No, not Al Qaeda demanding Americans convert to Sharia law Islam or die.

And no, not this one of Bill Maher accepting Al Qaeda's offer, and yukking it up about the kidnapped FoxNews journalists (as Marion Frances Berry busts a gut at the jokes).

No, the one at the end of this post. After documenting the yawwwwn DUers announcing their intention to forget entirely about 9/11, Flopping Aces appends a video which is, excluding Al Qaeda's murder-porn, one of the foulest ever seen.

The 9/11 attacks. Set to the bouncy jingle and laugh-track of America's Funniest Home Videos.

Leftist humor.

Enjoy.

Link Fixed. Thanks to Steph for alerting me.

The Poster's Politics... Can be gleaned readily enough from his favorite YouTube videos noted here.

As for Village Idiot's objection that this could just be a "high school kid," well, the guy's screenname is Superman1969, and lists his age as "69," which I think is meant to be taken as his birth year, from which his age can be derived (and needs no further updating).

According to the information he supplies, then, he's 37 or so.

Not really a young punk just looking to shock his parents.

As for the larger objection that this doesn't represent anything more than One Lone Nut's sick sense of humor, allow me to respectfully disagree.

Posted by: Ace at 09:28 PM | Comments (33)
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I think that's a damned good question.

Setting aside this whole, special prosecutor nonsense, which is just confusing as hell given separation of powers, what the hell was Fitz thinking?

Look, I'm on board with his responsilibilities and all. Until that point when he knowed no crime had been committed.

I'm old and I'm dead but even I know if it ain't a crime, conspiring to do it ain't shit.

So there.

Posted by: Ace at 07:31 PM | Comments (28)
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Most of the outrage here seems directed at Armitage himself, allowing other people to twist in the wind, and go to jail (like Judith Miller), and be indicted on perjury charges (like Scooter Libby), while remaining silent about his crucial role in "outing" the supposedly covert Valerie Plame.

I was wondering about this, and decided Armitage had kept quiet because he was still a subject of possible indictment himself for a while, and didn't want to antagonize Fitzgerald by revealing what Fitzgerald was keeping quiet.

Which made me wonder: Why had Fitzgerald kept quiet about this so long?

Fitzgerald is emphatically not bound by the rules of confidentiality that Woodward and Novak were. They're reporters. He's a prosecutor whose mission it was to find the leaker and determine if any laws were broken.

He knew who the leaker was the day he took over the investigation. Why on earth did he not reveal it to the world on day one?

Did ethical guidelines prevent him from doing so? Perhaps they did. And yet we we had a whole lot of leaks from his office about Scooter Libby and Karl Rove. I knew Scooter Libby was involved early on from Chris Matthews on Hardball.

So it appears that Fitzgerald and/or his team of lawyers were quite willing to leak to the press what they found out about the targets of their hunt (i.e., those working in the White House) but not about another target (i.e., someone not in the White House, and the original culprit, who wasn't a "partisan gunslinger," and hence not useful to Fitzgerald).

Armitage received a letter from Fitzgerald some time ago that he would not be charged with any crime. (Despite the fact that he is as chargable with perjury as Scooter Libby for failing to disclose his leak to Bob Woodward-- obviously the prosecutors asked him about this, and yet he "forgot." If "forgetting" works for Armitage, why not Libby?).

Why no announcement from Fitzgerald at that point?

And why on earth has this exculpatory information been withheld from Scooter Libby? Granted, we're not at the trial phase yet; but it seems a defendant has a right to know such things.

The obvious answer, though perhaps not the correct one, is that Fitzgerald has been so remarkably protectivive of Armitage because revealing Armitage's critical role would hurt his case against the guy he actually wants to prosecute, for anything he can possibly prosecute him for. Prosecuting someone who is "no partisan gunslinger," even one with a suspect failure of memory, isn't gong to win Fitzgerald a governorship or Senate seat in the future. No, to make a big name for himself in the Democratic Party, he needs to get someone loathed by the Democrats. Someone like Scooter Libby.

It seems strange to me that Fitzgerald knew the name of the leaker from the day he began his investigation, knew from a one or two day bit of research at the law library that no possible crime and been committed, and nevertheless chose to undertake an multiyear investigation which included throwing a reporter in jail for 85 days when he had all the answers he needed from the very beginning.

Why did Fitzgerald, early on, float his absurd "conspiracy to commit acts which are not at all criminal" theory? Because that was the only possible way he could justify continuing an investigation when he already knew the culprit and already knew the culprit, or any other culprit, had broken no laws. He needed to postulate an absurd theory of criminality -- a conspiracy to commit acts which were in fact legal, which, you know, makes it not a conspiracy at all -- to provide a pretext for gunning for Rove and Libby.

