All of the following pictures are original and all rights are reserved by the photographer, Michael Greer. They are his property and are reproduced here only with his permission.

Jeri Thompson, I think, looking pretty but rather subdued, alas.

If she's going to dress like a librarian this whole campaign, then The Terrorists Have Already Won (TM). more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:08 PM | Comments (48)
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I say everyone's in on it. But it's still funny.

You know those big Jumbotron proposals...? What if your buddy arranged for you to propose to your girlfriend without your knowledge?

You see the possibilities for comedy. And painful recriminations.

It's so over-the-line that I can't buy it, but it's still a funny idea.

Thanks to dri.

Having Now Watched It... Faaaaaake. The fact that this is not so much a prank as a cruel relationship ending bit of sabotage kind of makes me doubt "friends" thought this would be a cute idea.

Still.

Other Pranks... can be clicked on in the vid. It's a series of pranks and vengeance pranks. Who knows, maybe if they've both agreed to be pranked, this could actually be real.

Posted by: Ace at 12:27 PM | Comments (13)
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Connecting the dots. "Not an operational cell," which I guess is the new way to say "aspirational terrorists only." Their main offense, so far as we yet know, seems to have been the creation of a video threatening terrorism.

Posted by: Ace at 12:09 PM | Comments (10)
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One show only.

One of my cobloggers posted this in the sidebar, but I thought it was too cool not to mention more prominently.

I went to a bar trivia contest last night. Team name: The Litmus Configuration. One question was thus: "What musical term means a part of a piece of music bringing the piece to a close, from the Latin for 'tail'?"

As he often does, the MC/DJ played a clue in the music after the question. It was a Led Zeppelin song.

So, so old it's painful, but yes, the Viking Kittens dramatically interpreting The Immigrant Song:

Posted by: Ace at 11:57 AM | Comments (39)
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He declared it doesn't go far enough, that it's unnacceptable to him, and it's unacceptable to the American people.

Reid said the recommendation by Gen. David Petraeus, expected to be embraced on Thursday by President Bush in a speech to the nation, "is neither a drawdown or a change in mission that we need. His plan is just more of the same."

The New Democratic strategy on Iraq is the Old Democratic strategy on Iraq. Pull them all out and lose.

Check me on this somebody, I thought Bush was the stubborn one? The guy who absolutely refuses to change course or tactics in the face of new facts, or a changing situation on the ground.

I am remembering that correctly, aren't I?

Posted by: Dave In Texas at 11:49 AM | Comments (15)
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Via Hugh Hewitt (well, Soxblog), so it's safe to click.

Here's how Saint Andrew of the Sacred Heart-Ache remember 9/11:

What You Call A Bad Day

Allow me a vent. So yesterday, I woke up back in DC trying to start a new regimen, by going into the Atlantic offices early, rather than blogging from home in the morning. We got back over the weekend and the place is a bit of a wreck with unpacking, wedding gifts, a mountain of unwanted mail, etc. First thing: a water-main broke over night and there's no water in the shower. Second: I remember that my bike was stolen the last week I was in DC, and so I have to cab it. Third: I left my keys in Ptown and couldn't access the exercise room and shower at the office. Fourth: I left my cell-phone in my apartment. Fifth: I couldn't find Obama's press-guy's phone number and I need an interview soon. Sixth: leaving the office around eight, I get home to walk the dogs while Aaron is in class for the evening with his cell off, and find that the spare keys are not where we hide them. A friend had used them to get in the apartment while we were away and had forgotten to put them back in the right place. Seventh: it's about 100 percent humidity, the beagles are baying on the other side of the door, and I can't find my husband. Sometimes, days just compound themselves. Aaron did get home around 11, by which time I was blearily watching Anderson at a friend's apartment. Oh, and my friend's air-conditioning was bust.

I feel better now.

Memories of Wonkette's dismissal of 9/11 several years ago: "3,000 dead, blah blah blah..."

Thoughts on the vanishing day of infamy from Jonah Goldberg:

There are a lot of reasons why the emotional half-life of 9/11 has been so short, many of them good, or at least understandable. We havenÂ’t been (successfully) attacked at home since 9/11, for example.

