Well, my moron friends, this is my last guest ONT host gig. It has been a pleasure and an honor to have served my fellow morons in this capacity. It's harder than you think but fun nonetheless. I want to thank Ace and Maet for giving me this opportunity. That shock collar you made us wear to prevent us from posting naughty things is damn strong though! Hopefully, myself and the other scab-bloggers kept you enthralled and if not, well, I was gonna write something up but figured I'd let my man Russell Crowe address you.

I keed, I keed! On with the ONT! more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:40 PM | Comments (605)
Post contains 657 words, total size 8 kb.

A tipster (eh, who am I kidding, it was a regular blogger who will remain anonymous) passed on these little nuggets to ponder today.

1. In response to the Ghailani trial failure, the White House has inexplicably ordered the Office of Military Commissions to stand down. Note the WH non-denial.

2. The Somali pirates that the Navy brought back were convicted on Wednesday in Norfolk. It's the first U.S. piracy convictions in almost two centuries.

3. A wanted, known jihadist lives openly and freely in Kosovo. Note that Kosovo is still protected by U.S. troops.

4. Creeping statism: a judge is allowing the wiretap authority created to aid investigators of terrorism to be used now for financial fraud investigations. Civil rights? What civil rights?

Ready, set, discuss.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 04:57 PM | Comments (58)
Post contains 133 words, total size 1 kb.

What can I say; brilliance takes time. Sit. Consume. Flatter me. Buy me drinks. Sit on my lap. Run your fingers through my hair. Tell me how much you ... wha? Oh, yeah yeah, blog. Okay, okay.

The Difference Between Us and Them

The rest of the world:

Meanwhile, at AoSHQ:

After the jump: Things! more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:48 PM | Comments (227)
Post contains 499 words, total size 6 kb.

Republican National Committee members are set to vote in two months.

A significant bloc of Republican National Committee members wants embattled chairman Michael Steele to step aside, but the rank and file have failed to settle on a clear alternative, according to Associated Press interviews with committee members.

More than four dozen interviews with members of the 168-member central committee found fear that a badly damaged Steele could emerge from the wreckage of a knockdown, drag-out fight to head the party as it challenges President Barack Obama in 2012. While most agree that Steele's time has been rough — and costly — the members also recognize that a leadership fight could overshadow gains that Republicans made in the midterm elections.

For the same reasons Steele's leadership was "rough and costly," we're looking at a leadership fight. Because it's all about Michael Steele. And since it's all about Michael Steele, there is little hope he will bow out and spare the party a leadership battle. After all, it's his time to shine.

Link via Hot Air.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:42 PM | Comments (86)
Post contains 183 words, total size 1 kb.

While you ate turkey yesterday, AmericaÂ’s retired speechwriter tidied up her jottings and submitted them to the Wall Street Journal in fulfillment of her contract. And now Peggy Noonan can sit back and see how the commoners react to her continued irrelevance and sappy handed scrawl.

Peggy Noonan worked in the crucible at 1600 Penn in the Reagan administration and sat in the round where many other young, intelligent and overly eager speechwriters have sat - in a set of offices where the clockÂ’s always the enemy and the coffeeÂ’s served in perpetuity. A place where you better be on your game and know how to jump, and not be adverse to hoops, because the White HouseÂ’s operational structure is rife with jump callers and hoops.

While Noonan wrote good presidential script leveled in strong words, empathy and good ole Reagan charm, she was remunerated in kind for talking the talk and writing it down. In the years to follow though, Noonan has been a sort of preachy schoolmarm of bilateral politics; all over the board politically and yet static in her schoolmarm role.

While IÂ’m writing this, IÂ’m listening to VivaldiÂ’s Gloria from the motion picture sound track Shine, I only listen to this when I am in a good mood. Yet, some things need to be said despite being in a good mood and despite VivaldiÂ’s musical transcendence.

In her latest WSJ column titled, ‘The Special Assistant for Reality’ Noonan immediately begins to make excuses for President Obama.

This is accomplished by detailing how the modern day American President resides in a bubble of security and advisors which places the poor old American President in the most untenable of positions, not being able to understand what is really going on outside of the white house.

In the present day of 24 hour news cycles, new media and instant polls, the president unable to determine whatÂ’s going on outside of the white house is a tough pill to swallow indeed.

