The Weekly Standard's blog notes Joe Wilson's ever-chaning answer to the direct question of whether Iraqi officials met with the Nigerian PM in 1999.

To the CIA, in his debriefing after his "mission," he said "yes." Then he "forgot" to mention this meeting in his infamous NYT piece and subsequent interviews. Then he began specifically denying any such meeting had taken place.

And then later, when questioned about it under oath by the Select Senate Committee on Intelligence, he admits the answer is "yes" again.

He seems to have Hillary Clinton's gift for convenient amnesia and convenient recall.

What a spaz.

Thanks to JackStraw.

Posted by: Ace at 08:54 AM | Comments (19)
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The guy gets a whole column out of this. The commenters -- all super-PC liberal Brits -- are positively scandalized.

What retards.

Thanks to JeffC.

Posted by: Ace at 08:47 AM | Comments (24)
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If it hadn't been reported as "loud booing," I wouldn't even have heard it at all. Listening specifically for booing, I guess I hear it, but it's hard to say it's "loud booing." It sound like general crowd noise.

But the AP says it's true, so it must be. Instapundit recalls the AP reporting genuine applause as "loud booing" in the past. Remember the supposed "boos" Bush was greeted with by a conservative crowd when he wished Clinton good luck in his heart operation? The actual tape demonstrated not booing at all, but cheers for the sentiment.

First comment at Gateway Pundit is by Mike O, who observes:

Of course, the AP reported he was being booed loudly. From the press area, I'm sure that's all you could hear. The AP crew probably has sore throats this morning.

Indeed.

Update: A reader who was playing hooky from work and who attended the game says the booing was loud and noticeable, and that AP has the story right.

Posted by: Ace at 08:42 AM | Comments (12)
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Lots of lofty rhetoric. Less actual sacrifice for others.

Do young leftists exhibit any more heart than young right-wingers?

...

Let's dispense with righteous rhetoric and look at what really counts: behavior, starting at the level of heart in personal relationships. Consider two groups of people under age 30: those who say they are liberal or extremely liberal, and those who say they are conservative or extremely conservative. According to General Social Survey in 2004, liberal young Americans are significantly less likely than the young conservatives to express a willingness to sacrifice for their loved ones. For example, progressives under 30 are significantly less likely than young right-wingers to say they would prefer to suffer rather than let the one they love suffer, that they are not happy unless the loved one is happy, or that they would sacrifice their own wishes for the one they love. (The practical implication of this is that you might want your daughter to marry a Republican.)

This pattern persists at the community level. Young liberals in 2004 belonged to one-third fewer organizations in their communities than young conservatives. In 2002, they were 12 percent less likely to give money to charities, and one-third less likely to give blood. These differences were not due to demographics such as age or education. Imagine that you picked two people, both under 30, from the American population. Imagine they had the same education level, same household income, and were of the same race and gender. The only difference was that one was a self-described liberal, and the other a conservative. Based on nationwide data collected in the year 2000, the young conservative would donate nearly $400 more per year to charity than the young liberal.

I for one am sick of the mercenary capitalist winner-take-all belief system of liberals.

Thanks to Ogre Gunner.

Posted by: Ace at 08:35 AM | Comments (33)
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South Korean condoms play into the one stereotype about black men I imagine they don't mind all that much.

So cool, Respect! Piece!

Thanks to Sandy Berger.

Posted by: Ace at 07:22 AM | Comments (18)
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It persists, somehow, despite being on the wrong side of science. How?

Because politics still trumps scientific inquiry.

In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen.

Secondly, when you get frozen out from responding to a rebuttal of your work in a scientific journal, there is something terribly terribly wrong in the Editor's office.

Posted by: LauraW. at 06:51 AM | Comments (29)
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In his typical fashion, Mark Steyn points out how Iran has been consistently, methodically pursuing a quiet war against the West. The West, in turn, seems hell bent on ignoring the threat and convincing themselves that dhimmitude wouldn't be so bad after all, would it?

Even for the attention span impaired, Steyn's brevity is as humorous as it is chillingly stark:

Anyone who spends half an hour looking at Iranian foreign policy over the last 27 years sees five things:

1. Contempt for the most basic international conventions;
2. Long-reach extraterritoriality;
3. Eeffective promotion of radical Pan-Islamism;
4. A willingness to go the extra mile for Jew-killing (unlike, say, Osama);
5. An all-but-total synchronization between rhetoric and action.

I pray that the West can wake up before it is too late.

