Fired CIA Spy Gave to Kerry and Democrats

This rather long post by Flopping Aces ties Mary McCarthy, the fired (and soon to be indicted) CIA analyst to:

Richard Clarke, Sandy Berger, Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Wesley Clark, General Anthony Zinni, and more to come.

Here's very insightful commentary (read the whole thing) from Belmont Club:

Here's the problem as I see it. The leaky and politicized intelligence system has made it difficult to judge the truth value of any proposition. Did the Plame affair damage national security? Did Ms. McCarthy's actions damage national security? Is there someone lying dead in a gutter because somebody talked? The answer to those questions about the intelligence agencies is going to be answered by the intelligence agencies themselves. And so we come full circle to the modern version of the Cretan Paradox: which asserts that when a Cretan says 'all Cretans are liars' all logical roads lead to a contradiction. How then to know the truth about the lies? When intelligence agencies -- and I use that word broadly to encompass the press, which is the civilian intelligence system -- are politicized, then even our knowledge about our knowledge becomes uncertain. We are in a Wilderness of Mirrors indeed.

Here's an interesting observation from Hold the Mayo:

Compare And Contrast

Scenario 1: Government employee gives possibly classified information to a journalist who reprints the information with little or no impact to national security.

Result: Other journalists outraged over the leak demand an investigation to determine its source. This leads to Special Prosecutor investigation resulting in a procedural indictment unrelated to the original subject of the investigation. No charges filed in the investigation of the leak.

Scenario 2: Government employee gives journalist highly classified information regarding on-going anti-terrorist intelligence operation. Journalists print information causing significant national security impact.

Result: Journalists win coveted award.

And ACE OF SPADES makes this fearless forecast:

Here comes what I like to call "The Weekend of Important Distinctions."

Libby leaked something that hurt a Bush critic. Bad leak; one that was completely illegal and improper; he should rot in jail and/or Hell, not necessarily in that order.

McCarthy leaked something that hurt Bush himself. Good leak; one that was necessary for the public to fully understand the dirty and illegal actions the government is taking in its name; the investigation of McCarthy is nothing short of an, um, McCarthyesque witch-hunt, possibly to distract us from the war in Iraq and Bush's flagging popularity.

Everyone will be saying the same fucking thing.

And it's not the DNC talking points. There's no coordination here. The MSM just all think exactly alike, and precisely the same as the DNC's communication squad.

Comments from Strata-sphere:

Two days before the embassy bombings, Clarke’s staff wrote that Bin Ladin “has invested in and almost certainly has access toVX produced at a plant in Sudan.”43 Senior State Department officials believed that they had received a similar verdict independently, though they and Clarke’s staff were probably relying on the same report. Mary McCarthy, the NSC senior director responsible for intelligence programs, initially cautioned Berger that the “bottom line” was that “we will need much better intelligence on this facility before we seriously consider any options.” She added that the link between Bin Ladin and al Shifa was “rather uncertain at this point.”

Michelle Malkin chimes in.

Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi Hates e-Mail

By Iowahawk

Word up whitebread, how you livin'?
Yeah, I been gettin' all your email haterade. All y'all infidels be texting and emailing, and it's all like "yo Zarks where u at? Al Qaeda cut off your TypePad account? LOL!!!"
Hey cuz, act like you know. Like the Zarkman got time to be blogging this bitch with the Q1 decapitation reports overdue, and Fatima all up in my grille wantin’ money for the kids' summer martyr camp, and Team Satan sendin’ another crew of laser-guided "downsizing consultants" every freaking day.

Fo real, you think Zarkman got time to play penpal with you chumps? Cracka, every damn morning I got an Outlook inbox full of fresh steaming dung to deal with. Meeting notices from Zawahiri. Overdue notices from the IED suppliers. Ads for Hoodia and boner pills. Six different NCAA pools. Then there's the tardmail from my Daily Kos fanboys:

Hey Zarkman!OMG u r teh ROXOR! Its like u r total Che Guervera and Fidel and Malcom X plus System of a Down!! Good luck against the Zionist neocon occupiers!!!! Ya,, SCREW those mercenaries!!! Everybody here at UCLA Ed school thinks u r total l33t HARDCORE!!!

Fight teh POWER bro!!!
Dr. Peter McLaren

Professor, Graduate School of EducationUniversity of California at Los Angeles

PS - check out this awesome flash movie!!! Its Bush turning into a fukkin nazi monkey!!!! LOL!!!!

Click on the link for the rest.

If Nominated I will Not Run, If Selected I will Not Accept ... a Pulitzer

A man can often be identified by his friends or his enemies. I have often said that if I ever ran for office and the Virginian Pilot endorsed me I would wonder where I had gone wrong.

For the same reason, the Pulitzers are tainted. Douglas MacKinnon in the Washington Times:

Still not convinced that Columbia University and its Pulitzer committee uses a liberal checklist? Then I implore you to look at the names of this year's finalists. From Republican-hating fashion writers, to Republican-hating editorial cartoonists, to Republican-bashing editorial boards, you will find a wish list from the left, of politically correct, more than diverse, "journalists" who are driven solely by an agenda and not the responsibilities of a once noble profession.

I wonder if the Pulitzer committee will award a prize for "examining and exposing" the "blatant liberal bias" of the Pulitzer committee. I think I'll submit this column just in case.

Is Porter Goss Cleaning House?

A CIA employee has been fired for leaking to the media.

And from CNBC

Marines in Iraq - One Letter

To Everyone,

I just wanted to let you all know that I'm still doing well and have been blessed with the Lord's protection every day. I finally got back to the 'rear' where I could get on the computer to email everyone. I don't have a lot of these opportunities, so if I get a second while I'm out operating, I'll write what I can and save it for when I can email it. That's what I've written below - an Easter weekend message. I hope you enjoy the update and I hope you enjoyed your Easter!

To everyone,

I am writing to wish you a wonderful Easter weekend (a bit late). It’s about 0300 the day after Easter right now and I’ve got a few minutes to write an email to all of you to update you. I’m writing this email on my “Toughbook” computer, one of the ones we bring out to conduct tactical communications and planning….it’s a really awesome piece of gear. Yep, I’m “outside the wire” right now, typing up an email to send later! Hard to believe isn’t it? Well, I haven’t had more than a few minutes to eat, or sleep over the past four days, so this is my first breather to be able to write, and I know that as soon as we get back “inside the wire” we’ll be prepping to turn around and come right back out…so that’s why I’m writing you an email from out here.

You’re probably wondering how I have power to run a laptop. We have power converters in our humvees that we run extension cords from, and just start the trucks every so often. This powers our computers, a single light for my platoon “ROC” - Recon Operations Center, and various radio equipment. Of course, we can operate without power, but it makes everything easier. Without going into great detail on our tactics, I’ll explain where I am. I’m currently in the house of an Iraqi family. Yes, it’s a shame, but we have to kick them out of their houses for periods of time in order to have a secure place to operate. Most of them know the deal by now, so it’s not too hard. I’m provided with lots of cash to compensate and I usually leave the place much cleaner than we found it and with some money waiting for the owner. We quickly turn a house into a defensive position and can operate out of it for long periods of time if required. If you’re wondering what the conditions are like I’ll paint a picture.

This is the house of a self proclaimed doctor. There are pills and needles everywhere and rotten food all over the house. We consolidate as much of the crap as we can and move it into an area where we set up a “portable-crapper” - a collapsible toilet seat and a bunch of trash bags. That’s the same place we store all our “piss bottles.” You see, we don’t go outside unless we need to, and we’re in full gear ready for a fight. We keep cans of Lysol around and lots of hand sanitizer to keep disease down, but it’s hard when you’re sleeping on the floor of an Iraqi house and you’re dragging in animal feces on your boots, etc. No telling what kinds of diseases the occupants had when you kicked them out either. ( I guess that’s why we get so many shots all the time.)

