“Detainees Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots, claims the WaPo's headline, and the article it heads attempts to establish that.

It fails.

The Post also acknowledges that Zubaydah’s “interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla” but dismisses Padilla as the man behind a fanciful “dirty bomb” plot and notes that Padilla was never charged in any such plot. In fact, Padilla was a hardened terrorist who had trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and was a protégé of al Qaeda’s third in command, Mohammed Atef. And when he was captured, Padilla was being prepared for a much more sinister and realistic attack on America.

In June of 2001, Padilla met in Afghanistan with Atef, who asked him if he was willing to undertake a mission to blow up apartment buildings in the United States using natural gas. He agreed, and was sent to a training site near the Kandahar airport to prepare for the attack under close supervision of an al Qaeda explosives expert, who taught him about switches, circuits, and timers needed to carry it out. He was training in Afghanistan when Coalition forces launched Operation Enduring Freedom. Atef was killed by a Coalition airstrike, and Padilla joined the other al Qaeda operatives fleeing Afghanistan.

...

Since his capture, Abu Zubaydah had provided the CIA with the critical link that had identified KSM as “Muktar” and the mastermind of 9/11, as well as information that led to the capture of Padilla and the disruption of a planned attack on the American homeland. The CIA knew he had more information that could save American lives, but now he had stopped talking. So the CIA used enhanced interrogation techniques to get him talking again -- and these techniques worked.

Zubaydah soon he began to provide information on key al Qaeda operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th, including Ramzi bin al Shibh. At the time of his capture, bin al Shibh had been working in Karachi on follow-on operations against the West – including a plot to hijack passenger planes in Europe and fly them into Heathrow airport. Bin al Shibh had identified four operatives for the operation, when he was taken into custody.

Read the whole thing.

Posted by: Ace at 01:01 PM | Comments (1)
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Murtha Fucker.

Allah mentions OJ's own use the word "if," in his confession "If I Did It."

Another OJ quote is worth mentioning: regarding the woman whose head he almost completely severed from her body, he said something along the lines of "If I'm guilty of anything, it's of loving her too much."

Tough love, as it turns out. Loved her to death. Loved her head off.

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Add Comment
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A commenter asks if anyone actually did this.

Oddly enough, I did -- sorta. I was visiting hippy-ish friends on Saturday night and they did it. Over the rest of our objections. We were conservatives or leaning this way and were annoyed by the bullying hippy environmental nonsense.

But, as it turned out, drinking beer in candlelight was kinda nice.

The thing is -- I was just complaining about this IRL -- there's nothing necessarily bad about earth day, or earth hours, in principle.

I like the environment. I don't like pollution (real pollution, I mean; I am less concerned by carbon dioxide, "The Invisible Killer").

I like the earth. When the earth is invaded by aliens, I promise to be on the earth's side.

Unless the aliens are the Tempter/Bargainer sort of aliens, who promise great wealth and power to those humans willing to sell out their fellow men and act as managers and executioners for the alien masters; in that case, of course, it really depends on the deal they offer.

But I think that's obvious.

Anyway, a lot of this crap -- like conserving electricity once a week -- is not actually a terrible idea, and can lead to the rediscovery of forgotten pleasures. Like -- with the tv off, who knows what you might do. Wives might actually agree to sex, if only to mitigate the tedium.

But obviously the "movement" is not about the celebrating the earth per se, or conserving energy, or anything like that. It is a joyless affair, not about celebrating anything, but rather castigating the heretics and bullying the meek; and calculated to exclude anyone who doesn't buy into the envirosocialist/enviroluddite manifesto.

Forgive me for sounding Crunchy Con here, but there are worse things one could do than light candles one night and simply read by them (reading having been largely given up on my many of us, including me), or make merry without the distractions of the tv or internet. Even for futurists, there is something that just feels right and wholesome about the "Old Ways," and returning to them, even superficially and briefly, for a few hours at a time.

The fact that this reduces the electricity bill and also reduces some of our demand for foreign oil is almost just a bonus.

