Chuck Hagel '08: The Republican Who Can Do What The Democrats Merely Threaten.

Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, said today that he is not jumping into the 2008 presidential race — for now, at least — so he can concentrate on domestic and global concerns, particularly helping to bring an end to the Iraq war.

“I want to keep my focus on helping find a responsible way out of this tragedy and not divert my energy, efforts and judgment with competing political considerations,” Mr. Hagel said. “I will make a decision on my political future later this year."...

Yes yes yes. But does he have what Republicans crave most in a candidate -- a "reputation as an unpredictable maverick," which means, of course, "a reputation as a perfectly-predictable supporter of just about any and all Democratic policies"?

Why yes-- yes he does:

Mr. Hagel, who has developed a reputation as an unpredictable maverick during two terms in the Senate, made his remarks at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He left open three possibilities: running for president at the 11th hour, seeking re-election to the Senate or leaving politics entirely.

You know which one I'm rooting for-- but you know which one it really is too, don't ya?

Meantime, I'm sure you've seen this, but if you haven't, you ought to know. The media is rather less interested in Fred Dalton Thompson's interest in entering the race, because he is, alas, not an "unpredictable maverick" but rather solid on the conservative agenda, and, further, could actually win.

Have I entirely forsworn Rudy Giuliani? No, not entirely. I'm amazed that pro-life evangelicals are willing to overlook his not exactly crowd-pleasing policy on abortion -- I did not see that coming, honestly -- but it seems he's just taking far too many left-leaning positions, or, at least, is not walking them back fast enough for my liking. Making him, in my opinion, more likely a flash in the pan than someone who'll be racking up primary victories a year from now.

Still early, of course. And the man does have his virtues.

But I agree wholly with Mitt Romney supporter Dean Barnett on this:

When candidates back into the nomination because they’re the favorite or because the field is weak, you get unappealing or unqualified nominees. (Insert your own bipartisan list here – I’ll start things rolling by mentioning Dole, Dukakis and Clinton.) For the good of the country, I hope Thompson uses his appearance on Fox News Sunday tomorrow to announce he’s in it to win it.

Indeed, when the front runners are all perceived as too liberal for the party, there will inevitably be challengers from the right -- and if there to be such challengers, as it seems there must be, it's so much better to have a guy who can actually win the general election making that challenge.

If the party turns on its current front-runners in favor of -- apologies to supporters of these men -- a Sam Brownback or Tom Tancredo, we'll lose the general election. That simple.

So whether or not I support Fred Thompson (and, actually, I do), and whether or not I'm bothered by his strong conservative voting record (which, actually, I'm not), I'm a big fan of this particular challenger from the right.

The right of the party needs a voice -- and it might as well be a strong, reassuring, articulate, dramatically-trained one.

Mooting Gingrich: Gingrich could easily fill this role as star-power spokesman for the GOP right. My trouble with Gingrich is America's trouble with Gingrich -- the public simply doesn't seem to buy him as a national candidate. He is, I'm afraid, all but unelectable.

Thompson, should he enter the race, would fill Gingrich's hypethetical role, but with the added benefit that if he should actually take the nomination, he really could win the election. Which is, in the end, what counts.

I'm not one for sending messages or keeping to ideological purity at the expense of actually making policy and having the power to advance elements of the ideological agenda. If the GOP puts up another Dole sort of candidate, I'll do what I did in 1996 -- sit the elections out. I'm not wasting my time in the voting booth just to "send a message." I vote to in hopes of actually electing a winner.

As do most people.

Posted by: Ace at 12:24 PM | Comments (149)
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$20 billion in a must-pass defense appropriations bill has nothing at all to do with defense, unless there's some Al Qaeda threat against the storage of peanuts and similar concerns.

How bad a boondoggle is ethanol? Well, the most charitable analysis suggests that it 75% of the energy of a litre of ethanol is consumed in just making the stuff. And some analysts think it's more than 100% -- that is, it takes more energy to create a litre of ethanol than is actually present in the finished product of a litre of ethanol.

Horrid, world-rending gasoline, on the other hand, consumes only 6% of the energy in the finished product in order to produce the stuff.

And of course corn used for ethnol production is corn not used for food production. Even at the minor levels of ethanol production we have now, that's causing some perfectly-predictable unintended consequences:

Making ethanol is profitable when oil is costly and corn is cheap. And the 51 cent-a-gallon federal subsidy doesn't hurt. But oil prices are off from last year's peaks and corn has doubled in price over the past year, from about $2 to $4 a bushel, thanks mostly to demand from ethanol producers.