Was he absent the day they taught law at law school? One can't have a "conspiracy" to get together and rent a movie on Pay Per View. If the acts one agrees to undertake aren't illegal, no conspiracy charge is possible.

But that absurdity, and the press' willingness to go along with it, is what got us to where we are now.

Related... Lyrics here, audio here. "Secret Agent Plame." Pretty funny.

Thanks for the last to Larwyn.

Update: That Odd Theory of the Case: I've been searching for this cite for a while, and only found it now. I keep referencing it, but without a cite, I've been going on memory. Here is the then-new theory of the case as imagined by Fitzgerald:

But a new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose.

Unless there have been changes in the law I'm not aware of, there is no crime of "Discrediting and Retaliating Against A Political Opponent In the First Degree." Sorry, but that's just daffy, at least based upon my admittedly hazy recollection of the law.

At some point in a conspiracy charge you have to prove the agreement to commit a criminal act of some sort. A "criminal purpose" is impossible without an actual criminal act. Conspiracy statutes usually require proof of an "overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy," and that act itself need not be criminal (i.e., it's not criminal to buy rubber gloves, but that would satisfy the "overt act" requirement in a conspiracy to commit burglary charge), but at the end of the day a conspiracy charge requires some illegal action to be agreed upon.

As Fitzgerald knew, or should have known, from very early on that no laws had been broken, nor could have been broken, how the hell can he claim he's investigating a conspiracy to commit legal acts?

This is absurd as charging me with conspiring with other bloggers to criticize Patrick Fitzgerald. Our aim is not criminal, so we cannot have a "criminal conpsiracy" to achieve our aims.

My take is that this was a cobbled-together transparently-bogus rationale to continue the investigation when it was quite clear that not only was the culprit known, but it was known full well he wasn't even a criminal culprit.

But Fitzgerald couldn't just announce a week in that no crime had been committed. He needed a crime somewhere, and if it took several years of putting people in jail or under oath before a grand jury, he'd find a crime eventually where none had existed previously.

Posted by: Ace at 03:23 PM | Comments (56)
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"Thought mainly to be young British Muslims of Pakistani origin."

We could do a pool on these things, like they do for Superbowl scores. "Young men" would be like drawing a "3" out of the hat, "Muslims" would be the coveted "7," and "of Pakistani origin" would be like drawing the wonderful "0."

All other possibilities would be like drawing the dreaded 9 or 5. Actually, it's worse than that; you could fluke into a 9 with a lot of field goals and a 5 with 5 touchdowns.

So, really, all other possibilities would be like drawing "4 square roots of pi to the ith power" from the hat.

Unless the scoring system changes to permit square roots, pi, and imaginary numbers, you're just not going to win any money.

Posted by: Ace at 02:33 PM | Comments (13)
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Back Talk makes a good point: If reporters actually bothered to put up charts showing multiyear trends when they poor-mouth the economy, viewers would immediately see that they're grossly distorting the actual facts of the matter, which is that the Bush economy is very nearly equal to the "miracle economy" of Clinton.

No, Bush hasn't ever hit Clinton's astoundingly low 4.0% unemployment figure (the average unemployment figure for 2000), but then, Clinton managed that at the end of his boom, when unemployment hits its rock-bottom point due to overhiring. (And then, of course, those marginal jobs are quickly and ruthlessly eliminated when the inevitable correction of a recession occurs.)

Were the MSM to post Back Talk's charts when discussing the economy, it would be immediately evident to all that they're simply lying.

Which is, of course, why they don't use them.

Thanks to... I have no idea. I'm checking my email and windows I have open and don't know who to hat-tip.

Posted by: Ace at 02:13 PM | Comments (7)
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TNR has now deleted all of Siegel's blog postings. Which seems to be a case of burying the evidence; can't they just keep them up with a link to the post of his firing?

And why the hell does TNR keep having these sorts of problems, over and over again?

"Are you mad at me, Leon? Why are you looking at me like that, Leon?"

At any rate, when I read the name "Lee Siegel," I knew I had read one post of his. One. He was a nothing, but I had blundered upon him at some point.

I finally remembered what I'd read of his. A little Google search for a cached page turned this up.

Now, in fairness, Siegel is here defending another TNR blogger from the unhinged attacks of The Daily Kos. Jason Zengerle was the blogger who exposed the "Townhall" mailing list and the Kos-suggested code of silence on his possible financial conflicts of interest; he was subject to a demonization campaign based on his daring to cross the Kosfather. (And also for making a fairly minor mistake: printing one brief "Townhouse email" which wasn't a Townhouse email at all. Zengerle corrected after a couple of days, but of course is still being attacked for the error.)

