Musharraf just received a report from the Interior Ministry that Pakistan's policy of "appeasement" towards the Taiban could permit the movement to engulf the country were "swift and decisive action" not taken.

Now Asia Times says he's given the US permission to go Taliban hunting, and Taliban bombing, in the tribal areas formerly designated sanctuaries for the terrorists.

Where Osama bin Ladin is, if he's still alive, and where Al-Zawahiri probably is too.

He's expected, it's claimed, to make a major speech about the threat of extremism justifying this new policy.

Good news? Not really. It's confirmation that Pakistan is teetering on the edge of becoming the world's first Islamist terrorist nuclear power.

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (12)
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Eh... I think he will, but not yet.

His fundraising was poor -- $11.2 million last quarter -- and he's had to let go of 50 or more staffers, plus cut the salaries of his most senior advisers.

More On McCain's Woes: At NRO. This has to sting:

McCainÂ’s futures contract has plummeted in just one week from around $12 to below $6 at InTrade.com. The contract, which can be redeemed for $100 if McCain gets the nomination (and is worthless if he does not), once sold for nearly $60. By this measure, he trails Giuliani and Thompson, who trade above $33, and Romney at $20. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas is now close behind McCain at $3.

Then again, Ron Paul's supporters are retarded, and have this childish belief that if all thirty of them band together to falsely create the impression a groundswell for Paul, the rest of us idiots -- who aren't smart about the Constitution and fiat money and piracy like Ron Paul and his fans -- will start supporting him, because we're sheep and we don't know any better.

And they have nothing better to do with their time than engage in this childish prankery, and, it seems, little more better to do with their money.

Someone please set up an inTrade thing for only Ron Paul, so I can put money against him; Paul's supporters will feel obligated to take all the action I can give them.

Posted by: Ace at 10:58 AM | Comments (38)
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Content warning.

Thanks to steve_in_hb.

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (17)
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Sorry to swipe Allah's video, it's too big.

Print article, links, and commentary by Allah here.

Can the inevitable be avoided any longer?

Presidents have a lot of control over making crises into non-crises-- they just don't talk about them. They pretend they're not happening. They patrol carefully for leaks to keep the public from finding out there are serious threats to America... which they'd rather not deal with right now, but were the public appraised of them, they might be forced to.

The Bush Administration hasn't exactly frozen news about Iran's complicity in Iraq out of the press -- officials have indeed mentioned it from time to time -- but they've really not strongly pushed the stories, either.

Could be prudence on their part: After all, they can't be perceived as being too eager to begin another war in the Muslim world.

But this latest event may take that crisis-control-by-keeping-quiet tool out of Bush's toolbox.

And perhaps he thinks he finally has the predicate he needs to take action. CNN didn't just get this story out of dogged investigation, after all.

I Question The Timing: Afghan officials admit Iran is arming the Taliban to the teeth.

This seems like a Case for War being made.

If not "war" in the sense of full-blown invasion -- which I think is politically and likely militarily impossible -- then definitely a full naval blockade and likely airstrikes.

No rebuilding. No Colin Powell "You break it, you bought it." Bullshit. We're breaking it because it's killing our soldiers. They can do the rebuilding themselves; it may not be the Iranian people's fault their government is killing us, but it sure the hell ain't our fault either, and we're not required to commit to pacifying and rebuilding the country simply because we act out of self-defense against an enemy making incessant war on us.

A case could be made the organic rebuilding of the country -- by Iranians themselves -- will be bloody and difficult, but likely less bloody and difficult than with the hated American Infidel attempting to bring peace.

Destroy the state. Reduce it to chaos. It is a ticking time bomb, and it's time for a controlled demolition. "Render it safe."

Allah Says, "Nah:" He tells me to have a tall cool drink of calm your jets juice, noting Petraeus has already said the Quds forces were involved in the January massacre of our troops, and five Quds forces troops were captured in Irbil, so what does this really add to the evidence?

I suppose that's right... except this isn't speculation, it's a confession, and this story was served pipin' hot to Michael Ware as an exclusive -- something which generally gets more attention from all media outlets than a story simply announced to the press as a whole. (Strange but true.)

