Hysterical. The Democratically controlled House limited chartered airplane flights provided by lobbyists and deep-pocketed advocates -- a not terribly disguised sort of campaign contribution verging on outright graft -- and now they all (including Republicans!) reverse the restrictions so long as the lobbyist/donor giving you the pricey flight is a "friend."

The change stipulated that members of Congress can fly their own airplanes on official business as well as accept "personal use of an aircraft ... that is supplied by an individual on the basis of personal friendship."

...

"As long as you call a lobbyist your personal friend, it is apparently OK," says Sloan, who believes the ethics enforcement process is crippled because only members of Congress can file complaints against their colleagues. "I don't see a member filing a complaint against another member for flying on someone's plane, saying they are not really friends."

With friends like these, who need bribery?

Instapundit points out it's particularly stunning given the two-fer nature of it: One, it's an inarguable surrender to the "Culture of Corruption," Two, it's absurdly hypocritical for liberals to encourage more unnecessary private air flights given their supposed jihad on carbon dioxide.

Here's a hat-trick: The do-nothing Democratic Congress is not only not achieving any of its program, but it's actually already undoing the minor inside-baseball stuff it passed just weeks ago.

Posted by: Ace at 03:43 PM | Comments (17)
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Scorching good read from clear-eyed neoliberal Anne Applebaum in the amateur leftist webzine Slate.

As I say, [Chirac leaves] a very important legacy: One of consistent scorn for the Anglo-American world in general and the English language in particular, of suspicion of Central Europe and profound disinterest in the wave of democratic transformation that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s, of preference for the Arab and African dictators who had been, and remained, clients of France. In his later years, Chirac constantly searched, in almost all international conflicts, for novel ways of opposing the United States. All along, he did his best to protect France from the rapidly changing global economy.

It was, in other words, the legacy of a man who was deeply conservative, almost Brezhnevite in his view of the world - so much so that the word most often used to describe his political beliefs is "stagnation." But as he leaves office, the loudest condemnation of his twelve years as head of state comes not from the outside world, but from the French themselves. Don't listen to me, listen to them: After all, it is they who have just elected a man who promised to "break with the ideas, the habits and the behavior of the past.

The relentless moral support and apologism on behalf of tyrants is especially repellent.

Via Instapundit.

Posted by: Ace at 03:31 PM | Comments (16)
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The slow bleed of support from the President -- and the Iraqi government -- continues.

It's an article of faith in Republican circles that Congress should not impose deadlines on the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. But should deadlines be off limits in the Iraq debate? Maybe at this point, a deadline for the Iraqi government wouldn't be a bad thing.

Yes, it's true that a deadline would simply tell the enemy how long he has to wait before the U.S. leaves. But it would have the same effect on the Iraqi government, too, and that might be a good thing. Every instance in which there has been significant progress in Iraq — the writing of a constitution, election of a legislature, etc. — has come as a result of the U.S. pushing the Iraqis to meet a deadline. Without a deadline, they mess around, and mess around some more, and act as if they have all the time in the world. And even with a deadline, they are likely to miss it and delay until the last minute before getting anything done.

Meanwhile, Sunnis are threatening, and probably planning, to completely withdraw from the Iraqi government, due to the goverment's resistance to any pass any of the constitutional amendments they consider necessary for preserving their political voice and securing a chunk of the oil money.

And of course several moderate GOP senators may jump to the anti-war side come September, apparently their unofficial deadline for substantial progress in the war.

Weigheing against this welter of bad news is the fact that Anbar province seems well on the way towards stabilization, and, perhaps, relative security.

Remember this story?
Ah yes, just 7 months ago Al Anbar was "lost."

Amidst my travels to neighborhood watch centers and police stations where local Sunni Muslims who have porn on their cell phones are playing hard ball against AQIZ types who would ban porn on cell phones I forgot all about this article in the WaPo last September.

Anbar is so "lost" now politically that there is a waiting list for anbaris to join the IA and IP.

It is so lost, that in the AO I hope to visit next the local Sheiks have declared war on AQIZ and the neighboring tribe supporting AQIZ.