But itÂ’s important to remember that from the outset, the media took it as their sworn duty to keep Americans from getting too riled up about 9/11. I wrote a column about it back in March of 2002. Back then the news networks especially saw it as imperative that we not let our outrage get out of hand. I can understand the sentiment, but itÂ’s worth noting that such sentiments vanished entirely during hurricane Katrina. After 9/11, the press withheld objectively accurate and factual images from the public, lest the rubes get too riled up. After Katrina, the press endlessly recycled inaccurate and exaggerated information in order to keep everyone upset. The difference speaks volumes.

The column I wrote in 2002 was subtitled “I want to be disturbed.” It seems that when it comes to 9/11 it would have been more fashionable if I’d written some pabulum subtitled “I wanna be sedated.” (Apologies to the Ramones).

But the chief reason 9/11 has lost its punch is politics. To talk about 9/11 as a justification for any foreign policy position — activist, isolationist or realist — is to start an argument...

There are plenty of arguments one can have about the Iraq war and the uses and abuses of 9/11, but I think what a lot of people fail to realize is that the disagreements over the Iraq war are expressions of divisions that long predate it. The culture war, red vs. blue America, Bush hatred, Clinton hatred, and radical anti-Americanism poisoning much of the campus Left: All of these things were tangible landmarks on the political landscape long before the invasion of Iraq.

On the day before 9/11, a University of Massachusetts professor proclaimed the American flag “a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.” After 9/11 the hits kept coming. Barbara Foley of Rutgers University explained of the attacks “whatever its proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.” Moveon.org whimpered that the Afghan war would perpetuate the “cycle of violence” making America “like the terrorists.” The New York Times called Afghanistan a quagmire almost from the get-go. In 2001, Michael Moore expressed exasperation that al Qaeda would be as stupid as to kill non-Bush voters. In 2004, after his political porn movie Fahrenheit 9/11, he became arguably the most popular leftwing figure in America and he sat in Jimmy Carter’s booth at the Democratic Convention.

Dissent has become institutionalized on the left. Dissent is healthy when it’s not schtick. But from Michael Moore’s apologias to Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein, to Noam Chomsky’s anti-American Manichaeism, to that knock-off cigar store Indian Ward Churchill, to the bowel-stewing stupidity that once prompted even The New Republic to run an “idiocy watch,” primarily aimed at the mainstream left (and the nutter-right), it now seems difficult to fathom a more legitimate hard left in this country, one that could ever quit the habit of making a living off of casting America as the locus of evil in the modern world.

...

It quickly became a cliché that 9/11 changed everything, but when it comes to the basic divisions of the last 20 years, 9/11 didn’t change nearly enough so much as accentuate everything we knew before. And that all but guarantees we’ll have another 9/11 of which to ponder the meaning.

He knocks Bush around a bit for failing to convince the supposedly Loyal Opposition into opposing Bin Ladin as much as Karl Rove, but I think that's rather daft. Yes, Bush has been a rather poor president on most matters, and has not been an effective leader or communicator, but the left -- including "sensible liberals" -- were in the main opposed to this war, including the one in Afghanistan, from the beginning. They didn't see it as America's war, but a war they had to permit the rightwing to fight to get it out of our excitable systems.

What they're angry about is that war did not end quickly enough -- not for the sake of actual victory, but to get the issue of war off the table so that they could go back to preaching a naive philosophy of appeasement and prostration without paying a political penalty for doing so. Oddly, had Bush won the war faster and more decisively, it would have benefited liberals. It is the lingering nature of it that hurts them.

But we don't fight wars for the benefit of one party or another, and we don't schedule them so as not to "distract" from supposedly more pressing domestic issues. We fight wars for the benefit of America and (sometimes) he allies, and liberals have never seemed to have much interest in actual winning the war, so much as just wishing the whole bother to be done with.

The left is much like Maureen Dowd and Wonkette and, of course, Andrew Sullivan: They're annoyed that all this "boy stuff" is taking the spotlight off them and their girl-stuff priorities.

And no matter how well Bush conducted himself as President, that would not have changed.

