Dr. Norman Spack. That doesn't sound like the name of a creepy doctor who performs unnecessary sexual surgery on children or anything.

oston’s Children’s Hospital bills itself as the hospital for children — and now it’s also the hospital for children who want a sex change, a procedure some critics are calling “barbaric.”

Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric specialist at the hospital, has launched a clinic for transgendered kids — boys who feel like girls, girls who want to be boys — and he’s opening his doors to patients as young as 7.

Spack offers his younger patients counseling and drugs that delay the onset of puberty. The drugs stop the natural flood of hormones that would make it difficult to have a sex alteration later in life, allowing patients more time to decide whether they want to make the change.

Spack also offers some teenagers hormone therapy, a drastic step that changes the way they grow and develop. While the effects of drug treatments can be stopped, long-term hormone therapy can be irreversible, causing permanent infertility in both sexes.

Posted by: Ace at 11:22 AM | Comments (45)
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Whoops!

Obama repeatedly stressed the risk posed by Iran, as he suggested that danger has grown because of policies supported by McCain.

"Iran is a grave threat. It has an illicit nuclear program. It supports terrorism across the region and militias in Iraq. It threatens Israel's existence. It denies the Holocaust," he said. "The reason Iran is so much more powerful than it was a few years ago is because of the Bush-McCain policy of fighting in Iraq and refusing to pursue direct diplomacy with Iran. They're the ones who have not dealt with Iran wisely."

There's that judgment coming through again.

It's fairly plain that Obama's previous statement is the one he actually believes, and that this "correction" is what he is being forced to say by his staff and other Democrats.

But of course this is all just a "distraction" from the real issues.

Posted by: Ace at 10:59 AM | Comments (37)
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The reporter who acted as Pellicano's attack dog, attacking the government's case against him, just happens to have written most of the stories about Pellicano. And, oh yeah, seems to have a friendly relationship with him.

It gets weirder.

A day after [Busch, the former reporter who is now calling for an investigation] found the package, records show, a man with a criminal record called her out of the blue with information about the threat. A private investigator had hired someone else to blow up her car, he told her. As Ms. Busch and her colleagues met with F.B.I. and police officials to consider their next moves, the newspaperÂ’s lawyer, Karlene Goller, spoke up with a suggestion.

Maybe Anthony Pellicano would know something about this, Ms. Goller said, according to two Times employees.

Ms. Busch insists that Ms. Goller talked of “bringing aboard” Mr. Pellicano.

Ms. Goller declined to comment, citing lawyer-client confidentiality. But Paul Lieberman, a reporter who heard the suggestion, said he saw nothing untoward in it. “He was someone that knew” the criminal element,” Mr. Lieberman said.

A reporter who had long experience with Mr. Pellicano as a news source, Chuck Philips, said he had tried to reach him at Ms. Goller’s urging and did not get through. But, he added, it was “preposterous” to think Ms. Goller would have proposed hiring him.

At this time, Mr. Pellicano was not suspected in the threat against Ms. Busch. But wrongly or rightly, the discussions left her convinced that the paper was too cozy with him.

Bear in mind, it was Anthony Pellicano ultimately convicted of making that threat. But the genius LAT considered hiring him to check into it.

Yeah, I'm sure the LAT will get right on that internal investigation.

Posted by: Ace at 10:49 AM | Comments (4)
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Saturday night, Alice H. caught the Seattle Times' Bruce Ramsey changing a key paragraph from a column, which included the statement What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable, all in an effort to make the world safe for appeasement again.

Michael Goldfarb picks up on this stealth edit, unacknowledged by the paper, and notes, wryly, that at least Ramsey practices what he preaches: Facing aggression from "a few hundred" irate Internet brownshirts, he re-writes the offending paragraph to appease us.

Hey, Pussy Boy? Appeasement doesn't work, which we'll now prove by further ridiculing and rubbishing you. You've added dishonesty to your previous resume of leftism, Hitler apologetics, stupidity, naivete, and unhinged hackery.

Incidentally, his rewrite hardly helped.

The original pro-Hitler apologetic:

What Hitler was demanding was not unreasonable. He wanted the German-speaking areas of Europe under German authority. He had just annexed Austria, which was German-speaking, without bloodshed. There were two more small pieces of Germanic territory: the free city of Danzig and the Sudetenland, a border area of what is now the Czech Republic.

Um, it isn't "now" part of the Czech Republic, it always was, at least in modern times. (Or at least it was part of Czechoslovakia before it broke into two states.) I'm not sure of his intent here, but his description of the Sudentenland suggests that which country it was a part of has only recently been settled.