It is so lost, the local neighborhood watch centers deliver captured IEDs to Marine Combat Outposts.

It is so wildly stinking lost that...wait, it is not lost.

In fact, the situation has flipped so much in 7 months that the heavy lifting in Al Anbar may be coming to a close--the heavy lifting being the political work of flipping the tribes to support the coalition and take charge of their own security.

But there's a storm coming:

As the Sunnis who supported AQIZ now flip to supporting the coalition, and the tribes take control of security in their villages and transition from neighborhood watch to provisional forces to sworn police officers, AQIZ will have little recourse but to escalate and assert themselves.

I predict that the Summer of 2007 could be one of the most violent in the history of this Emergency. As troops surge in and create gated communities in the cities, as battalions flood into combat outposts in the tribal areas on the River valley, AQIZ will have two choices, go to ground and give the coalition a hollow victory--which means a longer permanent garrison--or escalate the level of violence to show the surge is not working.

This Summer is when the rubber does meet the road in Iraq. It is make or break for all sides. But Anbar is far from lost.

Although I take Byron York's point about timelines, the primary reason to resist them is simple: It's a go signal to AQ to start racheting up the bodycount.

If I had to guess at the future, I'd say the most likely "exit strategy" -- assuming that victory-as-an-exit-strategy is unacheivable, will be a last-ditch effort by America to strongarm the Iraqi government, consisting, somewhat cynically but understandably, of demanding the Iraqis take actions we know they will outright refuse. These demands will be calculated to provide a pretext for the withdrawal of US troops or, even better, the request of the Iraqi government that US troops leave the country.

Formally legislated or not, the US is on a timetable for withdrawal as a practical matter.

Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (75)
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He quoted Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would later found the KKK.

And what was Forrest quoted on? The need to keep the bloodlines pure? Lynching black folks?

No.

I was a little worried when I saw Dan Riehl's headline. Maybe some cracker did quote a Klannish line in Congress.

But then I saw the quote.

This is absurd: the left is going crazy because one of the most famous aphorisms about war -- "Git thar the fustest with the mostest" -- was quoted.

That line is so famous that even I know it. It's endlessly quoted because it's simplistic, and yet pretty accurate about military strategy in broad outlines. Plus it sounds pretty funny.

But there you go: The left's new scandal.

It says a lot about them that they'd never read or heard this quip before. Their ignorance, as always, is part of their power.

Misquote: Wikipedia says he never actually spoke the famous line:

Forrest is often erroneously quoted as saying his strategy was to "git thar fustest with the mostest," but this quote first appeared in print in a New York Times story in 1917, written to provide colorful comments in reaction to European interest in Civil War generals. Bruce Catton writes, "Do not, under any circumstances whatever, quote Forrest as saying "fustest" and "mostest." He did not say it that way, and nobody who knows anything about him imagines that he did."

I don't know if Wikipedia is right about that. I do know "fustest with the mostest" is one of the most famous quotes about war, up there with Clauswitz' line and "war is hell."

Posted by: Ace at 11:24 AM | Comments (164)
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Old news at this point.

But interesting to me is even older news that I didn't know, and the what-might-have-beens it suggests. Here Rich Lowry castigates Giuliani for holding an inconsistent and politically-calculated non-position on abortion.

Giuliani claims he “hates abortion.” Oddly, this hatred didn’t manifest itself until Giuliani realized he had to have something to say to pro-lifers besides that he supported abortion on demand in any circumstance.

Giuliani has been pounded by pundits for his answers on abortion at the first GOP debate. But he didnÂ’t commit a gaffe. He only suffered from the contradictions of a position that appears to be the product of poorly thought-out political calculation.

The Giuliani camp figured he couldn’t abandon his pro-choice position when running for president. His political appeal is based on his strength, so he can’t be seen as wavering on so fundamental an issue. Besides, he already had changed his position once before — when first running for New York City mayor in 1989 — from pro-life to pro-choice.

That's interesting to me. I wonder if Giuliani could have cast his flip-flop as simply deferring to the wishes of the city he wanted to manage. True, his previous statements have gone further than merely saying "I will support this 'right' because nearly all New Yorkers do." But there was always going to be some amount of flip-flopping in his position; wouldn't it have been better for him to have announced he was "functionally pro-life," but had to make strong assurances of defending abortion rights to NYCers in order to get accomplished what needed to be accomplished?

