Still around. Just in case there's stuff out there I'm not seeing.

Posted by: Ace at 01:56 PM | Comments (29)
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I don't know how much this really reminds me of an A-10.

One thing definitely seems "A-10" themed, though. Namely, the minigun built into its steering assembly.

Not sure you really need much more theming than that.

More pics at Geekologie.

Posted by: Ace at 01:34 PM | Comments (24)
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An old barb described a narcissistic man of wanting to be "the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral."

"Practitioners" (apparently the latest euphemism for "Muslim extremists") are determined to be the perpetrators and heroes of terrorism... as well as its primary victims.

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, The Sydney Daily Telegraph's columnist wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline:

"British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing."

Indeed. And so it goes. This time round – Mumbai – it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims "found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion".

Oh, I don't know about that. In fact, you'd be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was "linked" to any religion, least of all one beginning with "I-" and ending in "-slam." In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations – "Islamic terrorists," "Muslim extremists" – and by the time of the assault on Mumbai found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators "militants" or "gunmen" or "teenage gunmen," as in the opening line of this report in The Australian: "An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok."

Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.

The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution "practitioners." "Practitioners" of what, exactly?

Hard to say. And getting harder. For the Wall Street Journal, Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Mumbai media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."

Hmm. Greater Mumbai forms one of the world's five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An "accidental hostage scene" that one of the "practitioners" just happened to stumble upon? "I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?"

Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for "going after the wrong people" and inflaming moderates, and "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster" in Mumbai.
Really? The inflammation just "appears"? Like a bad pimple? The "fairer" we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as "ultra-Orthodox," "ultra-" in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for "strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn't have been over there in the first place."

Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two "inflamed moderates" entered the Chabad House, shouted "Allahu Akbar!," tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young rabbi's pregnant wife. Their 2-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mowed down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.

The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an "accidental" hostage opportunity – and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it's not a hostage situation, it's a mass murder-in-waiting. The sole surviving "militant" revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance. The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg. Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels. Remember their names, not because they're any more important than the Indians, Britons and Americans targeted in the attack, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.

In a well-planned attack on iconic Mumbai landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the "militants" nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city's poor in a nondescript building....

Read the whole thing.

That "ultra-Orthodox" terminology is especially repellent, given that the MSM's determinations to avoid giving any religious labels to Muslim terrorists whatsoever. "Ultra" = "extreme" and "extreme" = "just asking for it."

Ah, so the media is willing to brand people as deranged or at least weird based on their adherence to a religion... so long as they're the victims of Muslim terrorism, rather than the perpetrators of it.

Thanks to Curtis.

Posted by: Ace at 01:21 PM | Comments (45)
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A US source says there's not enough evidence to establish a direct tie to ISI for the attacks themselves... which, in the scheme of things, is a pretty weak and nuanced denial.

A week after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Indian officials on Friday stepped up their efforts to draw a connection between the violence and Pakistani government agencies.

In New Delhi, a high-level source in the Indian government, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said India has "clear and incontrovertible proof" that an Islamist militant group based in Pakistan, Lashkar-i-Taiba, planned the attacks and that the group's leaders were trained and supported by Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI.

"We have the names of the handlers. And we know that there is a close relationship between the Lashkar and the ISI," the source said.

U.S. intelligence officials, however, were more cautious in their interpretation of the evidence. Although U.S. analysts acknowledged historical ties between Lashkar and ISI, as well as more recent contacts between militants and Pakistani intelligence officers, they said they were not convinced that Pakistan supported the attacks in any significant way.

"Even if there were contacts between ISI and Lashkar-i-Taiba, it's not the same as saying there was ISI support," said a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The official would not dismiss the possibility that further evidence would reveal active ISI involvement but said: "The evidence we've seen so far does not get you there."

So the US, which is attempting to cool things down, seems to confess that the ISI trained L-i-T and has close connections to that terrorist group -- pretty much the L-i-T is a creature of the ISI -- but says there's not enough evidence so far to demonstrate direct, active ISI involvement in this particular terrorist attack.

That is about as damning a defense as conceivable. Short of declaring "I damn thee, I damn thee, I damn thee," I'm not sure how much more damaging that nuanced defense of the ISI could be.

Bear in mind the US ousted the Taliban for a less direct involvement in Al Qaeda's terrorist operations. The Taliban provided Al Qaeda with haven, protection, and privileges... but not training and not support.

Posted by: Ace at 01:05 PM | Comments (16)
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From here. The artist is apparently serious.

There's some "oogedy-boogedy" for ya. Liberals continue to be perplexed that anyone would worship Jesus while studiously ignoring the quasi-religious cult they've created, and "quasi" just left town to open a Jimmy Buffet themed taco stand in Key West.

Thanks to JackM, swiped from the Corner.

Goof? Stop the ACLU says this guy is conservative,so it appears to be a goof on liberals. His online gallery is here, and features a lot of traditional religious imagery.

I hope he sold a lot of these though.

Posted by: Ace at 11:58 AM | Comments (50)
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Full story here.

Vid below the fold.

Note she wanted her daddy and a blue toy truck.

So where's the blue fuckin' truck? more...

Posted by: Ace at 11:44 AM | Comments (51)
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"I never killed or injured anyone" ?

