Dear me, our postilion has been struck by lightning.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:07 AM | Comments (23)
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Pretty cocky.

Gingerly, Gingerly: The DC joins me in my "befuddlement" that Ginger Lee got all excited about a DM from Weiner that Weiner claims was just "See AnthonyWeiner.com."

Patterico gives a shout-out on that.

Just doing a little backfilling. more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:28 PM | Comments (129)
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Quite a piece by Patterico.

I'm going to skip past some of the more disturbing implications of it all -- skip right past this business of DMing with truly underage girls -- and quote the part with the least "ugh" factor, as it at least involves a 21 year old.

If Veronica was telling the truth, what does all this prove? That Betty had DMs from “college girl” Gennette Nicole in which there were references to Gennette Nicole flirting with Weiner. And possibly pictures as well.

Meaning (if all this is true) that Weiner was flirting with Gennette Nicole, and that there is more picture evidence out there.

I think most people suspect these things anyway. This would just provide further corroboration of WeinerÂ’s guilt.

IÂ’m going to close with this: Andrew Breitbart has been on the radio today saying that he has new information that is going to change the dynamics of this story.

This is not over, folks. Not by a longshot.

Starting to wonder if Weiner's claim about "not knowing all the pictures of my junk out there" might actually be true.

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Posted by: Ace at 05:51 PM | Comments (280)
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That Stupid Palin Woman

Everyone knows Sarah Palin is just plain stupid. And sure her Paul Revere statement could be plausibly correct - certainly more than '57 states' was. But that doesn't matter since she's dumb, dumb, dumb.

But she's not alone on the Right in her ignancy - here are some other well-known GOP dunces:

IÂ’ll remind you of Barry Goldwater, the thoughtless stupid ideologue who set a lot of the Conservative movement in motion;

Jerry Ford, the stupid clumsy oaf who was a football star, who graduated in the top 25 percent at Yale Law School while coaching football full time, and was known to be supremely athletic, continuing to ski well into old age;

and Ronald Reagan, the “mere actor” who was president of SAG, two-term Governor of California, two-term President of the United States, and who even liberal historian Doug (son of David) Brinkley now admits was a brilliant and well-read man.

But on the other hand the always well-reasoned and soft-spoken Bill Maher says Americans are dumb enough that even a known ignoramus like Palin has a chance:

"When it gets down to two people, the electorate always holds their nose and votes the one they like the least. The economy is in the toilet -- I, I, I think anybody could be president in this dumb, f**king country,"

Posted by: Maetenloch at 04:50 PM | Comments (886)
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The West Point Cadet is now suing Patti Labelle. The Cadet, Richard King, claims that he was assaulted by Patti LaBelle's bodyguards without provocation.

Apparently he was waiting in the passanger pickup area at the Bush International Airport in Texas. At some point Patti LaBelle walked by and got into her limo followed by three body guards and two carts of luggage.

King was on his cell phone with his back to the luggage(albeit in very close proximity to the luggage) when LaBelle allegedly commanded her body guards to rough him up.

The lawsuit said two of the guards immediately "pounced" on King, knocking him back and punching him in the face.

After the initial attack, the lawsuit alleges the two guards came back, accompanied by a third guard, and punched and shoved him until he fell and hit the back of his head on a concrete pillar.

The video below the fold. (it's a collection of still images.) more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 02:48 PM | Comments (247)
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Is anybody in the Make Believe Media watching this thing we're carrying on in Libya?

British warplanes struck a military barracks in the capital Tripoli, while Apache helicopters were used against Gadhafi strongholds along the coast. Arab satellite channels say the deployment of attack helicopters has galvanized rebel fighters, while sapping the morale of Gadhafi loyalists.

Apache helicopters. I've heard of these. In fact, I see em almost every day running training sorties around my house here in central Texas close to Ft. Hood. I think I know what they can do and how they do it. In Libya.

Meanwhile Dennis Kucinich receives messages from space while the rest of the congress says "ok, uh, what is it again we're up to? Saving human lives in Libya from an oppressive regime? Is that it?"

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Syria?

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I'm still trying to understand how Obama gets a pass on this regarding Gaddafhi.....oh.. wait..

oil.

Ok I remember now.

Carry on NATO.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 01:33 PM | Comments (307)
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Open thread, with another super high tech MSPaint map for you to enjoy for your afternoon.

What if the generic ballot advantage Republicans enjoyed state by state, and the intensity of loathing towards Democrats state by state, were applied to the 2012 race, with President Obama facing his strongest challenger, Generic Republican?
Considering the magnitude of the shifts in the Midwest, New England, South, and even parts of the West, here is roughly how things would pan out:

I know what most of you morons are probably doing right now:

so I will give you your privacy, and enjoy your open thread.
UPDATE- Finally noticed the image looked a bit funny, after sobering up. Cleaned above, but if any part of it is tough to read, I included a very, very big image below the fold to avoid screwing up the AoS mainpage: more...

Posted by: CAC at 10:35 AM | Comments (242)
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During his first debate with Senator McCain in 2008, then-Senator Obama suggested that he would consider launching attacks into Pakistan if the Pakistanis weren't cooperating in the war on terror. McCain's reply was more "nuanced". McCain said "you do what you have to do, but work with the Pakistani government."

This debate is taking place again, only this time within the Obama Administration.

Fissures have opened within the Obama administration over the drone program targeting militants in Pakistan, with the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and some top military leaders pushing to rein in the Central Intelligence Agency's aggressive pace of strikes.

[...]

The White House National Security Council debated a slowdown in drone strikes in a meeting on Thursday, a U.S. official said. At the meeting, CIA Director Leon Panetta made the case for maintaining the current program, the official said, arguing that it remains the U.S.'s best weapon against al Qaeda and its allies.