Posted by: Ace at 11:06 AM | Comments (40)
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...in his crotch! Brian Christopher Thomas (the man with three first names?) walked into Henry Hudson's Pub in Oklahoma City wearing a Longhorns t-shirt. One of the Sooner animals (they're not really people, trust me) grabbed him by the crotch and pulled him to the floor. (Insert gay Sooner joke here.)

Other bar patrons had to break it up, but not before Thomas sustained a wound that required sixty stitches to close. The Sooner animal, who turns out to be a church deacon actually pled "Not guilty." As usual, the consensus among Sooners is that he deserved it for wearing a UT shirt in "Sooner country."

At the moment, the case is at he-said/he-said stage. But I've been to Norman; I'm leaning toward the Texas fan.

I was actually planning on braving orange-throwing Sooners and going to the bedlam game in Norman the day after Thanksgiving. We'll see.

h/t to Jahi for sending the link.

UPDATE: HotAir now has a link to a more complete version of the story at FoxNews.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:04 AM | Comments (21)
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County Circuit Court Judge W. Dale Young is a bonafide jerk.* He's got two people in his courtroom, they are married, but the woman is looking for an order of protection from her husband.

Instead of examining the merits of Anna Calixto's petition, Young asked the husband and wife about their immigration status. The woman, at least, had some immigration papers. But that wasn't enough for the judge. He allegedly told her "Go back to Nicaragua." He didn't bother to rule on her petition for protection.

Calixto immigrated in 1994 to attend school and find a job. She claims to have a work permit from DHS. But this is beside the point.

Does Judge Young actually believe that the courts of this country are helpless to rule on the cases of people standing in his very room? Calixto is not asking for a handout, she's asking for protection from her spouse.

Does Judge Young actually think that we should let abusive spouses of legal or illegal immigrants free reign rein to terrorise other immigrants? That's atrocious.

*Assuming that this story is true. So far only the Maryville Daily Times has it. No transcript of the proceedings exists.

Correction to the headline: According to the judge, immigrants have no rights here.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 11:00 AM | Comments (31)
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Working hand in glove with the left, while claiming to be a disinterested apolitical news service:

Jake Tapper at ABC News reported that MoveOn.org paid $65,000 for its full page anti-war advocacy sliming of General David Petraeus. This figure raised the suspicions of attentive blogger Confederate Yankee whose intuition appears to be correct. (h/t Michelle Malkin) While looking up the current New York Times rate book he discovered that MoveOn.org received a $102,000 discount on the standard political advocacy rate that is advertised at $167,157.

For a newspaper that pretends to be objective purveyors of news this discount seems a bit steep for the deep pocketed liberal advocacy group. In fact the amount MoveOn paid is less than any rate listed in the New York Times schedule.

I wonder if Freedom Watch can get a similar discount?

This is doubly harmful for the company, of course. Not only are they deliberately reducing the value of their brand, they're giving up money from their crippled advertising revenues to do so.

As I've often said of Pinch Sulzberger and other leftwing media-types: The job you're looking for, where you can agitate honorably and honestly for your political preferences, is in the DNC. By posing as a news service while so transparently acting as an owned-and-operated franchise of the Democratic Party, you are attempting to dishonestly leverage your false "independence" and "objectivity" to give DNC press releases a sheen of impartiality they otherwise would not have.

The media claims to be in the business of truth, but their entire empire rests upon a foundational lie, which they simply will not admit. Virtually every player in the MSM begins its reportage to the public with a flat-out lie: That they are politically disinterested and do not push one party over the other.

If the first words from their lips are lies, why should a goddamn thing they say next be believed?

Question: Should the New York Times be charged with an in-kind donation to MoveOn.org? Shouldn't it have to declare it made a $102,000 donation to a political group?

Posted by: Ace at 09:59 AM | Comments (17)
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I was surprised by this; I'd've figured it was common throughout history and more or less innate. But I guess the whole idea of kissing is somewhat strange, certainly stranger than sex itself, which has a biological drive behind it and a clear purpose.

Kinda cool. If only the Romans and then the Europeans hadn't spread the meme of kissing, you wouldn't have had to kiss your granny so often right on the lips, and you'd be able to just get down to business without all this liplock bother.

Posted by: Ace at 09:42 AM | Comments (22)
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