Thankfully, the helicopter is undamaged.

No, come on, that's not a death wish. I'm glad we had no loss of human -- or, especially, helicopter -- life.

Just saying: We almost had a tragedy.

Helicopters don't grow on trees, you know.

Well, I seem to be digging a hole here and I'll just stop.

Main point: Helicopter. Fine.

Tragedy Averted; Hero Returns To Action.
Nation Lets Out Its Collective Breath.

I seriously mean no disrespect to Mssrs. Hagel, Kerry, or Biden.

I'm just saying: Look at that. It's a really fucking nice helicopter, you know?

It's like it's waving at me with its blades. Like a puppy.

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (66)
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My Google skills have failed... Even with the help of Liberrocky I couldn't find something.

Does anyone remember, or can you find, the piece which may have been in Politico about how very much Hillary's camp hated Obama's camp? I'm thinking it was from about a month and half ago, maybe two months tops.

It's not a big deal, just a cute little throwaway post.

Update: I stupidly wrote in the comments that a reader had found the cite. Stupidly, because who's going to read down there?

Anyway, thanks a lot, it's found now. I appreciate all your help.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (17)
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Ah, ODub. The days when I used to give shit movement.

Just for the sake of nostalgia, I'll note ODub has stepped in crap again in headlining a dump of a pro-Obama post as Smells Like a Movement.

A movement reeking of Filet-O-Fish, Funions, and failure, I imagine.

This is the first time in Michelle Obama's adult life she's been proud of the modern sewage and sanitation system.

Brand Democrat, baby.

Thanks to The Chap In The Deerstalker Cap.

Who's Oliver Willis? Well, no one. Cuffy Meigs wants to know what the backstory is on this.

Basically two people got me into blogging:

Karol from Alarming News was the first person I ever actually met who had a blog, and she told me it was easy to do. I had long thought you had to write your own code and buy your own server and that sort of thing. So she encouraged me.

And then there was Oliver Willis. Around 9/11 when I started reading blogs (as most of you did, I'm guessing), there really weren't all that many. One of them was Oliver Willis, and Instapundit used to link him all the time, despite the fact he was a drooling imbecile.

This pissed me off to no end, and as I have said before, somewhat comically, I decided that if there were dribbling morons out there who would get attention from the public for saying incredibly stupid and/or obvious and/or plainly erroneous shit, well, I was at least 10 IQ points smarter than the average spit-bubbling cretin and should have that attention myself.

I say that comically but it's the truth, actually.

So, the early history of this blog consisted of numerous posts in which I made fun of Oliver Willis and also sometimes Instapundit for linking this braying jackass.

I haven't done that in a long time -- I mean, look, there's a reason you haven't heard the name "Oliver Willis" before -- but I thought I'd slap his silly ass one last time based on this sorta-funny little tip.

Posted by: Ace at 11:58 AM | Comments (43)
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I guess I need an article for this. This will do as well as any:

Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton for the ninth and tenth straight time last night, with blowouts in Wisconsin and Hawaii. Needless to say, this means nothing. As Clinton strategist Mark Penn explained yesterday, Wisconsin has a lot of independent voters, so it doesn't really matter. And Hawaii is practically Obama's home state, so it obviously doesn't matter. Anyway, as Penn said recently, "winning Democratic primaries is not a qualification or a sign of who can win the general election." It's apparently not even a sign of who can win the Democratic nomination — at least not when the victories are Obama's.

...

Spin works best when it's intermittent and plausible; the Clinton camp's has been constant and ludicrous. Is it really wise to dismiss the vast majority of the United States as insignificant? Does anyone believe that the misguided attack on Obama's kindergarten ambitions was "a joke"? Explain to us again why Michigan's delegates should be seated even though Democrats agreed not to campaign there and Obama wasn't even on the ballot? Why are we supposed to ignore Wisconsin when it's got exactly the demographics that Penn has assured us are part of Hillary's "enduring coalition," back when Hillary had a massive lead in the state and just about every other state?

...

This morning, after his resounding victories in Wisconsin and Hawaii, Hillary finally acknowledged the obvious about Obama: "He's had a good couple of weeks, and he's run a good race." It wasn't an admission of defeat; it was an admission of reality. It added a bit of credibility to her larger where's-the-beef argument, which is that Obama isn't ready to be President, and voters have been falling for his fancy speeches without examining his substance. That's spin, too, but it's reasonable spin that tells a debatable but plausible story. We'll see if voters buy it in Texas and Ohio.

And if they don't, we'll find out whether Texas and Ohio don't matter either.

Actually, read the whole thing. If we're bending over for McCain and rolling over for Obama, we might as well lie back and enjoy it.

Exhibition? Slublog's on a roll:

"Everything's fine! There are no tanks in Baghdad!
And I'm still leading in Pennsylvania by a thinning margin!"

If you want a piece of this, please host the pic yourself on Photobucket or something and post the link.

I have a reason: I get a lot of these sometimes but I don't want to put up ones I don't think are very good. So then I feel like shit for not putting up someone's work. I'm a sensitive guy (really).

But I do want to just post really good ones.

So if you link, your pic gets seen, and then if it's good, I'll put it down below, too. Plus if people are telling me "That one's great!" I might put it up even if I don't like it, trusting the wisdom of the commentariat.

It was my original idea to Slublog to do "Tourist Guy" type shots of Hillary at the world's most famous disasters... he's not on that kick, but I think it's a funny possibility.

Posted by: Ace at 10:44 AM | Comments (84)
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This is breaking right now.

Serbian demonstrators opposed to Kosovo's independence stormed the US embassy in Belgrade, a State Department spokesman said Thursday. [...]