To those who'd say he was admitting he lied when he claimed he had became pro-choice, he could respond that he was making a promise on the issue, a promise he ultimately kept, despite his personal and philosophical reservations about it. And he could state that he's similarly offering a new promise to pro-life Republicans now, one which he will also keep.

I don't know. This seems pretty likely to sink him -- a CNN poll now has McCain within striking distance of Giuliani, and the directionality doesn't look good -- and I can't help but think that almost any other course would have been better than the one he chose.

Lowry suggests a possible save:

Giuliani can upgrade his position by pronouncing Roe a constitutional monstrosity. Is opposing Roe and being pro-choice too confusing? Giuliani can give everyone a basic lesson in self-government — you can hold a position without insisting that the Supreme Court mandate it. He should vow to veto any expanded funding of abortion. And in keeping with his (supposed) hatred of abortion, he should make it clear that he values the work of anti-abortion activists and understands why they would vote to prohibit abortion in a post-Roe world, even if he would vote the other way.

This would make Giuliani as acceptable as a pro-choicer is going to get to social conservatives. His position would still be a contrivance, but at least it would be a coherent and shrewd one. The alternative might be watching his campaign founder on an issue about which he cares very little.

That's the hell of it -- I'm pretty sure Giuliani doesn't really care terribly much about abortion either way. There are issues we know he cares about, and issues we know he doesn't care about (for example: ferrets). And yet with either kind of issue he tends to dig himself deep and hard into his position, even if he doesn't care about it much.

If Giuliani was willing to flip-flop in favor of pro-choice in order to become mayor of a city that needed him, why on earth has he been so self-destructively unwilling to flip-flop further towards the pro-life site in order to become President of the United States?

The answer may be simple: Giuliani wanted to be Mayor of New York City his entire life. Becoming president seems less important to him, an opportunity he never much pursued suddenly availing itself to him, so he's decided to half-heartedly give it a shot. And if that's the case, he just doesn't have the "fire in the belly," as Thompson has been talking about lately, to actually be our president.

Posted by: Ace at 11:14 AM | Comments (111)
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The Religion of Peace Peaciness:

Six Islamic militants from Yugoslavia and the Middle East were arrested on charges of plotting to attack the Fort Dix Army post and ''kill as many soldiers as possible,'' authorities said Tuesday.

In conversations secretly recorded by an FBI informant over the past year, the men talked about killing in the name of Allah and attacking U.S. warships that might dock in Philadelphia, according an FBI criminal complaint.

''This was a serious plot put together by people who were intent on harming Americans,'' U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said Tuesday. ''We're very gratified federal law enforcement was able to catch these people before they acted and took innocent life.''

One suspect reportedly spoke of using rocket-propelled grenades to kill at least 100 soldiers at a time, according to court documents.

''If you want to do anything here, there is Fort Dix and I don't want to exaggerate, and I assure you that you can hit an American base very easily,'' suspect Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer said in one conversation secretly recorded by a government informant, according to the criminal complaint.

''It doesn't matter to me whether I get locked up, arrested or get taken away,'' a suspect identified as Serdar Tatar said in another recorded conversation. ''Or I die, it doesn't matter. I'm doing it in the name of Allah.''

Another suspect, Eljvir Duka, was recorded saying: ''In the end, when it comes to defending your religion, when someone is trying attacks your religion, your way of life, then you go jihad.''

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Tuesday there is ''no direct evidence'' that the men had ties to international terrorism.

If that's supposed to be reassuring, I'm not reassured.

The FBI was tipped off in January 2006 when a shopkeeper alerted agents about a ''disturbing'' video he had been asked to copy onto a DVD, according to court documents. The video showed 10 men in their early 20s ''shooting assault weapons at a firing range ... while calling for jihad and shouting in Arabic 'Allah Akbar' (God is great),'' the complaint said.

...

