The various candidates' ass-sniffing toadies just can't restrain themselves from constantly invoking Ronald Reagan in relation to their campaigns.

The man is dead and will not be endorsing any of you.

Just fucking quit it already and let's get on with the future.

Am I alone here?

Posted by: LauraW. at 11:35 AM | Comments (58)
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The answers seem to be: Just about everything and September 2002.

Of course they, including Nancy Pelosi, were so horrified they didÂ….nothing.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Â…

Yet long before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

Â…
"In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic," said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. "But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.' "

Thank God the military and intelligence agencies have done such a great job of preventing further attacks on America. They made it safe for the Democrats to play irresponsible games with national defense to further their political agenda.

The World's Safer Now? [Ace]: As Democrats claim "the world was different then, when we approved of torture," an Instapundit emailer asks:

"If it was an acceptable practice five years ago, when the world was a more dangerous place, then what has happened in the past five years to make the world a less dangerous place where such harsh methods are no longer necessary?"

Good question, as the Democrats maintain nothing -- nothing -- the government or our troops has done since 9/11 has made America even an iota safer.

This would be a good question for Russert et al. to ask -- which statement are you lying about, the part about America being no safer or America now being safe enough that Democrats can oppose harsh interrogation methods (with political safety)?

But of course no one will ask it, because the question has no good answer and the MSM knows it.

Posted by: DrewM. at 11:31 AM | Comments (11)
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When I was 19 or 20 I was in college and my biggest concern was getting a good fake ID that would get me into bars.

I canÂ’t imagine facing what Spc. Alejandro Albarran (20) and his wife Janay (19) have at their ages and dealing with such monumental challenges in such an amazing way.

More than a year after Spc. Alejandro Albarran lost part of his right leg in an explosion in Iraq, he still hasn't decided whether he'll stay in the Army.

"Right now, I'm leaning against it," said the 20-year-old infantryman, looking ahead with distaste to a possible desk job.

Whatever he decides, he won't be leaving Army life behind - because his wife has enlisted to take his place in uniform.

"After everything he's gone through - and he loves the Army - he kind of inspired me," said Janay Albarran. "I made him a promise that I would finish what he started."

While he underwent five-day-a-week rehabilitation to recover his balance and strength on a prosthetic leg at an Army rehabilitation facility in San Antonio, she was in boot camp at Fort Jackson, S.C., learning to shoot a rifle and stand in formation.

Janay Albarran graduated from basic training on Friday, gaining the rank of private. The couple's 2-year-old daughter is staying with a grandmother in Arizona.

Posted by: DrewM. at 09:20 AM | Comments (27)
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As I'm apparently the official Voice of Fred here in Moronville, I guess I should note that John Hawkins of Right Wing News has an interview up with Bill Lacy, Fred's campaign manager.

There aren't a whole lot of surprises here -- his victory scenario is essentially what I've said, stay "viable" until winning South Carolina -- but Lacy is quite forthright and gives some insight into what they may have been thinking leading up to yesterday's Iowa story (and Drew, your link was borked).

My guess on the latter is that it is both about giving the campaign a definite and visible focus and -- though Fred says he is only shooting for #3 (that is, eliminating the possibility of finishing worse and being written off before the big race begins) -- the possibility of picking off either Romney or Huckabee to finish #2. If, after spending a gazillion dollars there (since, what, the Clinton Administration?) Romney can't even finish second in Iowa, his campaign might find itself shedding supporters fast. Ditto the Huckabee bubble, which could pop at any time.

Posted by: Open Blog at 03:50 AM | Comments (57)
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There comes a point where you've been up so long that you can't seem to lie down. Which is why I'm up at 3 in the morning reading this brown-panic article from Pat Buchanan that my brother sent me. Townhall should be ashamed to have published it.

Go ahead and read it, although I'll be quoting some of it below. The gist is that diversity equals destruction, and that as the U.S. becomes more "multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual" we will go the way of Yugoslavia. It's rather heavy on rhetoric and short on facts.

Buchanan's major error is that he implies a causal connection between diversity and the destruction of society when he's presented no evidence that there is one. He's got a long list of "diverse" countries that have broken up and implies that the cause of the break-up is the diversity.

Even in those cases where the multiple ethnic and religious groups can be said to be the foundation of a break-up (e.g. the Former Yugoslavia), there is a significant intervening factor in the cause of the break-up. There, ethnic groups with a thousand-year history of violence were forced together by larger powers (much as the creation of Iraq after WWI sandwiched the Kurds, Sunni, and Shia together). Here in the U.S., we have no blood-drenched history with any of our immigrant groups, nor are we being forced to share limited territory and political power.

He also relies on quite a revisionist view of U.S. history, presenting the good old days when the U.S. was 90% "European-American" and 90% Christian as a time of national unity. He mentions the immigration of the Irish in the nineteenth, but manages to omit the amount of trouble that caused (I say that with irony as the descendant of one of those Irish Catholics).

Actually, now that I've linked that, I'll just quote a bit to jog your memories and push the whole "everything old is new again" button:

The Know Nothing movement was a nativist American political movement of the 1850s. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by Irish Catholic immigrants, who were often regarded as hostile to American values and controlled by the Pope in Rome. Mainly active from 1854–56, it strove to curb immigration and naturalization, though its efforts met with little success.

...

The immigration of large numbers of Irish and German Catholics to the U.S. in the 1830–60 period made religious differences between Catholics and Protestants a political issue. The tensions reflected European battles between Catholics and Protestants, but were much less intense. Violence occasionally erupted over elections.

