Check out Geraghty's pull-quote:

‘The United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims.’

Not only is this terrorist-symp crap in the first place, but note the odd and chilling presence of that key qualifier "innocent" -- The US has taken more Muslim lives than al-Qaeda has taken innocent non-Muslim lives.

Why is he restricting it to "innocent" non-Muslim lives? He didn't restrict the part about the US killing Muslims to "innocent" Muslims.

Why is he differentiating the "innocent" from the, what?, guilty or deserving victims of Islamic terrorism?

Of the 2,996 victims of 9/11 -- how many were "innocent" and how many, would he say, were well-served by justice?

Full Round-Up... At Pam Gellar's. It's her exclusive tape, and she calls out all the "moderate" quotes contained in it.

Thanks to DrewM.

Posted by: Ace at 12:35 PM | Comments (421)
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Yeah, I see a lot of this in his future: Soliciting donations at truck stops, highway rest-area bathrooms.

For now, though, all you get for your donation is the chance to support his nascent political career. Not even a handie!!!

In the documents, filed on Friday with the Alaska Public Offices Commission, Johnston states that he intends to run for a position in the City of Wasilla.

Levi doesn't specify which position he's running for ... but he's previously stated that he wants to become the next mayor ...a position once held by his baby mama's mama Sarah Palin.

By filing the document -- Levi is permitted to officially begin his campaign ... which means dude can legally accept campaign contributions.

This kid's testing the limits of his 15-minute limit like I test that inhuman 11:00 check out at hotels. No por favor! Occupado! Later-o! I'll give you eleven dollars and a coupon for Quizno's if you let me just sleep until a civilized hour like 2pm!

Andrew Sullivan just emailed me to ask if donations must be in currency.

Thanks to JackStraw.

No, But Seriously: 11am guys? Really? On a Saturday or Sunday?

Seriously? You have the next rush of clients coming in at the crack of one, huh?

Posted by: Ace at 12:23 PM | Comments (95)
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See, here's the deal -- we're going to freak out the White House, we're going to vapor-lock the Senate, and we're going to take back the House. Democrats know this and are preparing for the worst. Now think of 2008 -- we kinda hoped McCain was going to pull it off, but we couldn't muster much beyond pulling the lever. Remember that? And remember how somewhat concerned we were when Obama pulled it off? The pain was so, eh, cause we thought "how much worse can Obama be?" (Holy crap. A lot, as it turns out).

So with liberals whistling in the dark, hoping for more change, they are primed to experience ten times the whiney kind of pain they did when Kerry ate the schnitz in '04. If we deliver a defeat even worse than their worst nightmares. And I'll be honest with you (why would I lie to you? I love you idiots!) -- I want them to hurt much more than they did back then. I want their spirits crushed, their backs broken, their mommies cryin, all the donuts gone before they sneak into the break room to grab their 4th when nobody's lookin, and their dads tossin em outta bed at 6 in the morning, yellin at em to get a fuckin job already.

So the way we do that is we deliver a defeat worse than they ever imagined. We do that by winning states that have no business turning Red -- like Pennsylvania, Washington, Illinois baby, and so on -- states that were easy Dem victories in 2006. We do that by smashing their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate. We do that by defeating their leadership, like Harry Reid in the Senate. We do that by defeating their heroes, like Babs "Ma'am" Boxer. We do that by making sure a record number of Americans reject their catastrophic agenda, leaving it utterly discredited.

The day after the election, I want to see an electoral battlefield littered with crying Democrats, their ranks demoralized, their treasury under investigation, and only one lightworker to take the blame. I want a vacuum so complete, that a bloody leadership battle between the lunatic fringe leftists, blue dogs, and the confused, frightened survivors shakes the Democrat Party to its core, and leaves it too hoodwinked and bamboozled to push any more of their socialist agenda, much less ramp up for an even bleaker (for them) 2012.

Morons, I worry (a little) about complacency. Don't be that. We're not out to win this thing. We're out to smush them. And to win this thing, ok, yes, win and smush. And that's going to require a level of engagement you've actually done before. It'll mean organizing locally, volunteering, and donating. Work on my actual job keeps me from working the phones or walking precincts (and my wife told me she ain't doin it either), but I've surrendered a significant portion of my time, which my family can afford, and some money which I didn't tell them about but the info is publicly available, on behalf of the cause. We've all got something to offer, whether it's time or money, and now's the time to offer what we can (time and money).

One of my favorite co bloggers likes to say, "Fuck them up the ass, sideways, with a pineapple", meaning that when he fucks someone up the ass, sideways, with a pineapple, he will have used a really big, spiney pineapple to make a point (I think it's a metaphor). If he falls short? We kick him in the nuts and make him do it again in 2012. But he won't fall short, you really can't mess up that pineapple thing, it just works.