The result of the meeting—the first high-level debate within the Obama administration over how aggressively to pursue the CIA's targeted-killing program—was a decision to continue the program as is for now, the U.S. official said.

Apparently it is Panetta on one side versus the State Department plus unnamed military officials on the other. That may be why they're having this discussion now. Panetta, of course, is on his way to the Secretary of Defense's office at the end of the month and General Petraeus will be taking over at CIA.

Petraeus is known to be as much an advocate of drone warfare as Panetta, so if the StateDept folks are going to have their shot, it's probably right now while everyone is busy measuring drapes.

U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter, backed by top military officers and other State Department officials, wants the strikes to be more judicious, and argues that Pakistan's views need to be given greater weight if the fight against militancy is to succeed, said current and former U.S. officials.

Defenders of the current drone program take umbrage at the suggestion that the program isn't judicious. "In this context, the phrase 'more judicious' is really code for 'let's appease Pakistani sensitivities,' " said a U.S. official. The CIA has already given Pakistani concerns greater weight in targeting decisions in recent months, the official added. Advocates of sustained strikes also argue that the current rift with the Pakistanis isn't going to be fixed by scaling back the program.

There's plenty more over at the link above to the Wall Street Journal, which, BTW, always has excellent reporting from the intelligence community.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:28 AM | Comments (69)
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Silly. Even Kristen Powers, who is all about Team Hack, can see Palin owes them nothing.

In an additional nugget, Howard Dean says Palin could beat Obama.

This is where we're about to see some serious claim-reversing. Previously, the claim has been, via Limbaugh, "They will tell you who they fear," meaning that when they mock Palin and denigrate her chances, that actually means her chances are quite good, and they're trying to trick us into thinking otherwise.

Well now Dean says Palin can beat Obama. Is he still trying to trick us, or is he now on the level, and how do we tell, using this "they will tell you who they fear" opposite-talk analysis?

I should note this big round-up by Allah, on the nation's economy. One of these I've already linked prominently -- the economic indicators "falling off a cliff" -- and several more I had intended to link, but got lost in WeinerVille. It's a Quotes of the Day all worth reading.

If the economy is perfectly dismal in 2012 -- a scenario which is not yet definite but which is becoming more and more likely -- then I have to confess, yes, as I've said before, in that situation, almost anyone could beat Obama.

But, still, along with Dean, I'd say Palin still isn't my "first choice," as, given current perceptions, she'd be one of the few who would keep it competitive in that scenario, and could possibly lose.

I'm a-gettin' a little Weinered out, and I don't really want to post on it, so I will just secretly snuggle in an update here: The Hack3rz What Hack3d also @Hacked! his 3rd-party Tweetdeck program, just to put the frame on him even harder.

Added: [rdbrewer]

Since Ace is Weinered-out, and since our motto is "All the Weiner That's Fit to Print" . . .

It turns out that all Twitter feeds from members of Congress are recorded in real time by an organization called TweetCongress.org. The Library of Congress does this as well, but it doesn't make the information generally available.

TweetDeck is an application that helps organize and display tweets. Tweetdeck requires a password. When you tweet through TweetDeck and the tweet is recorded by TweetCongress, it puts a TweetDeck stamp on the tweets. This is a problem for Weiner.

Chet Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at security software company SophosLabs, said the TweetDeck stamp “does make it more plausible that it did come from him.”

. . .

“The complexity goes up,” said Chris McCroskey, the Texas software developer who founded TweetCongress.org. The site, which has advocated the increased participation from congressmen on Twitter, aggregates and archives all the feeds of the 112th Congress from Twitter’s application programming interface. It is the only known database to do this other than the Library of Congress, which does not publicly share its data.

Robert Stribley, a senior information architect at Razorfish, a social media strategy agency, reasoned that if Weiner used the TweetDeck app, “it would probably make it less likely his account was hacked.”

So while the TweetDeck stamp doesn't completely resolve the issue, it makes Weiner's story even less plausible. A hacker would have had to know Weiner's Twitter password and his TweetDeck password to set-up a matching TweetDeck account to make it appear the tweets originated from there. Add to that the fact that this couldn't be done while Weiner was online. Add also the fact that the hacker didn't change either password.

But the founder of TweetCongress does reveal a secret method of authenticating the tweet in question, something that would resolve the entire issue completely. The hidden knowledge is that Weiner could call the police.*

“Here’s the thing that solves it all,” said McCroskey, “for him to call for a criminal investigation. All they have to do is look at his TweetDeck and see if it came from there, see what IP address [it had]. The local police department or Capitol Police could probably figure this out in 15 minutes.”

*Actually, Ace may have been hammering this point all along.

Posted by: Ace at 07:14 AM | Comments (367)
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I'm about to finish up Jeff Shaara's "To The Last Man", another of his "fictional histories" in which he focuses on several major historical characters, along with some completely fictional ones, about The Great War. It's not a remarkable book but it is interesting enough to have kept me going.

He begins with the stalemate in the ground war and the development of air power, the principle characters are Manfried von Richthofen, Germany's "ace of aces" and American (volunteer) Raoul Lufbery. Shaara spends considerable time on weapons, tactics, and everyday life (and death) of these early air warriors. The second part of the book opens a narrative on Gen. John J. "Blackjack" Pershing, who is promoted by President Wilson ahead of many senior officers to lead the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, largely because of Wilson's belief that Pershing knows how to organize and build an army for a nation that is unprepared for war.

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Posted by: Dave in Texas at 04:50 AM | Comments (132)
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