The protesters entered the building after business hours and no embassy employees were inside, McCormack said.

CNN shows the building on fire right now. My bad. It appears that some other building is on fire, but CNN says that's not our embassy. A peaceful rally at an Orthodox church service led some portion of the crowd to throw rocks at the embassy and then break in.

The Other Shoe Drops: It took a few days, but the Serbians have gotten around to showing their displeasure with Kosovo's independence and our support for it. Earlier in the day, ex-Serb army reservists attacked a Kosovo-Serbia border checkpoint. Two other border checkpoints have been attacked in the last few days.

Thick black plumes of smoke billowed above the border crossing point of Merdare, in southern Serbia, after the attack by the angry group, who Serbian police said numbered around 300.

The violence was the latest in a series of incidents that followed Sunday's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian-dominated parliament -- a move vehemently opposed by Belgrade.

After crossing a Serbian checkpoint unhindered, the reservists pelted around 100 Kosovo anti-riot police positioned on the opposite side of the boundary with stones.

The police responded by putting up metal barricades and barbed wire as a helicopter of the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR) peacekeeping mission hovered overhead.

10:52am update: Those Kosovar police--really, any police force that deals with rioters--must have the patience of saints. They had rocks thrown at them and they didn't shoot back? Good men.

Back at the embassy: okay, so they've taken down the U.S. flag (I'm surprised it hasn't been burned yet). Now it appears that they are trying to set the place on fire.

11:14am update: Looks like some minor fire damage to the embassy. There are fire trucks parked out front now. What looks to me like Serbian military is in force and have pushed the rioters farther down the street.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 10:36 AM | Comments (26)
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As usual, they falsely described some over-the-top comments as "blog posts" written by the site's author.

Which isn't merely clueless-- we know the MSM knows and understands the distinction, otherwise, you know, they could be doing hundreds of stories about the death-wishes and cancer-hexes regularly offered up by leftwing blog commenters. Indeed, whenever a leftwing blog is taken to task, liberal defenders (including those in the MSM) immediately object "those are just comments!," even when they're not, such as the case with big Democratic macher Kos' infamous "I feel nothing -- screw them" statement.

So we know the MSM generally understands this distinction -- and certainly any goddamned reporter covering the Internet beat. Why then was this "error" ever made in the first place?

Do not ascribe to malice what can be better explained by stupidity and all that, but in this case, stupidity is not, in fact, a better explanation. CAIR pushed a hit into the MSM and the MSM dutifully complied.

Thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 10:03 AM | Comments (18)
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I would have added this as an update but as you may have noticed the site went down for a while, including the posting software.

Here's the vid:

Cuffy Meigs is actually a contractor working with the Defense Missile Agency (rocket scientist, who knew? I always thought he was a fucking idiot, myself), and he takes stock of the implications of this success.

There is one thing people aren't noticing, though. A while ago -- I forgot where I heard it, but I did -- there was a poll or some sort of survey that demonstrated that while people favored missile defense, they also thought we already had a working missile defense system in place. Now, that's fucking moronic, but I have learned to understand that I live in a nation of people who are largely not... what's the word?... smart.

So I'm not sure how this success actually aids the cause of missile defense -- we have a nation of imbeciles who are sitting back thinking, "Oh, cool, that missile defense system we've had since the Spanish-American War is still working smoothly."

Also [Gabe]: Don't forget to thank your friendly, neighborhood defense contractor. That's a Raytheon missile at work.

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Comments (43)
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ABC News blog Political Radar suggests that the Romney campaign was pushing this story:

ABC News' John Berman Reports: The remnants of the Romney campaign are shaking their heads this morning.

For months they were whispering about a New York Times investigation into John McCain's ties to a certain lobbyist.

They would poke and prod reporters to see if they had heard anything new about when and if the New York Times would publish the story.

On Thursday, while no one would allow their name to be published, several former advisers lamented the timing of the story, one suggesting, "If this piece had run before New Hampshire, McCain would have lost. If it had run before Florida, he would have lost."

I don't have much to add about this that Drew didn't already say: "meh." The point of the story is to make credulous and cynical readers believe that McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist and that he let the relationship influence his activities in the Capitol Building. Note, however, that it doesn't actually say that.

Instead, the explicit claim of the story is that McCain's staff thought there was a relationship and, horrors, he once wrote letters to some of her clients. Also, the quotes from the one and only McCain adviser to go on record in the NYTimes story are entirely focused on the political consequences of having a lobbyist with close ties to the campaign:

John Weaver, a former top strategist and now an informal campaign adviser, said in an e-mail message that he arranged the meeting after “a discussion among the campaign leadership” about her.

“Our political messaging during that time period centered around taking on the special interests and placing the nation’s interests before either personal or special interest,” Mr. Weaver continued. “Ms. Iseman’s involvement in the campaign, it was felt by us, could undermine that effort.”

No mention of a romantic relationship there. But given the previous 3,000 words, it's easy to jump to an inaccurate conclusion. As others have responded, "Where's the beef?" It seems the Times sent four reporters and two researchers (at least) on a wild goose chase after a story that was eight years old. When they came up with nothing to show for months of effort, they stitched together this pile of innuendo.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:37 AM | Comments (14)
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Just came over the transom. I'll give it a read but for now there's the link.

I wonder if it involves John McCain dancing around with a child-lobbyist's skull on his head.

Posted by: Ace at 09:22 AM | Comments (21)
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Sweet.

Via Hot Air with more.

Okay, That Didn't Work: I tried to embed the CNN video but I can't seem to manage it.

Posted by: Ace at 06:17 AM | Comments (22)
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