Despite the communication efficiencies of the present age, Noonan writes in terms of the occupant of the oval office as a victim unable, for some unknown reason, to exercise sound judgment.

Per Noonan: Presidents always get to the point where they want to escape Washington, and their lives, and their jobs. But they never can. Because when you're president and you go to Indiana, you take the bubble with you. Your bubble meets Indiana; your bubble witnesses Indianans. But you don't get out of the bubble in Indiana. Once you're in the bubble—once you're in the midst of a huge apparatus, once you have the cars and the aides and the security and the staffers—there is no getting out of it.

You cannot shake the bubble. Wherever you go, there it is. And the worst part is that the army of staff, security and aides that exists to be a barrier between a president and danger, or a president and inconvenience, winds up being a barrier between a president and reality. You lose touch with America and Americans in the bubble, no matter who you are, or what party. This accounts for some of the spectacular blunders presidents make.

Noonan of course needs the above preamble before segueing into just how out of touch she now sees President Obama in terms of the countryÂ’s outrage over the TSA imbroglio. Writing in generalities before launching into the clear deficiencies of Mr. Obama, has become a staple of those in the mainstream media, especially for those feigned conservatives who promoted Obama like Noonan. I suspect they view this as a veneer of cover so as to not upset the mainstream gentry.

For after all, every good fourth estate mainstreamer knows they canÂ’t cut to the chase when speaking ill of Obama. Such would be um, what is the word IÂ’m looking for? Got it! Such would be heresy. And every mainstreamer knows, mainstreamer heresy isnÂ’t a temporal type of sin for it could be mortal to oneÂ’s career.

So here we are a day after thanksgiving with a president whose popularity is at 39 percent, a country slammed with regulations, pending taxes, trillion dollar fiscal deficits and a vitriolic president who Noonan suggests needs a sort of reality informant; one to preside between Obama the ruler and we the ruled.

In 1996, Robert Bork wrote a book titled, ‘Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.’

In 2010 Peggy Noonan writes of a liberal President who needs to be told the ills of a government that molests airline passengers.

IÂ’m going to be turning up Vivaldi real loud now and try not to think for a while.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 12:29 PM | Comments (82)
Post contains 802 words, total size 5 kb.

This story qualifies as something I wouldn't expect to see at the top of the Washington Post's website.

Israel has long held the reputation as home to the world's most stringent airport-security procedures. But most passengers aren't frisked, there are no intimately revealing body-imaging scanners, and security experts dismiss as misguided the new, more intrusive American approach that requires pat-downs or highly detailed scans of every passenger.

"Taking the bottle of water from the 87-year old-woman at JFK, you will never find an explosive material that is coming from Bin Laden,'' said Shlomo Harnoy, head of the Sdema Group, an Israeli security consultancy that advises airports abroad. "You are concentrating on the wrong thing.''

Israel's approach allows most travelers to pass through airport security with relative ease. But Israeli personnel do single out small numbers of passengers for extensive searches and screening, based on profiling methods that have so far been rejected in the United States, subjecting Arabs and, in some cases, other foreign nationals to an extensive screening that comes with a steep civil liberties price.

I don't get this idea that invasive screening of some instead of all is a "a steep civil liberties price".

Airline security is about...security, not personal feelings or equality. By doing the faux, 'we're all in it together and are equal threats' thing we are hurting security but not feelings. That doesn't seem to be on point. Yes, that's easy for a pasty white guy like me to say but it's also the truth.

Of course the story goes into the usual tales of woe from Arabs who don't like getting the 3rd degree from Israeli security but so what? We can stack up plenty of similar stories from US airports from people who have zero chance of being a terrorist.

No system is going to be perfect but spreading limited resources thinner in the name of feelings fails on every level...it hurts security and creates resentments.

I'm somewhat skeptical that we can implement the Israeli model here. Aside from the lack of political will, there's simply a question of scale. Only a tiny fraction of people fly to/in Israel compared to the US. I can't find overall numbers for Israel but the main airport, Ben Gurion handles about 11 million passengers. By comparison, JFK in NY handles 45 million. That gives you a sense of scale we're looking at.

