The VENONA intercepts proved he was a Soviet collaborator and agent (not merely a communist) long ago. But that was just set back in the left's 50 year war to clear Hiss' bad name.

The VENONA intercepts proved that Soviet asset codenamed "Ales" was Alger Hiss by noting that wherever the Soviet "diplomatic" cables said Ales was, that's, coincidentally I'm sure, where Hiss was. If Ales was reported by the Soviet spymasters as being in Yalta, gee willickers, it turns out Hiss was in Yalta too. When Ales was reported to be in Mexico City, wouldn't you know it, but that's where Hiss was at the time.

Except in one case, which is where these unrepentant red-defenders make the entirety of their case. One cable, revealed recently, reports that Ales is still in Mexico City, whereas contemporaneous news accounts state that he'd already returned to DC 12 or so days before.

Rosenbaum notes the obvious problem with vesting so much in a single incongruent report -- just because Hiss was in DC doesn't necessarily mean the spymasters knew he was back in DC. He may not have checked in with them yet, leaving them with the impression he was still in Mexico City. Or that part of the report may have been days old, part of a blast of information from the past several weeks reported to Moscow in an information-dump including both fresh and stale reports. Or Gorsky -- the guy who sent this cable -- may have just not been very up on his Hiss-tracking. As Rosenbam notes, dryly:

And as we know, bureaucrats are never incompetent.

And Soviet bureaucrats were of course the most competent of all.

"But it gets worse," Rosenbaum notes, because in their giddy thrill to vindicate a long-ago lost delusion, they resort to McCarthyite tactics to identify an apparent innocent -- a man named Wilder Foote -- as the real Soviet agent.

They also find that Foote had "several longstanding friendships" with leftists, including two friends described by the Soviets as "highly left-wing," although there is no evidence that these friends were involved in espionage. Guilt by friendship!

They even use the rhetoric used by both communist and fascist regimes to brand their internal enemies: "Foote was a cosmopolitan," they say, and "an intellectual, and an internationalist." Case closed!

Worst of all, they quote Wilder Foote's son (who categorically denies their indictment of his father): "My father was on McCarthy's 'list' but was never called to testify."

The ultimate irony. In trying to exonerate Hiss, they end up (partially, at least) exonerating McCarthy's notorious little list of security risks. Essentially, they're saying that one of the alleged communists on McCarthy's list really was a secret Soviet asset.

So McCarthy's list of suspected Communist agents wasn't quite as apocryphal and flat-out fantastical as we had previously been led to believe, eh?

A long article, but an interesting one. It speaks volumes about the mindset of the left -- especially the part where, having branded an apparently innocent man of being a highly-placed Soviet agent and traitor to America, they attempt to make nice with him, calling him an "honorable" and decent man.

Well of course Soviet agents and traitors were honorable and decent men, dears. They were fighting the good fight to champion the murderous tyrant Stalin over the decadent (but not murderous nor tyrannical) West.

It reminds me of Islamic radicals speaking of Osama bin Ladin -- of course he's innocent of the 9/11 attacks! But he is a good and just man for ordering them, you know.

Related: An ex-Marxist pens an essay titled Why I Am Not A Marxist.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (21)
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Even FoxNews is merely speculating it may be old.

Not only is it old, but it's actually been broadcast before. And blogreaders already knew that.

They're just not terribly good at their jobs, you know?

Posted by: Ace at 10:23 AM | Comments (13)
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There's a Reichstag fire burning... in my pants.

A GERMAN bus driver threatened to throw a 20-year-old sales clerk off his bus in the southern town of Lindau because he said she was too sexy.

"Suddenly he stopped the bus," the woman named Debora C told Bild newspaper.

"He opened the door and shouted at me 'Your cleavage is distracting me every time I look into my mirror and I can't concentrate on the traffic. If you don't sit somewhere else, I'm going to have to throw you off the bus."'

The woman, pictured in Bild wearing her snug-fitting summer outfit with the plunging neckline, said she moved to another seat but was humiliated by the bus driver.

The company defended the driver's actions as proper, calling it an issue of safety.

Here's the chick, from the German tabloid Bild.de. For a newspaper that has more T&A in it, including nudity, than the Sun, you'd think in a story about cleavage they'd actually show cleavage. Alas, no.

