And then, after he finally sent an ambulance... he showed up to arrest her, for "abuse of 911," a charge that the report says doesn't even exist.

Oh-- and he hung up on her twice without getting her information. He called the ambulance only after the third time she'd called, after wasting six minutes.

The police department has given him two weeks suspension, and Captain Ed argues they're right to resist firing him, as anyone can have "one bad day."

That's true, but irrelevant. If someone has a legitimate medical emergency and all you can do is complain that you overheard her say "What the fuck?" before you even answered the phone, you're in the wrong business. This shows a profound psychological defect, or at least a gross mismatch in terms of the career selected.

He's also clearly a bad cop. I know cops have high-stress jobs and take an awful lot of abuse, but this guy has the stereotypical bad-cop attitude that his badge exists chiefly to extract respect from people -- coerecively, if need be.

He's got a hard-on about indecorous language, which is his right, but he's using his position to bully people around, and in this case, he's actually willing to let someone die if he doesn't get the respect and chop-chop compliance with his bullying that he seeks.

A cop who uses his badge in this way is already a bad cop. But when that attitude extends to blackmailing people with actual death, that crosses the line from "bad cop" to "ex-cop."

Maybe Captain's right that the police department needs to resist the firing -- but everyone else in Lincoln Park and the state of Michigan needs to pressure them into firing his ass.

You have to watch this.

Instinct: He just doesn't have the right instincts, or even normal human instincts. Granted, he gets a lot of 911 calls and so is naturally less affected by this stuff than other people, but when a quavering, freaked-out human voice asks for an ambulance, you say yes. If you don't, you're wired wrong to begin with, and you're certainly in the wrong occupation.

I can just see this guy responding to a call about a girl hit by a car, and as he lifts her head out of the pool of blood, saying, "You're dressed like a whore, you know. Button it up, Tartsy McSlatternCleavage."

Sorry, dude. You need to go. You need a less stressful job where you can make your demands for a more decorous society without anyone's life being put at risk.

Posted by: Ace at 11:18 AM | Comments (66)
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In this case, he doesn't merely stick to the Bush = Nazi comparison, which is vague enough to escape raising many people's hackles. No, in this case, he specifically compares waterboarding KSM to the Holocost, and cites the figures (6 million Jews, plus 5 million others deemed "undesirable" by the Nazis) to make his point.

He didn't just break Godwin's Law. He shattered it.

More at Moe Lane, including a link to donate to Dodd's challenger.

Dodd was meeting left-wing bloggers, by the way. As he's only got, what, five Connecticut donors, I guess he figured he'd have to really pander to them to get their support.

Posted by: Ace at 10:23 AM | Comments (7)
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Cuckoo for conspiracy theories.

No link for the headcase.

[G]iven this blog's coverage of governor Palin's various strange stories about Trig, and her continued refusal to provide any medical records to confirm her account, her speech to the Kansas Right To Life organization - her first public explanation for her unusual behavior, since the MSM decided it was a question that could not be asked - is worth entering into the public record.

She explains above what she describes as her "fleeting moment" of temptation to abort Trig when she found out she was pregnant at an out of state energy conference, and her decision to keep the pregnancy secret for seven months (an endeavor made easier by the fact that no one seeing her had any idea up to the very day she announced). I tend to assume that everything Palin says is untrue until proven otherwise, and in this case, have no basis to confirm or deny anything. But it is also only fair to give her own explanation for her secrecy an airing.

For the record, she says that she kept her pregnancy secret for seven months because there were "neanderthals" out there who would have refused to believe that a pregnant woman could handle her public duties as governor, and because of her own conflicted feelings about having a Down Syndrome child at the age of 44. She does not explain the bizarre circumstances of the day-long labor on various airplanes. But, hey, maybe at some point, she will. When she does, I will do my best to bring it to you. Maybe one day - who knows? - a journalist might even ask.

Sullivan continues pushing the claim that "no one could even tell she was pregnant" despite the fact that many reporters have gone on record to refute that and say it was entirely obvious.

And Bammy reads his blog.

Posted by: Ace at 10:06 AM | Comments (7)
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Specter had it wrong. We didn't need Jimmy Carter's War on Cancer. What we needed was a truce with cancer.

The fragile agreement, in which the government said it would allow Islamic law in the region in exchange for militants laying down their arms, was left in tatters when a soldier was killed in an ambush.

It came just a day after two local officials were beheaded and Taliban fighters began patrolling Mingora, Swat's main town.

The press mentions beheadings now as if they're routine, like a a local official speaking at a Kiwanis club.

A Taliban spokesman blamed the government and military for provoking the violence saying it had sabotaged the peace process to appease the United States.

Muslim Khan, said that the controversial peace deal "practically stands dissolved".

"This is not our army, this is not our government. They're worse enemies of Muslims than the Americans," he said. "They're US stooges and now it's clear that either we'll be martyred (killed) or we'll march forward," he added.

The attack came despite Pakistan making further concessions to the Taliban by establishing an Islamic appeal court.

Let me rewrite that sentence correctly:

"The attack came because of Pakistan making further concessions to the Taliban by establishing an Islamic appeal court."