The stealth-edited appeasement of the aggressors beleaguering him:

The narrative we're given about Munich is entirely in hindsight. We know what kind of man Hitler was, and that he started World War II in Europe. But in 1938 people knew a lot less. What Hitler was demanding at Munich was not unreasonable as a national claim (though he was making it in a last-minute, unreasonable way.) Germany's claim was that the areas of Europe that spoke German and thought of themselves as German be under German authority. In September 1938 the principal remaining area was the Sudetenland.

Ah. Now it wasn't unreasonable "as a national claim," though he allows that Hitler may have been "unreasonable" in making this reasonable national claim.

Clarification: Just to be clear, he rewrote the entire article without noting he'd done so, not just the quoted paragraph. Thanks to Alice H. for pointing that out.

Jerkoff, the guy had been railing about expanding the German Reich for years. Not only is it wrong in the first place to ratify the conquests of an aggressive psychopath as Chamberlain did (a big talker that Obama obviously considers something of a maligned hero), but it was also quite obvious to many sensible people -- among them, Winston Churchill -- that granting Hitler the Sudentenland would not satisfy him, and in fact would only encourage him to demand more and seize more territory by force.

This asshole seems to be suggesting that appeasement is getting a bad wrap because, honestly, who could ever have predicted it would turn out badly?

Well, genius, quite a few people predicted that. Quite a few people called this "appeasement" at the time and stated it would encourage Hitler by showing the weakness of Europe.

I'm still positively shocked that even an over-the-moon leftist could, at this late date, engage in apologetics for Hitler and his co-conspirator Chamberlain -- and furthermore believe that doing so actually aids his beloved Obamessiah.

I'm sure appeasing Iran by conceding it the bomb and permitting its murderous support of terrorists will work out just as splendidly as Chamberlain's magnificent Peace in Our Time talk did.

Next from Bruce Ramsey: The Khmer Rouge -- Misunderstood Warrior-Poets.

Posted by: Ace at 10:26 AM | Comments (24)
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Gee, that's funny. When this asshole was knocking the pin as a sign of "false patriotism," it apparently didn't occur to him that flag pin wearers were also wearing the pin for the same reasons.

Ah, well. Now that he's got the Fightin' Fightin' Nutroots on his side, I guess he can start pretending to have some moderate impulses.

Another Flip-Flop: As it turns out, former Kleagle Roberty Byrd apparently would indeed prefer to see Old Glory trampled down than to see this nation overrun with the mongrel races of darkest Africa. He endorsed Obama as a "Christian."

I guess if he's a Christian he's forgiven for his sins, such as being an insolent darkie.

Posted by: Ace at 09:38 AM | Comments (13)
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It's in TNR. Here's how it was teased to me:

I think you and your readers at Ace of Spades HQ will like this New Republic web exclusive by John B. Judis, “The Local,” which we have just posted on our site. It’s a major story, in which Judis explores the Obama campaign’s promise to end federal oversight of the Teamsters Union—even though its Chicago branch remains strongly linked to organized crime. Shouldn’t a Chicago politician know better? Judis writes:

If there is continuing mob influence in the Teamsters, it is probably centered in the Chicago area. And in the last decade, the Teamsters in Chicago have shown little enthusiasm for rooting out corruption in their ranks. As a veteran Chicago politician surrounded by a veteran Chicago campaign staff, Obama had to have known this--and that makes his warm words to the Teamsters all the more disturbing.

Judis also discovers that ObamaÂ’s Federal Election Commission records show a hefty contribution to his senatorial and presidential races from Chicago labor broker Richard Simon, whom Richard Stier of the Teamsters oversight group RISE described as "having ties to organized crime," and who a 2001 IRB report found to have been working to undermine a Teamster local in Las Vegas by negotiating non-union, low-wage agreements to service the city's numerous business conventions, which was a breach of the union's commitment under the National Labor Relations Act to offer "fair representation" to its members.

Here's the beginning:

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that last summer, Illinois Senator Barack Obama told officials in the Teamsters union that he favored ending the Independent Review Board (IRB) that was created in 1989 by the federal government to rid the union of organized crime. Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama, confirmed the story, saying that the candidate believed that the IRB had "run its course" because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined." The Teamsters subsequently endorsed Obama for president, in late February.