One reason we use such ham handed methods is the relative inexpensiveness of the system and the large supply of low skilled workers it takes to run it. Hiring tens of thousands of highly trained and educated profilers isn't going to be cheap or easy.

Overall though, it's good that we are at least beginning to have a discussion about this and not simply accepting the government's, "this is the way it's going to be" approach. Maybe we can't have the Israeli system but perhaps there something between that and the idiocy we are going through now. We'll only find out if we demand it.

National "Opt Out Day" may have been a bust on the ground but the pressure is clearly building to bring some sanity to the airline security.

Posted by: DrewM at 11:35 AM | Comments (82)
Post contains 560 words, total size 4 kb.

I think it's time for a slight revision to the Unofficial Hierarchy of Western Civilization. As of today, the bottom three slots are:

#5934. Costanza.
#5935. Alan Grayson.
#5936. Black Friday shoppers.

That's right - I paint them all with the same broad brush.

Animals!

Via Breitbart. Cross-posted.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 11:14 AM | Comments (38)
Post contains 66 words, total size 2 kb.

(Yes I can spell. I just can't see the damn screen.)

UPDATE: According to Li'l Bobby Gibbs it was an elbow to the face that did it. That would probably do more damage than a basketball.

Place your bets now as to how long it will take for some leftwing blogs to accuse the poor bastard that did this (who's probably one of Obama's best friends) of being a Republican plant and try to destroy the guy's life.

Original post below:

President Obama + Baseball Basketball = 12 stitches to lip.

That's all we know thus far.

(Thanks Mr. Dave (and 845 other people after him; geez, you guys are sticklers for facts and stuff) or actually reading the one-line article and correcting me. I'm in a greenhouse shopping for fake Christmas trees and woozy from the Benadryl.)

Posted by: Open Blogger at 10:29 AM | Comments (177)
Post contains 152 words, total size 1 kb.

Good afternoon sports fans! What a day of college football we have before us. Here's the sked:

IRON BOWL: #2 Auburn vs #11 Alabama. 2:30PM EST on CBS. I gotta say I'm so sick and tired of the Cam what's his name talk and worship by the announcer's. I think I'll watch this game on mute.

Colorado vs #15 Nebraska. 3:30PM EST on ABC. Seriously, everyone else is watching the Iron Bowl at this time except during commercials.

#21 Arizona vs #1 Oregon. 7:00PM EST on ESPN. Should be a snoozer unless you like to watch Oregon pile up the points. Interesting to note that CAL almost beat both teams this year. But almost only counts in hand grenades.

#4 Boise St vs #19 Nevada. 10:15PM EST on ESPN. Second best match-up off the day. mpfs says Boise St is the real #1 and all others are posers. more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:55 AM | Comments (348)
Post contains 224 words, total size 2 kb.

Pilots speak their minds in online forums.

When pilots do talk, the comments tend to be circumspect—with the notable exception of Michael Roberts, the ExpressJet pilot who refused to go through a full-body scanner in Memphis.

There is, however, a place to get an unfiltered view from the cockpit. ThatÂ’s at the online discussion boards where pilots hang out and air their views, safely anonymous behind electronic nicknames. At sites like AirlinePilotForums.com and PPRUNE.org, heated discussions about the screenings rage on.

Some of the things they have revealed online: A few pilots feel TSA screenings are necessary. They generally agree that profiling should be used. Drug mules have long known about security gaps that scanning and pat-downs could not detect (body cavities). And TSA workers are idiots:

If there is one theme that emerges clearly time and again in pilots’ online discussions, it’s disdain for the TSA checkpoint worker. They are “the government equivalent of being a Wendy's burger flipper,” according to one typical comment from AirlinePilotForums.com. “Barney Fife is more suited for their job,” writes another. Anecdotes frequently portray TSA workers as mindlessly hewing to procedures at the expense of exercising the judgment needed to sniff out the evildoers.

Many other concerns of pilots are addressed in the article. For example, the TSA is apparently doing nothing about threats posed by airport workers who have access to planes beyond security checkpoints. The fact that they're not patting-down baggage handlers or emptying and X-raying the contents of food delivery trucks outside the view of the traveling public is further proof current security measures are merely Security Theater.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 08:00 AM | Comments (90)
Post contains 277 words, total size 2 kb.