But I think that's simplistic, because it implies that Pakistan could do something to stop this, which I'm not sure is true anymore. If it ever was. The country seems to be going Taliban.

Thanks to JackStraw.

Posted by: Ace at 09:28 AM | Comments (3)
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First the good news...Sen. Jeff Sessions will replace cowardly turncoat Arlen Specter as the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary committee. For the official Ace of Spades HQ positions on Jeff Sessions, check out this post. Short version...he's just a mustache away from being as cool as John Bolton.

As for the presumptive front runner to replace the lackluster David Souter, it turns out aside from a nifty bio, she may not be the brightest star in the liberal legal firmament. This isn't an attack from the right but a writer on the left in The New Republic.

But despite the praise from some of her former clerks, and warm words from some of her Second Circuit colleagues, there are also many reservations about Sotomayor. Over the past few weeks, I've been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court. Nearly all of them acknowledged that Sotomayor is a presumptive front-runner, but nearly none of them raved about her. They expressed questions about her temperament, her judicial craftsmanship, and most of all, her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices, as well as a clear liberal alternative.

...Some former clerks and prosecutors expressed concerns about her command of technical legal details: In 2001, for example, a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants. The most controversial case in which Sotomayor participated is Ricci v. DeStefano, the explosive case involving affirmative action in the New Haven fire department, which is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court. A panel including Sotomayor ruled against the firefighters in a perfunctory unpublished opinion. This provoked Judge Cabranes, a fellow Clinton appointee, to object to the panel's opinion that contained "no reference whatsoever to the constitutional issues at the core of this case." (The extent of Sotomayor's involvement in the opinion itself is not publicly known.)

There's always all sorts of whisper campaigns for and against Supreme Court candidates but the left knows they are going to get a solid vote. What they really want however is someone who can take Scalia and Roberts on toe to toe. Well, good luck with that.

Anyone who has the intellectual heft to even think about being the left's Scalia likely has a long paper trail. Can Obama nominate someone like that and still hold on to Senators like Landreau, Lincoln, Nelson, Webb, Tester, etc?

Even with a filibuster proof majority life isn't all skittles and beer.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:07 AM | Comments (4)
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Wouldn't it be more honest if they, with a few notable exceptions, just dropped to their knees when Obama walked in? That would more accurately reflect their worship and make it easier to service Him.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:22 AM | Comments (2)
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And repeats Sullivan's erroneous claims about Churchill (safe link to Power Line).

What on earth would lead an intelligent man like Barack Obama to stand before the world and pronounce that Churchill ever said: "We don't torture"? Now we know. Obama's "knowledge" on this point derived from the recent "Churchill vs. Cheney" post by Andrew Sullivan on his Daily Dish blog calling for the prosecution of Dick Cheney. (I have long held that Sullivan's blog would more aptly be called the Daily Ditch.)

Why call for Cheney's prosecution? Sullivan seems as foggy on the authority of the vice president as he is on British history. Nevertheless, despite the exposure of the fraudulence of his post, Sullivan reposted it after Obama's press conference. A correction would have been more appropriate.

Sullivan is such a crude and hysterical polemicist on matters related to the Bush administration that he has long since become unreadable. His tirades regarding the Bush administration's responsibility for "torture" are a torture unto themselves.

The post then continues to deconstruct the nonsense that somehow the British stuck to the Name, Rank and Serial Number requirements of the Geneva Conventions when it came to captured German spies. Spies of course being outside the purview of the conventions, much the same as terrorists are.

Next up...Barack Obama questions who Trig's real mother is!

And no, this isn't some nutwing fantasy, the White House is bragging about it and says Obama has been influenced by Sullivan's "thinking" on "torture".

Since we know Andrew reads this blog, it might be a good time to remind him that Obama opposes same-sex marriage.

To think, we could have had a President who reads this blog. Ah, what might have been.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:31 AM | Comments (2)
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What the fuck, man?

"Well, I was sorry to disappoint many people. Frankly, I was disappointed that the Republican Party didn't want me as their candidate," Mr. Specter said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "But as a matter of principle, I'm becoming much more comfortable with the Democrats' approach. And one of the items that I'm working on, Bob, is funding for medical research."

Mr. Specter continued: "If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine."

You gotta be kidding me.

There's a reason good people don't like Senator Independent-Minded and this is it. He's got no respect for anything other than his own ambition. Which is why he thinks it's just peachy to exploit Kemp's death before his body is even in the ground.

This fits perfectly with his new party. It's unverifiable speculation whether more cancer spending would have prolonged Kemp's life. And it doesn't make a lick of sense. Does Specter think that there is no interest in curing cancer unless the federal government spends money on it? Is he retarded?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:22 AM | Comments (2)
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Hey, I've got an idea. You know last week? Let's do it all over again. And again. And again. And again. Then you die.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 04:07 AM | Add Comment
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Okay, I wasn't planning on another of these and the overnight thread will pro'ly be along soon, but there's another great photo at Shorpy. This one is a digitally restored image:

As usual, click for the big version.

That's 30 Rock in 1933. Of course, St. Patrick's is already across the street, but there's not much else to distract from the Art Deco masterpiece.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:50 PM | Comments (33)
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