Now, I think it's rude, often just an attempt to shut down debate, and just plain distasteful to call nativist or call racist, but I've got to say, Buchanan spiked my detector with this:

Last week, we learned that in the last seven years 10.3 million people, almost all from the Third World, entered the United States, more than half illegally. The nation that was one-tenth minority in 1960 is now one-third minority. European-Americans will soon be a minority in the nation, as they are today in California, Texas and most large American cities.

And when that day comes, what then will unite us as a people?

Certainly not religious faith, for the last 40 years has seen a large influx of Muslims, the rise of a rabid secularism and the break-up of Christian churches -- the Episcopalians most recently -- over issues of morality: abortion, civil unions, homosexual bishops, assisted suicide, stem cell research, Darwin, creationism. No longer are we united by a common language, as the fastest growing radio and TV stations are Hispanic.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be assimilating as fast as our little Borg nanoprobes will let us (okay, maybe I am getting tired). I am saying that there's every reason to expect that I have more unity with non-European-Americans than I do with Pat Buchanan, who is ostensibly of my race and religion. And it's interesting that he lumps all those "issues of morality" in there, especially since the Hispanic folks he fears so much are more likely to agree with him than not on those topics.

This also struck me as an extremely curious, perhaps unique, way of arguing against diversity:

There came a new diversity when the English came to the Red Man's continent in 1607 and Africans were brought as slaves in 1619. From that diversity came the near annihilation of American Indians and a racial divide that led to the American Civil War, bloodiest in the West in the 19th century.

Yeah, I'm definitely getting tired now, so I'm just going to leave that with a big, fat, lazy WTF?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:20 AM | Comments (71)
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Adding to the story I wrote about on Friday, it turns out that then Deputy Director of Operations, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. ordered the destruction of hundreds of hours of recordings of two interrogations over the objection of quite a few folks:

White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.

The chief of the agencyÂ’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.Â’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said.

[...]

As the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee in 2003, Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida, was among Congressional leaders who warned the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes, the former intelligence officials said. Mr. Goss became C.I.A. director in 2004 and was serving in the post when the tapes were destroyed, but was not informed in advance about Mr. RodriguezÂ’s decision, the former officials said.

So the DDO acted against the advisement of Congress, the White House, Justice, and the Director of the CIA. Congress wasn't informed of the destruction of the tapes until a year after the fact and the White House says they don't recall being told about the tapes' destruction before this week. This is in addition to what we knew on Friday, that the tapes had been requested in a criminal trial and by Congress.

Both Congress and the Executive are supposed to share oversight of the CIA. It is not exempt from that oversight simply because its purpose is intelligence gathering, any more than it is exempt from following the law. Expecting it to conduct itself in a legal manner is not "keeping it on a short leash." Volumes of legislation provide the CIA plenty of legal cover for its activities. In fact, it has much greater latitude in its activities than others and greater protections from disclosure and liability than the rest of government; it therefore enjoys quite a lengthy leash.

This episode is even more frustrating because it imperils the military commissions, which are just getting on their feet. I already talked about how this might affect the Moussaoui and al-Timimi cases (and was told that criminal justice has no place being involved in stopping or punishing terrorism). Hopes that military justice would be a viable substitute are probably wasted.

Unfortunate, from the perspective of anyone who wants to see vigorous prosecution of the War on Terror, is the fact that this has given both houses of Congress all the excuse they need to tighten their grip on the CIA and probably on interrogation practices in general. Both houses have already started investigations into this. So have the Department of Justice and the CIA's general counsel. If the CIA wasn't "constantly looking over their shoulders for fear of a politically-motivated gotcha" before, you can bet they sure are now.

Incidentally, I have a few minutes to go through the comments in the previous post on this topic. Some of you had good discussion and I was too busy yesterday and today to give it the attention it deserved. You may want to check back there for my replies (if you're interested, of course).

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 01:55 AM | Comments (59)
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Jumping all over a juicy racist quote from Mark Steyn's America Alone, lib blogger Jim Henley is utterly beclowned. Henley is taking advice in his open comments...

Posted by: Open Blog at 09:08 PM | Comments (46)
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Over the years, I have enjoyed sticking the news of the benefits of a little nip of alcohol once in a while to help prolong your life to my self-righteous, and dry, in-laws. Well, it seems that birds can enjoy a longer life if they hit the bottle once in a while.

And I love reading how this bird reacts to his whisky:
more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 08:15 PM | Comments (8)
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The Black Eagles of VAW-113 take on the Sun Kings of VAW-116.

It's ON biotch.

A bunch of kids (to me, mostly) having fun.

If you haven't seen the vids from the Sun Kings, they're great, and here.

These things just cheer me. Bunch of hard workin naval aviators and crew, doing the job and finding a way to have some fun. God bless em, and their families. They are so far away, and doing so much. more...

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 05:06 PM | Comments (33)
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Tomorrow, my family and I will be going to Westroads Mall to leave a little something at the makeshift memorial in front of Von Maur.

In his "suicide note," the killer said "I just want to take a few pieces of shit with me."

That's how he viewed his victims, as pieces of shit, the same as him.

Unlike him, they were human beings with lives to live ahead of them. So please take a moment to remember the victims of this atrocity, and say a prayer for their families who are going through Hell right now.

There's a photo gallery of the victims here. more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 05:05 PM | Comments (27)
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