If only a poll of Americans would find the same:

Eight-one percent Afghans polled think Al-Qaeda is a negative influence in the world, with only six percent saying Osama bin Laden's terror network has a positive impact.

Osama bin Laden himself, once sheltered by the Taliban militia ousted with the help of a US-led coalition in 2001, has even lower ratings, with 90 percent of those polled saying they had an unfavourable view of him.

Eighty-eight percent said they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban.

The poll, conducted across ethnic groups including Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbek and Hazara communities, also found large support for the US military presence in Afghanistan.

Eighty-three percent said they had a favorable view of "US military forces in our country."

I've said it before, but Afghanistan was dubbed by liberals as "The Forgotten War," until it was fairly clear we had stabilized the country and won the war and the peace, at which point liberals, of course, forgot all about it.

Thanks to the A-Man.

Posted by: Ace at 09:12 PM | Comments (26)
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Brokeback Mountain II.

Are you effin' kidding me?

Next up: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, starring David Caruso, John Leguizamo, and "Ducky" from Pretty in Pink as "Angeleyes."

Via Fark. He gets off a good line: "not only is Hollywood out of ideas, they hate us."

Even Better: This is the only sort of prestige war movie Hollywood is capable of:

Mike Nichols is in discussions to direct Tom Hanks in "Charlie Wilson's War," a CIA drama based on a book by a former "60 Minutes" producer.

The Universal Pictures project centers on the CIA's covert operation in Afghanistan to arm the mujahideen during the 1980s. The covert ops were engineered by Charlie Wilson, a charismatic, wheeler-dealer, liberal Texas congressman who teamed with a rogue CIA operative. The two manipulated Congress, the CIA and a host of foreign governments in order to assist the Afghan rebels in their fight against the Soviets. Many of the men armed by the CIA went on to become the Taliban's enforcers and Osama bin Laden's protectors.

Before you say, "Well, that could actually kind of be good," bear in mind the script is written by Aaron "West Wing" Sorkin.

Mike Nichols. Tom Hanks. Aaron Sorkin. I doubt they'll portray the mission as a good (and ultimately successful) one.

Can Aaron Sorkin Ruin A Good Book? A poster writes--

Charlie Wilson's War was an excellent book, and I don't know how you could ruin it, but they'll find a way and I'll leave the theatre dissapointed.

I'm not familiar with it, but I do know that they were able to take Bob Baer's book -- which argued we weren't doing enough to fight tyranny and terrorism in the Middle East -- and turn it into the "inspiration" for George Clooney's Syriana.

But that bit about the mujahadeen going on to become Al Qaeda fighters could easily just be the reporter's little political slant. It might not be part of the script at all.

Posted by: Ace at 08:33 PM | Comments (39)
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Disputed, but the weapons-grade crazy keeps on comin':

AN Egyptian cleric's controversial fatwa claiming that nudity during sexual intercourse invalidates a marriage has uncovered a rift among Islamic scholars.

According to the religious edict issued by Rashad Hassan Khalil, a former dean of Al-Azhar University's faculty of Sharia (or Islamic law), "being completely naked during the act of coitus annuls the marriage".

...

For his part, Al-Azhar's fatwa committee chairman Abdullah Megawar argued that married couples could see each other naked but should not look at each other's genitalia and suggested they cover up with a blanket during sex.

Oddly enough, though, giving your wife a Nasty Adolf is considered "just good manners."

Posted by: Ace at 08:08 PM | Comments (30)
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Some scientists work on repairing injured spines. Others peer back into the first moments of the universe. These guys don't roll like that. They're into the important stuff:

A chemist and a nose specialist have just invented a new compound that turns manure's stench into a "pleasant smelling" odor.

The invention could help to ease tensions between farmers and locals who cannot stand the smell of animal waste. In past decades, rural and urban areas were more clearly delineated, but population growth has led to housing developments in areas that once were unoccupied or solely used for farmland.

...

Olfactory neuroscientist Charles Wysocki, who created the compound with organic chemist George Preti, explained to Discovery News that their process uses a one-two punch to snuff manure's malodorous bouquet.

He said one part of the process takes advantage of a natural phenomenon known as olfactory cross adaptation, which happens when the nose adapts to one odor and then becomes less sensitive to a second smell that is perceptually or structurally different from the first.

"The cross adapting compounds in the patent are hypothesized to bind to their appropriate receptor sites and those for the bad-smelling molecule, thereby blocking the malodorous parent molecule from activating its full complement of receptor sites," said Wysocki.

...

The second part of the one-two punch involves odor reducers that are stirred into manure to prevent its smelly substances from being released as a vapor.

The article's full of things you just don't read every day, like the statement that "Scientists still don't why humans find [the smell of crap] so disgusting," or why dogs eat their own feces.

A-Man, who apparently also Goolges for "Malodorous bouquet."

Posted by: Ace at 06:43 PM | Comments (21)
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Craig sent this along.

I don't know if this is real or not...

It's a real scam, according to Snopes. (Thanks to Sean for that.) more...

Posted by: Ace at 06:33 PM | Comments (12)
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Keep it up:

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria secretly incited Iraq's top Shia leader to declare holy war against US and British forces, according to Washington's former administrator in the country.

In his new book, My Year in Iraq, Paul Bremer said he heard the explosive intelligence in October 2003 as sectarian tensions soared across the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein.

News of Assad's actions ‘stunned’ the US administration in Iraq
The report came from an extremely senior source, the supreme leader of Iraq's majority Shia community, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

...