Posted by: Harry Callahan at 05:37 PM | Comments (54)
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Says we must, immediately it seems, "pull back" into small bases, is in post-war Germany and Korea, and stop patrolling the country.

Another supporter of the war deserts it.

Suppose the occupation was a mistake. Is it a mistake we can afford to lose?

It took this country 20 years to partially recover from Vietnam Syndrome. Shall we now begin 30 years of Iraq Syndrome?

Posted by: Ace at 01:32 PM | Comments (59)
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1, we caught heat over Bill's "spank the monkey" joke last week and my "abducted by lesbian cheerleaders and forced to watch them make out" line.

I was informed it was out of bounds to "conjure" images of "lesbians touching each other."

When Jeff and I both came aboard rightalk, we were told we were expected to not necessarily be completely G-rated. It seems now that has changed, before anyone decided to inform us. It's not that I can't work clean, it's that... well, I don't want to. Well, no it's not that. It's that if something can easily get by the censors on, say, David Letterman, I think that's clean enough for the Internet.

I get that I can't be dirty. But now even slightly risque is forbidden, too?

But whatever. I'll deal. Or I won't. First time I've ever been threatened to be fired from a "job" that doesn't pay me a dime.

Meanwhile, there's the Debbie Schlussel vs. Prof. Rusty Shackleford thing.

Basically, as Rusty notes on his blog, he called in to debate Debbie on the point of the propriety of printing derogatory information about Jill Carroll. For the record, as far as the actual information, I don't see why it's out of bounds to discuss it; I didn't think so when I originally linked it, and I still don't. I wasn't kissing Debbie's ass on the general point that I don't get what's so heinous about this information.

Certainly no one complained very loudly when it was pointed out, here and all over the place, that the Christian "peace" workers in Iraq failed to thank the US military for rescuing them/recovering them. There wasn't a rule against saying something uncharitable about former hostage victims then, and I still don't get why the rule is different for Jill Carroll. I understand some object to the "rumor" nature of this, but there's a guy on the record, who's offered up his name, so this isn't an anonymous rumor. It may or may not be true, but if you have a guy on the record putting his own credibility behind it, I don't see how that's a rumor that must not be repeated.

Anyway, on to the Rusty call. Debbie felt this was a kind of set-up/ambush interview situation as she had not been previously informed he'd be calling in; I never planned it myself, and I only found out about it three minutes before the show. I think that's what bothered her the most-- the idea that we had always planned on bringing in a critic to "debate" her as a guest, but had never told ther that. She explained in a later email that if she had known he was only a caller, not a long-planned ambush-debate guest, she wouldn't have minded as much.

I didn't know there was such a huge controversy over this, and such a sometimes emotional and personal one; I thought it was just something being debated. I tried to smooth it over with Debbie during the break to let Rusty ask his question or make his point, but she didn't want to, considering his previous postings to have been too personal in their critique. And more the comments than the postings; she said commenters piled on calling her "c--t" and "whore" and the like.

Not sure how bad any of this was -- again, I really didn't even get that there was this huge firestorm over the matter -- but that's what I was told. When Debbie said she never would have appeared on the show if she'd been told in advance she'd be set up to debate Rusty, we made the decision to not take the call. I tried to get his basic point before he hung up, so I could ask the question myself, but by that time the show was back on the air and I lost him just as he was saying "Well I don't object to the story necessarily, I just object to..."

And then we were back on the air, and lost him as a caller.

I think Jeff tried to ask a lot of questions in the general area of propriety, though I don't know yet if he touched on Rusty's specific objection.

Anyway, so, that was the show. Some embarrassment about feeling as if I'd "set up" a guest, not being sure what the hell to do about it, and then getting yelled at by my engineer for ten minutes over unauthorized use of the term "lesbian cheerleader."

Crucified by rightalk.com.

Update: Debbie says she'd be willing to debate Rusty on the point, maybe on next week's show, if only to dispel claims that she's ducking a critic. So, maybe next week, if they're both available, we can have them discuss this in the last long segment.

Posted by: Ace at 12:56 PM | Comments (172)
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Bumped.

Jeff and I will be interviewing Debbie Schlussel about immigration, Jill Carroll, Bush's "nefarious illegal leaking," and other stuff. Maybe even about Chrylser's supposedly "homophobic" new car ad.

Click on Hoist the Black Flag at Rightalk at 4 PM ET.

Posted by: Ace at 10:46 AM | Comments (40)
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