Obama and the Teamsters bristled at suggestions that any deal was made. The Obama campaign also circulated a tape of a speech that Senator Hillary Clinton made last March to the Teamsters saying "at some point the past has to be opened," but Clinton's statement, like those made by Senator John Kerry in 2004, stopped well short of committing her to end oversight of the Teamsters. Based on the statements the newspaper quoted, it is fair to assume that The Wall Street Journal got the details right.

There are two reasons to be concerned about Obama's actions here. The first is procedural. Obama's promise to close down the IRB suggests a Bush-like contempt for the customary relationship between government and the judicial process. The president himself can't shut down the IRB. He can only recommend to his attorney general that he recommend to the U.S. Attorney in New York that it be shut down. But in these kind of touchy matters, presidents usually defer to the judgment of their attorney generals. By coming close to promising a shutdown, Obama was putting politics above judicial procedure--which is just the kind of "Washington" behavior that he likes to criticize his opponents for doing.

The second reason for concern is more substantive. Labor leaders have made plausible arguments for shutting down the IRB, but a Chicago politician should be extremely wary of acceding to them. If there is continuing mob influence in the Teamsters, it is probably centered in the Chicago area. And in the last decade, the Teamsters in Chicago have shown little enthusiasm for rooting out corruption in their ranks. As a veteran Chicago politician surrounded by a veteran Chicago campaign staff, Obama had to have known this--and that makes his warm words to the Teamsters all the more disturbing.

A different type of politics, to be sure. Making corrupt deals with mob-connected thugs to win union endorsements.

I guess it's "new" in the sense it's so retro; we haven't seen much of this kind of open, not-even-trying-to-hide-it corruption since the bad old days of, say, the sixties.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 AM | Comments (20)
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Much Western/liberal ink has been spilled on the supposed defect of the US military failing to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world. And how by killing terrorists "we only make more terrorists."

Much less is written about the US' greatest asset in the war on terror -- the cravenly psychopathic behavior of the Islamofascists themselves. They're not winning hearts and minds either -- and in fact by terrorizing, they seem to be making more anti-terrorists.

A.J. Strata considers this, and links a powerful video interview with a newscaster silenced by Hezballah thugs (and Lebanon's own "neutral" army) at Future TV (aligned with the "good guys," to put it into simple but quite accurate terms).

It's long, but worth watching. If you're pressed for time, listen to her for about a minute then skip ahead to the last minute when she loses her shit.

Her basic point: She had attempted to be "objective" in giving voice to the arguments and claims of the Shi'ites and Hezballah, but was (of course) not given the same treatment in return. She says she now feels a "victim" of her own objectivity, and that Hezballah has ignited sectarian passions in her she had not known before.

The power of it comes from her righteous anger and palpable feelings of betrayal by thugs, though.

Perhaps Obama should watch it, so that he later will find the need to regret his own attempts at "objectivity" and even-handedness between civilization and murderous thuggery.

Thanks to dri.

Posted by: Ace at 08:54 AM | Comments (9)
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Why not? That's Obama's plan for Iran -- ratification by inaction. Why can't "other countries" offer us the same deal?

Isn't it strange that Obama's already negotiating away a substantial part of the US economy without even having sat down to "talk" with his partners in compromise?

He's already conceding major points to the rather-unthreatening Chicken Little alarmists of Brussels.... I'm sure he'll be so much tougher with the mad mullahs of Iran.

Thanks to merle, via Drudge.

Shocker of the Day: Obama drove a Hemi V-8 sedan before someone noticed, and only after charges of hypocrisy were made did he switch to something a bit less carbon footprintish?

Gee, I never saw that coming.

Aftershocks: Slublog offers more examples of the sacrifices Obama urges on non-millionaire Americans but is unwilling to make himself.

And yet he was one of the many Democratic candidates who admitted to using a private jet to get to a debate: Video here.

And to get to the Virgin Islands: Note the vehicles used to transport him to the hotel.

Perhaps Keith Olbermann will offer a spittlenacious indictment of Obama for refusing to sacrifice anything for the War on Terror. At least Bush gave up golf, which Olbermann found so offensive he practically had a stroke. If giving up golf is trivial, how does giving up nothing at all strike him?

Schism? Charlie Rangel, who drives expensive leased cars that, for reasons that escape me, you're paying for, might have a problem with Obama on this issue.

Or maybe not. We all know it's just "the little people," who barely have carbon footprints at all, who are expected to sacrifice for the sake of the environment and a more equitable distribution of the world's wealth. The wealthy and powerful are too busy imposing sacrifices on everyone else to do any sacrificing themselves.