Still... you tell me. Siegel obviously considers himself part of the MSM, and does not consider himself a mere "blogger," even though he's writing this pap on, you know, his blog. Is this sort of writing good evidence of what he seeks to prove, i.e., the superiority of the MSM over the childish bloggers?

more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:45 PM | Comments (13)
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Tom's smiling because he and Brooke Shields have made up.

1 hour, 12 minutes ago

BURBANK, Calif. -

Brooke Shields says Tom Cruise has apologized for publicly criticizing her use of antidepressants after the birth of her first daughter.

The two had a public beef last year after the "Mission: Impossible III" star, echoing the position of Scientology, said in an appearance on NBC's "Today" show that depression can be treated with exercise and vitamins rather than drugs.

The 41-year-old actress says Cruise apologized in person Thursday.

Whew. Glad that's over.

Now when is Tom going to reconsider the bronzed baby poop auction?

AP - Shields: Cruise made 'heartfelt apology'

Posted by: Ace at 01:43 PM | Comments (8)
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By Fred Weir, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
Fri Sep 1, 4:00 AM ET

MOSCOW - The hard, bitter questions just won't stop coming.

Two years after the terrorist attack on a Beslan school that killed 332 people, including 186 children, a majority of Russians say they don't believe their government is telling the truth about the tragedy.

An independent investigation published this week will heap fuel on the flames of public doubt by challenging key points in the official version of what happened during the three violent September days that are often referred to as "Russia's 9/11."

The remarkable thing is that any of this is even being publicly aired in Russia. Not so long ago, the official cover-up would have been automatic and effective, especially given the seriousness of the charges.

That account has long been challenged by a group of bereaved Beslan mothers. The group believes that corrupt officials allowed the terrorists to store weapons and explosives in the school in the weeks preceding the attack, and enabled many of them to escape amid the confusion of the final gun battle.

Even worse is the accusation that police in Chechnya knew of the attack in advance, and did nothing.

Savelyev's report, which includes hundreds of pages of testimony from witnesses, photos, videos, and expert opinion, cites evidence that police in the neighboring republic of Chechnya had several hours notice of the pending attack, but failed to notify their counterparts in Beslan's North Ossetia republic. Savelyev this week told the radio station Ekho Moskvi that evidence shows a Russian RPO-A flame-thrower triggered the final, deadly gun battle.

"I came to the conclusion that those homemade explosive devices installed by the rebels did not explode at all," Savelyev said. "(The blasts came from) explosive devices delivered from outside."

Citing witnesses, Savelyev says at least 60 of the militants were inside the school during the siege, about half of whom escaped. Like other critics, the Savelyev report is scathing on the authorities' overall lack of readiness to handle the crisis. When the school burst into flames, the report says, no firetrucks were on hand, then arrived later woefully ill equipped.

Other members of the Duma commission have slammed Savelyev for publishing his report on the eve of the politically-delicate Beslan anniversary. Commission head Alexander Torshin derided Savelyev's report this week as "speculation."

CSM -- Russian forces faulted in Beslan school tragedy

Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (10)
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A fugitive wanted by the FBI urges us to convert to Islam. Zawahiri thinks we should listen to him.

DUBAI (AFP) - The number two in Al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urged Americans to convert to Islam in a video that featured a converted US national sought by the FBI.

In the 48-minute video, Zawahiri presented "Azzam the American," and urged the "American people in particular and Westerners in general to listen to the extremely serious words of our brother Azzam the American concerning their fate."

"Our brother Azzam the American is trying to lead his own from obscurity towards the light. Listen to him," insisted Zawahiri, who wore a white tunic and turban.

In some sick way, I wonder if Zawahiri isn't actually trying to help us with the example of brother Azzam.

Here is the advice they want us to ponder:

In an Arabic translation of a poorly audible English statement, a man previously identified by the FBI as Adam Yahiye Gadahn said: "I call on all Americans and other infidels to embrace Islam," also reciting Koranic verses in Arabic.

"I call especially on those who have fought for the illusory Crusader plan of (US President George W.) Bush in Afghanistan, Iraq and everywhere else, to convert to Islam," said Gadahn, dressed in a white tunic and turban.

"Time is running out. Choose the right path before it is too late, before you meet the sad end that thousands have (already) known," Gadahn added.

According to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Gadahn, 28, "is being sought in connection with possible terrorist threats against the United States."

Thanks for the advice Azzam. I'm going to say a prayer for you tomorrow in church.

AFP -- Al-Qaeda deputy urges Americans to convert to Islam

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (21)
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Actually, I suppose we don't know it's jihadis. Could be a lunatic apocalyptic Christian sect, or just an 15 year old screwing around.

But the phone number placing the call has been forwarded to the FBI.

Posted by: Ace at 12:26 PM | Comments (9)
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