High corn prices are causing social unrest in Mexico, where the government has tried to mollify angry consumers by slapping price controls on tortillas. Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, predicts food riots in other major corn-importing countries if something isn't done.

Slightly more energy-efficient than corn-based ethanol is sugar-cane based ethnol, but the moronic US subsidy system keeps cane sugar too expensive to be used as fuel. Latin American countries are using sugar for fuel, but, in a typical governmental Catch-22, such fuel is slapped with a 54-cent-per-gallon tarrif, making it, once again, too expensive as a fuel.

Condi Rice just signed an agreement with Brazil making cane ethanol an internationally traded commodity, which may be a first step to permitting cheaper (though not cheap) cane ethanol to begin being purchased in America.

The Economist sees this entirely as win-win-win. Cheaper fuel for America, less dependence on foreign sources of fuel (well, less dependence on the foreign suppliers we're most tweaked by), an explosion of wealth in Latin America, and even less illegal immigration to America, as Latin American laborers find decent-paying jobs nearer to home. (To be fair, however, the Economist always sees increased international trade as win-win-win.)

Thanks to Larwyn for all of that. Who knew she was such a bear about agricultural subsidies and ethanol policy?

Posted by: Ace at 12:05 PM | Comments (37)
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I put the question mark there not because I doubt they've been deployed, but because I doubt they are "elite trackers." Have the old ways of American Indians survived so long in a society long past the hunter-gatherer phase? Were the old ways even as amazing as cultural lore would suggest?

An elite group of Native American trackers is joining the hunt for terrorists crossing Afghanistan's borders. The unit, the Shadow Wolves, was recruited from several tribes, including the Navajo, Sioux, Lakota and Apache. It is being sent to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to pass on ancestral sign-reading skills to local border units.

In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have mainly tracked smugglers along the US border with Mexico.

But the Taliban's resurgence in Afghanistan and the US military's failure to hunt down Osama bin Laden - still at large on his 50th birthday on Saturday - has prompted the Pentagon to requisition them.

US Defence Secretary Robert M.Gates said last month: "If I were Osama bin Laden, I'd keep looking over my shoulder."

Michelle wants to know why they're only now being deployed. Perhaps just because it's much easier to track smugglers in a desert than a few dozen men over rocky mountain tracks.

Gotta give it up for the Green Lantern motto of the company:

"In brightest day, in darkest night, no evil shall escape my sight, for I am the Shadow Wolf."

More info and links at Michelle's.

Posted by: Ace at 11:33 AM | Comments (53)
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The OMB was supposed to release a report noting who had requested each earmark and how much each cost the taxpayer. And, of course, who benefits from each.

Part of the campaign to inform the public how appropriatotrs spending your money, and paying off well-heeled contributors, in the darkness, without notice, and without your consent as voting citizens.

Caved.

When I heard last week from Hill sources that the White House congressional liason staff was pressuring OMB Director Rob Portman to not release all of the earmarks requested by Members of Congress to executive agencies under the FY2005 budget, I called the OMB press office.

When I asked for a copy of the earmark database and copies of all correspondence between OMB and executive branch officials and Members and Hill staff, I was promised a call-back from a senior OMB spokesman. Not surprisingly, that call never came.

Now this morning, word is circulating on the Hill that the Bush administration is going to release only a limited database of earmarks later today or maybe no database at all, but just aggregate or summary data.

Why? Fear of "offending" Congressional appropriators.

Perhaps it is Bush's calculation that appeasing the porkers will buy the goodwill necessary to stave off attempts at defunding the war.

But that's never worked before, and it's not going to work now.

Bush isn't a very good President when it's all said and done, is he? His early life, marked chiefly by taking the path of least resistance, is a fair preamble to his presidency.

Yes, the war is a good counter-example; but even his relatively steadfast position on that has been marked, often tragically, by half-steps and ill-advised compromises.

Tom Coburn, meanwhile, calls the Senate Democrats out on violating the new law of earmark transparency:
more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:12 AM | Comments (73)
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This aggression cannot stand:

A front-page story in The Post last week suggested that the Bush administration has no backup plan in case the surge in Iraq doesn't work. I wonder if The Post and other newspapers have a backup plan in case it does.

Leading journalists have been reporting for some time that the war was hopeless, a fiasco that could not be salvaged by more troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy. The conventional wisdom in December held that sending more troops was politically impossible after the antiwar tenor of the midterm elections. It was practically impossible because the extra troops didn't exist. Even if the troops did exist, they could not make a difference.