The news "stunned" the US administration in Iraq. "This was an act of extraordinary irresponsibility from Syria's president," Mr Bremer writes. "We had good intelligence showing that many insurgents and terrorists were coming into Iraq through Syria."

But the allegation was far more serious, he says. "This message from Assad essentially incited Shia rebellion. If he were to succeed, the coalition would face an extremely bloody two-front uprising, costing thousands of lives."

I'm just checking: Is Syria the country with the nukes or without them?

Without them?

Okay, just checking.

Allahpallooza!

Posted by: Ace at 05:04 PM | Comments (15)
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Unbelievable.

Let's see: to protest the NSA spying on Al Qaeda and the threat that this program might be used to spy on domestic political rivals, unhinged moonbat Democrats are going to actually start spying on domestic political rivals.

Okay.

Posted by: Ace at 04:13 PM | Comments (132)
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From Karol's, I've learned it's National Delurkers' Week

Posted by: Ace at 04:04 PM | Comments (98)
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Yep, they used the word.

Three in 10 Americans believe the federal government has made unjustified intrusions into personal privacy as it investigates terrorism, which is nearly double the level of concern shown a few years ago, albeit still far from a majority.

More broadly, the public still grants investigating terrorism a higher priority than guarding privacy rights, but by somewhat less of a margin than in the past. And Americans divide about evenly on the specific issue of warrantless wiretaps by the National Security Agency: Fifty-one percent call them acceptable in investigating terrorism, 47 percent unacceptable — views marked by huge partisan and ideological gaps.

Separately, this ABC News/Washington Post poll finds George W. Bush's overall job rating unchanged after a gain following the Iraqi elections last month. Forty-six percent of Americans approve of his work in office, while 52 percent disapprove. That's almost identical to its mid-December level, but better than his low (39 percent approval) this fall.

I had to agree with the critics of the Rasmussen poll: yes, throwing that scare word into the question would have reduced the number of respondants in favor-- but not, I thought, by all that much, as everyone understood what the question was asking about. (And, of course, that raises the question of whether or not the scare word should be offset by a caveat like "when the President determines national security depends on a warrantless intercept.")

Putting the word in did reduce support. But not below majority level.

One more point: Democrats are just crazy to push on this issue. For one thing, it convinces the public, which already doesn't need much convincing, that the Democrats are simply soft on national security, and are willing to put a host of other concerns (union proectections for national-security employees, Fourth Amendment protections for terrorists' pen-pals who happen to reside in America) above that as a top priority.

In addition, while many Americans may have reservations about this -- I do, myself, as do many readers here, and many conservatives generally -- we are not "outraged" by steps of dubious propriety taken with the intent of saving our frigging lives. Bothered? Maybe. Concerned? Sure. Saddened that we have to engage in this sort of activity? Perhaps.

But outraged? Calling for impeachment? Definitely not.

Conservatives are right to generally be fearful of expanded government power, but, you know, once in while there comes along an even greater fear. Like fundamentalist lunatics detonating an atomic bomb in downtown New York. It's not that the government still shouldn't be feared. It's that something else has overtaken it, by a comfortable margin, as a threat to our lives and freedom.

I think the liberals have this idea that Bush will use this program to spy wholesale on domestic political opponents... and the more unhinged on-line legions of "dissidents" and "political prisoners of Bush's Amerikkka" actually think Bush cares enough about them to spy on them personally, just because they wrote "Chancellor Chimpy McHilterburton" on the Daily Kos. There is always that possibility, and this becomes more of a fear when you simply don't trust the guy making the call.

But forgive me for thinking this fear is a rather -- what's the right word? -- fictitious threat. Bush may be "intellectually incurious," but surely he's heard about what happened to Nixon when Nixon began doing such things.

Via the "Six Days, Bitch" newswire.

Posted by: Ace at 02:22 PM | Comments (60)
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Also says "No President is above the law."

"When someone becomes a judge, you really have to put aside the things that you did as a lawyer at prior points in your legal career and think about legal issues the way a judge thinks about legal issues," testified Alito, a federal appeals judge the past 15 years.

Is he lying? Or has he fully embraced the liberal penumbras and emanations regarding the alleged "right to privacy" in the Conhstitution?

I'm not sure it's either. I've mentioned this before (and had a lot of dissent about it, which I tried to "chill," to no avail) but I do think there is something in the Constitution's basic thrust about freedom, even if a particular freedom isn't actually named in it. Even a good conservative can hypothesize laws which are so nannystate, busybody, and anti-freedom that they might say could be ruled unconstitutional even lacking a clear textual reference to that subject.

I mean, honestly: Do you really think that the Constitution should permit the outlawing of contraceptives? Or, for that matter, oral sex?

I realize that this sort of allowance -- that the Constitution may guarantee more than what it actually, you know, guarantees -- is subject to a host of abuses, many of which are not hypoethetical at all, but rather "mainstream jurisprudence."

Fred Barnes says it's just how the game is played:

Well, I think the questioning's going to be pretty brutal by the Democrats, but I think it's going to be a cakewalk for Alito. Look, everybody knows now how you get confirmed. You don't do what Robert Bork did, and argue with Democrats over the right to privacy, and so on. What you say is, oh, that issue, you know, Senator, I would love to talk about it, but there's a very good chance it'll come before the Court next year, or the year after that, and I can't prejudge it. So I'm sorry, I just can't answer that.

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (31)
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