Jules Crittendon is similarly baffled that the NYT would let that sort of statement pass without challenge. His source? Previous reports in the NYT:

Most of the bombs the Weathermen were blamed for had been placed to do only property damage, a fact Mr. Ayers emphasizes in his memoir. But a 1970 pipe bomb in San Francisco attributed to the group killed one police officer and severely hurt another. An accidental 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village town house basement killed three radicals; survivors later said they had been making nail bombs to detonate at a military dance at Fort Dix in New Jersey. And in 1981, in an armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, N.Y., that involved Weather Underground members including Kathy Boudin nand David Gilbert, two police officers and a Brinks guard were killed.

Annoyingly, a piece of crap blog calling itself "The Moderate Voice" weighs in. "The Moderate Voice" is typical of many self-declared moderates; i.e., it's full-on liberal, but doesn't want to say so. The "Moderate" Voice (linked by Crittendon) boldly predicts that "some people" won't be satisfied with Ayers' "repentance," as it terms it;

Of course, that won’t be enough for some people, who will parse Ayers’ words to build their case anew that he has still not repented. Those “some people” will carefully ignore much of what Ayers writes, including his …

– Unqualified acknowledgment that the Weather Underground’s acts were illegal and improper
– Expressed regrets about “mistakes of excess,” “inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else.”

– Acceptance of “responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions”

– Confession that he “cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today”

– Reminder that, for 40 years, he has been “teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life”

Instead of acknowledging those points, our amorphous group of “some people” will opt to …

– Rage on about Ayers’ characterization of “the Pentagon and the United States Capitol” as “monuments to war and racism”

– Obsess over the equivocation of phrases like “perhaps even of common sense”

– Debate the use of the word “indiscriminately” in Ayers’ definition of terrorism, suggesting it is evidence he intended to kill and injure people, albeit on a targeted basis.

Mark my words, these and similar arguments will be made by “some people.” Maybe not today, but eventually — suggesting that Ayers might have been most accurate when wrote:

I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ scene from George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.

Wow, bold predictions on how "some people" will react.

Incidentally, if that post sounds like parody -- yeah, it sorta does, but his opening paragraph makes it clear he's not offering satire, merely stupidity:

During the run up to the election, I wrote a series of posts challenging those who challenged Obama on the basis of his “association” with Bill Ayers. Today, in the print edition of the New York Times, Ayers takes his own shot at setting the record straight and offering the repentance for past deeds that so many of his new-found critics demanded he offer...

I enjoy the sneer-quotes around "association." Apparently Pete Abel isn't convinced the two men associated with each other.

Hey, "Moderate" -- it's a rather easy call to cop to an "excess of rhetoric" when you're actually being accused of terrorism and murder. "Mistakes were made" and etc. -- admit the tiniest imperfections while steadfastly denying the serious charges.

This is a "Moderate's" idea of repentance.

In any event, the "Moderate" overlooks the fact that a lack of repentance is not the most serious complaint against Ayers in the first place, nor the most important part of the objection to Obama's chummy association with him. Ayers is an unrepentant terrorist. Note "unrepentant" modifies the word "terrorist."

It would be better for Obama had his good friend, colleague, mentor, political patron, occasional babysitter, likely ghostwriter, and fellow Alinsky acolyte Bill Ayers were repentant. But that doesn't do a lot about the terrorist thing.

Someone can repent for such actions -- but it takes more than a mere confession of a "lapse of common sense" or Ayers' small-bean "If I'm guilty of anything, it's of loving too much" sort of admissions. For example, hey, dedicating one's life to repudiating terrorism and violent political action and speaking out against it and those who practice it, as some truly repentant ex-Islamic terrorists have done. (At some risk to their lives, of course.)

Remember... As gm points out, the NYT allowing Ayers to recycle his spin from Good Morning America and lie about his complicity in murder is the same NYT that rejected an Op-Ed from John McCain as being not quite original enough and failing to address the points made by his critic (in that case, Barack Obama, whose earlier-published essay was apparently not constrained by the requirements of freshness or direct answer to his critics' points).

If only John McCain had bombed an American base. He'd have gotten a NYT editorial -- and presumably a NYT endorsement, too.

Posted by: Ace at 11:05 AM | Comments (63)
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A Philadelphia man was forced to pay more than $12,000 in child support for another man's daughter and spent two years in jail for falling behind on payments.

Petitions he filed for DNA testing were opposed by the court's domestic relations officials and denied by the judge.

Walter Sharpe and his attorney, Tabetha Tanner, claim his identity was stolen in 2002, when he met with agency officials and provided identification showing he was not the father. Instead, his personal information was entered into the agency's computer records, he said.

Officials in the court's domestic relations office would not respond to the newspaper's questions. They said in court papers that they determined Walter Sharpe was the father "after reasonable investigation."

Curious that a "reasonable investigation" of paternity didn't actually include a ummm...actual paternity test.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 08:26 AM | Comments (68)
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Army Navy on right now. Big 12 Championship tonight, I don't expect OU will have any trouble with Mizzou.

And the big test this afternoon at 4 ET for Alabama against Florida, the winner expected to play for the national popularity contest.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:20 AM | Comments (32)
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His name is Jon Favreau. No apparent relation.

Hillary's advisers are laughing it off...

Clinton senior adviser Philippe Reines cast the photos as evidence of increased bonhomie between the formerly rival camps.

"Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon's obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application," he said in an e-mail.

...but somehow I don't think she finds it all that funny.

Michelle Malkin headlines the photo "Grope and Change."

Posted by: Ace at 06:00 PM | Comments (129)
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