But of course that's not what earth day or earth hour is, and it never will be. But there is room for an Alternative Earth Day, one that genuinely celebrates what a splendid planet we've been given either by luck or fate or God Himself.

And candlelight is kinda nice.

A lot of conservatives railed against the idea (again, I among them); but that conflates antipathy for the bullies and busybodies who endlessly push this PC pap on us with regard for the planet itself. They call themselves spokesmen for the earth; but of course they are not. And we shouldn't let their insistence that they are fool us.

That doesn't mean I'd participate in their Earth Hour penance plan again, nor will I be attending an Earth Day event. (In San Diego, the GOP is barred from having a table at the event, letting me know in no uncertain terms that I'm quite unwelcome.)

But it might not be a bad idea to untangle the idea of earth and conservation from the anti-progress, anti-wealth, anti-human perversion the self-appointed Guardians of Gaia have fashioned them into.

If we do that, we're buying into their definitions and their agenda, even if we oppose it.

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 AM | Add Comment
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Some discussion from Nice Deb, including mention of our very own Concerned Christian Conservative andros, who, seriously, is a gen-u-ine conservative, he just wants us all to give this Obama feller a chance, and he fears for the future of our movement, what with its Reagan worship and all.

I don't know how big a thing this is now -- I know for a fact there was, in the months before an election, an organized campaign (organized by whom, I don't know) of Concerned Christian Conservatives popping up on rightwing sites to tell us all the GOP was doomed and rightly so. I know it because all of them recited their talking points according to the same three-step script. (Note I pin it on David Axelrod there, the "Master of Astroturfing," and still do suspect that, but of course any number of lefties have had this idea and tried it in the past -- "mobies" are thus-called because electro-sissy "Moby" suggested doing this way back in, what, 2003?)

As Nice Deb notes, it's a pretty stupid thing to do, because they're almost immediately spotted. They don't really have any idea how we think and therefore what conservative arguments ought to sound like. We, of course, know how they think, as we can't avoid it; we're fed the liberal talking points from an early age by our media.

Posted by: Ace at 10:40 AM | Comments (1)
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Safe link to NewsBusters:

President Obama and the Democrats should wave the white flag in their strawman war on Rush Limbaugh. The Media Research Center delivered the grim casualty figures for the Democrats. Since January, the top talk show gabber's ratings have soared off the charts. Radio affiliates that carry Limbaugh's syndicated show call the ratings boost he's gotten from the Democrat's orchestrated attack on him a "dramatic surge."

In further Limbaugh news, the LAT runs an opinion piece by conservative writer Andrew Klavan insulting the LAT's entire audience.

If you are reading this newspaper, the likelihood is that you agree with the Obama administration's recent attacks on conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh. That's the likelihood; here's the certainty: You've never listened to Rush Limbaugh.

...

By lifting some typically Rushian piece of outrageous hilarity completely out of context, the distortion gang knows full well it can get you to widen your eyes and open your mouth in the universal sign of Liberal Outrage. Your scrawny chest swelling with a warm sense of completely unearned righteousness, you will turn to your second spouse and say, "I'm not a liberal, I'm a moderate, and I'm tolerant of a wide range of differing views -- but this goes too far!"

There is more untruthfulness in that statement than in a speech by President Obama. Even the commas are self-deceiving. You're not a moderate or you wouldn't be reading this newspaper. You're not tolerant of a wide range of views; you are tolerant of a narrow spectrum of variations on your views. And, whatever you claim, you still haven't listened to Rush Limbaugh.

He goes on to brand all the LAT's readership "intellectual cowards."

Posted by: Ace at 10:01 AM | Add Comment
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Those trees needed light to read their copies of Earth in the Balance.

Posted by: Ace at 09:47 AM | Add Comment
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So reads the headline of the Philadelphia Bulletin, citing the claims of Arica Moncreif, who is both an ACORN whistleblower and a disgruntled ex-employee.

A lawyer involved with legal action against Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) told a House Judiciary subcommittee on March 19 The New York Times had killed a story in October that would have shown a close link between ACORN, Project Vote and the Obama campaign because it would have been a “a game changer.”