The Iraqis have electricity off and on for a few hours a day, so we shut off the breakers (if we can find them) to prevent lights from coming on, etc. Of course, there is no A/C, etc. This place where we live, once we’ve hardened it, is called our “firm base.”

Life in the “Firm Base” - once again, without getting into the details that I don’t want the bad guys knowing, I’ll fill you in on a common day. My platoon rotates Marines through guarding the firm base, conducting patrols, and being ready as part of the “QRF - quick reaction force.” As you can see, rest is not in the schedule. For a very small platoon (can't talk numbers over email) to accomplish all of this, is pretty difficult. Rest occurs when you’re on QRF….if you don’t have to react to something. I spend most of my time in my ROC, receiving and passing on information, analyzing information, and planning offensive and defensive actions.

At times I will get out to visit local sheiks or people to gather information from, usually in the middle of the night. My Marines usually get about 4-6 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period, but it’s usually 2 to 3 hours at a time. Depending on how much offensive or defensive action is taking place, I may get between one hour and 6 hours of sleep per 24 hours, never at more than 2 to 3 hour lengths. It can get tiring, but you get used to it.

So far, I’ve been impressed with my platoon and their level of motivation and competence. Already they have been tested under fire and have performed well. I literally have to reel them in when we’re engaged in a firefight, which is much better than having to tell someone to stop ducking and shoot back.

The enemy has taken notice to my boys’ aggression as well, and have lately scaled back on their overt action against us. The first time they hit us it was with multiple machine guns at close range and they were quickly overwhelmed. Fortunately for us, after their first few inaccurate bursts, they had to fight the rest of the time by sticking the barrels around the corner and firing - which is generally inaccurate. Unfortunately for us, that makes them hard to hit. I was mad when we couldn’t find any blood, but understood that we did the best we could.

The people we’re fighting here are truly evil people. Many of them have lost every bit of humanity that a normal person possesses. They habitually kidnap and execute Iraqis for reasons varying from religious differences, to robbery, to vicious retribution for helping give us information, etc. This makes it very difficult to find these bad guys because they have such a grip on the people. (Although one platoon did recently rescue a hostage who was surely about to be killed - talk about a good feeling…KNOWING you saved someone’s life!)

As for the bad guys, imagine the MOB operating without the threat of any law enforcement and with every weapon and explosive they want at their disposal and the financial and moral assistance of fundamentalists and probably even other governments from around the globe. It’s a tough fight, but we’re winning. It’s just slow. As tired as I am of living the dirty life of an infantryman and having to constantly worry about the safety of my Marines, I still know that I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing in ridding the world of these evil people. If these people weren’t here trying to kill us, they’d be figuring out a way to get over to American and kill us there. The proliferation of the ideals that these people dedicate themselves to, present as great a threat to the world as those of Hitler. It’s too bad many people don’t realize that and the same Marines have to return time and again to the same places to kill these people instead of an entire generation standing up to fight evil. I can’t complain though, because even if there aren’t lines at the recruiting stations, at least we’re getting all the stuff we need out here and we know we have the support of the majority of the population back home. That makes all the difference in the world!

Perhaps the thing that makes the most difference is the prayers of everyone back home. I thank you for your prayers and I know that’s why my Marines have been kept safe so far. This past Easter weekend has been a time of lots of little miracles, and I’m sure that they’re do to all of the prayers from all of you back home. Personally, I look forward to future Easter weekends when I can watch kids running around hunting for Easter eggs instead of big kids running around hunting bad guys and looking for IEDs! In the meantime, I appreciate all your prayers, so that we can bring all these big kids home safe!

If you’re wondering what kinds of stuff we’d like to have out here, I’ll tell you that it’s different than the last two deployments. In the past we needed socks and batteries, and razors, and stuff that we couldn’t get out in Afghanistan or in the city of Fallujah. Well, because we’re stationed in a large camp this time (for the short periods of time that we’re actually in it) we have access to pretty much everything we need. Things that are great to have though, are those types of snacks from back home that you don’t get in your supply system and that don’t come in MREs. Some of these are: beef jerky (any kind), packs of tuna (esp. the different flavored kind!), sunflower seeds (There’s a really good “Jim Beam / BBQ” flavored variety out there!), protein bars or protein powder, multi-vitamins, cashews, dried fruit / trail mix, etc. You can see that this list is pretty healthy - we’re all out here trying not to let our bodies get too skinny and nasty while we’re out running around in the heat.

We’ve got a set of 25 lb dumbbells my guys stole from the base gym - that’s our platoon’s workout equipment….that and a deck of cards (you do the amount of pushups for the numeric value of each card, for ½ a deck or a whole deck each day). It’s kind of funny how when you go to war, it’s all the non-infantry people who come home looking like studs (or completely fat) and all the infantry guys and Recon guys who come home like skinny little weaklings.

There’s a certain amount of jealousy that we who leave the wire have for those people, every now and then….only every now and then. You see, the big fancy bases around Iraq and Afghanistan are referred to as a “Forward Operating Bases” or “FOBs” and throughout this theater of operations, the infantry have come to name the two types of people who occupy these FOBs - “FOBBITS” and “FOB GOBLINS.”

You see, a FOBBIT is a person who is a happy little being, who is completely content, knowing that every day he’ll get up, take a hot shower, go to the chow hall where he’ll request eggs over easy, or maybe an omelet with whatever he wants, or maybe anything from a wide array of donuts, pancakes, waffles, fruit, yogurt, and pretty much anything he could ever hope for in a chow hall. He’ll eat that food with a grin, knowing that if he wants, he can have any variety of Baskin Robins ice cream for dessert after every meal! Then he’ll go to work in an air conditioned trailer for however many hours his schedule says, and then go back to the nice chow hall, the nice hot shower, and the tidy little air conditioned FOBBIT-den that is his home, where he’ll get his scheduled FOBBIT beauty rest. His gut will never churn with fear nor very rarely from diarrhea. Yes, the FOBBIT lives the good life, and almost always, he lives. Perhaps he is the smartest of us all!

Now, the FOB GOBLIN is a different being. He is the guy who might be an infantryman, might be a “meat eater” of sorts, but for some reason, his current billet puts him in a position where he must endure all of the luxuries of the FOBBIT, when all he wants to do is get outside the wire and bring death to his nation’s enemies. For this sad state of existence, he is forever frustrated and jealous of both the FOBBIT and the guys who live outside the wire. This is perhaps the worst condition one might face….yes, the FOB GOBLIN gets a certain amount of sympathy from his brother meat eaters who get outside the wire.

So, as I close this email, I thank the Lord to have placed me in the privileged position of being one who lives outside the wire, letting me live the life of the FOBBIT for maybe a day or two every few weeks, and never relegating me to the frustration of the FOB GOBLIN. I thank you for the daily support and prayers you provide that give us our daily miracles and make our lives outside the wire as safe as they can be. I hope that you enjoy an email update every now and then and I hope to have a few more opportunities to write in the coming weeks and months.

