... and will nuke Israel if we say boo about it. And then, you know, New York.

Enjoy your weekend!

I'm just curious: are liberals bothered at all about New York getting nuked?

When it does get nuked, will you scream that the votes of the two million dead New Yorkers should still be put in the Democratic column, so as not to allow a terrorist attack to shift the balance of American politics?

I'm actually curious about that. As you don't seem to have any concerns about this -- in fact, you pat yourselves on the back for being "brave" enough to not care about about Tel Aviv and New York being destroyed -- I'm just wondering if you'll also live with the political consequences of such a bombing.

The actual people you don't seem to care about. But how about their votes?

Posted by: Ace at 12:46 PM | Comments (75)
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But let's not jump to conclusions.

A source close to the probe said witnesses have told detectives that Kennedy was at the Hawk & Dove before he slammed his Ford Mustang into a security barrier near the U.S. Capitol. The source added that cops are continuing to seek evidence to confirm that Kennedy was at the watering hole.

The Herald reported last week that a Hawk & Dove hostess said the 38-year-old pol is a frequent customer and was drinking in the bar before the May 4 crash. Kennedy has denied he was drinking, blaming the accident on a cocktail of prescription painkillers and sleeping pills. He has since checked into a Minnesota rehab.

Disinterested witnesses say he was drinking; but, on the other hand, we have the word of a Kennedy involved in a DUI car accident saying he wasn't.

Who to believe, who to believe...?

I don't know. It's a real puzzler.

...

The source said detectives are still trying to track down a woman who Kennedy claims he was with before the crash.

He can't remember if her name was "Brandy," "Chivas," or "Colt 45 Malt Liquor."

Thanks to Jack Straw.

Posted by: Ace at 12:34 PM | Comments (28)
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Sam Jackson on Ellen.

Clip from the movie.

That's hot: Elle MacPherson loves the "endless opportunities for no-strings sex" that singlehood offers.

Or, at least, such opportunities that singlehood offers to someone who looks something like Elle MacPherson, anyways.

I don't know if singlehood similarly offers such "endless opportunities" for no strings sex to these gals. Or guys dressed up sort of like gals. I don't even know what the hell this is. And I'm happier that way, I think.

Also hot: "The freedom to be sexy without fear." Electric stun-guns built right into eff-me pumps. A must-have when traveling on the NYC subways.

Thanks for the Gem Sweater video to Muslihoon, who has a good post about the Muslim split in opinion between what is owed to God and what is owed to one's fellow humans. (Sort of like the God/Caesar distinction.)

And he got that, he says, via the ever-feisty Feisty Republican Whore, who has a United 93 review.

Other tips thanks to yls.

More Silliness: British perfume makers introduce "Eau de Stilton," a perfume that smells like stinky blue-veined Stilton cheese.

Because, you know, guys like women, and guys like cheese. So it's only natural they'd want the best of both worlds -- women who smell of stanky cheese.

Coming soon: The Morning After fragrance.

The Morning After Fragrance

Why wait until morning to smell like sunked beer, cigarette smoke, armpit-sweat, and sex?

Let a guy know where the evening's headed by reeking of an ill-considered bout of semi-anonymous sex before you even let him get to third base in the Fuddruckers parking lot.

The Morning After Fragrance. Because nothing says romance like a scent that proudly announces "I don't wash my junk."

Hey... Did that old SNL fake-commercial with Gilda Radner already do this?

Not exactly, if I'm remembering right. I think that perfume was just called "Hey You." I don't think the commercial said the perfume smelled of post-coital afterstank. It just sent out the signal that the wearer was cheap.

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (25)
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...as provided by liberal idiot commenters.

First, something that seems to escape most of you. The jury is a finder of fact; the judge is the finder of law.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:21 AM | Comments (24)
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Jihadi computer geeks (as if either could get more awful) hacked Aaron's site.

He's not fully back up yet, but he's got a little dancing Mohammad for them.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (6)
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What would the NSA find if it analyzed my calling history? Or yours?

Assuming you're like me, they'll find the following nuggets of super-secret, very private, and potentially comprosing information:

* I call my mom on holidays, her birthday, and a couple of times a month in any event.

* I call my dad less often.