...

During her testimony, Ms. Heidelbaugh said Ms. Moncrief had told her The New York Times articles stopped when she revealed that the Obama presidential campaign had sent its maxed-out donor list to ACORNÂ’s Washington, D.C. office.

...

Ms. Heidelbaugh then told the congressional panel:

“Upon learning this information and receiving the list of donors from the Obama campaign, Ms. Strom [a NYT reporter] reported to Ms. Moncrief that her editors at The New York Times wanted her to kill the story because, and I quote, “it was a game changer.”’

I'm not sure I believe that -- but then, it is possible that the NYT's editors erred in telling the truth to their reporter, who was then so angry she repeated their words to her informant. Possible, but still unlikely; liberals never admit stuff like this. They claim "the story is still being developed," etc., etc., in perpetuity, or at least until after an election is safely behind them.

Kevin Williamson... of National Review puts me some fucking information:

The paper was launched (with me as its first editor) in 2004. Daily broadsheet, New York Sun-inspired, Catholic, conservative: all the good stuff.

Well, all rightie then. It was a bad move to stealth-impugn the paper by saying "I've never heard of it" (which I've now deleted). I was afraid it was some fly-by-night internet only thingee; a simple bit of checking would have dispelled that worry, and I shouldn't have been too lazy to do so.

I have to tell you that blogging makes one lazy in a lot of ways. As far as fact checking-- I've got 5000 fact-checkers out there, multiple layers of painstaking editorial oversight that the media claims it has.

Thanks to the commenters for letting me know earlier it was a real, and good, paper.

Posted by: Ace at 08:59 AM | Comments (2)
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At the hands of Chris Hitches and Salman Rushdie. Even Bill Maher puts him some information... at least before he comes riding to the ignoramus leftist Truther's rescue. (Well, he sounds like a Truther. I'd guess he's a Truther, or would be a Truther, if he were even informed enough to have heard of Trutherism.)

Mos Def asks again and again what Al Qaeda's and the Taliban's agenda is. The clear implication is that he doesn't believe there's enough information to say they're bad guys.

Mos Def is, like many of his kind, protected from the responsibility of making judgments by his well-crafted shield of full and complete ignorance.

Comment Snark:

Dear Al Qaeda,

I'm not sure what your ideas are, so I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Sincerely,

Mos Def

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:23 AM | Comments (10)
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When he wasn't too buy accepting mortgages from his good friend Angelo at Countrywide, Chris Dodd was raking in the cash from AIG. And not the 'good' part of AIG. No, Chris was pals with the folks at the Financial Products unit. You remember them, they are the ones who almost melted down the economy.

As Democrats prepared to take control of Congress after the 2006 elections, a top boss at the insurance giant American International Group Inc. told colleagues that Sen. Christopher J. Dodd was seeking re-election donations and he implored company executives and their spouses to give.

The message in the Nov. 17, 2006, e-mail from Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products chief executive, was unmistakable: Mr. Dodd was "next in line" to be chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the insurance industry, and he would "have the opportunity to set the committee's agenda on issues critical to the financial services industry.

"Given his seniority in the Senate, he will also play a key role in the Democratic Majority's leadership," Mr. Cassano wrote in the message, obtained by The Washington Times.

Mr. Dodd's campaign quickly hit pay dirt, collecting more than $160,000 from employees and their spouses at the AIG Financial Products division (AIG-FP) in Wilton, Conn., in the days before he took over as the committee chairman in January 2007. Months later, the senator transferred the donations to jump-start his 2008 presidential bid, which later failed.

Campaign contribution...retention bonus. It's kind of hard to tell the difference these days. Didn't there used to be a term the media threw around about stuff like this? Culture of something. Corruption! Yeah, a 'culture of corruption'. Whatever happened to that term? You don't hear it much these days.

Last week Larry Kudlow squashed the rumors he was interested in running against Dodd. Can the Republicans in Connecticut come up with someone to run against this corrupt piece of shit?

Posted by: DrewM at 07:44 AM | Comments (4)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:50 AM | Comments (4)
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