NOTE:

About 8 hours after I typed this message, we got attacked again and were fortunate enough to get one of the bad guys. He (or someone else helped him) got into a car and got away, but probably didn't live too long judging by the blood trail. We were blessed again, as one of my Marines (one of my very few Catholic Marines) was actually praying while standing guard and had the first round of the firefight pass 8 inches from his head and lodge in the wall behind him. Those guardian angels have been working hard for us. We appreciate all your prayers that have been keeping us safe. I miss everyone and hope to be able to write to you all again next time I get back "inside the wire." If you would like to write back, please do so, eventually I will be able to read it and hopefully have a chance to write back.

Semper Fi,
(name withheld)

Policy on Iran nukes seems to be off-target

Mark Steyn:

Excerpt:
You know what's great fun to do if you're on, say, a flight from Chicago to New York and you're getting a little bored? Why not play being President Ahmadinejad? Stand up and yell in a loud voice, "I've got a bomb!" Next thing you know the air marshal will be telling people, "It's OK, folks. Nothing to worry about. He hasn't got a bomb." And then the second marshal would say, "And even if he did have a bomb it's highly unlikely he'd ever use it." And then you threaten to kill the two Jews in row 12 and the stewardess says, "Relax, everyone. That's just a harmless rhetorical flourish." And then a group of passengers in rows 4 to 7 point out, "Yes, but it's entirely reasonable of him to have a bomb given the threatening behavior of the marshals and the cabin crew."

That's how it goes with the Iranians. The more they claim they've gone nuclear, the more U.S. intelligence experts -- oops, where are my quote marks? -- the more U.S. intelligence "experts" insist no, no, it won't be for another 10 years yet. The more they conclusively demonstrate their non-compliance with the IAEA, the more the international community warns sternly that, if it were proved that Iran were in non-compliance, that could have very grave consequences. But, fortunately, no matter how thoroughly the Iranians non-comply it's never quite non-compliant enough to rise to the level of grave consequences. You can't blame Ahmadinejad for thinking "our enemies cannot do a damned thing."

Murder Shocks Brussels

Last Wednesday Joe Van Holsbeeck, 17 years of age, was murdered in Brussels Central Station. He was stabbed five times in the heart by North African youths. They demanded that he give them his MP3 player. When Joe refused he was savagely murdered. The atrocity happened during the evening rush hour on a crowded platform. Though there were hundreds of people on the platform, no-one interfered – perhaps because many people do not notice what is happening around them on a crowded, noisy and busy platform where passengers are rushing to catch their trains.

Here's the disgraceful part:

For an entire week the police, the authorities and most of the media have tried to downplay the fact that the killers are Muslim youths. Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and Cardinal Godfried Danneels addressed the indignation, but gave it a spin of their own. How was it possible for such an atrocity to take place in a crowd with no-one interfering, they asked. Both Verhofstadt and Danneels said that Joe was a victim of “indifference in Belgian society.” “Where were you last Wednesday at 4 pm?!” the Cardinal asked the congration in Brussels Cathedral during his Easter sermon on Sunday. The Cardinal blamed the murder on the materialism and greed of Western society “where people get killed for an MP3 player.”

Belgian citizens realize, however, that the murder has nothing to do with “indifference in Belgian society,” but everything with a group of North African youths terrorizing Brussels and the “indifference” of the authorities to eradicate this scourge. Last January five Moroccan youths slit the throat of a 16-year-old black boy and left him to bleed to death because he refused to buy a cell phone they had stolen. The murderers have not yet been found. Some Belgians doubt whether Joe’s murderers will ever be found, and if so, how long they will have to serve. In 1998 Patrick Mombaerts, a 32-year-old electrician, was murdered by a Moroccan youth who was after his money. The murderer spent only seven months in jail because he was a minor at the time of the murder. The Moroccan thugs do not care about life and they are used to slitting throats – a procedure they get to practise on sheep from a very young age.

"Mr. Wonderful"

Sometimes it helps to be reminded of things that make us ashamed.

At the Babalu blog there's a roundup of recollections of men who fought at the Bay of Pigs forty five years ago. It's an emotive subject in the Cuban-American community. Many survivors of the Cuban 2506 assault brigade believe to this day that they were betrayed by the Kennedy Adminstration. The memoirs emphasize that the operation had been planned under two US administrations but that key details -- the landing site and the provision of support -- were changed at the last moment. The Babalu blog reproduces this dialogue.

"Where are the PLANES?" kept crackling over the invasion ships' radios. That was their commander, Pepe San Roman, roaring into his radio from the beachhead between artillery concussions. Soviet howitzers were pounding 2,000 rounds into the desperately embattled men (and boys). "Send planes or we CAN'T LAST!" San Roman yelled while watching the Russian tanks close in, his ammo deplete and his casualties pile up.

The pleas made it to Navy Chief Admiral Arleigh Burke in Washington, D.C., who conveyed them in person to his commander in chief.

JFK was in a white tux and tails that fateful night of April 18, 1961, having just emerged from an elegant Beltway ball. For the closing act of the glittering occasion Jackie and her charming beau had spun around the dance floor, to the claps, coos and titters of the delighted guests. In the new president's honor, the band had struck up the Broadway smash "Mr. Wonderful."

"Two planes, Mr. President!" Burke sputtered into his commander in chief's face. The fighting admiral was livid, pleading for permission to allow just two of his jets to blaze off the carrier deck and support those desperately embattled freedom fighters on that shrinking beachhead.
"Burke, we can't get involved in this," replied Mr. Wonderful.

Judas: A Saint for Our Seasons

Vanderleun explains the thrill that atheists get in "sticking it" to Christians, this time with the "Gospel" of Judas.

A must read, but here is an excerpt from a great writer:


This dark thrill of denigration has the immediate benefit of pleasingly confirming them in their own Church of Zero, and the secondary benefit of being much, much safer than, say, sticking it to Islam, a faith that enforces its demands for respect with bombs and beheadings, and whose central message to all cowards is "Don't mess with Muhammad." The sad fact of our modern era is that if you denigrate Islam, you often have to bag up body parts and hose down the sidewalk, but when you denigrate Christianity the most you need to clean up after yourself is a warm washcloth.

Beer Ad

You have to see this to believe it.

A Leftist Manifesto of Sanity - The Euston Manifesto.

What took you so long?

It now appears that leftist activism is finally causing those who are reasonable to pull away and make a statement of principles that can form the basis for rational discussion between the Right and the Left in this country.

Preamble:

We are democrats and progressives. We propose here a fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values. It involves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not.

The present initiative has its roots in and has found a constituency through the Internet, especially the "blogosphere". It is our perception, however, that this constituency is under-represented elsewhere — in much of the media and the other forums of contemporary political life.

The broad statement of principles that follows is a declaration of intent. It inaugurates a new Website, which will serve as a resource for the current of opinion it hopes to represent and the several foundation blogs and other sites that are behind this call for a progressive realignment.

Click on the link to read the rest.

The Eternal City

Click on the link.

Unhinged and proud of it

The Washington Post recently had an article about a Leftist blogger that made pit bulls seem like pussy cats by comparison.

Maryscott O'Connor says her liberal Web log, My Left Wing, is "one long, sustained scream." And scream it is.

Here are her opinions as she contemplates what she should blog about:

She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers "malevolent," a "sociopath" and "the Antichrist"? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as "Satan," or about Karl Rove, "the devil"? Should it be about the "evil" Republican Party, or the "weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving" Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says "I have a special place in my heart . . . a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned"?

It would seem that Maryscott is not a very loving person. Certainly not ready to turn the other cheek.

But here is the amazing thing. The author of the piece ascribes her mental problems to the RIGHT! The author of the Washington Post article, David Finkel claims:

“What's notable about this isn't only the level of anger but the direction from which it is coming. Not that long ago, it was the right that was angry and the left that was, at least comparatively, polite. But after years of being the targets of inflammatory rhetoric, not only from fringe groups but also from such mainstream conservative politicians as Newt Gingrich, the left has gone on the attack. And with Republicans in control of Washington, they have much more to be angry about."