* I call a couple of friends on occasion.

* I occasionally call Dell computer and stay on the phone for hours with them. Then I call them back a couple of times more. Because they can't fix anything on the first or second try. Dell apparently utilizes an analogue of the three-date rule. Sure they'll eventually "put out," but only once you've shown enough persistance to convince them you're really interested in them emotionally.

* And yes, I occasionally call my cable provider, my phone company, guests I'm trying to get on my show, etc.

Liberals-- what super-duper secrets do they have on you?

Of course, anyone could guess at a lot of the people I call. If they simply spoke to a friend about me, they could find out my relatives and friends and so forth, and pretty much know every number I might be dialing in a week.

Liberals like to imagine that the NSA really gives a shit about them.

Trust me, they don't.

You're not very important in the scheme of things. Most of us aren't important "in the scheme of things," actually, but you're, well, a little less than unimportant.

And you must know that, in your hearts.

Let me prove it to you. All you jackasses are running over here to post on my site. When you do so, you provide your IP to me.

I don't like you. I've never met you but I don't like you. You're annoying and venomous and very stupid, and what's worse, you're the sort of stupid that's so stupid it mistakes itself as smart.

The following is NOT a threat; I would NEVER do what I'm about to say I *could* do; I am only saying this to expose your pretense about concerns abour your sacred privacy.

But, you know-- once I have your IP, I could pay $50 for a simple program to find your exact street location, and then it would only take an interent reverse-address look-up to find your name. And then, likely, I could find your employer.

Now, I don't like you. You know that. If you're so worried about your privacy, why are so blithely unconcerned I might do such a thing, and let your employer (assuming you have one, which is a little doubtful, quite frankly) know you're jerking off on the Internet on company time?

Again, I wouldn't do such a thing. Not even because I object to it in principle (though I do). Not because I fear legal ramifications (which are minor and unlikely-- after all, this is information you willngly and knowingly provide to me).

No, I wouldn't do any of that because, fundamentally, I don't give a rat's ass about you. You're not even on my radar. I care less about you than the last cigarette I stubbed out. I have less an emotional investment in you, even in a bad way, than I do about the fact that they voted the "Rocker Dude" off of American Idol.

Now, if I don't give a shit about what you say or what sites you visit or who you communicate with, and you're actually kind of hasselling me by polluting my blog with your stupidity and hatred -- how the hell do you imagine a terrorist-hunter at the NSA has time to give a crap about you?

If you don't have any fear about me -- not screened by security procedures, in no danger of losing my blog-job by using information in an unlawful manner, etc. -- how do you delude yourself into believing the Bush Administration is verrrry concerned about when you call Mom on Mother's Day?

You don't. So stop pretending you are.

I know it's fun to pretend you're important enough to care about, but trust me, you're not. Internet trolling is just about the lowest level of speech, a past-time only for the ineffectal, the impotent. Those with wayyyy too much time on their hands to actually count for beans in real life.

Liberals are forever whining that their right to dissent is being "chilled." If only. You jackasses never seem to shut the eff up, and you seem to have all the time in the world to spit bile at perfect strangers on blogs.

So color me unconvinced you're worried about your privacy.

Posted by: Ace at 09:50 AM | Comments (63)
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If I speak to you in my own home, or over the phone, that's private. No one else is privvy to our interaction.

If I buy a book from Amazon.com, that's "private" in the sense that only a few dozen sales reps know about it, and an entire corporation could access my records if they so chose, and they could sell my sales history to any third party if they wanted, and a lawyer could subpeona those records should they be relevant in some lawsuit, and a private detective could pay a $13.00/hour Amazon worker a couple of hundred bucks if he wanted (for some reason) to know what I was buying on Amazon.

Yes, that's "private" information, all right.

It seems strange to me that liberals are shrieking that the Bush Administration is collecting the sort of information about Americans to defend this country against terrorists that corporations regularly collect, and sell to each other, for the purpose of selling you the Verizon Friends & Family plan.

To be fair, liberals have been shrieking about the loss of privacy to information-devouring corporations for a while. But, to point out their hypocrisy, they seem to have suddenly forgotten these previous complaints in order to pretend they truly had privacy as regards interactions with large corporations previously, and that Bush asking phone companies to voluntarily turn over calling histories represents some great and tragic loss of privacy.

