Doesn't matter, it was still Putin.

It does sort of explain one thing, though. This cat was alleging that the Russians themselves were behind the series of apartment-building bombings that were, of course, actually conducted by Chechen Muslims. The claim was that Russia was bombing its own citizens in order to stir up anger against a False Enemy and give Putin a freer hand in re-imposing Soviet fascism on his country.

Does that scenario sound familiar to American ears?

Now, Putin is re-imposing Bad Old Days Soviet fascism on Russia, without doubt. But bombing his own people? Absurd. It fails the qui buono test (sp?), because Putin doesn't benefit by such moves. He's pretty much free to remake Russia into a Soviet KGB police state with the public's blessing, terrorism or no terrorism.

It does sound an awful lot like the rantings of an American convert to Islam, who assures us that Muslims had nothing to do with 9/11, and it was all the doings of Bush:

Barrett first drew attention to his views by writing letters to the editor of the Madison Capital Times and Wisconsin State Journal, in which he claimed that Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks: "As a Ph.D. Islamologist and Arabist I really hate to say this, but I'll say it anyway: 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam. The war on terror is as phony as the latest Osama bin Laden tape." Barrett has also asserted that other purported terrorist attacks, including the July 7, 2005, London bombing, and the March 11, 2004, Madrid bombing, were the actions of a "special wing of, probably, U.S. or western military intelligence," and not Islamic terrorists.

I have to confess I am not terribly concerned by outrages Putin may have conducted against Chechen terrorists. Which is the story the murdered Russian journalist was working on (and whose murder, in turn, the poisoned Russian spy claimed he was close to solving).

But, at the risk of stating the obvious, it's unacceptable for the head of a state to begin killing people just because he finds their claims or "reportage" embarrassing.

It says a lot that Russia's state-sponsored Murder, Incorporated is now killing somewhat insignificant proponents of fairly daffy conspiracy theories.

Let there be no doubt about Putin's response should someone connect him to an actual crime.

Posted by: Ace at 04:00 PM | Comments (33)
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Good catch by LGF.

The AP doesn't say which media outlets may have run this cameraman's propaganda shots -- nor, specifically, whether AP ever has.

Now, if the cameraman's propaganda were run only on, say, Al Jazeera and local Arab media, AP would have said so, right?

The AP also doesn't name the "Hamas cameraman." When the name comes out, the searches on Google Images will be fast and furious.

Posted by: Ace at 02:10 PM | Comments (65)
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Vladimir Putin immediately claimed that it was "very common" to be poisoned by the rare-element radioactive isotope Polonium 210, and suggested that he probably got it "from bad clams."

The bad old days are back.

large quantity of radiation, probably from a substance called Polonium 210, has been found in the body of dead ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.

The "major dose" of alpha radiation was detected in his urine, said Government experts, who added that Polonium 210 is only dangerous if ingested.

They also revealed that police have found radiation at three locations: his Muswell Hill home, a central London sushi bar where he ate shortly before falling ill, and a hotel where he had met two Russians that morning.

Dr Pat Troop, head of the Health Protection Agency, said the death was an "unprecedented event in the UK" and he had "apparently been poisoned by a type of radiation".

The ex-spy/defector-turned-reporter was named Litivenenko -- I'm pretty sure he wrote a book I read called "Inside the KGB."

How Putin remains popular is beyond me. Yes, I suppose people appreciate that the Russian economy is doing better than it has been, and that he's a "strong man" when it comes to Chechnyan terrorism.

But he's quite obviously murdering people. That still gets a pass in Russia?

More on those "Russian businessmen:"

A Russian former intelligence officer was quoted in a newspaper on Friday as saying he and two other men met ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko in a London hotel on November 1, the day before Litvinenko complained of feeling unwell.

...

Businessman Andrei Lugovoy, a former officer in the FSB state security service, told Kommersant daily newspaper that he had known Litvinenko since 1996 and had been in touch with him in London several times over business affairs.

"There was nothing personal in our contacts -- only business," Lugovoy was quoted as saying.

It's just business.

So: The radioactive material turned up at the bar and hotel where he met the "former" Russian security agents.

The only mystery here is why the hell they were still in Britain at the time of the arrest.