Sorry, I am part of the Right, and my side in no way and at no time directed the kind of hatred and venom at the Left and at Liberals that is being mainstreamed on the Internet, at rallies and in public discourse today. To see hatred and venom, one needs to go back to the Viet Nam era when angry leftists and their hangers-on spat at returning vets, threw urine and feces at cops, took over campus buildings (and blew at least one of them up), and in general hijacked American society.

Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff rightly comments:

But the author, David Finkel, presents no evidence that the left was ever the "target of inflammatory rhetoric" (at least from anyone with an audience) that resembles the raving he depicts here. And the reference to Gingrich is laughable. Like him or not, the former Speaker was (and remains) a man of ideas, not invective.

Finkel also appears to credit the left's excuse for its lunacy --"powerlessness." But, again, there's no evidence of this level of hysteria by conservatives during the long periods when they were out of power. Instead of trying to outdo one another in dreaming up slow painful deaths for their adversaries, conservatives did things like develop the National Review, the Heritage Foundation, and the neo-conservative movement. These outlets too were about ideas, not invective.

Moreover, what level of power would it take for unhinged leftist bloggers to indulge in civility? And not just towards conservatives. Right now, these folks don't have much more use for Hillary Clinton than they do for President Bush. A Democratic president unwilling to commit political suicide by veering radically to the left with respect to foreign, domestic, and security policy can expect to incur the rage of left-wing bloggers, a rage that more likely stems from psychological imbalance and an authoritarian personality than from powerlessness. Indeed, if the Daily Kos "screw em" crowd ever achieves what it considers the appropriate level of power, these folks are more likely to begin trying to impose on the objects of their hatred the psychotic fantasies they blog about ("I just want to see these [expletive] swinging from their heels in the public square") than to behave with civility.

Hugh Hewitt comments:

The left has become disfigured because the excess that dominates the lefty blogs is absorbed by rank-and-file activists and encouraged by the Democratic Party leadership, which embraces, posts at and praises the blogs that are among the angriest and most vulgar/profane/hate-filled.

The collapse of the left's ability to engage in politics will continue and in fact accelerate unless and until the leaders of the Democratic Party rebuke the party's activist base and its spokesmen, which is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Iraq Nukes the World ... for Details, see page A13

Yesterday I pointed out that the MOST threatening world event was being reported on page A13 of the Virginian Pilot, after the story about the Baptists nailing index cards on which they had written their sins to a cross.

The American media a clueless. Mark Steyn – than whom there is no better wordsmith in America today – illustrated it well:

You know what's great fun to do if you're on, say, a flight from Chicago to New York and you're getting a little bored? Why not play being President Ahmadinejad? Stand up and yell in a loud voice, "I've got a bomb!"

Next thing you know the air marshal will be telling people, "It's OK, folks. Nothing to worry about. He hasn't got a bomb." And then the second marshal would say, "And even if he did have a bomb it's highly unlikely he'd ever use it."

And then you threaten to kill the two Jews in row 12 and the stewardess says, "Relax, everyone. That's just a harmless rhetorical flourish." And then a group of passengers in rows 4 to 7 point out, "Yes, but it's entirely reasonable of him to have a bomb given the threatening behavior of the marshals and the cabin crew."

That's how it goes with the Iranians. The more they claim they've gone nuclear, the more U.S. intelligence experts -- oops, where are my quote marks? -- the more U.S. intelligence "experts" insist no, no, it won't be for another 10 years yet. The more they conclusively demonstrate their non-compliance with the IAEA, the more the international community warns sternly that, if it were proved that Iran were in non-compliance, that could have very grave consequences. But, fortunately, no matter how thoroughly the Iranians non-comply it's never quite non-compliant enough to rise to the level of grave consequences. You can't blame Ahmadinejad for thinking "our enemies cannot do a damned thing."

Will Iran get a bomb? Will the mullahs finish what Hitler started? Will the world stand by while it happens? Are we next?

Stay tuned, or better yet, you may find it on page A13 of the Virginian Pilot … right next to the Haynes Furniture sale ads.

Why read the Virginian Pilot?

Question: Why read the Virginian Pilot?

Answer: To remind yourself that’s it’s a waste of perfectly good trees.

Lest I be accused of making unsupported accusations, let me use today’s section A as an example. The headline is “Norfolk didn’t fit Ford plan.” This leads a story about Ford’s announcement that it is closing the local F-150 truck plant in 2008.

Now, that is worth covering because Ford is a major employer and the closing was unexpected. The problem with this as a “news” story is that by the time it hit the front porches of it’s readers, you would have had to be comatose or dead not to have heard the news – and in greater detail. So as a “news” story, it told us nothing we did not already know. All that is left is the “human interest” angle and, sure enough, there was the obligatory story of three generations of the Spruill family who worked at the Ford plant.

Isn’t this what Oprah does, only better?

On to page A2. There is a section called the “1 minute news.” It begins with a sentence about members of the Woodland Heights Baptist Church nailing their sins to a wooden cross. The other 1 minute news items are in the same vein. The rest of the page is devoted a large graphic of the weather over the next 24 hours, an ad for Priority Auto, and Public Editor Marvin Lake making corrections. Example: “Antwan Thorne Sr., who was killed earlier this week, was 23 and last resided in Portsmouth. Due to source errors, Thorne’s first name, age and city of residence were incorrect…”

Half of Page A3 is devoted to “Bush Gives Rumsfeld strong endorsement,” U.S. Won’t do business with Palestinians,” and “Rumsfeld: U.S. sought balance in troop levels.” The other half is devoted to and auto ad for Charles Barker Infiniti.

On to page A4, with about 70% taken up by a Verizon Wireless ad.

The other stories: “Report on failed space docking withheld,”

Florida: Suspect in shooting death of boy found 30 years later,”

Pennsylvania: Man jailed after beating death of girlfriend,”

Pennsylvania: Father, two of triplets die in wood chipper incident.”

(Busy day in the Quaker State)
Can you guess which editor found these stories worth printing? Me neither.

Page A5. The profit motive strikes again: roughly 65% of the page is taken up by ads for cars, hot tubs and windows. The other headlines are “Missouri couple who profited from sextuplet story charged,” "Tax returns show Bushes earned $735,180; Cheneys $8.82 million,” and “Man called hero faces drug, gun charges.”

Page A6 has a story on the tornadoes in Iowa and “Government considers giving refund on phone tax.” Two-thirds of this page is devoted to ads for the Perry auto dealership.

Page A7. More auto and furniture ads. A little over half the page is devoted to news: “Reid won’t appear in Moussaoui trial,”
“6-year-old girl killed, mother, toddler hurt after black bear attack.,”
“Police try to interview Duke team about party,” and
“Agent who shot self while talking to kids sues DEA.”

Page A8 and A9 are exclusively devoted to full color ad for a Haynes Furniture sale. Read all about “Pine elegance dining… and 92 inch 100% leather sofa.”

Page A10 is devoted to Iraq. Most of the page focuses on the dead, the injured and a critical article from the AP headlined “Report questions Iraqi security spending.” When I say “devoted” by the way, I mean that a little less than half is devoted to “news” articles, the rest of the page is devoted to ads.

Page A11 is 75% ads. The rest is a picture of a Uruguayan cowboy being thrown from a horse at a rodeo … in full color. What a scoop! The rest of the page is a story about the Woodland Heights Baptists and their practice of writing their sins on index cards and nailing them to a cross. (Remember page 2?)

