Finally.

Can you imagine RICO being used against almost-entirely-peaceful organizations on the left? I can't. I'm not even sure they use RICO against violent, destruction-promoting organizations like ALF or ELF, or at least they don't use RICO to the extent they could. They could bankrupt PETA if they did.

Anti-abortion groups brought the appeal after the 7th Circuit had asked a trial judge to determine whether a nationwide injunction could be supported by charges that protesters had made threats of violence absent a connection with robbery or extortion.

The 8-0 decision ends a case that the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had kept alive despite a 2003 decision by the high court that lifted a nationwide injunction on anti-abortion groups led by Joseph Scheidler and others.

8-0. Good news. All sense isn't departed from the left wing of the Court yet.

For those who squeal about the loss of civil liberties-- they sure didn't make a fuss about an act intended for use against organized crime being used against political protestors. And I'm sure they're gnashing their teeth about it today.

Posted by: Ace at 11:28 AM | Comments (51)
Post contains 210 words, total size 1 kb.

Or "honor" killings, I guess. Not sure how "honorable" it is to murder a defenseless woman:

1091 honor killings were committed in Turkey in the past 5 years, said Turkish Parliamentary Investigation Commission which was set up to probe honor killings.

...

The report says women are maltreated generally by their husbands, fathers or brothers. The common peculiarity of men who resort to violence is that they are young and have low income.

5000 worldwide honor killings annually. 5000 murdered women. With little justice for their murders.

On the plus side -- and this is a big plus -- Turkey is brave enough, and sane enough, as a nation to commission an investigation into this, and reveal the results to the world, no matter how shocking.

Thanks to Ogre Gunner.

Posted by: Ace at 11:22 AM | Comments (9)
Post contains 158 words, total size 1 kb.

It hardly even needs to be pointed out anymore.

CBS weighted its sample, but still only to the point where they counted 289 Republicans to 381 Democrats.

This is always a polling issue, with good arguments on both sides. Some say one shouldn't weight polls for party ID, as party ID fluctuates-- maybe there simply are more Democrats now. Some say weight the results, as we know there is (approximately) parity between the parties.

CBS apparently chooses a mixed approach, weighting results, but not to the point of near-parity.

It's a hard question to resolve. However, I'm pretty sure that Democrats have not claimed an approximately 33% advantage over the Republicans.

Could the split now be 40 to 30? Perhaps. But such a sea change seems unlikely.

Much More... Reactions from the left and right of the blogosphere at the Blogometer.

I think this poll is rigged, but they usually are rigged to favor Democrats a bit. Rigged or not, it's still not good news for Bush.

Posted by: Ace at 11:01 AM | Comments (30)
Post contains 181 words, total size 1 kb.

Nice:

About 5,000 children chanting "Hang those who insulted the prophet" rallied in Pakistan's largest city on Tuesday in the latest protest in the Islamic nation against the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

The children, ages 8 to 12, burned a coffin draped in U.S., Israeli and Danish flags at a traffic intersection in the port city of Karachi as police in riot gear looked on.

The rally was organized by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan's largest Islamic group. The children, some wearing school uniforms and headbands emblazoned with "God is great," were released from schools to take part.

God is apparently the capo di tutti capos of a transnatinal Murder, Inc.

Who knew God ordered hits? He's like Al Capone, except with a loftier penthouse.

Posted by: Ace at 07:03 AM | Comments (53)
Post contains 153 words, total size 1 kb.

Male fans go berserk (in a good way!) when a soccer star tosses his dirty, stinking soccer shorts into a crowd.

Why, it's like Tom Jones, in reverse, and with filthy, smelly man's athletic shorts.

Thanks to JohnS.

Posted by: Ace at 06:33 AM | Comments (76)
Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.

Pretty chilling stuff:

Everyone has seen the videos of beheadings that Muslim Jihadis release. You see that during the most despicable acts imaginable, which is the cold blooded murder of another human being, they invoke the name of their deity Allah. This shows that they do not perceive this dastardly act as wrong. On the contrary, this is to them an act of worship. Their compass does not tell them that they are doing anything wrong. That compass is set by the Quran which everyone, including the foolish non-Muslim appeasers respect and call "holy". So in the Muslim mind, what you and I perceive as heinous and evil is divine. Just as you don't consider yourself to be a bad person for eating hamburger [as a Hindu would, as he has a different moral compass], a Muslim can kill the non believers with no compunction and he does not believe that what he does is wrong.