Posted by: Ace at 06:51 PM | Comments (98)
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I'm trying to convince Allah to cut a long version of the first guy shown below, who doesn't get nearly enough air time here.

First, he walks into the house, expecting to meet a 13-year-old boy, completely naked. He does not disrobe as soon as he gets in. He walks in naked. Except for his socks, I think. Toting a container of beer and condoms.

Okay, fair enough. After being caught on tv trying to screw a 13 year old boy, the very next day, he attempts to pick up another 13 year old boy -- who is also a To Catch A Predator decoy.

These brief snippets don't do it full justice, but it's what I've got.

I'll post Allah's home phone number later to get some "people-powered politics" working to get him to cut the long version.

By the Way: The show I saw the long version on was "Predator Raw: The Unseen Tapes," running on MSNBC late-night-ish. I imagine they'll be running repeats, as usual.

DA Shoots Himself In Head When Confronted By Hansen Over Online Pedophilic Solicitation: The DA never showed up at the house, though he did chat -- sexually -- with a TCAP decoy. When Hansen's crew showed up to ask him about it, he blew his brains out.

The whole town is in an uproar. I don't see why myself. Obviously they're luring pedophiles to the town, but for the purpose of prosecuting them and locking them away. And I have trouble with this claim that the suspects can't be prosecuted due to impermissible involvement of "amateurs" -- 1, citizens are allowed to give witness at trial and even make arrests, and 2, these guys ain't amateurs, buddy.

Thanks to commenters for pointing this story out.

Allah says... he'll record and cut the guy above when the Predator marathon runs on MSNBC on July 4th... if I remind him by the day before. I'm planning a short vacation then, so I don't know if I'll be able to. Maybe if you're online drop a reminder to Allah in a comment or by email if you have it?

Thanks.

Posted by: Ace at 03:54 PM | Comments (38)
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You're toast.

The meme that just won't die -- everyone's surprised that educated, middle-to-upper class Muslims are involved in this, rather than the poor, uneducated, "economically alienated" Muslims the MSM prefers, as their low social status makes them victims themselves of a sort and neatly mitigates their vicious criminality.

Both doctors were working at UK hospitals and were apparently here legally.

The revelation raises the horrifying prospect that Al Qaeda propaganda is reaching beyond disaffected young Muslims.

"These are highly-educated, articulate and intelligent people," one security source said.

Um, haven't they been paying attention? Most of these people are fairly well-off. But they don't like admitting that's the case, else they rob the poor Muslim terrorists of their victim status. These people have other lifestyle choices beyond mass-murder (as if psychopathic mass-murder becomes a viable career path if one's unemployed); they simply choose murder.

Murder is not thrust upon them by "society." They choose murder. Get it straight, assholes.

Why any country in the world continues permitting Muslim immigration is beyond me.

More tick-tock from Allah, noting the police were actually watching the Glasgow bombers before the struck.

Remember Andrew Sullivan's, Josh Marshall's, etc.'s, constant "questioning the timing" of the arrests of the SkyBomb plotters, the Fort Dix Six, etc.?

Check it out, morons -- this is what can happen when you "time" your arrests too late.

Posted by: Ace at 03:29 PM | Comments (56)
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Real decpitation outrages -- against children! -- perpetrated by Al Qaeda, as reported by a real reporter (Michael Yon).

Fake decapitation stories, reported by fake reporters (AP et al.). Unbelievably, Confederate Yankee's DecapiGate scandal is not the first, but the third (that we know of so far) of AP's "Fifty Heads in a Duffel Bag" stories, all of which are entirely unsubstantiated with no witnesses whatsoever and which have all be dismissed by the military as false after actually bothering to interview locals about the mass-slaughters supposedly happening within their lines of sight.

Any retractions? Follow-ups casting doubt on the initial reports? No.

Apologies? Hah!

Compare and contrast. Here's one minor difference: The real reporter actually visits the site in question, sees the bodies with his own eyes, and takes pictures.

The fake reporters sit in their jacuzzis in the Hotel Intercontinental and dutifully type up unverified rumors from highly-dubious sources/propagandists/hucksters lookin' for a buck and pass them off as a fact without having to to get their feet dry.

