarettes.

Or, let's say he was poisoned via sushi. The radioactive material would be all over his hands (even if he did use chopsticks, he'd have still touched the plate the sushi was on). So he'd be transferring trace amounts of radiation throughout the day.

Via A.J. Strata, who is continuing to push the theory that Berezovsky is behind the poisoning. Which I still think is pretty farfetched. He seizes upon Alex Goldfarb's claim that Litvinenko may have sweated out the poisoon at Berezovsky's offices as a "slip up" in the plan, stating as a fact that Litvinenko couldn't have been sweating radioactive material.

Well, I don't know if that's true, but I don't think Alex Goldfarb is an expert in radioactive poisoning, so either way, I don't see this as a "slip up" so much as a non-expert taking guesses, the same as many of us are.

Given that Goldfarb was in close contact with Litvinenko through his illness, and also worked for Berezovsky, I don't see why traces of the toxin couldn't have been passed to Goldfarb and then to the offices.

Then again, that could just be completely implausible. It seems possible to me just because I don't know what I'm talking about.

But I haven't read that traces of the toxin couldn't be transferred in such a way.

Thanks to Larwyn.

Posted by: Ace at 11:53 AM | Comments (13)
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Those dumb, uncultured, uneducated Canadians:

A Canadian man who could not figure out how to deal with his girlfriend's feverish 10-month-old daughter put the baby into a freezer to cool her down, a local newspaper reported on Friday.

Derrick Hardy faces charges of criminal negligence and assaulting the infant, who was rescued when her mother came home, the Charlottetown Guardian said.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. said the mother found the girl crammed into the freezer alongside ice cubes and hamburger meat.

Come on -- kids love the freezer. Ice cubes and hamburger meat? The only thing that could make it more like Heaven would be if she were buried in Fudgicles.

Hardy said he had left the door ajar but the mother said it had been closed when she returned.

You've heard the old saying: feed a cold, asphyxiate a fever.

Fire needs oxygen to burn, right? 'Nuff said.

He told a court in the eastern province of Prince Edward Island on Thursday the child had only been in the freezer for about 40 seconds.

Hardy, 21, who admitted to police that he had no real parenting skills to deal with a sick child...

He admitted that? Seems like quite a concession.

... said he had noticed the girl was very hot and put a cool cloth on her face, but this had no effect.

He then carried the girl outside into the night air but, frustrated that this also did not work and worried she might drown if placed in a cold bath, he put the baby into the kitchen freezer. She was wearing only an undershirt.

The only thing is... isn't an ice-bath used, sometimes, with a very bad fever?

Just sayin'.

Well, okay, it's different. But the principle is about the same, or might look that way to a moron.

Now, closing the door...

Apparently he was worried enough about the fever to put the kid into an icebox, but not quite so worried to call a doctor.

Thanks to yls.

Posted by: Ace at 04:55 PM | Comments (116)
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He was laughing as he said this, which sort of mitigates it as intended as a bit of silly schtick.

Still, the fact that nobody's talking about this, whereas Rush Limbaugh was already fired by this point in his ESPN-inappropriate-racial-remarks controversy, speaks volumes.

This happened some days ago, and I only just heard of it. Not quite the media firestorm of the Rush Limbaugh comments, is it?

You may have missed when noted sociologist and anthropological expert Michael Irvin stated that Tony Romo must have African lineage in his genome, which explains why the Dallas Cowboys quarterback is such a good athlete.

Said Irvin on a national radio show this week: "He doesn't look like he's that type of an athlete. But he is. He is, man. I don't know ... some brother down in that line somewhere ... I don't know who saw what or where, his great-great-great-great-grandma ran over in the 'hood or something went down."

But he said it and I do not believe Irvin was kidding. The host of the show apparently did not think Irvin was joking, either. He responded to Irvin, "Oh, that's the only way he can be a great athlete?"

"That's not the only way, but it's certainly one way," Irvin replied. "If great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandma pulled one of them studs up out of the barn (and said), 'Come on in here for a second,' you know, and they go out and work in the yard. You know, back in the day."

I'm not sure I should be outraged! by this. I know I'm not. Although I suppose it is the equivalent, sort of, of suggesting that a bright black person must have "some white in 'im."

Maybe it's time for everyone to just stop making such a big deal over such remarks -- on both sides of the racial aisle.

Apparently... ESPN is simply ignoring the story altogether. Just refusing the mention their employee's gaffe.

Again, they didn't seem shy about weighing on Rush Limbaugh, who suggested something far less incendiary. He suggested not that there was any sort of actual inborn difference between blacks and whites, but that the media was a bit too "solicitous" in claiming that Donovan McNabb was a great quarterback to be mentioned constantly in the same breath as Brett Favre.

(And, of course, he was right. McNabb is/was a good quarterback, but not a great, and certainly not in the league of the NFL's all-time elites like Favre.)

Of Course... McNabb wasn't the only quarterback touted far beyond his skills or accomplishments.

I'm a New York Giants fan, so I tend to notice when sports commentators apparently don't ever watch the NY Giants play.

If they did, they would stop saying stupid things about how critical Jeremy "Hands of Stone" Shockey is to the offense, or that Eli Manning is "maturing" and has the promise of being a great quarterback.

Ummm, no, he's not maturing, and he'll never be great. He aspires to be above-average. If he makes it up to Jake Plummer level, he can count himself lucky.

Update/Correction: ESPN Mentioned Story. The Commish notes:

Actually, Sportscenter (ESPN's flagship sports highlight show) played the Irvin clip last night. So they're covering it.

And here's Michael Irvin's apology, in which he says he tries to give fans an insight into what type of things are said in the locker room. He explicitly apologizes. This is from ESPN.com, and it was linked on the front page as early as a few hours ago (although it's since been moved down to the front page of the NFL page because other headlines have moved in):

http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=2677581

So Irvin isn't exactly getting a pass. But he won't be lambasted like Limbaugh was.

Posted by: Ace at 03:28 PM | Comments (87)
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