I’m going to stop with page A13 because this is beginning to bore even me. But this page actually has some interest, first because more than half is devoted to news and, second that some of the news is important. For instance “Iran’s president says Israel soon will head toward annihilation.”

Now this is important. Wasn’t there someone in the dim past who also wanted the Jews exterminated? Who had a “Final solution?” Who made no secret of his plans; even writing a book about it? What was his name?

But that person only had bullets and gas chambers. His “Final solution” was fairly cumbersome, and as a result, some Jews survived. Iran is developing a nuclear bomb, a much more efficient tools for a “Final Solution” and this story find it’s way on to our poor dead trees among the car, piano and tax preparation ads on page A13 of the ever vigilant Virginian Pilot.

Pathetic.

“True to the Democratic Party in victory of defeat.” (Virginian Pilot Official Slogan (it's true).

Virginian-Pilot: True to the Democratic Party...

A poster named "wagglebee" at Free Republic told me something that explains a lot about the Virginian Pilot:

A couple years ago on the anniversary of the Wright Brothers flight at Kitty Hawk the Pilot ran the original front page from 1903. In the top right hand corner it carried the statement, "True to the Democratic Party in victory or defeat." I sent a letter to the editor recommending that they start using it again so that military personnel moving to the area wouldn't be surprised that the local paper in the largest military community in the world was as left-wing as the rest of the media -- I never heard back from them.

http://epilot2.hamptonroads.com/Default/Skins/VPspecial/Client.asp?skin=VPspecial&daily=VPspecial&enter=true&BaseHref=VPspecial\1903\12\18&PageSize=1&AppName=1

Surprise, Surprise: The New York Times Get It Wrong Again.

In the immortal words of Jared Paul Stern:

"We know how to destroy people, It's what we do. We do it without creating liability. It's our specialty."

From Townhall.com we get this piece of investigative reporting by Jonathon Burns:

The New York Times has done it again. They’ve gotten the story wrong. Unfortunately, instead of reprimand and public scorn for their efforts in sloppy journalism, the Times has seen one of its journalists granted an Overseas Press Club Award. Now an innocent man stands to lose 10 years of his life, and a nation faces dramatic losses in foreign investment, thanks in no small part to irresponsible journalism.

In September of 2004, New York Times journalist Jane Perlez came out with an expose detailing how gold-mining giant Newmont “polluted” Buyat Bay in Indonesia and caused the deaths of innocent villagers, including a baby girl. Shortly after the article was published, Rick Ness, CEO of Newmont in Indonesia, and several other employees were arrested and some of the employees were thrown into Indonesian prisons alongside hardened criminals and recently captured terrorists. Observers hailed the act as a positive crackdown on evil Western companies. After all, Western companies are all hell-bent on stealing Indonesian resources and raping the land, right?

[snip]

Despite the blind idiocy of the Overseas Press Club, the truth is that Jane Perlez and the Times are better at sensationalism than investigative journalism. In fact, it’s not certain who or how many villagers she interviewed, or if she even went to Buyat Bay in person. I personally interviewed several villagers and Buyat village leaders, and none of them had ever heard of Perlez or of any woman journalist coming to their village for interviews. Had she interviewed any villagers, she would have easily discovered that the Bay is a popular local draw for vacationers, drawing in thousands on the weekends. Since she won’t agree to an interview, one can only wonder how much solid investigation went into the research for her articles.

Perlez got the “pollution” story utterly wrong. The only science that backs up her assertions of the Bay’s pollution is a sketchy police study and a Canadian specialist she dug up. In the latter case, the gent didn’t travel to Buyat, but he did thoroughly analyze a seaweed sample Perlez procured from her enviro-friends.

Conveniently absent from any of Perlez’ articles are mention of any of a litany of well-respected scientific groups which have conducted studies of the Bay. The Minamata Institute of Japan (the world’s leading authority on mercury poisoning), The World Health Organization (WHO), and numerous other groups have all cleared Newmont of any wrongdoing. Interestingly, the WHO report said the mercury and heavy metal levels of the Bay and nearby estuaries were normal... and better than many places in the U.S. The report attributed the slightly higher levels of mercury in the streams for neighboring communities to artisanal mining operations. Artisanal mines are native-run and notorious for poor health and pollution standards. Yet mention of the artisanal mining activities are conspicuously missing from Perlez’ articles.

Read the whole thing...

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Character assassination, media-style

The media as character assassins. This time it's a combo of NY Times, CNN, ABC, Elizabeth Vargas, Brian Ross and a whole host of characters who remain out of sight, but lie for a living.

Read Brent Bozell's commentary on T. Boone Pickens.

In the immortal words of Jared Paul Stern:

"We know how to destroy people, It's what we do. We do it without creating liability. It's our specialty."

Secrets, lies, and the resurrection

Chuck Colson makes a powerful point.

Just think about the situation Christ’s disciples were in after He left them. Here was a group of peasants, powerless, up against the most powerful empire in the world. Possible prison time was the very least of their worries. They knew that torture and execution could be in their future if they refused to stop preaching the name of Jesus Christ.
But they couldn’t stop.

To a man, they kept talking about Christ’s life, death, and resurrection to anyone who would listen. None of them would deny or retract their story. Eventually, just as the authorities had threatened, most of them were executed for it. But still, all of them maintained to the very end that Jesus had risen from the dead—that they had seen Him, touched Him, talked with Him.

What would inspire men to suffer and die for a belief? Only one thing—the absolute certainty that their belief was true. Who would die to protect a lie or a hoax, especially if he knew it to be a lie? You’d have to be insane. As we’ve seen from the examples I gave, most of us won’t face prison—no, never mind prison. Most of us won’t face public humiliation to defend a lie.

Which leads me inescapably to one conclusion: Jesus’ resurrection was not a lie. These apostles would have turned state’s evidence in a heartbeat, copped a plea, unless they had seen the risen Christ in the flesh.

Have a blessed Easter.

Reporting? or Faking? the News

Michelle Malkin has excellent sources and has the resources to go after an original story. She is also a blogger and columnist.

She has exposed blatant journalistic malpractice before and now exposes the AP and it's "stringer" BILAL HUSSEIN in her article "Where is Bilal Hussein?"

Excerpt:

A year ago, I blogged about a controversial, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken by an unidentified Associated Press stringer in Iraq. More background from the blogosphere here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Do take the time to re-read them all. The context is important.

One member of the Pulitzer-winning AP team was AP stringer Bilal Hussein. Hussein's photos have raised serious, persistent questions about his relationship with terrorists in Iraq and whether his photos were/are staged in collusion with the enemy. I've learned of an intriguing news development that strengthens those lingering suspicions.

This afternoon, in response to a tip from an anonymous military source in Iraq, I contacted both the AP reporter embedded with the Marines in Ramadi, Todd Pitman, as well as AP's media relations office headquartered in New York concerning Hussein's whereabouts. No word from Pitman. But at 6:20pm EST, I received the following e-mail response from AP:

We are looking into reports that Mr. Hussein was detained by the U.S. military in Iraq but have no further details at this time.
Jack StokesThe Associated PressCorporate Communications

According to my tipster, Hussein was captured earlier today by American forces in a building in Ramadi, Iraq, with a cache of weapons.

More From Saddam's Archives

Powerline has a link to a translation of one of Saddam's documents. Except (read the whole thing):

This document refers to a heroic, around the clock effort to destroy documents relating to Iraq's WMD programs that I have also seen mentioned in the audiotapes of meetings in Saddam's office. While there is some ambiguity in the last paragraphs, the document does seem to imply that Iraq's WMD progams were ongoing as of late 1998. Some of the ambiguity might perhaps be resolved if others could check the translation.

