Happy Wednesday night.

I was just noticing this a couple of hours ago: While we're talking about scandals, Rubio and McCain are using this opportunity to get their Amnesty Bill passed in the Senate.

Posted by: Ace at 04:15 PM | Comments (158)
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Hmmm...

At the AP, via @conartcritic.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is gearing up for re-election next year, his third race in four years. But the Republican’s courting of out-of-state donors and conservatives, his plans to visit Iowa this week and his refusal to say whether he would serve out another full term if elected suggest he might be seeking a much bigger prize — the presidency.

Not that he will openly acknowledge as much.

“I love being governor,” Walker said recently, just two years after bursting onto the national political scene when he challenged public unions and a year after surviving a recall election. “I’ve had to work hard for it. I’m focused on being governor, and I’m going to continue to be governor as long as the people of the state want me to be governor.”

Walker has a big advantage over any other contender, except, perhaps, Paul Ryan.

When you think about the conservative movement as a whole... haven't we already all sort of run one election with Walker? At least one, I mean. The recall. We were all very passionate about that.

We already have bonded with Walker in a national (effectively) electoral contest, and a big one.

Some guys, when I hear they want to be President, I'm all like, "That guy?" Dismissive about it. It's a weird thing to think of person as President.

But Walker has already sort of crossed that bridge, at least for me. The left elevated him by attacking him. The left gave the right a lot of buy-in into Walker. I'm not sure anything is more advantageous to a candidate than that.

Posted by: Ace at 02:39 PM | Comments (381)
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You probably remember hearing that the Brothers Tsarnaever were suspected in a 2011 triple homicide (taking place around the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks).

More information is coming out now. Courtesy of ABCNews, we now know the three men were either beheaded or nearly beheaded (anyone see a trend?). Apparently at least one of them was involved in selling pot; marijuana was tossed over his bloodied body. Drugs and cash were left at the scene of the crime.

Via ABCNews:

Tsarnaev had also been close to one of the murder victims, 25-year-old Brendan Mess, investigators told ABC. The two had been training together in a local gym –each helping the other with a missing element from their fighting arsenal. Tsarnaev, a golden-gloves heavy weight boxer, lacked martial arts training. And Mess, an experienced jiu jitsu competitor, lacked boxing experience.

The two sparred together at an Allston, MA gym called Wai Kru...

Tsarnaev and Mess lived just a few blocks apart in Cambridge, in the same predominantly Russian neighborhood. Authorities believe there were times Mess crashed at Tsarnaev's apartment.

It was unclear if Tsarnaev knew the other men slain, Raphael Teken, 37, and Erik Weissman, 31.

Given that Jafar smoked pot, it is speculated that this was possibly some sort of Honor Killing by Tamerlan, living out some kind of murderous avenger fantasy, most likely due to his increasing interest in a religion that promotes murderous avenger fantasies.

Or it could simply be yet another beheading of members of a group that Muslims don't like, which is everyone who is not Muslim.

Corrected: I wrote the three victims were Jewish. I think I got that off of Twitter-- but now I don't see any real confirmation of that.

Meanwhile.... Things are just lovely in Stockholm.

Update: At Hot Air, NBC reports that Todashev confessed. And it was just a drug deal gone bad.

Or so he said.

Dead Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev and another man — who was killed by the FBI on Wednesday — murdered three people in Massachusetts after a drug deal went wrong in 2011, law enforcement sources tell NBC News.

Sources say that what began as a drug ripoff ended in a triple homicide when Tsarnaev and friend Ibragim Todashev realized their victims would later be able to identify them.

Posted by: Ace at 02:09 PM | Comments (163)
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She'll be recalled tomorrow.

What I expect is that she will be forced to invoke the 5th for each of a series of pointed questions, such as her previous refusal to investigate an illegal Al Gore donor, and her previous hardline stance against Christian organizations. As well, of course, about her complicity in the IRS scandal.

She will look very bad doing so.

I didn't know the law on this and Allah recaps it at the link: While you may not selectively invoke the 5th in a criminal trial, you probably can at a Congressional hearing, so she won't be held in contempt.

She will, however, be made to look awful, which sounds about right.

Posted by: Ace at 01:19 PM | Comments (290)
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The wheels of the bus go 'round and 'round, 'round and 'round...

Two scandals, one scapegoat.

It’s not Obama’s fault, the administration wants you to know. BuzzFeed dutifully reports that the CIA and Obama’s national security team were all about transparency, transparency, transparency. But then along came the White House Counsel’s office, headed up by “Kathryn Ruemmler, Kathryn Ruemmler, Kathryn Ruemmler.”

“It was aggravating,” one administration official said. “It comes back to Kathryn Ruemmler, Kathyrn Ruemmler, Kathryn Ruemmler. I hate to say it, as it sounds like piling on, but it’s on her doorstep too.”

Iowahawk's a little sketpical:

How valiantly Ben Rhodes tried to get the correct Benghazi info out, only to be foiled by Kathryn Ruemmler.

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) May 22, 2013

Right. It definitely wasn't Hillary Clinton protecting Hillary Clinton's image and electability; it was this hitherto-unknown lawyer who broke all the laws to protect Hillary Clinton.

Damn these mid-level employees! Always screwing things up for the higher-ups by their dogged determination to protect the higher-ups.

By the way, Victoria Nuland, the woman who actually wrote all those emails demanding the talking points be retracted, is not being named as a problem. She's apparently still an Outstanding Civil Servant.

Read Twitchy, by the way, for a good War on Women joke that I won't steal.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:00 PM | Comments (460)
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He can't believe the affrontery of a foreigner offering pungent commentary on a horrific crime shortly after it has occurred, nor the gall of this interloper to dare to tell a country of which she is not a citizen what gun-control laws they ought to have to prevent such crimes.