The left claims we criticize these stories in an effort to prove repellent violence isn't happening in Iraq at all. Nonsense. We're accutely aware of the real violence. And when it comes from a real reporter, we have no problem noting it.

The left, on the other hand, seems to believe that because "everyone knows" there's rampant violence in Iraq, it disobligates their pet propagandists from actually verifying rumors before transcribing them, unverified, unconfirmed, and largely even unedited, into a "news" report.

Hey, dickheads-- I know there's "a lot" of corruption, both hard and soft types, in Congress. That wouldn't give me the right to simply begin manufacturing made-up reports about Congressmen X and Senator Y being on the take, now would it? The fact of a general condition does not empower "reporters" to begin spinnning fictions about specific events which are merely congruent with the general condition.

I can't believe amateur bloggers have to explain this to the allegedly expert Priesthood of Information in the media -- or that the media actually argues the point, and has plenty of supporters for its jackass position. Eric Boehlert and other leftist media apologists virtually say, in so many words, that if the "The Larger Truth" is that there is lots of violence in Iraq, it is well within journalistic license to spin Steven Glass-like stories which are, in fact, technically untrue, but compatible with and reinforcing of "The Larger Truth."

There was a time when the media actually had some shame about getting facts wrong -- even when those incorrect facts did, in some way, illustrate "The Larger Truth." No more -- they've adopted the apocryphal quote the hated Ronald Reagan they're so fond of regurgitating, "Facts are stupid things."

What makes this doubly ironic -- and doubly infuriating -- is that the media is constantly criticizing bloggers for 1) engaging in sensationalism intended to push emotional buttons, 2) cherry-picking facts which serve its basic political agenda, and, most of all, 3) "reporting" unverified speculation and rumor as actual confirmed fact in the interests of advancing an overarching politicized metanarrative which descirbes the world as we'd like to see it, not necessarily as it actually is.

Well, MSM: We've learned at your knees. The DecapiGate scandal proves the media guilty of all three of those criticisms yourselves, but, unlike bloggers, who are actually ashamed and embarrassed when we're caught wrong, you shamelessly defend your errors as being, somehow, in the service of "The Larger Truth."

Fake but accurate, fake but accurate. What was once a derogatory slogan has become the MSM's credo, its mission statement, its guiding ethic of "sound journalism."

BTW: If the Iraqi government is so good at hiding bodies, how come they weren't able to do some cleaning up before Michael Yon got to the scene?

Let me guess: Because the Iraqi government wanted those bodies found, as propaganda against Al Qaeda, whereas the bodies supposedly found decapitated in Salman Pak were, what, unhelpful to the goverment in establishing that it is beset by psychopathic murderers?

No Pictures? Why? Watch how cutely ABCNews conflates two different stories -- 1, the beheading stories, 2, the quite-verified bus-bomb story -- to suggest, to those who aren't reading carefully, that there's television video of the former:

Twenty beheaded bodies were discovered Thursday on the banks of the Tigris River southeast of Baghdad and a car bomb killed another 20 people in one of the capital's busy outdoor bus stations, police said.

The beheaded remains were found in the Sunni Muslim village of Um al-Abeed, near the city of Salman Pak, which lies 14 miles southeast of Baghdad.
Related Stories

The bodies all men aged 20 to 40 had their hands and legs bound, and some of the heads were found next to the bodies, two officers said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.

The victims' identities were unknown, but they were found in an area where Shiite travelers have been kidnapped and killed in the past, en route to the Shiite-dominated provinces of Wasit, Maysan and Basra.

A bomb in a parked car ripped through a crowded transport hub in southwest Baghdad's Baiyaa neighborhood at morning rush hour, killing at least 20 people and wounding more than 50, another officer said on the same condition.

Many of the victims had been lining up for buses, awaiting a ride to work. Some 40 minibuses were incinerated, police said.

Baiyaa is a mixed area with a Shiite majority, but it is also the main commercial center of a Sunni-dominated part of Baghdad on the west bank of the Tigris River. It is one of a string of neighborhoods just south of the main road to Baghdad International Airport where sectarian tensions have been running high.

AP Television News video showed a square strewn with smoldering car parts and charred bodies with clothes in tatters. Bystanders, some weeping, gingerly loaded human remains into ambulances.