FreeRepublic has the translation and comment:

In pages 63 and 64 of document Document CMPC-2003-002284 , there is secret and confidential memo dated September 16 1998 concerning a meeting of the National Monitoring Department to discuss how to destroy some “non necessary documents” and keep the necessary one in a safe place according to the memo but the most important part of the memo is a pareagraph on how to handle “The Researches That Cannot Be Declared and that is related with the previous Prohibited Programs of WMD and how to make sure that information about these researches will not leak to the outside because it will be too dangerous if this happened”. Yet another document that proves without any doubt that Saddam Regime never stopped working in his WMD programs and Research and they were just waiting for the opportune moment to produce these WMD again on a large scale. Also remember that in September 1998 the UN inspectors were still in Iraq and they were kicked later on that year after some US air and missile strikes. So most definitely these Secret Research Programs related to WMD were still in existence and may have reached a more advanced stage from late 1998 to late 2002 where during this period of time there were no UN inspectors in Iraq. This document is another proof that we could have never trusted Saddam and that we had all the right to remove his brutal and terrorist regime after 9/11/2001.

The Internet and Blogosphere is doing the job that the government and the press has failed to do, and that is to comb through Saddam's documents and reveal what really happend in Iraq. From the NY Times:

"I'm trying to pick up documents that shed light on the political debate," said Joseph G. Shahda, 34, a Lebanese-born engineer who lives in a Boston suburb and is spending hours every evening on translations for the conservative Free Republic site. "I think we prematurely concluded there was no W.M.D. and no ties to Al Qaeda."

Mr. Shahda said he was proud he could help make the documents public. "I live in this great country, and it's a time of war," he said. "This is the least I can do."

RUMSFELD ASKED TO DENY FUNDS TO CALIFORNIA COLLEGE

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should withhold federal funds from a California college given the failure of the college to ensure the safe presence of military recruiters on campus, the Secretary was advised by a public interest law firm in a letter released today. According to news reports, military recruiters were forced to flee yesterday from a University of California Santa Cruz job fair because of a raucous mob. Mountain States Legal Foundation advised Rumsfeld that the college’s actions violate the Solomon Amendment, which requires that colleges permit military recruiters on campus or lose all federal funds. UC Santa Cruz received $80 million in federal funds during 2005. A unanimous Supreme Court ruled the Solomon Amendment constitutional early last month.

Ann Coulter on the Illegal Immigrants

BROWN IS THE NEW BLACK
by Ann Coulter
April 12, 2006

This is the only country on Earth that thinks it's not sporting to consider our own interests in choosing immigrants. Try showing up in any other country on the planet, illiterate and penniless, and announcing: "I've seen pictures of your country and it looks great. I think I'd like to live here! Oh, and by the way, would you mind changing all your government and business phone messages, street signs and ballots into my native language? Thanks!"

They would laugh you out of the country.

What seems not to have occurred to the "NO HUMAN BEING IS ILLEGAL" crowd is that this is a country, not a public park. There are more than 6 billion people in the world, many of whom apparently like the idea of living in the wealthiest democracy on Earth. But if the billions of people of the world did live here, it wouldn't be "here" anymore.

America is special for a reason that must transcend the right to vote — or everyone would be trying to immigrate to Iraq right now.

America has a seller's market in immigration, but thanks to Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration law, we no longer favor skilled workers from developed nations, but instead favor unskilled immigrants from the Third World. Kennedy's bill promptly cut the number of European immigrants in half and increased Third World immigrants to 85 percent of the total.

Not surprisingly, post-1965 immigrants have sharply higher levels of poverty and welfare dependence. Europeans may not seem like ideal new immigrants, but the truth is, if what they want is welfare, they'll stay in France.

It's as if we've got the last Xbox 360s available on Christmas Eve and instead of doubling the price, we're entertaining low-ball offers. Or more accurately, we're paying our customers to take the darn things off our hands — and the customers are still indignant with us. On CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on Monday, Dobbs was interviewing Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican-American Political Association about his demand for "full immediate, unconditional legalization for all persons currently in the United States." Dobbs posed this innocuous question about Lopez's planned boycott, "You're talking about a boycott of all illegal aliens in this country?" Lopez exploded: "Well, first off, I refute your terminology. You don't say 'kike,' 'patty,' 'WOP,' OK. You don't say "nigger"! ... You're using language that's offensive to me and offensive to my people! ... You pollute the air every day, Dobbs. ... That language is offensive, it's derogatory, it's denigrating, and don't use that terminology to me again, referring to my people!"

Dobbs eventually ended Lopez's Tourette's episode by calmly asking him what he expected the impact of the boycott to be. An hour later on MSNBC's "Hardball," Dave Rodriguez, of the League of United Latin American Citizens, leapt in to denounce Rep. Tom Tancredo for using the word "amnesty." He said: "There isn't any such thing as amnesty in this law. I don't understand what this debate is. That's your own terminology on it ..."

Bank robbers and drug dealers ought to start claiming that the words "bank robber" and "drug dealer" are akin to the N-word. They could accuse lawmakers of "criminalizing felonies" and claim they don't understand what the word "jailbreak" means.

At the same time on CNN's "The Situation Room," Maria Elena Salinas, an anchor at Univision, was informing Wolf Blitzer that "all Hispanics feel offended by what has been going on, by the rhetoric, the level of the negativity that you hear coming out of Capitol Hill and also on some television stations and by some journalists."

So it's really more like we've got the last Xbox 360s available on Christmas Eve and the customers are not only demanding money to take the hottest sales item off our hands, but are verbally abusing us and acting petulant. I'm offended that you would even think about asking me to pay for the Xbox 360! You say it has a "20 GB detachable hard drive"? Well, would you use the word "kike"?

As hardworking as illegal immigrants are when they come here, they are immediately demagogued by liberals into adopting the victimhood pose so popular on college campuses. Everybody wants to act like his ancestors were brought here on slave ships. Consider this e-mail from Michele Waslin, La Raza's director of Immigration Policy Research, to her members denouncing Sen. Lamar Alexander's proposal to provide government grants to immigrants who want to learn English and American history and to organizations offering those courses. (I'd be happy with a law that simply trained new immigrants not to be "offended" all the time.)

Even though this potentially meant free money for La Raza, Waslin — of the Guadalajara Waslins — ominously warned that while the amendment "doesn't overtly mention assimilation, it is very strong on the patriotism and traditional American values language in a way which is potentially dangerous to our communities." Meanwhile, Americans aren't allowed to consider whether millions of immigrants refusing to learn English and American history is "potentially dangerous to our communities."

Here, please — we'll pay you, just take the whole Xbox 360 factory.

COPYRIGHT 2006 ANN COULTER DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
4520 Main Street, Kansas City, MO 64111

Iran's Bomb

If I were running a medium sized country and wanted to develop nuclear weapons, I would do it surreptitiously. I would not provide information about my progress. And I would especially not brag about my achievements until I had a supply of weapons.

So why is Iran crowing about its progress?

From all that we know, Iran has the intention of producing nuclear weapons. It has stated its intention of wiping Israel off the map; presumably with the assistance of such weapons. A large number of countries, not just the United States, have demanded that Iran stop its development of such weapons. It would seem that the best course the Iranian government could take would be to deny its intentions of producing weapons while producing these weapons. Yet they appear to be making an effort to publicize their efforts and wiping the world’s eye with their progress.

Why?

