New campaign slogan for Robert Mugabe: I butcher economies, too!

The governor of Zimbabwe's reserve bank last week admitted that his country is in the grip of hyperinflation, with some economists predicting an inflation rate of 1,000% within two months.

This week saw the introduction of a so-called "bearer cheque" worth 50,000 Zimbabwean dollars - 50 times the highest available banknote - but actually worth around half a US dollar and only enough to buy a loaf of bread.

Via Drew Curtis' Fark.

Posted by: Ace at 10:10 AM | Comments (30)
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If only:

April 1, 2006. New York -- In response to a series of offensive cartoons published in an Iranian newspaper and subsequently printed in every newspaper around the globe, including many which had refused to publish the now-forgotten "anti-Muslim" cartoons last winter, the "Jewish street" erupted. At Brandeis University, a course on Lesbian motifs in Yiddish literature was briefly interrupted as students asked their professor what he thought about the controversy. In Washington D.C. a flurry of letters to the editor and press releases poured out of Jewish organizations. In New York, Commentary magazine -- a leading organ of the "neoconservative" Jewish Right -- announced it would run three articles on Iran in its next issue as well as an extensive letters section.

Now that's some Old Testament style justice.

Posted by: Ace at 09:08 AM | Comments (26)
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More of this, please:

The director of the CIA has launched a major internal probe into media leaks about covert operations. In an agencywide e-mail, Porter Goss blamed “a very small number of people” for leaks about secret CIA operations that, in his words, “do damage to the credibility of the agency.”

According to people familiar with the Goss e-mail, sent in late January and classified secret, the CIA director warned that any CIA officer deemed suspect by the agencyÂ’s Office of Security and its Counter Intelligence Center (which handles internal affairs) could be subjected to an unscheduled lie detector test.

Goss told CIA employees there were ways other than talking to the news media to resolve any issues they had with classified CIA operations.

Legal ways, too.

Posted by: Ace at 09:05 AM | Comments (13)
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On behalf of conservatives everywhere, I say You're welcome.

Posted by: Ace at 08:20 AM | Comments (12)
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You can't beat something with nothing:

Asked to describe the health of the Democratic Party, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said: "A lot worse than it should be. This has not been a very good two months."

"We seem to be losing our voice when it comes to the basic things people worry about," Mr. Dodd said.

Democrats said they had not yet figured out how to counter the White House's long assault on their national security credentials. And they said their opportunities to break through to voters with a coherent message on domestic and foreign policy — should they settle on one — were restricted by the lack of an established, nationally known leader to carry their message this fall.

As a result, some Democrats said, their party could lose its chance to do to Republicans this year what the Republicans did to them in 1994: make the midterm election, normally dominated by regional and local concerns, a national referendum on the party in power.

"I think that two-thirds of the American people think the country is going in the wrong direction," " said Senator Barack Obama, the first-term Illinois Democrat who is widely viewed as one of the party's promising stars. "They're not sure yet whether Democrats can move it in the right direction."

Mr. Obama said the Democratic Party had not seized the moment, adding: "We have been in a reactive posture for too long. I think we have been very good at saying no, but not good enough at saying yes."

Complaining and kvetching is not, last time I checked, a coherent political platform.

Newt Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America did not read:

1) Bitch

2) Moan

3) Go into hysterics

4) Jump on top of a table and begin screeching "I think I saw a mouse"

5) Have a full-on conniption fit

6) Raise taxes

7) Help terrorists evade government surveillance

Who is the Dems' target audeince lately? Whom do they think these unhinged theatrics are going to persuade? Nathan Lane in The Birdcage?

Posted by: Ace at 07:53 AM | Comments (35)
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After noting a NYT critic calling the republishing of the "callous" cartoons a "cheap point" made by a "conservative" European newspaper, Sullivan wonders:

"Cheap points"? It's a "cheap point" to illustrate the climate of fear and intimidation that free artists and writers live under in Europe when tackling the issue of Islam. It's "cheap" after the fatwa against
Salman Rushdie, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, and the police protection for many others, now including the editors of Jyllands-Posten. Choosing sides between those who would murder and kill and those who would simply draw and provoke is, for Michael Kimmelman "exasperating." After all, the newspaper that published them could be broadly described as "conservative". "Conservative" in a land where the welfare state is well to the left of America's Democratic party. The pusillanimity of the New York Times on this subject is another low-mark for the paper. They have the gall to run vicious commentary on images they will not publish. Below are two images: one of the Virgin Mary constructed out of dung and supported by public funding; and one of the "callous" Danish cartoons, that pokes fun at the newspaper that ran them. The NYT will publish one but not the other. They are not journalists. They are merely cowards.

The images he mentions are here.

The point is too obvious I don't even feel like commenting on it.

The New York Times: All the news that's fit to print, but won't unduly upset religious crazies who might burn down embassies.

Meanwhile, the entire editorial staff of the New York Press walks out after the owner spikes republishing the "callous" cartoons. The Editor-in-Chief explains:

New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group -- consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editor Jonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.

Resign? That's different than a walk-out. Good on ya.

And Amir Teheri writes that Islam has generally allowed satire and irreverence. Until, at least, the maniacs took over.

