At least they're consistent.

After a series of legislative defeats in 2007 that saw the year end with more U.S. troops in Iraq than when it began, a coalition of anti-war groups is backing away from its multimillion-dollar drive to cut funding for the war and force Congress to pass timelines for bringing U.S. troops home.

In recognition of hard political reality, the groups instead will lower their sights and push for legislation to prevent President Bush from entering into a long-term agreement with the Iraqi government that could keep significant numbers of troops in Iraq for years to come.

The groups believe this switch in strategy can draw contrasts with Republicans that will help Democrats gain ground in November and bring the votes to pass more dramatic measures. But it is a long way from the early months of 2007, when Democrats were freshly in power and momentum for a dramatic shift in Iraq policy seemed overpowering.

“There was a consensus that last year was not productive,” John Isaacs, executive director of Council for a Livable World, said of a meeting attended by a coalition of anti-war groups last week. “Our expectations were dashed.”

The meeting, held at an office on K Street, was attended by around 20 representatives of influential anti-war groups, including MoveOn.org and Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, which spent $12 million last year opposing the war.

Isaacs said he thought the meeting would be a difficult one, with an adamant faction pressing for continued focus on timelines and funding. It wasnÂ’t to be.

“We got our heads together and decided to go a different way,” Isaacs said. “The consensus was not to keep beating our heads against the wall trying to block every funding bill — not because we don’t agree with it, but because we don’t have the votes.”

Politically I guess this helps the Democrats, who are less pressured by the nutroots and Soros-controlled front-groups to commit electoral suicide and cut the legs from under our troops as they're poised to achieve a historic victory.

And that, in turn, helps the troops and America.

Ah well. Take the good with the bad.

Posted by: Ace at 01:10 PM | Comments (18)
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I got a few tips about this last week or so when Fraser died. This article is pretty good.

After reading so many gushing tributes to Fraser and Flashman, I'm thinking I have to finally read one of these books.

Posted by: Ace at 12:38 PM | Comments (13)
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I didn't know about this ad campaign. If you haven't seen it, here's Burger King's real ad. The first thirty seconds is enough to get it.

These three dudes parodied it. Language/Content Warning.

But this is the real Whopper freakout. Cost of a burger in hyperinflation-ripped Zimbabwe? Fifteen million bucks.

And that's not even supersized.

Posted by: Ace at 12:12 PM | Comments (16)
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Doesn't quite gel but still amusing.

She does sound like Hillary. Though she has an incongruously sexual streak I don't think she shares with her doppleganger.

From Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard Blog.

Posted by: Ace at 11:55 AM | Comments (14)
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Idiotic.

Dan Riehl notes that H. Ross Perot began talking about this just as the flyers started appearing.

Posted by: Ace at 11:46 AM | Comments (63)
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Did I say "global warming"? Of course I meant climate change.

While the rest of Europe is debating the prospects of global warming during an unseasonably mild winter, a brutal cold snap is raging across the semi-autonomous nation of Greenland.

On Disko Bay in western Greenland, where a number of prominent world leaders have visited in recent years to get a first-hand impression of climate change, temperatures have dropped so drastically that the water has frozen over for the first time in a decade.

'The ice is up to 50cm thick,' said Henrik Matthiesen, an employee at Denmark's Meteorological Institute who has also sailed the Greenlandic coastline for the Royal Arctic Line. 'We've had loads of northerly winds since Christmas which has made the area miserably cold.'

Matthiesen suggested the cold weather marked a return to the frigid temperatures common a decade ago.

...

The mayor cautioned against thinking that the freezing temperature indicated that global warming claims were overblown. He noted that a nearby glacier had retracted more in the past two decades than in recorded history.

'We Greenlanders have acclimated to changing conditions over the past 1100 years,' said Frederiksen. 'Temperatures change at regular intervals.'

Um, temperatures have changed at regular intervals over 1100 years, so that's evidence that, um, global warming climate change is a new phenomenon?

Bonus fact: Greenland's capital is "Nuuk." Did anyone know that? Be honest. I don't care if you lie to me, but don't lie to yourselves.

Thanks to Mike.

Posted by: Ace at 11:35 AM | Comments (33)
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Where were you when you heard?

I heard about it the next day or maybe two days after. A guy in my office brought up this big breaking scandal about Clinton and an intern that was on the Drudge Report.

"What's the Drudge Report?" I asked.

"Oh it's just this guy with a website in Hollywood," he said. "He covers a lot of hurricanes and disasters."

And so he did.