What a gyp.

Thanks to someone.

Posted by: Ace at 09:39 AM | Comments (51)
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20th-level monsters:

A couple who authorities say were so obsessed with the Internet and video games that they left their babies starving and suffering other health problems have pleaded guilty to child neglect.

The children of Michael and Iana Straw, a boy age 22 months and a girl age 11 months, were severely malnourished and near death last month when doctors saw them after social workers took them to a hospital, authorities said. Both children are doing well and gaining weight in foster care, prosecutor Kelli Ann Viloria told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Michael Straw, 25, and Iana Straw, 23, pleaded guilty Friday to two counts each of child neglect. Each faces a maximum 12-year prison sentence.

Viloria said the Reno couple were too distracted by online video games, mainly the fantasy role-playing "Dungeons & Dragons" series, to give their children proper care.

"They had food; they just chose not to give it to their kids because they were too busy playing video games," Viloria told the Reno Gazette-Journal.

...

Last month, experts at an American Medical Association meeting backed away from a proposal to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder, saying it had to be studied further. Some said the issue is like alcoholism, while others said there was no concrete evidence it's a psychological disease.

Pic of Dick Chick:

Surprisingly hittable. I mean, she's not going to be blackmailed in NJ by old Facebook photos anytime soon, and looks like a reject from the background dance-skanks in Love is a Battlefield, but still, better than we had a right to expect.

The Dude:

Not exactly what I expected, but he does look creepy.

From this account, which includes these charming details:

The girl, who when born weighed six pounds, was a mere 10 pounds. Medical staff said they had to hold the girl up because she was too weak to roll over or move on her own. She couldn't walk or hold her head up due to minimal muscle development.

A nurse had to wash her hair, which was matted with cat urine. The little baby was so dehydrated that when she cried, she produced no tears and only urinated after getting fluids via an IV. She had dirt under her nails and was not interested in eating. Doctors also discovered she had an infection in her mouth. A nurse also noted that she still had some sort of baby hair on her body that usually disappears by now in well nourished children.

Meanwhile, her brother was also malnourished, police said, and he had an infection on his genitals. Officials noted that his behavior was not typical of a 2-year-old and that he seemed to be slow-acting. He also had difficulty walking because of minimal muscle development.

Again thanks to Dan Riehl.

Posted by: Ace at 05:09 PM | Comments (50)
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"Soon," at least. Maybe by the fall. I can't think of nicer guys to unleash the Cylons on.

The robotic fighter's name? The Reaper.

Number of ejaculations: I'll let you know after I get a ladder and count 'em up on the ceiling

Posted by: Ace at 03:50 PM | Comments (47)
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The Politico reported Ron Paul...

...said the country is in "great danger" of the U.S. government staging a terrorist attack or a Gulf of Tonkin style provocation, as the war in Iraq continues to deteriorate.

The Texas congressman offered no specifics nor mentioned President Bush by name, but he clearly insinuated that the administration would not be above staging an incident to revive flagging support.

NRO's David Fedderoso disputes this, saying that Paul did not speak those words nor did he "clearly insinuate" anything of the sort.

Who wins?

It's kind of a tie on points -- Paul was appearing, for the bazillionth time, on the Alex Jones Truther/conspiracy show, pandering again to the Truther crowd with words that could be construed as Truther-ish without actually committing himself to that insanity. And the question to which Paul answered in the affirmative was a rambling Truther-style one about the possibility of a staged attack, which Paul -- the Only Man Who Can Save America -- apparently did not have the courage to rebut directly, choosing instead to endorse that lunacy through his implied acceptance of it.

So yeah, technically, Paul didn't come out and say Bush was planning another (9/11 cough cough 9/11) fake terrorist attack on his own country to rally the sheeple into a unilateral war. He simply kissed a lunatic's ass in an effort to cadge money from similarly-minded lunatics and courageously lended his authority (such as it is) the proposition that something like that was possible at all.

Posted by: Ace at 03:47 PM | Comments (24)
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It's amazing that these people can continue lying in the face of confessions like this.

The BBC's 2007 impartiality report reflects widespread support for the idea that there is "some sort of BBC liberal consensus". Its commissioning editor for documentaries, Richard Klein, has said: "By and large, people who work in the BBC think the same, and it's not the way the audience thinks." The former BBC political editor Andrew Marr says: "There is an innate liberal bias within the BBC".