Posted by: Ace at 07:48 AM | Comments (35)
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That's a nice headline, but it sort of hides the most newsworthy part of the Death to Bush rally, doesn't it?

President Bush paid honor to the life of Coretta Scott King from the pulpit of a Baptist church in suburban Atlanta yesterday, recalling that "as a great movement of history took shape, her dignity was a daily rebuke to the pettiness and cruelty of segregation."

It was the type of eloquent tribute that Americans have come to expect from their president when an iconic figure passes. But the presidential gesture took on added significance because it marks the latest step in the administration's effort to repair its frayed relations with many black civil rights and political leaders.

"President Bush was where he should have been," said Bruce S. Gordon, the new president of the NAACP. "Coretta Scott King is a very important figure in black American history and American history. I thought it was appropriate for the president to be there to honor her."

Very nice, but the article then goes on to note, once again, that Bush is the first President to not speak before the NAACP since... whenever.

It's not until the end of the article -- ninth paragraph, surely past the jump in the print addition -- that the reporter bothers to suggest why Bush might not be keen on meeting with the NAACP:

While Bush was greeted respectfully at the funeral, the tension between him and some black leaders also was evident. The Rev. Joseph Lowery, former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, drew a standing ovation when he criticized the war in Iraq, saying, "There were no weapons of mass destruction over there."

"For war, billions more, but no more for the poor," Lowery added as Bush sat behind him on the speaker's platform.

Former president Jimmy Carter, who has been critical of Bush's warrantless eavesdropping program, pointed out that King and her husband, the slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., were targets of a "secret government surveillance" at the height of the civil rights movement.

"The struggle for equality is not over," Carter said. "We only have to recall the color of the faces in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi -- those most devastated by Katrina -- to know there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."

Asked about the criticism, Gordon said: "There are issues between this administration and the African American community. There is no question about it, and that is not going to change in just a few months."

Is this Bush-bashing at a funeral (again!) an outrage? I'm not sure. A funeral is supposed to honor the deceased, and one could easily imagine that this is precisely how Coretta Scott King would have wanted to have been eulogized -- with ranting against the white President's supposed hatred of blacks and the poor.

It certainly looks tasteless, though. Which may be why the Post buried it.

Instapundit has reactions, and speculates the Democrats need to turn every funeral into a political rally because funerals are the few times people bother listening to them.

Which throws that whole Karl-Rove-Killed-Paul-Wellstone-and-Mel-Carnahan theory into question. Who benefits? Maybe it was actually James Carville.

Posted by: Ace at 07:37 AM | Comments (68)
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But it's not necessarily bad:

Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), who was elected House majority leader last week, is renting his Capitol Hill apartment from a veteran lobbyist whose clients have direct stakes in legislation Boehner has co-written and that he has overseen as chairman of the Education and the Workforce Committee.

The relationship between Boehner, John D. Milne and Milne's wife, Debra R. Anderson, underscores how intertwined senior lawmakers have become with the lobbyists paid to influence legislation. Boehner's primary residence is in West Chester, Ohio, but for $1,600 a month, he rents a two-bedroom basement apartment near the House office buildings on Capitol Hill owned by Milne, Boehner spokesman Don Seymour said yesterday. Boehner's monthly rent appears to be similar to other rentals of two-bedroom English basement apartments close to the House side of the Capitol in Southeast, based on a review of apartment listings.

Possible problems:

-- The rent is "similar" to other rents. But if it's, say, $200 per month less than the going rate, that ads up to $1200 year in what could be called a contribution.

-- Boehner had better being paying the rent more or less on time every month. If it turns out that he's several months behind, etc., that's a big problem.

-- A basement apartment? I think snoops will want to know if he's actually in that apartment, or perhaps in a nicer apartment owned by the same lobbyist, with the basement apartment simply the one he pays rent on -- a paper rental serving to disguise a subsidized apartment.

For the moment, the Post dug, and seems to have come up dry. One wonders why, with all the possible real estate in DC, Boehner chose to rent from a lobbyist. It may be that lobbying firms buy up a lot of Washington real estate to rent, primarily to Congressmen, to have that much more of a relationship with them, and so they own a lot of the rental properties near the Capitol.

We'll see. For now there's no fire and only a tiny trickle of smoke.

Posted by: Ace at 07:08 AM | Comments (6)
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Chirac warns media over cartoons

Mr Chirac said any subject matter that could hurt other people's convictions should be avoided.

But Denmark's prime minister told the BBC that it was not for the government to censor the media.

Guess which country gift wrapped its Jews for Hitler and which one protected its Jews.

By the way, if you want to get a fatwa named after you, just go here. But don't say I didn't warn you!

Posted by: Tanker at 07:07 AM | Comments (13)
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Of course, some good may come out of this story, even in this country. If nothing else, this controversy should bring an end to that naive, charming and sadly incorrect American theory of international relations that "the more we all learn about one another, the less we will fight." Gradually, the Islamic world is learning that we don't respect religion in the same manner they do. Slowly, we are learning that they feel differently about the printed word, and the printed picture, from us. And somehow, I've got a feeling that this new knowledge will be not the beginning of understanding but the inspiration for more violence. -- Anne Appelbaum

Posted by: Ace at 07:13 PM | Comments (38)
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