That's kind of inconsistent, don't you think? You can't have been screaming for years your privacy had already been lost and now claim that, gee, it's being lost now. Sorry; a virgin can only lose her virginity once.

Seems to me the government is less likely to act against your interests with such information; the information resides in the computer banks of the NSA, where only well-paid and security-screened individuals have access to it.

Is that the case at T-Mobile? If a spouse suspects you of cheating, will a detective she hires be unable to bribe a T-Mobile employee into giving up your cell-phone call history?

Oh, wait a minute-- the detective wouldn't have to. That information is freely sold on the Internet for $100 or $120, no questions asked. You can get someone's entire call history, as well as their physical location when making those calls (because your cell phone is always sending out signals to the closest calling stattion), no questions asked, no warrant required.

Okay-- but what about calls from a landline? Indeed, it would cost someone $200 or $300 in a bribe to access your entire call history.

Feel safe?

There is a difference between "private" and truly private. It's time for liberals, as well as civil-liberties-focused conservatives and libertarians, to stop pretending the two are the same. Every purchase you make (unless its cash, paid at a physical bricks-and-mortar location) is tracked electronically, and that data is stored forever. Companies routinely sell that information to companies that analyze -- or, shall we say, "data-mine" -- such purchasing histories in order to re-sell your name as a "lead" to other companies.

And anyone who really wants to can get hold of that information.

It's "private" in the sense that it's not generally available to the public.

But it is readily available to anyone who's actually interested in it, which could range from the annoying (someone selling property in Florida) to the legally threatening (your spouse's private dick) to the physically dangerous (that stalker ex-boyfriend of yours who's hired someone to find out where you are).

I'm pretty sure the NSA isn't interested in selling me land or aiding those with lawsuits against me or assisting stalkers in tracking me down.

And yet, because it's the "government" -- and BusHitler's government, damnit! -- we're all supposed to pretend this is the scariest thing ever.

At least that's what the media and the liberals think we should pretend.

But two-thirds of us aren't going along with the pretense.

Incidentally: When this issue last came up, I *thought* I remembered reading a court had found in the 50's or 60's that while a warrant was needed to listen in on the content of a conversation, no such warrant was needed to simply record the particular numbers you had dialed, or had dialed into your home. You had an expectation of privacy in the former but not in the latter. As an analogy, while you may have an expectation of privacy when you enter a friend's house and speak with him, you don't have such an interest when you're walking around in public towards his house, and then knocking on his door. That is all visible to the public, and so you can't claim a privacy interest in it.

Similarly, just dialing someone's number is the telephonic equivalent of walking to someone's doorstep and ringing the bell. Yes, when you're inside, the content of your conversation is private, but not the actual dialing of the number.

Mu.nu's search function is down, so I can't confirm that.

Orin Kerr writes that the phone companies may have acted illegally in turning over these records, however, at least based on his reading of the law and his understanding of the facts. (And he is qualified and hesitant about that conclusion.)

But note that his piece is about the phone companies' disclosure of the records, not the government's request for the records or storage and analysis of the records.

Kerr's bit seems to analyze the legality of the phone companies' disclosure of the information only, not the legality of the government's receipt and storage of the information, so my memory may still be correct.

Posted by: Ace at 09:11 AM | Comments (19)
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Biased, that is, in favor of Israel.

THE OFFICIAL REPORT for the governors of the BBC on its coverage of the Palestine-Israeli conflict found predictably that there was “was little to suggest systematic or deliberate bias” but then went on to list a series of measurements by which the BBC could be said to be biased in favour of Israel.
This produced mocking guffaws in my own newsroom, where some of the BBC’s greatest hits — or perhaps misses — remain fresh in the memory. There was the hagiographic send-off for Yassir Arafat by a BBC reporter with tears in her eyes and that half-hour profile of Arafat in 2002 which called him a “hero” and “an icon” and concluded that the corrupt old brute was “the stuff of legends”.

There was Orla Guerin’s unforgettably inventive spin on the story of a Palestinian child being deployed as a suicide bomber, which most journalists saw as a sickening example of child abuse in the pursuit of terrorism. Guerin had it as “Israel’s cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes”.