Four of the men were born in the former Yugoslavia, one in Jordan and one in Turkey, officials said. All had lived in the United States for years. Three were in the country illegally; two had green cards allowing them to stay permanently; the other is a U.S. citizen.

...

''They were planning an attack on Fort Dix in which they would kill as many soldiers as possible,'' Drewniak said.

...

Shnewer named Fort Dix and a nearby Navy base, explaining that the group ''could utilize six or seven jihadists to attack and kill at least one hundred soldiers by using rocket-propelled grenades'' or other weapons, the complaints said. The Navy base was not named in the papers.

...

The description of the suspects as ''Islamic militants'' renewed fears in New Jersey's Muslim community. Hundreds of Muslim men from New Jersey were rounded up and detained by authorities in the months following the 2001 attacks, but none was connected to that plot.

You know who else the description of the suspects as "Islamic militants" renewed fears in? In everyone not in NJ's Muslim community.

Posted by: Ace at 10:55 AM | Comments (33)
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After reading this, I'm beginning to believe Laurie David is a conservative plant, an agent of Karl Rove sent to discredit the entire environmental movement. The unintentional hilarity is not the article, which is yet another attempt to canonize David's "activism" while completely ignoring the contradiction between her words and her lifestyle.

The true funny comes after the article, with an excerpt from David's book - "Stop Global Warming: The Solution is You." Presumably, by "you" she means you. Not her and her Hollywood friends - you beer-swilling, country music listening, NASCAR watching vermin in flyover (in a private jet!) country.

After all, she cares more than you do.

I hated those first few months of motherhood. The baby had colic, Larry was on a soundstage seven days a week, my career was on hold-all of my friends worked-I had no one to talk to. I was isolated and scared. I spent a lot of time walking around the neighborhood, pushing a stroller. I started noticing an enormous amount of SUVs on the street. Everyone was driving them. I frequented a local bookstore and picked up a book called High and Mighty by Keith Bradsher of The New York Times. It was about the proliferation of SUVs and how they were really harming America. It explained that our fuel-economy standards were plunging because of a loophole in the law that classified SUVs as trucks, thereby allowing them to have lower mileage standards than regular cars-fewer miles per gallon and double the carbon-dioxide emissions. So, every time you drove somewhere, to the store, the school, the freeway, you were now all of a sudden doubling your personal CO2 pollution. I panicked, because everyone I knew was driving them. I had had other lightbulb moments in my life-like the first time I tasted good wine and then couldn't drink the cheap stuff any more; or the moment that I learned that bald men make better lovers, and never dated a man with hair again. But this was different. This awareness landed with a thud on my shoulders. And with awareness comes responsibility.

After reading this, awareness has landed like a thud on my shoulders - Laurie David is a hypocritical simpleton and an elitist gasbag.

And with awareness comes responsibility. more...

Posted by: Slublog at 06:54 AM | Comments (117)
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Not sure if anyone cares, but (content warning) someone snapped a picture of her breastfeeding her kid.

At least I assume it's her kid. If it's not hers, it's kinda weird.

Other blogs will post this on the pretext of the politics of breastfeeding.

I'm just putting it up because it shows an actress with her tit in someone's mouth. Integrity.

Via Gawker.

Posted by: Ace at 12:41 AM | Comments (91)
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Remember that weird story about suspicions that strange-looking Canadian coins were really miniturized surveillance devices, perhaps even incorporating nanotechnology?

Well, it turns out they're just not-particularly-uncommon coins minted in 2004.

No one bothered to look the coin up in a collector's book
before issuing intelligence warnings to contractors visiting Canada.

An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind the U.S. Defense Department's false espionage warning earlier this year, The Associated Press has learned.

The odd-looking -- but harmless -- "poppy coin" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

The silver-colored 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy -- Canada's flower of remembrance - inlaid over a maple leaf. The unorthodox quarter is identical to the coins pictured and described as suspicious in the contractors' accounts.

The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the poppy's red color from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 commemorating Canada's 117,000 war dead.

"It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source," wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. "Under high power microscope, it appeared to be complex consisting of several layers of clear, but different material, with a wire like mesh suspended on top."