We won't have regrets on Election Night, thinking that some Democrats squeaked by because we failed to buy enough pineapples. We can't have a Nancy Pelosi clutching a gavel in her leathery granny-fist in the next session of the Congress, knowing that maybe if we had done just a little bit more to help we could have prevented that. Because this shit is happening. Pelosi? She's a dead man. Reid? Dead! Neidermayeeeeeeeeeeer! Even if all they can give is $5 to one candidate, or one afternoon phone banking, it doesn't matter. There's a lot of us, and their little gestures add up to a whole lot of bupkus.

We are approaching a historic night, and one that can radically transform the direction of our country. And heal it for a generation. So like my dad used to tell me when I was off to a job interview, "Boy, don't fuck this up. And get your ass outside and mow the lawn."

(In case you don't recall the original from Kos, see here.)

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 10:23 AM | Comments (200)
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Don't get cocky, and all of that.

69? Why not. "Tea Baggers" and everything.

Over at Hot Air, a link to The Hill deciding that fifteen Senate seats are now in play and only two of them are GOP seats.

And one of those is pure, unbridled liberal optimism: Rand Paul made this race a little more interesting that I might have liked, but he's buttoned-up and straight-laced now and the Democrats have about as good a chance of taking red Kentucky in this red-wave year as I have of having sex with a woman before I turn 30.

Yes, Florida, Florida, Florida... But damnit, Rubio's a great candidate, textbook-great, and Charlie Crist is an apricot Fig Newton.

Correction: Wrong! Four Republican seats are listed; I didn't notice Ohio and Missouri.

Those last two are silly, especially Missouri, but Brandon in Baton Rouge is right, I missed those. Look, they're just keeping some of these seats in there, and high on the list of "likely takeovers," no less, because... well, the reality is just too awful to bear.

Also at Hot Air, that interview with Democratic-leaning poll-guru Charlie Cook, where he keeps saying the GOP will gain 35-45 seats but then keeps adding "But really, it will be more."

This is that tendency I mentioned, about people finding comfort in making less-dramatic predictions than they really want to make; Charlie Cook keeps doing this, where he says "officially 35-45" and then adds, "Oh, but I'm being very conservative there and the chances of it being more than that are a lot higher than it being less."

He sort of wants credit for both predictions; he wants you to notice his conservative, comfortably-small prediction, but he also wants credit when his bigger real prediction comes through.

Bloodbath, baby.

Disclosure: AllahPundit promised to see "Jersey Boys" with me on Broadway, with Karol as a buffer, if I wrote a post linking Hot Air twice.

Oh:

Old and Busted: Republicans hope 2010 will be as about as bad for Democrats as 1994.

New Hotness: Democrats begin hoping 2010 will be about as bad for Democrats as 1994, and only that bad.

Posted by: Ace at 10:10 AM | Comments (213)
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This Is An Important Action Alert

No, really.

A company called Righthaven is purchasing the copyrights to the content in many media outlets and suing bloggers who republish that content.

As DrewM. notes in email: "There's always the chance some of these folks were re-posting whole articles and we've gone through the fair use thing but when people are basically conducting shakedowns they aren't all that particular sometimes."

Gibson’s vision is to monetize news content on the backend, by scouring the internet for infringing copies of his client’s articles, then suing and relying on the harsh penalties in the Copyright Act — up to $150,000 for a single infringement — to compel quick settlements. Since Righthaven’s formation in March, the company has filed at least 80 federal lawsuits against website operators and individual bloggers who’ve re-posted articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, his first client.

HERE: Clayton Cramer provides information on how to avoid arousing the professional interest of this firm. Contains list of media outlets that Righthaven is known to protect.

I say "known to" because:

Gibson says heÂ’s just getting started. Righthaven has other media clients that he wonÂ’t name until the lawsuits start rolling out, he says.

He's a sneaky little shit, just like Neidermeyer.

Posted by: LauraW at 08:42 AM | Comments (114)
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The Daily Caller reports:

“It’s standard operating procedure” to pay bloggers for favorable coverage, says one Republican campaign operative. A GOP blogger-for-hire estimates that “at least half the bloggers that are out there” on the Republican side “are getting remuneration in some way beyond ad sales.”

No, it's really not. This is some guy offering this reporter the quote he wants -- but it's not SOP, at least not that I've heard.

...

One pro-Poizner blogger, Aaron Park, was discovered to be a paid consultant to the Poizner campaign while writing for Red County, a conservative blog about California politics. Red County founder Chip Hanlon threw Park off the site upon discovering his affiliation, which had not been disclosed.

Okay, there's one guy. But The Daily Caller uses that one instance to prove a general trend through that article-making "standard operating procedure" quote.