There was the disturbing case of Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC Arabic Service correspondent, who addressed a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, and was recorded declaring that journalists in Gaza, apparently including the BBC, were “waging the campaign shoulder to shoulder together with the Palestinian people”. Pressed for an explanation, the subsequent BBC statement said: “Fayad’s remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC.”

Yup. The BBC is too pro-Israel, and the damn American media is too pro-Bush.

Posted by: Ace at 08:00 AM | Comments (19)
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Oh, what a card:

In a scene from his new candid-camera program "Juiced," O.J. Simpson pulls a prank involving the infamous white Bronco, drawing criticism from the family of a man he was accused of killing.

As part of the pay-per-view show, Simpson pretends to sell the Bronco at a used car lot and boasts to a prospective buyer that he made the vehicle famous....

"It was good for me - it helped me get away," Simpson said, referring to the slow-speed, televised police chase that preceded his 1994 arrest on charges of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.

Goldman's father, Fred, told "Inside Edition" he found Simpson's comment "morally reprehensible."

Simspon and the producer of the show claim that OJ wasn't paid for this. Right. I'm sure he wasn't paid a cent. He's just doing a show completely for free. Has nothing to do with the huge unpaid judgment against him for wrongful death.

If the show is successful, there may be a sequel in the works, tenatively titled O.J.'s Funniest Bloopers and Savage Beheadings.

Thanks to yls.

Posted by: Ace at 07:39 AM | Comments (11)
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Liberals: enemies of America.

It's outrageous. I speculated that one cocksucker liberal had lied to get on the Moussaoui jury, lied about his or her pre-existing complete objection to the death penalty. Juries in capital cases are supposed to be "death-qualified," and those with a commitment against the death penalty are required by law to admit this in voir dire so they can be removed from the jury pool.

The system works, unless one son of a bitch decides to subvert the law and democracy itself -- by interposing a one-man veto over the popularly-enacted laws -- by lying to get on a jury.

And of course this will usually require a judge willing to, let us say, be less than vigorous in questioning the jurors, and turn a blind eye to those who appear to be deceptive or evasive in their answers. A judge like Marge Brinkema, for example.

The jury split 11-1, 10-2, 10-2 in favor of the death penalty in the three counts. Only ONE juror refused to find for the death penalty on any count.

Here's the kicker: the voting was anonymous. Furthermore, after the jury would keep finding one holdout on one count, they would attempt to argue out the reasons for keeping Moussaoui alive. But the bastard who kept voting against the death penalty remained silent during these deliberations, and refused to express his or her reasons for voting against the death penalty.

The other jurors tried to engage this secret terrorist-sympathizer, even offering their own anti-death penalty arguments in an effort to draw him or her into the discussion, but he or she kept perfectly quiet.

Jurors are supposed to deliberate. This juror refused to deliberate. Jurors are supposed to discuss the issues with other jurors, so that they may come to a shared decision. This juror refused to discuss anything with any other juror.

The reason? Well, when a man or woman does something in secret, it's usually because they're doing something dishonest.

So, this son of a bitch wanted to act our his or her Twelve Angry Men fantasies and play "hero" in sparing a terrorist killer-by-remote-control his true justice. But the bastard (or whore) chose to do it secretly. No impassioned speeches to the other jurors in this version of Twelve Angry Men! No-- that would require some guts, some moral courage. This piece of shit just kept writing down the word "No" and then, coward that he or she is, kept silent about his or her reasons for doing so.

Probably because his or her reasons were wholly unlawful. He or she was not permitted to vote against the death penalty simply because he or she objected to the death penalty on principle-- if that were the case, he or she was required, by law, to announce that fact and disqualify himself or herself from the pool.

He or she kept silent then-- and thus had to keep silent during the actual deliberations.

If this country weren't already lost, the prosecution would seek a mistrial. Brinkema would be investigated for deliberate judicial misconduct. And this prick would be investigated for obstruction of justice and deliberately perpetrating a fraud on the court.

But none of those things will happen, of course. Because liberals get to break the law with impunity. Society has to bow to their delicate consciences.