The confidential accounts led to a sensational warning from the Defense Security Service, an agency of the Defense Department, that mysterious coins with radio frequency transmitters were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

The only thing even vaguely suspicious about the coins is that the poppy part of them glows a bit oddly under ultraviolet light.

Now, I could make a lame joke about Canada being so boring and useless it's actually mysterious, and the fact they've minted tens of thousands of war-memorial coins takes US intelligence months to find out. Because, you know -- Canada. Who cares?

But there is something very wrong with our intelligence agencies if they cannot manage to simply buy a book about Canadian coins to find their answers. Or just, as Rosie says, Google it. It's not like anyone was trying very hard to keep these coins secret.

By the way -- the coins were mostly distributed through an especially insidious company -- Wendy's hamburger joints in Canada.

Our spy agencies were writing memos about contractors getting strange coins handed to them as change at Wendy's.

So not only did they have to speculate the Canadians were developing super-spy coins (conveniently marked with a big red translucent poppy on one side!) to Americans, they had nefariously roped in the Wendy's hamburger chain into their nefarious schemes.

What the hell are these people doing?

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 12:32 AM | Comments (26)
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Via KC Johnson:

Ubuntu, the group co-founded by potbanger and Duke graduate student Serena Sebring, held a "["Creating a World without Sexual Violence:] National Day of Truthtelling" in Durham last week. The Orwellian call was not to demand "truth" from the DA's office, or the Police Department, or Bob Ashley's newsroom, but instead to suggest that the "truth" had not been exposed in the lacrosse case.

And I thought "Lightning bolt! Lightning bolt!" was embarrassing. At least those guys had cool armor, and didn't intend their video to circulate beyond their fellow gamers.

The left's pathetic, bathetic "Express Yourself!" culture champions this sort of clownishness, encouraging poets who are shit for poetry and interpretive dancers who look like they're staggering away from the lobotomy table. They must be "creative," they must perform, despite their utter lack of creativity or craft.

They remind me of this wonderful observation of Michael Caine's in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels:

Lawrence Jamieson: Freddy, as a younger man, I was a sculptor, a painter, and a musician. There was just one problem: I wasn't very good. As a matter of fact, I was dreadful.

I finally came to the frustrating conclusion that I had taste and style, but not talent. I knew my limitations.

We all have our limitations, Freddy. Fortunately, I discovered that taste and style were commodities that people desired.

Freddy, what I am saying is: know your limitations. You are a moron.

Indeed. Like Freddy, they can never come to Jamieson's sad realization, because they are morons. And unlike Jamieson, they don't even have the taste and style to even fake talent.

Also from Durham in Wonderland: notice that Amanda Marcotte has finally addressed the Not A Rape case:

Amanda Marcotte --taking a page from extremists among the Group of 88--recently posted a comment on her blog, announcing, "Having never accused anyone directly of anything, I have no idea what I'm supposed to apologize for. Oh yeah—being a feminist and opposed to rape and sexual harassment."

One of her own readers explained, "Amanda, how about apologizing for this: 'Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it? So unfair.' Again, I ask, What sexual assault are you referring to? Again, I ask, What sexual assault do you continually refer to when bashing those three lacrosse players? Again, I ask, Why were they guilty until proven innocent, and even then continually guilty, according to you?"

The comment thread is particularly notable for its willful ignorance: among Marcotte's defenders, about the only piece of news they appear to have witnessed since April 6, 2006 is Duff Wilson's August New York Times article, which was frequently (and fawningly) referenced.

John Edwards' hand-picked "blogmistress." His wife Elizabeth is a huge fan.

Feminism -- strong form, not the vaguer, older idea that women ought to have rights, opportunity, and respect, and all that gay shit -- has been a fantasy ideology since its degeneration into dementia sometime in the seventies.

Pretty much the only thing that the current feminists stand for is a woman's right to behave precisely as viciously stupidly as the fat, drunk boor at the end of the bar who won't shut the hell up despite the fact it's plain to everyone, including himself, he has no idea what he's talking about and is chiefly screaming and hurling insults in a pathetic attempt to assert he matters.

Posted by: Ace at 11:49 PM | Comments (74)
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