This is the ten-year anniversary, to me, of the superheating and supercharging of American politics. People became radicalized. I know I did. Until the Impeachment Wars I didn't mind Clinton so much -- I didn't particularly like him by that point, mind you, and I preferred the Republican Congress' policies in the main, but I didn't hate him.

But what followed was a year of being lied to, absurdly lied to, by both Clinton and his myriad defenders. Meanwhile those telling the truth about the affair were torn down and slandered by the Clinton Machine and its willing accomplices in the media.

And of course it was the birth of the conspiratorial thinking that has become de rigeur among the left since Hillary first made it politically acceptable to blame one's problems on a "vast right wing conspiracy, conspiring against my husband." Has anything happened since then that wasn't in one way or another due to a vast right wing conspiracy?

At its heart the subject of the lie might not have been all that great, as the liberals uniformly contended. (That is, after their initial claim that no lie had been told became inoperative.) Perhaps that was the problem -- the lie was arguably just small enough that liberals could convince themselves they were "defending the Constitution" in attempting to carve out a new exception in the law against perjury. Even so, that lie spawned a thousand new lies and new slanders, and those were harder to forgive than the first.

The left, I think it's fair to say, became unhinged at this point. As they say, the left despised Clinton earlier as a Republican-lite sell-out; it was, oddly enough, his perjury regarding a sleazy affair with a 21 year old intern that rallied them to Clinton's cause. And already on edge, they went still further crazy after the 2000 elections, and then of course came 9/11.

Toxic times, and we're all still living with the aftereffects. All because Clinton couldn't -- perhaps on the demand of his wife -- simply pay Paula Jones a $25,000 nuisance go-away settlement and apologize vaguely for any harm he "may" have caused.

No, he had to "win," and winning meant lying, and lying meant perjury, and perjury meant putting the country through a year of screaming and distraction.

Newsbusters' Question: Will the media acknowledge the anniversary? Well, I haven't even seen it mentioned on FoxNews yet. So I don't think the networks are planning a retrospective.

Hillary believed Bill, or so she claimed. But she's the one we want negotiating with North Korea and Iran.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (79)
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Illegal in South Carolina (where they're being placed), though the group running them claims a First Amendment right to run them. I suppose there's a good case to be made there, but it's still illegal by the letter of the current law and sleazy in any event.

Huckabee's supporters just can't be stopped. But Huckabee himself won't go negative, understand.

Posted by: Ace at 10:57 AM | Comments (17)
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I actually am blogging but I'm finding stuff that all seems sidebar-ish.

This article about body armor is pretty interesting. It soberly notes the trade-offs and limitations implicit in current armor systems, before having some fun with this gee-whiz next-gen possibility:

The Army is aware of the problem and is now polling industry to set new requirements for weight, flexibility and multi-hit capability. In the long term, the Army is pursuing the idea of "liquid armor"--a magnetio-ferrous substance that is normally liquid (and thus flows freely within the body armor vest) but which becomes rigid when subjected to the force of a bullet impact. The concept has been demonstrated in the lab, but is still about a decade from full-scale testing and evaluation.

This seems more likely in the short term, but the Army apparently resists the idea:

There are alternative technologies available now, which promise to deliver better performance, flexibility, and reduced weight. Many of these are based on the use of ceramic cylinders embedded in polymer resin over a SpectraShield backer. In contrast to plates, each cylinder is mechanically discrete, so a hit that destroys one in the process of stopping the bullet doesn't affect its neighbors. I have personally tested such an insert, putting ten high-power, armor-piercing rounds into it without any loss of integrity or debonding. Because the cylinders are crush-resistant, they are extremely rugged, and can be dropped, or even pounded with a hammer or an axe (something else I have done) without any breakage. Finally, because the resin in which the cylinders are embedded can be flexible, the entire plate can bend with the movements of the user, making the entire ensemble more comfortable.

Posted by: Ace at 10:41 AM | Comments (10)
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Scientists findthat long Heidi Klummy legs are sexier then short hobbity ones.

Research involving more than 200 men and women revealed that people whose legs are 5% longer than average are considered the most attractive, regardless of their gender.

A little longer was good but stork-like was bad:

While all of the people were the same height, the length of their legs was altered to make them equal to the Polish average or longer by 5%, 10% or 15%.

The team found that regardless of the volunteers' own body shape and leg length, people whose legs were 5% longer than average were rated as the most attractive. The next most appealing was an average leg length, or those that were 10% longer than normal.

Posted by: Open Blog at 09:53 AM | Comments (17)
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