Thanks to TopSecretK9.

Posted by: Ace at 08:22 AM | Comments (67)
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... thereby proving Obama is a serious threat to the US.

Captain Ed takes a few shots in this target-rich environment of retardities.

“They don’t pose a serious threat to us in the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us,” Obama told a cheering audience, explaining why he doesn’t think we need to worry about “tiny” countries like Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. Obama also displays a weird sense of history when he suggests that the Berlin Wall fell because we engaged Mikhail Gorbachev....

Much of this talk about talking seems to miss the real point. Because it's a difficult issue to explain, it tends to get reduced to the simple-but-largely-wrong idea that talking to Iran gives them credibility and dignity and reduces our bargaining position. That's true, but those are rather small-beans questions of tactics and strategy; when Obama asks "What can listening to them hurt?," I think many nod in agreement.

The real problem is Obama's naivete in believing that talk is enough to resolve serious fundamental disagreements between countries.

Just as Bush said:

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

Simply put, what is the point of a "negotiation" when neither party can or will settle for a compromise? If a man is absolutely unwilling to work for less than $50,000 per year and his would-be employer is absolutely unwilling to pay him more that $40,000, there's no "negotiation" to be had. $45,000 per year is not a compromise that either party can accept.

Our differences with Iran are similarly absolute:

Iran wishes to have atomic bombs capable of threatening the region, and possibly destroying Tel Aviv and other large Jewish cities which don't have Muslim holy places within them. We wish them not to have such bombs.

Iran wishes to attack Israel and Lebanon through its ghoulish terrorist proxies Hamas and Hezballah. We wish them not to.

Iran wishes to arm, train, and coordinate attacks on US troops in Iraq in order to destabilize that country, reduce it to a terrorist-spawning failed state, and claim it as a satrapy. We wish them to stop doing so.

Now, my question for Obama is, "What 'compromise' solution do you propose for any of those disagreements?" That Iran shall be permitted to have six nuclear warheads but no more than six? That Iran shall be permitted to arm Hamas but not Hezballah? That Iran will cap the number of US troops it murders per year at, say, 100? With, perhaps, a monetary penalty to be paid for each additional American it kills in excess of that number?

Or perhaps we can permit Iran to achieve one of those policy goals if it relents on the others? In which case, I really need to know which of those Obama plans to concede to Iran. Will they be allowed to have the atomic bomb if they stop funding, training, and arming terrorists in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq? Will they be allowed to ramp up terrorism in Israel and Lebanon if they refrain from doing so in Iraq?

That sounds an awful lot like appeasement, the naive prayer that if a resolutely aggressive regime is given one concession it will consider itself satisfied and stop demanding more. But, the media will tell us, this is nothing like appeasement; after all, Iran doesn't wish to rule the Sudentenland.

The only other inducements Obama could offer Iran are of course already offered to Iran. We could normalize Iran's place in the world diplomatically and economically. We could end the various embargoes, including the pressure on banks and investment houses to not put money into Iran (which does seem to be damaging the Iranian economy).

But of course Iran already determined that its goals of acquiring the bomb and sponsoring terrorism are much more important to it than normalized diplomatic relations and end to sanctions. Furthermore, they obviously could have both of those benefits at any time they choose to stop their quest for the bomb and end their support for terrorism. They already know that. It's not like Barack Obama needs to explain to them they can have those things. And it's not as if the Bush Administration never contemplated ending the isolation of Iran if it should become a better-behaving state, and that it's only Barack Obama who came up with the genius idea of ending sanctions if the sanctioned country ends the behavior that earned it the sanctions in the first plalce.

So what, precisely, does Obama believe he will talk about with Iran? Is he really so naive and arrogant to think that if he offers Iran the same deal Bush (and Clinton, and Bush, and Reagan) have been offering Iran for years, his natural charm and nonthreatening good looks will convince them to accept the deal they've rejected for nearly thirty years now?

Obama is absolutely allergic to the threat of military force against Iran, but of course that's the only card we have. And even that might not work. But certainly it has a better chance of working than simply re-offering Iran the exact same "clean up your act and we'll treat you more nicely" deal that's been on the table since the wild-eyed theocrats took over the country three decades ago.