Only one juror stood between the death penalty and Zacarias Moussaoui and that juror frustrated his colleagues because he never explained his vote, according to the foreman of the jury that sentenced the al-Qaeda operative to life in prison last week.

The foreman, a Northern Virginia math teacher, said in an interview that the panel voted 11 to 1, 10 to 2 and 10 to 2 in favor of the death penalty on three terrorism charges for which Moussaoui was eligible for execution. A unanimous vote on any one of them would have resulted in a death sentence.

The foreman said deliberations reached a critical point on the third day, when the process nearly broke down. Frustrations built because of the repeated 11 to 1 votes on one charge without any dissenting arguments during discussions. All the ballots were anonymous, and the other jurors were relying on the discussions to identify the holdout.

"Wednesday [April 26] was a very intense day," she said. "But there was no yelling. It was as if a heavy cloud of doom had fallen over the deliberation room, and many of us realized that all our beliefs and our conclusions were being vetoed by one person. . . . We tried to discuss the pros and cons. But I would have to say that most of the arguments we heard around the deliberation table were" in favor of the death penalty.

The foreman, who said she voted for the death penalty because the government proved its case, was the second juror to be interviewed by The Washington Post since the trial ended last week. The first juror said he voted for life in prison because he thought that Moussaoui's role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks was marginal. He said some other jurors shared his point of view, but he would not reveal the vote. Questioned again after the foreman's comments, the first juror said that he is "happy someone else came forward" and that the 12 jurors "differed in the way we interpreted the things we saw and heard." He declined to discuss the deliberations further.

The foreman said deliberations broke off April 26 when one juror questioned why they should take another vote. "What for?" the foreman remembers the juror saying, "We all know how it is going to come out."

The next day a juror called in sick, and there were no deliberations. That Friday, the jury returned. The foreman told the group that she wanted to send a note to U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema stating that the jury was "not holding deliberations in the true sense of deliberations because the con arguments were not being thrown out on the table so we could investigate them as a group."

She said the jurors did not want any notes sent to the judge, so they decided that the whole group would raise anti-death penalty issues because that way the lone dissenter would not feel isolated or "ganged up on." Deliberations continued, but the foreman said the lone dissenter still did not raise any issues. Three days later, jurors delivered their decision to Brinkema.

The foreman said at the end of the deliberations she felt better about the process but not the outcome.

"I felt frustrated," she said, "because I felt that many of us had been cheated by the anonymity of the 'no' voter. We will never know their reason. We will never be able to hold their reason up to the light and the scrutiny of evidence, fact and law."

...

She has gone back to work after taking a few days off and is still processing the experience. She still wonders why the one dissenter never raised specific objections to sentencing Moussaoui to death.

"We don't know whether we covered all of the cons in the deliberations," she said. "Our sense was this was a done deal for that person and whoever that person is, they were consistent from the first day and their point of view didn't change."

They were wrong not to send a note to Brinkema. Brinkema wouldn't have done anything, but at least we'd have her on record as being opposed to requiring the jurors to do their jobs.

They were lazy and lacked any conviction in doing what was right. They chose to spare a terrorists' life rather than confront a dishonest holdout and argue with him or her, or force him or her to at least make the case for mercy out loud.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

But the Secret Liberal Holdout is guilty of far more than that. He or she is likely guilty of an actual crime, and a crime committed to save a terrorist from justice.

Brinkema may have ordered the name kept a secret, but if it should happen to come into some blogger's email box, it's not going to be a secret for long.

This son of a bitch took advantage of secrecy in the jury room. He or she won't have that secrecy in the real world.

Juror Zero could have explained his or her reasons forthrightly in the jury room. Juror Zero didn't. So now Juror Zero will have to explain those reasons publicly.

Be on notice, Juror Zero. Your secret's not safe, pal.

Thanks to Allah, who notes sardonically once again, "at least we didn't give Moussaoui his martyrdom."

Sorry For the Rant: Whether this son of a bitch broke the law or not, it's too dangerous to out the person. It's dangerous to the juror and the other jurors as well; Al Qaeda would still likely harm any of them.

This person shouldn't have been on the jury and I'll bet dollars to donuts Brinkema knew that.

Posted by: Ace at 09:04 PM | Comments (383)
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