So she's now banned from his show.

And yes, if you can believe it, Dana Loesch's outrageously offensive tweets were about... gun control in England.

Exit question: Per the "Piers Morgan Standard," should he still appear on his own show that nobody watches?

Posted by: Ace at 11:21 AM | Comments (329)
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Two men have been shot (but not necessarily killed) following a "frenzied" machete attack on a third man, a soldier from a nearby barracks, who died from wounds sustained in the attack.

Police shot the attackers.

Earlier, police had refused comment on whether or not this was a terrorism attack (i.e., more Islamic "lone wolves," who now seem to be operating in duos). Which of course meant it was precisely that.

The government is now treating the attack as suspected terrorism.

The above is what I got from the "Key Points" section of a BBC report on the matter. I rewrote it so that I didn't have to link them. A "Key Points" digest is supposed to contain the most noteworthy parts of the report, right?

But now I see the Daily Mail is reporting the story.

They're a tiny bit more forthcoming with actual facts-- such as the fact that the dead soldier was beheaded in the attack.

One of the attackers also offered this Motive of Unknowable Import:

Video filmed by an onlooker and broadcast by ITV News shows a man with his hands covered in blood and holding a bloodied knife and machete. He says in a London accent: “I apologise that women had to witness that, but in our lands our women have to see the same thing.

“You people will never be safe. Remove your Government, they don’t care about you.”

He then walks off, still carrying his weapons, back towards the body of the victim who is lying in the middle of the road.

In other parts of the video, said to be too shocking to show, it is claimed he says: “This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”

Here's another alarming fact:

One witness, who declined to be named, tells Jasper Copping the attackers were "praying like it was a sacrifice" and "making people take videos".

And:

The attackers shouted "Allahu Akbar" (the Arabic expression meaning "God is Great"), according to Whitehall sources - BBC News.

The BBC "Key Points" contains none of this. Apparently if one scrolls down to the non- key points, one might find additional non-key information like that the men shouted "Allahu Akbar," but apparently that didn't make the "key points" cut.

Why would the BBC suppress a key, unavoidable facts like that?

Welcome to the World in 2013.

More: Video of the men explaining their motive, which I fear we may never fully understand.

Probably Tea Party.

Note the men announced "you will never be safe in your country" on video and the British police still would not comment earlier about it being a terrorist attack.
more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:42 AM | Comments (405)
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Marshall and Klein have portrayed all the scandals as faux scandals. Ezra Klein notoriously predicted -- wishcast, actually -- last week that the wheels were coming off the scandal wagon and that everyone would see how silly all of this is.

But today, they sing a different tune:

Both of those tweets argue that Lerner should be fired.

I imagine they're arguing for this because Obama has already decided to fire her.

Thus, they put out a Possible Solution Which Will Completely Solve This Whole Scandal-Business, Obama implements this Solution, and then there's no more scandal!

What I glean from this is that the previous White House position -- nothing more needs be done, this is all a "partisan fishing expedition" -- is now inoperative, and a new defense -- fire Lois Lerner and then claim that nothing more needs be done, this is all now just a partisan fishing expedition, again -- is now in effect.

Posted by: Ace at 09:15 AM | Comments (466)
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Clownshow.

To their credit, the left-leaning reporters asked this absurd question did not play ball with former DNC spokescretin Karen Finney and shot her down.

Finney claimed that "everyone knew" about the scandal.

I'm sure that if Mitt Romney brought up a suspected but not proven scandal, the media -- especially NBC/MSNBC -- would not have portrayed him as a paranoid Birther in the least.

Posted by: Ace at 10:14 AM | Comments (171)
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Gabe mentioned this account in his morning post. It's still pretty mysterious.

From CBS News:

A man named Ibragim Todashev had been a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, possibly due to their joint interest in martial arts and murdering civilians.

An FBI agent and two Massachusetts state troopers went to his apartment to interview him. At some point, he went crazy For Reasons We Will Never Understand, and advanced with a knife on the FBI agent. The agent sustained minor injuries, and Todashev was shot dead.

Remember that story that Tamerlan was suspected of having a connection to a triple homicide of his friend? This Todaschev may have been connected to that.

Officials told NBC News that investigators did not believe Todashev played any role in the bomb attack, but were questioning him in connection with a 2011 triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts, in which Tamerlan Tsarnaev also may have been a suspect.

A few days ago Mary Katherine Ham wrote this wonderfully sarcastic headline:

Note Found In Boat Points to Mystifying Motive We May Never Truly Understand

“Basically the note says that he does not mourn his brother Tamerlan, that Tamerlan was a martyr now and that he was in paradise, that Dzhokhar expected to join him there soon,” Miller said. “That the bombings were in retribution for the US crimes against Muslims in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; that the victims of the Boston bombing were ‘collateral damage,’ the same way innocent victims have been collateral damage in US wars around the world, summing up that when you attack one Muslim, you attack all Muslims.”

Per MKH, the NYT deigned to report this, albeit as an incidental fact mentioned deep in an article about another topic entirely. That story concerns the FBI's interest in another Tsarnave pal, Musa Khadzhimuratov, who, based on the first name, I'm guessing is the mysterious "Mischa" we previously heard might have been influencing the brothers towards the path of jihad.

“We talked about family, not religion or politics,” he said. He said he had no inkling that Mr. Tsarnaev had driven several times from his home in Cambridge, Mass., to New Hampshire to buy fireworks for the explosive powder used in the bombs or to shoot at a firearms range in Manchester — let alone that he would attack the marathon.

I've highlighted the part I think is less than credible.

Posted by: Ace at 08:46 AM | Comments (194)
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