For a time it puzzled me that after 50 years of tumultuous change the media liberal attitudes could remain almost identical to those I shared in the 1950s. Then it gradually dawned on me: my BBC media liberalism was not a political philosophy, even less a political programme. It was an ideology based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine. We were rather weak on facts and figures, on causes and consequences, and shied away from arguments about practicalities. If defeated on one point we just retreated to another; we did not change our beliefs. We were, of course, believers in democracy. The trouble was that our understanding of it was structurally simplistic and politically naïve. It did not go much further than one-adult-one-vote.

We ignored the whole truth, namely that modern Western civilisation stands on four pillars, and elected governments is only one of them. Equally important is the rule of law. The other two are economic: the right to own private property and the right to buy and sell your property, goods, services and labour. (Freedom of speech, worship, and association derive from them; with an elected government and the rule of law a nation can choose how much it wants of each). We never got this far with our analysis. The two economic freedoms led straight to the heresy of free enterprise capitalism - and yet without them any meaningful freedom is impossible.

But analysis was irrelevant to us. Ultimately, it was not a question of whether a policy worked but whether it was right or wrong when judged by our media liberal moral standards. There was no argument about whether, say, capital punishment worked. If retentionists came up with statistics showing that abolition increased the number of murders we simply rejected them.

Related: Last week the Chicago Sun-Times announced it's editorial pages were "returning to our liberal, working-class roots, a position that pits us squarely opposite the Chicago Tribune -- that Republican, George Bush-touting paper over on moneyed Michigan Avenue. We're rethinking our stance on several issues, including the most pressing issue facing Americans today: Bush's war in Iraq."

Returning?

Whatever; doesn't seem to matter. Because now the paper has a change of heart candor and claims it's not liberal, won't be liberal, and never was liberal:

"We're an independent paper.... We're not going to be a small L liberal paper. We're not going to bind ourselves to a party or ideology in anything."

What you mean is that you're just not going to honestly admit it. As annoying as the paper's declaration of a "new" commitment to liberal values was, at least it was partly honest, at least as regards its future liberalism.

Posted by: Ace at 03:13 PM | Comments (29)
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People keep asking for this, so okay, here it is. It's a troublesome review because while I like the movie on the whole, it's got a lot of problems. It's easy to write a slam or glowing review; it's harder to write a, um, nuanced one.

So here's what I remember of the movie.

Basically, three stars, which is my rating for "worth seeing in the theaters, and worth seeing again on DVD," but a disappointed three stars, because I was hoping for three and a half. (The four stars (plus) of the original Die Hard I considered impossible to match and so had no illusions on that score.) It's basically slightly less of a movie than Die Hard With A Vengeance, which is sad, because if it just didn't commit a few unforced errors it might have been as good as that film or even a little better.

Fuller review after the fold. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:57 PM | Comments (47)
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Indonesian delicacy? Coffee made from beans gathered from civet crap.

In the animals' stomachs, enzymes in the gastric juices massage the beans, smoothing off the harsh edges that make coffee bitter and produce caffeine jitters. Humans then separate the greenish-brown beans from the rest of the dung, and once a thin outer layer is removed, they are ready for roasting. The result is a delicacy with a markup so steep it would make a drug dealer weep.

It's called kopi luwak, from the Indonesian words for coffee and civet, and by the time it reaches the shelves of swish foreign food emporiums, devotees fork out as much as $600 for a pound — if they can even find that much. The British royal family is said to enjoy sipping it. A single cup can sell for $30 at a five-star hotel in Hong Kong.

Enjoy it with a nice bowl of Bird's Nest Soup, made from the saliva and excrement of cave swifts.

Content warning for the inevitable linkage of the worst scene ever from Austin Powers.

As someone said about Scotland's guts, viscera, and blood pudding based cuisine, "The entire national cookbook seems based on a dare."

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 12:46 PM | Comments (45)
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If Theo Spark's Dillon Mini-gun video was Lawful Good, then this must be what Chaotic Evil looks like.

Except without the coolness associated with Chaotic Evil. Is there an alignment called Chaotic Douchebag?

Posted by: Ace at 12:35 PM | Comments (28)
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