So let me get this straight: Twenty beheaded bodies were found by police, and not a single civilian, or cop for that matter, snapped a valuable picture of the carnage with a cellphone camera? The cops were the very first people to notice all the headless bodies? Not a single civilian wandered past the site earlier and began documenting this?

Not a single ABCNews or AP source in the Iraqi Ministry was able to get, and leak, the official crime scene photos of the grisly find?

Even though such pictures are worth big money to the photographer or leaker? More than a month's wages, easily?

On the other hand, there's plenty of video of the bus-bombing taken just a short time after the explosion, while the wreckage and corpses are still smoking.

But of the twenty bodies -- and also the twenty heads -- no first-hand witness reports seeing them, and no one thought that maybe such a jaw-dropping scene might be worth the 400 kb of memory needed to capture it as a digital picture.

Really?

Really?

The story was filed June 28. It said none of the bodies had been identified, which is awfully convenient, despite the fact that some heads, and, ergo, some faces, were present on the scene.

It's now three days later -- and four days or so since the "discovery."

How's that identification process coming along?

Stringers are right on scene to capture poignant but rather trivial images like this...

...and yet no one's around to make with the snappy-snappy when a field is littered with headless human bodies.

Odd.

Posted by: Ace at 02:25 PM | Comments (51)
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Take a bow.

The phone calls early Thursday didn’t help bill supporters. And when the vote appeared to be going south, those who had yet to fully commit — and even a few who had — jumped off the ship and helped bring the bill down.

A Senate GOP aide said the tipping point on the floor came when Alaska Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Ted Stevens walked down the aisle and cast “no” votes together.

Shortly after that, Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, who had cast an early “yea,” switched his vote. “I just concluded as I was on the floor that the country is just not ready,” said Brownback.

At one time, Brownback, a 2008 presidential hopeful, was among the leading proponents of what supporters call comprehensive immigration reform. On Thursday, he said he still remains committed.

But not right now. “We need to let it rest,” said Brownback, who wouldn’t speculate about when the time would be right. “I think this has been a very passionate debate and I think this just needs to rest for a while.”

Even Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who stood behind Bush two weeks ago when he came to the Senate and helped revive the foundering bill, voted “no.”

“I just think the opposition to it was very strong,” said John McCain, R-Ariz., whose once front-running GOP presidential campaign has been cast into doubt, in part because of his support for legislation that would legalize the more than 12 million illegal immigrants. “A lot of the Republican base was passionate about the issue, and they made their influence felt.”

Once we've all caught our breath from freaking-out mode, maybe we can freak-out the same way over earmarks? It seems to work. If the intensity is there.

Republican Registration Up After Immigration Fiasco: Up by a very slight 1% to 32%, but that's a 10-month high.

Posted by: Ace at 01:48 PM | Comments (13)
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Are You Going To Be My Animal?

Actually... I know it's not something. The two songs just don't come together. As with most mash-ups, you're basically just listening to two different songs at once.

I just linked it because everyone -- expecially da ladies -- loves "Monononop."

I had thought I'd have to slap a content warning on it, because I thought they were going to mash in "Closer" ("I want to f*#k you like an Animal!").

No dice. They kept it clean.

But that, indeed, would have been something.

Definitely Something: I still love this terrific mash-up of the Beatles "You Won't See Me" with Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up." (Song's called "You Won't Give It Up," scan down.)

The guy does a lot of Beatles mash-ups, and Johnny Cash makes a few appearances too.

You have to register to download that, but it takes five seconds.

Retired Geezer... says DJ Earwax is brilliant. He mixes like, forty songs into one. RG suggests Under the Confluence of Giants and Stairway To Bootleg Heaven (in the sidebar, no registration required).

Meh. steve_in_hb said the best mash-ups take multiple songs and build something wholly new. That's what this guy does. But, uh, I'm not sure I actually want something wholly new. I sort of just want two or three tracks I like mixed together, while retaining most of their identity as the tracks I already love.

Posted by: Ace at 01:23 PM | Comments (11)
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On SkyNews.

Allah's tick-tocking this; I'm sure he'll have more as it rolls in.

Posted by: Ace at 01:14 PM | Comments (9)
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