The life of a non-Muslim to him is worth as much as the life of a chicken is worth to you and me. We don't go around killing every chicken we see. In fact we keep them and feed them as long as they are useful to us. But we don't lose sleep when we have to slaughter them. So it is not that Muslims will necessarily go around massacring every non-Muslim. As long as these non-Muslims are useful to them, they are granted protection. In fact dhimmi means protected. The non-believers will remain protected, as long as they pay the Jizzyah "with willing submission and feel themselves subdued."

Some of it you know, some of it you don't. Worth a read.

Thanks to Ogre Gunner.

More...

The world of Islam is a world completely distinct from ours. Muslims have a different set of values. They look at the world through the contorted mirror of Islam and everything they see is warped. That is the only reality they know. Islam is their only point of reference. Therefore when they commit the most dastardly acts such as murder of school children, they genuinely don't know that what they are doing is evil.

This makes Muslims very dangerous. What distinguishes us humans from animals is our conscience. Once our conscience is gone we lose our humanness. Without conscience, humans can be far more dangerous than beasts. Beasts kill for food, humans kill for ideology. Beast kill just enough to eat. Humans can kill endlessly.

Too true. When an ideology displaces the inherited, evolutionary restraint against murder, watch out.

As a general rule, human beings only kill other human beings under extreme emotional duress, or if they're just missing the inborn restraint against murder (psychopaths, sociopaths, etc.). The US military has to do a lot of training to get soldiers to ignore or suppress this aversion to killing on the battlefield.

We've seen what an ideology that supplants the inborn code against killing can achieve. In such a culture, murders can run from six million to tens of millions.

Posted by: Ace at 06:24 AM | Comments (42)
Post contains 498 words, total size 3 kb.

Why didn't they just cast Saul Rosenberg? He could have brought all his glasses. And his shoes.

JINXED James Bond star Daniel Craig ... suffered sunburn while topping up his tan before filming in the Bahamas.

...

A source on the Casino Royale set said: “It’s driving him mad. He constantly wants to scratch. It’s worst when he does a costume change. He is in agony.

“He has been moaning to his assistants that he’s got prickly heat. He is extremely wary of being outside now. But the nature of filming is such that he is out in the heat all day.”

I lost the link now, but it turns out he was also baffled by the manual transmission in the car he was supposed to drive as Bond.

He showed up for Bond film not knowing how to drive a stick. He thought, I guess, that James Bond drove an automatic.

Thanks to Scott.

Posted by: Ace at 06:07 AM | Comments (34)
Post contains 179 words, total size 1 kb.

In case you missed it, Ramesh Ponnuru and Andrew Sullivan have had an increasingly (at least on Sullivan's part) bitchy series of exchanges today. Just reading Ramesh Ponnuru's side of things (at NRO's Corner is increasingly hilarious. Just start there and scroll down.)

In the interests of reading them in their proper chronology, let me quote them in their increasingly annoyed order:

ANDREW SULLIVAN CAN'T READ, CH. 815 [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Sullivan says that I did not "point to a single inaccuracy or example of unfairness" in my post on him yesterday. Indeed, I'm now supposedly "smear[ing]" our poor martyr Sullivan. Inaccuracy: Sullivan claimed that Robert P. George "sees no moral difference" between abortion and the murder of an adult. That's not true, and I provided evidence that it's not true.

Unfairness: First, misstating George's views is itself unfair.

Second, Sullivan insinuated, though with a plausible deniability that he is now attempting to exploit, that George has no objection to killing abortionists. This deniability is, however, growing more implausible. I quoted a speech in which George said that pro-lifers should love and pray, ungrudgingly and without cease, for abortionists. Sullivan, absurdly, refuses to acknowledge that these comments amounted to a disavowal of violence against abortionists. Sullivan is holding on to his cheap insinuation for dear life.