...

Besides campaigns, industry groups and other political groups oftentimes pay bloggers for their insights.

Dan Riehl, who writes the Riehl World View blog, is one of Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele’s most vocal defenders in the conservative blogosphere. When The Daily Caller reported the RNC spent $1,946 at a bondage-themed nightclub featuring topless women dancers imitating lesbian sex acts, Riehl blasted the piece as a “pathetically weak story tailored to play to the Left and create problems for the GOP.”

“Riehl World View” readers might be interested to know that Riehl is not simply a blogger, but also a paid consultant to the RNC. In an interview, Riehl said he was paid an amount in the “hundreds of dollars” for writing a strategy document on how the RNC could better reach out to bloggers. Riehl said his motivation for defending Steele was to aid the Republican Party, and that he didn’t disclose his consulting work because, “I didn’t see it as having anything to do with my views.”

“I never made enough money to be bought,” he said.

Other bloggers openly lament how few campaign dollars are flowing their way. Conservative blogger Robert Stacy McCain complains that politicians aren’t purchasing more advertising on blogs. “Advertising buys good will,” he says.

If it appears that conservative bloggers are more likely to take campaign money than their liberal counterparts, there may be a reason. According to Dan Riehl, conservatives canÂ’t rely on the infrastructure of foundations and think tanks that supports so many liberal bloggers.

Riehl has made it a goal to mobilize conservative benefactors and organizers to establish a funding infrastructure mimicking what the liberal “netroots” created during the Bush years. “They did it the smart way,” Riehl says.

On the left, many of the once independent bloggers are now employed by, or receive money from, liberal organizations like Media Matters, the Center for American Progress and Campaign for AmericaÂ’s Future.

Here's Dan Riehl's response:

It was not a secret that the RNC paid me a few hundred bucks for a document.

I devoted hours and hours of my own time over a period of months trying to coordinate an effort involving many top bloggers and the RNC to improve communications and legal, legitimate cooperation in a partisan sense. I stress that, as it was the RNC that made me aware of certain FEC restrictions, which we were careful to not violate. That's why money wasn't involved. I made phone calls, took meetings, paid Metro and lunch costs, all out of my own pocket because I am dedicated to improving the blogosphere in an ethical manner - as well as winning politically for Republicans at the ballot box. I won't name which top bloggers were involved, but there are many that could vouch for these facts if they wanted to. If they want to stay out of it, that's fine, too.

If I had done it as a consultant, I'd likely have charged in the tens of thousands of dollars. I didn't. When all was said and done, the RNC asked me to write up a concise document based on the knowledge that was discovered from the process. It's called knowledge transfer, actually. I promptly disclosed to all involved bloggers that I had a chance to make a few hundred bucks for doing that, and only that - and I was taking it, if there were no objections. If they had any objections, none were conveyed to me at the time. So, see, it never really was a secret. It was so insignificant, especially in light of the many, many hours of non-paid, volunteer work I had done in the effort, it never even occurred to me to disclose it on my blog. It was simply insignificant as compared to the larger non-paid effort.

As a consultant, I would have billed a few thousand dollars for the document. DC consultants are notoriously over-paid. Instead, I charged a few hundred, mostly it was as a token of appreciation, really. And guess what, the Daily Caller's silly strip club story killed all that work. The RNC pulled in on itself, staff changes were made - and, so far as I know, the document I did designed to help the blogosphere and RNC relationship as a whole, simply got shelved. And, by the way, the out of pocket expenses some struggling bloggers paid on their own for calls, or a meeting, that all went down the drain, too.

Heckuva job, Tucker, heckuva job, you clueless idiot. And now everyone knows why I was so pissed and fought back so hard at the time. It never was about Steele, money and, or for, me, it was about helping all struggling, unpaid, Indie blogs and bloggers, each and everyone.

First of all, here's the answer to the question people are probably asking:

more...

Posted by: Ace at 08:07 AM | Comments (203)
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Pretty good ad, cute but making some tough points about Harman.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 07:15 AM | Comments (144)
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I double-posted (actually, it was a glitch in the system-- it does this sometimes) so to save the comments I'll just call this an Open Thread.

How you doin'?

Posted by: Ace at 07:15 AM | Comments (21)
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Brand Democrat™ from Slublog.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:04 AM | Comments (240)
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End of the weekend for some, just another day for others, but all are welcome at the ONT party.

1982 Interview With Ozzy Osbourne

Here's an interesting interview with Ozzy Osbourne from Night Flight in 1982 in which he goes into his views on life and the ins and outs of biting the head off of bats. And the resulting rabies shots.

Here he's a lot more thoughtful and articulate than you'd expect and you can see the John Osbourne behind the Ozzy character.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:23 PM | Comments (686)
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