And so he only offers "talk" as strategy for victory. Which is doubly frightening, for two reasons:

* Taking the military option off the table does indeed resolve our disagreements with Iran -- by tacitly conceding each and every point to Iran. If a cop and a thief arrive at the "compromise" that the cop will never arrest the thief, the thief sort of wins out in that "compromise," doesn't he? The thief has everything he wants from the cop -- free license to continue stealing without threat of punishment. And the cop has gained... well, he's gained some free time, I guess, as he won't be wasting time chasing down the thief anymore. Simply "talking" forever essentially ratifies Iran's policy positions and gives them everything they want.

* Furthermore, Obama will be forced to lie about this situation in order to get off the pages of the newspapers. Just as Clinton claimed his deal with North Korea had ended North Korea's nuclear program -- he could not admit that North Korea was continuing to build the bomb before the ink was even dry on the "treaty." Obama will be forced to claim all his worthless talk and talk and talk has actually borne fruit, and that Iran is now a much better behaved country. To preserve his own political position, he'll become an owned-and-operated spokesman for Iran. Each lie Iran tells about its real behavior will be endorsed by Obama as true, otherwise, gee willickers, it might look like Obama had accomplished nothing with all his wonderful talk.

Obama's plan, then, is essentially to concede every single point to Iran and simply take the issue off the table by claiming, falsely, that Iran is no longer a threat.

He's already begun that public relations rehabilitation of Iran -- by already declaring them not to be a "serious threat" before he even bothers signing all his wondrous treaties with them.

Obama's position -- talk first, talk last, talk forever -- makes him a captive of shared interests with the Iranian mullahs. They will conspire together to achieve their goals -- Iran, to achieve its goal of continuing to build the bomb and murder through terrorism, and Obama, to achieve his goal of dishonestly claiming Iran is no longer doing so, and thus he has "solved" the problem of Iran.

As they say, diplomacy almost always "works," because both sides have a strong motivation to claim the talks have produced a positive outcome. Iran will be permitted to continue its repulsive support of terrorism against Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, and the US itself; they will just be asked to do so more quietly and covertly, so that Obama can un-certify them as state sponsors of terror and claim victory. They will be allowed to work on the bomb secretly, with less bluster and no further public declarations they're building the bomb; Obama will pretend to believe them, and in fact direct the intelligence agencies to certify them as having abandoned the project.

Both sides win -- Iran wins, and Obama wins.... politically. The only loser is US national security, but who cares about such a trivial thing?

McCain's Response:

“Before I begin my prepared remarks, I want to respond briefly to a comment Senator Obama made yesterday about the threat posed to the United States by the Government of Iran. Senator Obama claimed that the threat Iran poses to our security is “tiny” compared to the threat once posed by the former Soviet Union. Obviously, Iran isn’t a superpower and doesn’t possess the military power the Soviet Union had. But that does not mean that the threat posed by Iran is insignificant. On the contrary, right now Iran provides some of the deadliest explosive devices used in Iraq to kill our soldiers. They are the chief sponsor of Shia extremists in Iraq, and terrorist organizations in the Middle East. And their President, who has called Israel a “stinking corpse,” has repeatedly made clear his government’s commitment to Israel’s destruction. Most worrying, Iran is intent on acquiring nuclear weapons. The biggest national security challenge the United States currently faces is keeping nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists. Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, that danger would become very dire, indeed. They might not be a superpower, but the threat the Government of Iran poses is anything but “tiny.”

He then goes on to argue about the "prestige" of a direct president-to-president summiting with Iran. Which, as I've argued ad nauseum above, is one of the weakest reasons possible to oppose Obama's plan to chat America's enemies into submission.

Posted by: Ace at 08:05 AM | Comments (59)
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Hillary Clinton has long been complaining that the media have been harder on her than on Obama. She even has a new ad out in Oregon that underscores that point.

Could it be true that the media have been displaying signs of pro- Obama favoritism during this election season?

I think a very good case can be made that they indeed have!

On Friday, Drew wrote about the latest “big stink” in the media:

This morningÂ’s big stink was Jamie RubinÂ’s op-ed piece in the Washington Post saying John McCain in 2006 had advocated dealing with Hamas. This was a clear attempt to help make Barack ObamaÂ’s desire to talk to every thug in the world without conditions look less insane than it is.

Well, Rubin was done in pretty quickly this morning by Ed at Hot Air and now by an extended excerpt from the interview.

Which led Drew to say:

We should really start keeping track of the lengths the media is going to protect the Chosen One.

To which Nice Deb immediately and enthusiastically volunteered. Just for the fun of it, I have broadened my search to include the more egregious examples of media favoritism towards Obama. So without further ado....

more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 07:30 AM | Comments (60)
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