Third: Sullivan suggests that it's frightening for the president to associate with someone who holds George's allegedly extreme views on abortion. The views to which Sullivan points are George's alleged inability to see any differences between abortion and the murder of an adult, and his alleged nonchalance toward the murder of abortionists. Since both views are not in truth George's, suggesting that it is not respectable to associate with George because of them is unfair.

It is altogether typical of Sullivan's debating style to attempt to change the subject to an irrelevancy: George's views about masturbation, of all things. What George is getting at is that we do not need to posit a "right" to masturbation to have good reasons for the government not to concern itself with it: not that you'd have any idea of that from Sullivan's description.

I'm not totally sure whether Sullivan's habitual inability to present his opponents' views correctly is a result of malicious lying, indifference to the truth, incompetence in figuring out the truth, or some combination of these things. Readers need not know the answer to that question to conclude that he is untrustworthy. Posted at 12:26 PM

HAT TIP [Ramesh Ponnuru]

I neglected to say that I found Sullivan's comment via a post on The American Interest's blog. (I don't agree with everything in that post: the bit about Sullivan's not living up to his "usual intellectual caliber" strikes me as misdirected charity. I used to make that kind of mistake about Sullivan myself.)
Posted at 01:05 PM

SULLIVAN AGAIN [Ramesh Ponnuru]

His latest bit of bad faith can be found here. For the record: (1) The First Things essay to which I linked yesterday goes through several moral distinctions that separate abortion from the murder of an adult, as any fair-minded reader will see. (2) I have never said (and do not believe) "that the government has in principle an obligation and right to police the private sexual lives of all its citizens to prevent them from sliding into 'immorality'"--that's pure invention on Sullivan's part. (3) I have already come out against the South Dakota bill, which is the latest irrelevancy Sullivan is using to distract attention from his record of misrepresentation.
Posted at 03:55 PM

SO NOW [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Andrew Sullivan is maintaining that I favor laws against masturbation. It doesn’t matter that I have never said a word in favor of such laws. (I haven’t heard this much about masturbation since that Seinfeld episode.) It doesn’t matter that I say I’m against them: I must be lying, he says. And he calls me hysterical. Sullivan is justly fond of Oakeshott’s metaphor of “conversation” as the essence of conservatism. But this sort of thing is why conversation with him is pointless. (Also: Sullivan has a second-hand report that one of Robert George’s colleagues once looked at him sideways! Call out the Guard!) I have another writing project to work on tonight. Tomorrow I’ll try to elaborate on one or two actually interesting points raised during this discussion, with as little attention to Sullivan’s accumulating lies and misunderstandings as possible.
Posted at 08:52 PM

Remember when we actually thought of Sullivan as a political writer worth listening to? I'm filled with gob-smacking heartache at the overwrought hack he hath become, although I think I'd recover if I could roll in enough crazy blog-money from Time Inc. (or at least from a good bandwith fundraiser).

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 06:33 PM | Comments (17)
Post contains 788 words, total size 6 kb.

You know, AOSHQ is a special community.

I feel very close to some of you, even when I really, really wish I didn't.

We share so much with each other.
But something is missing.

Something that can be found on many other blogs, but isn't present here. Something we all need.

Yes.

Cat pictures.
This is my best pal, Fluffy: more...

Posted by: LauraW. at 04:35 PM | Comments (35)
Post contains 89 words, total size 1 kb.

34%.

The latest CBS News poll finds President Bush's approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, while pessimism about the Iraq war has risen to a new high.

Americans are also overwhelmingly opposed to the Bush-backed deal giving a Dubai-owned company operational control over six major U.S. ports. Seven in 10 Americans, including 58 percent of Republicans, say they're opposed to the agreement.

Let's assume that CBS oversampled Democrats.

That's still not good, is it?

Maybe I'm just glum, but if you were polled as to whether you support the President's job peformance, would you say you did?

I don't know if I would. I think I'd pass on the question.

Posted by: Ace at 04:11 PM | Comments (90)
Post contains 127 words, total size 1 kb.