Four months later, the once insurmountable political opposition has been surmounted. The nonexistent troops are flowing into Iraq. And though it is still early and horrible acts of violence continue, there is substantial evidence that the new counterinsurgency strategy, backed by the infusion of new forces, is having a significant effect.

Jules Crittendon previously rapped the media for its childish petulance over the Americans turning the tide of war when they'd already pre-ordained them to lose. Damn the US military for forcing them to rewrite their metanarrative.

"Forcing them?" How silly of me. They won't rewrite, they'll just keep on with the same metanarrative as long as is plausible, and then some. The American media is now slightly less objective about the war than Baghdad Bob.

That's not quite fair, I suppose. Even Brian Williams isn't so stupid as to not notice the change, and even Ted Koppel is now oddly concerned about the implications of an American defeat, the consumation so devoutly to be wished by most his colleagues.

In case you haven't seen it, UPI's Pamela Hess almost breaks into tears trying to convey the justness and importance of the mission. But then, she's the Bush shill who previously noted that almost the entirety of the media denigrates those wo dare to ponder the consequences of defeat as "carrying the Bush Administration's water.

It seems Pam Hess has done what reporters aren't supposed to do -- she's "gone native," and assumed the beliefs and customs of the culture she's reporting on as her own.

Of course, most reporters do "go native," but when they do, they adopt the POV of America's enemies. Pam Hess has done the truly unforgivable -- she's gone native by adopting the POV of America's troops, the one strangely-customed group of exotic foreigners the media has no interest in probing the mindset of.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (10)
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Hollywood, this NYT writer informs us, has suddenly discovered "environmental villains" as heavies in its movies.

Dumping Hollywood villains of the past — drug lords, aliens, North Korean dictators, even the news media — for an environmental bête noire carries risks for studios that don’t mind frightening viewers, as long as it’s all in fun.

Yes yes, so many Hollywood movies feature "North Korean dictators" as a villain (well, one: Team America: World Police) and so, so many have featured "the news media" in that role (again, one I can think of: the lame James Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies).

But it also hints at the possibility of more sophisticated entertainment, and perhaps even the kind of impact that “The China Syndrome,” with Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, exerted on the nuclear power industry when it came out in 1979.

Cartoonish depictions of drug lords in order to provide the necessary "pure evil" attribute in Hollywood villains: Unsophisticated, knuckle-dragging pap for inbred yahoos.

Cartoonish depictions of industrialists in order to provide the necessary "pure evil" attribute in Hollywood villains: "a more sophisticated entertainment."

One example of this "more sophisticated entertainment" the NYT is so pleased about? Michael Bay's The Transformers movie.

In “Transformers,” which DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures are scheduled to release on July 4, robot warriors escape a planet laid waste by civil war, only to arrive on Earth as it faces similar devastation. Mr. Orci added that he had seen a number of development projects recently in which the monster was created by environmental change.

Yes, we will all thrill to the deep, sophisticated entertainment of watching Optimus Prime, part robot, part semi-trailer truck, all kick-ass fightin' machine, explain the dangers of greenhouse gasses to his nemesis Soundwave, a robot that can turn into a cassette tape player.

And that will be followed up by the "more sophisticated entertainment" offered by a remake of no one's favorite moster movie, The Creature From the Black Lagoon:

The source of that change hews closely to Hollywood convention: the exploiter is often a big corporation wreaking havoc by its greed. In “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” the remake that may be shot by Universal Pictures later this year, the murderous fish-man of the Amazon is spawned by the sins of a pharmaceutical giant. “It’s about the rain forest being exploited for profit,” explained Gary Ross, a writer and producer of the film, whose previous movies include “Seabiscuit.”

Hopefully that will prove so successful we'll finally get that remake of Robot Monster we've all been waiting for:

Sure, it looks silly -- an ape-suit with a space-helmet -- but when I tell you the Robot Monster was spawned by elevated methane levels produced by factory farms -- more sophisticated entertainment, non?

Japan's been making this sort of "more sophisticated entertainment" since the 1950's. It's called the Godzilla franchise. Check it out. How the Academy Awards have passed over this "more sophsiticated entertainment" for a half century is beyond me, but then, there's always hope.

As they say: Oscar loves a survivor and Oscar loves Hollywood royalty.

Script Pitch: I have an environmental villain in mind.