The reasons for this are open to debate, but here is a possible scenario. The “Western world” is largely disarmed both militarily and most especially morally against an Islamofacist onslaught. Witness the reaction in Europe and the US to the 12 cartoons and the efforts in Europe to ban speech advocating resistance to Islamic encroachments. Witness Yale’s decision to accept the propaganda minister of Al Qaeda as a student. Witness the description of the killers of school children as “insurgents” in the Western media.

Suppose that what the mullahs of Iran want is the removal of Israel from the Middle East and the capitulation of Europe to the most intolerant version of Islam. Knowing that they will be threatened with nothing more dangerous than wind from the UN, why not make yourself to be a budding nuclear power, even before you are one, and get the UN and the Europeans to do your dirty work for you.

Be threatening enough and you may be able to get the Europeans, who have already given a green light to open anti-Semitism, to help move the Jews out of Israel. And, if you are a nuclear power, you can begin to negotiate the increased immigration of Islamofacists into Europe.

If this keeps Europe from taking a nuclear strike, what are the chances that Europe – and the Left in the United States – won’t take that deal?

If this looks far fetched, let me ask you, at what point in this process, would the West be willing to fight and die?

Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence.

From the Opinion Journal; excerpt (read the whole thing):

There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science--whether for AIDS, or space, or climate--where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

Commenting on this by Power Line:

Most people assume that "science" has proved that the earth is getting significantly, and potentially catastrophically, warmer, and that the reason is human activity, specifically the release of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases. In fact, scientific support for that theory is weak. But it's where the money is: funding for climate research by the U.S. government alone is up more than a billion dollars a year as a result of the alarmism spread by--guess who--the same people, largely, who get the extra billion dollars. There are some contexts in which economic interests make reporters suspicious, and some contexts in which they don't. Why? Beats me. Ask a reporter.

Media Selectively Recycles the News

From RealClearPolitics:

We journalists are environmentally friendly. We recycle. We've been recycling old news all weekend, without, of course, telling you it's old news.

"A senior administration official confirmed for the first time on Sunday that President Bush had ordered the declassification of parts of a prewar intelligence report on Iraq in an effort to rebut critics who said the administration had exaggerated the nuclear threat posed by Saddam Hussein," reported David Sanger and David Johnston in the New York Times Monday.

For the first time? Here's the AP's Tom Raum on July 20, 2003: "The White House declassified portions of an October, 2002 intelligence report to demonstrate that President Bush had ample reason to believe Iraq was reconstituting a nuclear weapons program."

"The unusual decision to declassify a major intelligence report was a bid by the White House to quiet a growing controversy over Bush's allegations about Iraq's weapons programs," wrote Dana Milbank and Dana Priest in the Washington Post the day before.

Mr. Sanger and Mr. Johnston must have slept through that month. Why the recycling? In a court filing April 5, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald reported that I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, told the grand jury that Mr. Cheney had authorized him to disclose portions of the National Intelligence Estimate to Judith Miller of the New York Times a couple of weeks before its general release.

The NIE was declassified to rebut charges by Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that President Bush lied when he said in his 2003 State of the Union address that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa."
Mr. Libby has been indicted by Mr. Fitzgerald for lying to the grand jury about whether he told Ms. Miller that Mr. Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA, and was responsible for dispatching him on his now famous trip to Niger.

Dafna Linzer and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post should be grateful no legal jeopardy is attached to lying to their readers. In their story Sunday they said: "the evidence Cheney and Libby selected to share with reporters had been disproved months before."

The opposite is true. In July of 2004, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded unanimously that it was Mr. Wilson who was lying. He had been sent to Niger by his wife, and he told the CIA officers who debriefed him that Iraqi officials had approached Nigerien officials about buying "yellowcake."

Also that month, a parliamentary panel which investigated British claims about Iraqi WMD, the Butler Commission, concluded that the statements that Saddam had tried to buy uranium in Africa were "well founded." Perhaps Ms. Linzner and Mr. Gellman slept through that month.

Most of the recycled stories this weekend described the release of portions of the NIE as a "leak," a word that was not used in July of 2003 when the NIE was made public. For good reason. A leak is an unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Read the whole thing...

The New Chill on Campus

From FrontPage magazine:

When Brigitte Gabriel recently gave a speech at Memphis University, she was confronted with a familiar sight: an audience so hostile to her message that it had come not to debate but to silence her.

A passionate and powerful speaker who had witnessed Palestinian terrorism and experienced anti-Jewish and anti-Christian propaganda in her native Lebanon, Gabriel had been invited to speak at the Tennessee campus by religious studies professor David Patterson. But the day before Gabriel's speech, Patterson began receiving threatening e-mails.
“Do you honestly think the scheduled lecture will serve any useful purpose other than inflaming the Muslims, insulting them and spilling poison in the community?” one message asked. Another charged that inviting Gabriel to speak was “worse than hosting of the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.” Still another described her as among “the true enemies of Islam.”

The menacing emails proved prescient. When Gabriel and Patterson arrived in the campus auditorium 15 minutes before her scheduled presentation, several rows of seats in the front of the room were already occupied by men and women dressed in distinctive Muslim clothing. Before Gabriel was introduced, a Muslim man who has been a long-term graduate student at the university strode to the front of the room and announced: “We have been told that the speaker will only accept questions written on cards. Everyone who believes this is an un-democratic lecture, raise your hands.” The Muslims in the audience shouted their agreement.

Undaunted, Gabriel went to the front of the room and announced that the lecture belonged to her and that those who did not see it this way were welcome to leave. Two campus police officers stood on either side of her. They also called for backup. By the time order was restored and Gabriel began her speech, 10 police officers were posted in the room. Patterson implored the audience to give her a chance to be heard.

After her speech, she answered every question submitted — questions she described as “Palestinian talking points” — before the Muslim audience members swarmed onto the stage and surrounded her, yelling angrily. Finally, police officers grabbed her and hustled her out a side door. Someone else had to retrieve her coat and suitcase while she waited in a police car to be driven to the hotel where, for security reasons, she was registered under another name. Only after she had locked her door and drawn the curtains, did Gabriel allow herself to tremble.

Read the whole thing...

Park Slope NY: Are Blue Hats for Boys?

A real exchange via e-mail as to whether blue hats are for boys, gender stereotyping, head sizes ... and aren't you glad you don't live in Park Slope?

Excerpt:

Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 17:34:48 -0500
Subject: RE: Found: boy’s hat

Helene, I’m sorry, I know that you are just trying to be helpful, but what makes this a “boy’s hat”? Did you see the boy himself loose it? Or does the hat in question possess an unmistakable scent of testosterone?

It’s innocent little comments like this that I find the most hurtful…

What does this comment imply about the girl who chooses to wear just such a hat (or something like it)? Is she doing something wrong? Is there something wrong with her?

Lisa

How Does Anyone Get His Reputation Back Against Lies?

Let’s say you were accused of child abuse. You claim innocence. The accuser then goes further, assuming your guilt, and wonders how many more children you have abused. The following day, your accuser gets someone to claim that you have also raped a child. Pretty soon, people will assume that some of the stories must be true since people would not make such outrageous claims without anything to back it up. God forbid that your child should fall and skin his knee; “proof positive of child abuse” you accusers trumpet.

Well, that is pretty much the situation President Bush is in right now, thanks to a cynical and deadly assault of lies by the Left aided and abetted by the MSM.

David Limbaugh has an excellent article on this subject HERE

Media Appalled that George Bush Dare Defend Himself

From Gateway Pundit:

After all of the dishonest accusations from Joe Wilson and the media against George W. Bush and his administration, the media is now appalled that the President has defended himself!