Perhaps Putin's arrogant-yet-crude killers didn't think they'd find the polonium.

Flashback: Ukraine's Yushchenko was likely poisoned by an exotic and never-identified poison, too.

The infamous before and after:

Whoah! It seems that he may have been poisoned via sushi as well:

The Austrian doctors who treated him initially said they could not confirm the cause of the illness.

Food poisoning was the first diagnosis made by Ukrainian doctors on 6 September.

Mr Yushchenko's political opponents suggested he had eaten bad sushi, washed down with too much cognac.

One rival presidential candidate said he always stuck to more patriotic food, such as pork fat and vodka.

It makes sense. If you have a poison you think can't be identified because it's so rare, slip it into a food often blamed for poisonings. Doctors, finding no recognizable poison, will eliminate deliberate poisoning as a possibility and blame it, vaguely, on the obvious potential culprit of bad fish.

More at HotAir: I'm not sure if the poisoning occurred at the sushi bar; while radiation was found there, he seems to have met the obvious suspects earlier.

It could be a case of knowing he was going to eat sushi, or arranging for him to do so, so that the "bad fish" theory would be in play.

As if it's not already obvious what happened, Captain Ed lays it out:

ne does not find polonium just laying around somewhere; it’s rather rare, and difficult to produce in any quantity. However, small quantities are all that are needed for poisoning someone, as the maximum safe ingested dose is 0.03 microcurie. It’s 25 billion times more poisonous than hydrocyanic acid. Anyone who attempted to deploy this as an assassin’s weapon has to have a lot of expertise in handling polonium — which again strongly indicates a government assassin at work. It practically convicts Putin by its use.

And the tricksy thing is that it's hard to discover it, I guess. Putin was relying on that fact -- that it's hard to find the poison unless you break out just about every piece of analytical equipment you have.

Arrogant, crude, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

Just because Russians are too lazy and unmotivated to look for rare toxins doesn't mean the western world is.

What the hell happens now?

We pretty much know Putin committed murder in Britain. (Soliciting a murder that is then carried out puts one on the hook for murder, too.)

So what, exactly, do you do?

Posted by: Ace at 01:21 PM | Comments (42)
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Pics of the modified, fake CHP cruiser at the link:

German traffic police were shocked to see a California Highway Patrol car cruising along the motorway, driven by a man dressed as an authentic American cop, authorities said on Thursday.

But they recovered sufficiently to book the 35-year-old Goettingen resident, whose uniform badge read "T.J. Lazer," for possessing a replica Smith & Wesson revolver without a license and having out-of-date registration plates.

Trivia: Where did he get the "T.J. Lazer" name from?

Hint: It's a "cop show," but not a real cop show.

While You're There... Germany's Merkel refuses to send German troops to Southern Afghanistan, where all the fighting and combat deaths are.

Instead, she insists Germany must maintain the peace in very peaceful north of the country.

Which is Germany's way of saying to France, "My training is now complete... When I left you, I was but a learner. Now I am the master."

Only a master of cowardice, Germany.

Posted by: Ace at 01:13 PM | Comments (24)
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Second verse, same as the first. A little bit slower and a little bit worse.

Russia has begun delivery of Tor-M1 air defense missile systems to Iran, a Defense Ministry official said Friday, confirming that Moscow would proceed with arms deals with Tehran in spite of Western criticism.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue, declined to specify when the deliveries had been made and how many systems had been delivered.

Ministry officials have previously said Moscow would supply 29 of the sophisticated missile systems to Iran under a $700 million contract signed in December, according to Russian media reports....

Russian officials say the missiles are purely defensive weapons with a limited range.

I don't think that such systems will be very effective against US airpower, and I don't think they'd be around for too long during a serious bombardment. But as Hugh Hewitt notes, it's a pretty strong indicator that Russia is playing the same old game of client-state/proxy-war politics, and will do everything possible to make sure its lunatic satrapy continues to threaten the US. Including with nuclear weapons.

Posted by: Ace at 01:10 PM | Comments (15)
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Kinda-sorta safe for work -- has chicks in bikini-tops, but no actual nudity.

The obvious ones are, well, really obvious. The good ones are hard to catch.