Let's say a hypocritical theoenvironmentalist begins screaming that doctors and scientists shouldn't jet around the world in order to attend conferences due to the carbon emissions that produces.

Wouldn't it be interesting if that theoenviornmentalist was himself jet-setting around to deliver his Cassandra cry?

Someone call me; I smell a "more sophisticated entertainment" that could make a hundred million bucks.

A "More Sophisticated Entertainment" Hollywood Has No Interest In: The writer, Michael Ceply, seems to mean that "more sophisticated entertainments" feature real villains, not invented, imaginary ones.

So he's claiming North Korean dictators running ganster regimes of kidnappers, counterfeiters, drug-runners, and nuke-technology salesmen are not "real" in the sense impending climatic doom is. And drug lords, who routinely assassinate cops and judges in Latin America, aren't "real" enough, either.

Fine.

Can anyone think of real world villains who are at this very moment killing innocent people and conspiring to kill thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, more, all due to the vicious notion that psychopathic mass-slaughter is commanded unto them by their Murder God?

Is that "real" enough for Hollywood? A real-world problem that could use a bit of illumination?

A, dare I say it, "more sophisticated entertainment"?

Nah, there's too many other threats that are more dire. Like rampant farting by cows.

Posted by: Ace at 09:49 AM | Comments (89)
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AoSHQ bringing "piece" to the Middle East, one Ambassador at a time.

It no doubt ranks among the more bizarre reasons for recalling an ambassador. The Israeli envoy to El Salvador is being replaced after being discovered on the streets of the capital drunk and tied up — wearing nothing except for bondage gear, officials have said.

Tsuriel Rephael, whose posting to San Salvador marked his first spell as an ambassador, was found by police two weeks ago in a spot near his home and the Israeli embassy, Israeli media reported.

According to reports, officers noted that the ambassador had his hands bound, his mouth gagged and appeared to be with accessories that suggested sado-masochistic acts.

His defense? Somebody slipped a jewfi into his drink.

What?

Yeah..if Sarah Silverman told that joke you would all be laughing.

It's cause she's hot. Right?

Bastards.

Posted by: Jack M. at 09:27 AM | Comments (35)
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October 31st 1957 - March 10th, 2007

Apparent suicide. more...

Posted by: LauraW. at 06:44 AM | Comments (39)
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Artificial scientific 'consensus' requires thugs to enforce it.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.

From The Drudge Report.

Posted by: LauraW. at 05:02 PM | Comments (130)
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Bugs on windshields -- splat.

Via St. Andrew of the Sacret Heart-Ache, who tries to use anti-gay sentiment to undermine a movie's box office when he's he's already indicated he's predisposed to object to.

In the first link, he engages in the same sort of "playground taunting" as Ann Coulter in titling a post, "How Gay is 300?" In the second link, he quote's the amateur leftist webzine Slate's goofball reviewer Dana Stevens for the proposition that 300 stands with 24 on a contiunuum of "sadist-bigot trend... in the popular culture."

So obviously he's not claiming 300 is gay "in a good way." It's a taunt to suggest that those seeing a movie he doesn't think they should see are subconscious homos -- and since such subconscious homos are of course anti-gay themselves, they'll be less inclined to see the period fagorama flick.

Really, is there some special dispensation for liberals like Sullivan and Max Blumenthal for stirring up anti-gay sentiment so long as it's "for a good cause" -- undermining the Republican Party, discouraging straight viewers from seeing a movie they object to? Isn't playing to anti-gay sentiment just simply playing to anti-gay sentiment, whichever politics you're hoping to advance?

If calling someone a homo or faggot is something we can no longe countenance in this societ, honestly, the gays most exercised about this can do the cause a favor by not calling everyone they don't like a "homo" or "faggot" themselves.

Even if it's by cutesy, pussyshit implication rather Coulter's direct invective. Hey, give this to Coulter: At least when she calls someone a faggot, she's man enough to be foresquare about doing so and not hide behind girlishly snide insinuations. If only Sullivan could man up and have her balls about it.

He Also Implied That The Passion of the Christ Was A Sort of Gay BDSM Porn, Too, Didn't He? He seems to just keep working from the same playbook. He'll belittle straight men who see these movies by calling them faggots for doing so. That'll show them.

Well, if these movies are "gay porn" as he continues to natter, well, they're my kind of gay porn.

Related: Maher calls Repubicans gay for Reagan.

Again, I'm sure this was calling political opponents faggots in that "good way."

Posted by: Ace at 03:27 PM | Comments (76)
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