A lot of women who get breast implants seem to hate the shape of the breast, and want those big round softball-things, rather than the more natural looking (I'm told) teardrop-shaped implants.

Women may know everything about shoes, but they know very little about knockers. The irony.

Posted by: Ace at 12:52 PM | Comments (25)
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Oddly enough, the reporter who revealed this hasn't been murdered by Putin. Yet.

A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical.

The attack was reported in parkland in the centre of Lazo, a village in the Maritime Territory, and was witnessed by three local people.

A "big" stray dog was nosing about the trees and barking at squirrels hiding in branches overhead when a number of them suddenly descended and attacked, reports say.

"They literally gutted the dog," local journalist Anastasia Trubitsina told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

"When they saw the men, they scattered in different directions, taking pieces of their kill away with them."

You eye-ballin' me, boy?
You better not be. You ain't nothin'
but a nut in my world.

Thanks to JamesR.

Posted by: Ace at 12:48 PM | Comments (12)
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Patterico's done some digging and finds that the LA Times' assertion that an "airstrike" in Ramadi killed 30 people, most of whom were women and children, has a few problems.

Like, for one thing, the Coalition denies there were any "airstrikes" that day at all, and most other media organizations reported the clash involved a tank bombardment.

And that most reports state that young men of military age were killed -- not women and children.

How did the LAT reporter get such basic information wrong?

Because he's nowhere near Ramadi. He based his report on the claims of a local stringer, who seems to be simply parroting terrorist propaganda, and furthermore is alleged by one of Patterico's serving-in-Ramadi readers to have ties to the insurgents.

Almost this entire war is being "reported" by absentee "reporters" who don't bother to leave the Green Zone. They're live fifth graders doing book reports based on Cliff's Notes, but here the Cliff's Notes are written by Al Qaeda.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (4)
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Taranto (last item) catches Sullivan playing the Mormon card:

Mitt Romney will surely provide a fascinating glimpse into the Christianist mindset in the coming two years. He will be the candidate for the Christianist right, but he's not a Christian. And many Christianists may well recoil at the man's Mormon faith. . . . This emerges as a delicious irony: a candidacy made possible by sectarian politics could subsequently be made impossible by the same forces. I'm sorry if I have little sympathy for Romney's plight. Live by fundamentalism; die by fundamentalism.

One can be a "Christianist" without actually being, you know, Christian. Who knew? In the Sulliverse, all things are possible; Sullivan just needs to wish them to be, and so they are.

Anyone remember when Sullivan was pro-life? I do. Apparently, however, that position was easily changeable. He now seems fairly vehemently pro-choice:

Since the galvanizing force for Christianism (not Christianity, I might add) is the imposition of public policy criminalizing all abortions, banning all legal protections for gay couples, and banning embryonic stem cell research, the theological issues do not seem to me a huge problem for the Christianist Popular Front.

And of course he's not really pro-choice so much as he's against people who are against gay marriage, who are largely (but not exclusively) pro-life. Ergo, a flip-flop on a trivial issue like abortion in order to better align himself with those who support gay marriage, The Only Issue That Matters.

Taranto snarks that the world changed on "2/24" for Sullivan, which I guess is the day Bush announced his support for the FMA. Kind of funny -- 2/24 as an epochal watershed, similar to 9/11 (only much more important).

And I just can't help but steal Taranto's last bit. Romney's not a Christian, but guess who is?

The Madonna NBC concert was, to my mind, astonishingly good. . . . I believe Madonna is often an authentically Catholic pop-artist. Case in point: a whole set last night focused on chidren [sic] orphaned by AIDS in Africa, and used as its leitmotif a verse from Matthew's Gospel. Here is a pop performer, reaching millions, and proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ. . . . Madonna is closer to Jesus' authentic teachings in this respect than many Christianists.

Indeed, she is closer to "Jesus' authentic teachings." Who among us can forget the Sermon on the Gigantic Stage-Prop Dildo?

Thanks to Larwyn.

Posted by: Ace at 12:25 PM | Comments (26)
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Open thread for gratitude and giving thanks.

Posted by: Ace at 11:53 AM | Comments (171)
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