Just to give you a bit of the information that is not reported in the liberal media this week, here is a rehash of a few of the attacks and misperceptions from the media and the ultra-liberal and dishonest Joe Wilson:

read the rest...

Everything Old is New Again!

Via Power Line:

Three Years Later It's Still News

Today's New York Times page-one, joint-byline story by David Sanger and David Johnston is "Bush ordered declassification, official says." The story of course refers to the declassification and release of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimage consensus "key judgments" in July 2003.

Referring to the same document, on July 20, 2003, the AP headlined Tom Raum's story: "Declassified CIA documents on Iraq show divided intelligence community." Here is Raum's story in its entirety:

The point is that the release of the NIE three years ago was covered and written about prominently by the Associated Press and Knight Ridder, both primary news services for the nation's newspapers.

The Power Line guys end the story with:

The correspondent who forwarded this material to us comments: "That Fitzgerald is one helluva digger, able to ferret out this stuff that was in the headlines [three] years ago..." And don't these reporters deserve credit for making everything old new again?

Read the whole thing.

Standing Up to the Disability Police

A bunch of small business owners in Alpine, California all got the same extortion letter from a lawyer.

Mike McKany, owner of Alpine Liquor, received a letter informing him that he was being sued for three counts of violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). He was informed that three different aggrieved customers were suing him for damages of $10,500 each. The letter, from attorney Theodore Pinnock, offered him the option of settling if he called that day. The attorney offered to begin negotiating down from the $10,500 for each count, as long as the first payment was received by the following Monday.

McKany was puzzled by the alleged violations. Two years ago, California Lottery officials had assured him that he met the requirements of the ADA. His business had to be in compliance with ADA as a precondition of being allowed to sell California lottery tickets. The suit alleged that Alpine Liquor’s restrooms were not handicapped accessible. The liquor store doesn’t even have a public restroom. Pinnock’s letter claimed that McKany’s business did not provide disabled parking. But his parking lot does have disabled parking.

Read the rest...

WHERE ARE THE MUSLIM MODERATES?

They are out there, I suspect; in larger numbers than we might be led to believe. But if most are silent and fearful of speaking out, can you blame them?

The vast majority of Arabs and Muslims live in countries ruled by illiberal and oppressive regimes. And in the few relatively free countries – Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia – there is no protection from the long arm of Militant Islamism. Indeed, even in Europe it can be dangerous to challenge religious fascism. And last year, Shaker Elsayed, leader of Dar al-Hijrah, one of the largest mosques in the U.S., told American Muslims: "The call to reform Islam is an alien call."

Muslims who dissent from this orthodoxy have received precious little support from anyone. As far back as 1989, Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini called for the murder of British author Salman Rushdie. Such a frontal attack on freedom of speech should have prompted Western governments to send Iranian diplomats packing. Instead, Rushdie went into hiding while most Western intellectuals persuaded themselves this quarrel was none of their business.

Since that time, and perhaps partly as a consequence, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for making a movie some Muslims found insulting. Danish journalists who dared publish cartoons satirizing the radicalization of Islam have been threatened. Such formerly-courageous publications as The New York Times declined to publish the cartoons, claiming – unconvincingly -- that they had not been intimidated; they were merely demonstrating sensitivity.

Meanwhile, in Jordan and Yemen, editors who thought their readers deserved to judge the cartoons for themselves were jailed.

The pandering has escalated: Last month, Columbia University held a conference that included as a “highlight” a video of Libyan dictator Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi presenting “his views on the prospects for democracy in the twenty-first century.” Columbia's teachers and administrators are apparently untroubled by the fact that Libya's leading dissident, Fathi Eljami, is currently rotting in one of Qaddafi's dungeons.

"Get Whitey"...No Problem...Nothing to See Here...Move on.

It's been a week now since a car hit NYU student John Hehman after he ran into a Harlem street, fleeing from a gang of thugs.

Eyewitness accounts say Hehman had stopped to give a homeless man a dollar. One thug allegedly approached, asking, "Where's our dollar?"
Another yelled, "Get the white boy!" or "Get whitey!" The gang chased him.

Running into 125th Street, Hehman was hit by a Mercedes Benz.

Remember Howard Beach? Al Sharpton, call your office.

The Psychopathology of the Media

The Anchoress has an interesting take on the media. I have tried to put my finger on their problem, and have become convinced that there are no truly rational explanations, so I'll go with her for now.

Here is an excerpt, but it's well worth reading the whole article.

My son Buster was not in school today, of course, due to Veteran’s Day. He spent the better part of the morning and afternoon working on an Eagle Scout project for one of the fellows in his troop, and while they were working, they kept a radio on. One of the scoutmasters in attendance wanted to hear the president’s speech, and so they tuned into Limbaugh’s program.

“The speech was really good,” Buster said, “but when it was over, instead of switching back to music, we stayed tuned to Rush, because he was taking calls from people about the speech. Then at one point Rush said he was looking at the news-show responses and some reporter said something like, ‘the fact that Bush is defending himself proves he lied.’ Didn’t you tell me once, Mom, that that’s a psychopathic thing to say?”

My birth family was a troubled one - lots of dysfunction, of which I won’t go into detail, but one of the more messed up aspects of that dysfuction was that the Patriarch - a brilliant and troubled man - would routinely make outlandish, very ugly accusations at various members of the family and then, when they would struggle to defend themselves, their honor, their reputations, their own scruples, their own ability to reason, the escalating battle would result in the defendant falling into frustrated hysteria while trying to be heard and understood as innocent of whatever mad charges the Patriarch had made, (and believe me, the charges were always quite mad) and the Patriarch, sitting there very evilly, would smile and say, “if it were not true, you wouldn’t be trying so hard to defend yourself.”

I thnk I’ve mentioned before that I left home pretty young. I wasn’t going to subject myself to that madness.

I remember talking to a good friend, a psychologist, some years ago about the behavior of this Patriarch. After hearing a few stories she made a diagnosis. “He was a psychopath and a paranoid, with severe character disorders,” she pronounced. I didn’t disagree. Sounded about right to me.

It also explains why I don't get any of my news from the MSM any more. Not only is it old by the time it gets to my door, but it's simply the product of a psychopath and I refuse to subject myself to that madness.

Kerry on the Koran, the Torah, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles

For some reason, The New Republic has me on their e-mail list, but I got this one via Instapundit. It's Martin Peretz on John Kerry:

Mr. Kerry also told the group that he believed 'deeply in my faith'." Now, there are many Catholics including high ecclesiastics who doubt this. But who am I to have a point of view on what is essentially an intramural fight? In any case, as it turns out, Kerry is not only a Roman Catholic but also an ecumenicist. Once again I rely on the Times: Kerry asserted that "the Koran, the Torah, the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles had influenced a social conscience that he exercised in politics." My God, what bullshit politicians feel obliged to utter! Or maybe the bullshit is already second nature, or even first. But since Kerry raised it, let me ask: What hadith of the Prophet influenced him the most, and why?

Read the whole thing ... it's not long.

Saddam's Suicide Pilots

We realize that the MSM will never admit that Saddam had anything to do with the War on Terror; an innocent victim of Bush’s lies. But some very interesting news is being uncovered by the blogosphere which is translating those millions of documents we captured after Saddam fell.

It now turns out that the Iraqi Air Force put in a request for suicide pilots prior to 9/11 to attack “American interests.”

So far no word from the MSM which is still all aghast that George Bush would declassify some intelligence reports that showed Saddam was a threat. Hang him for fighting back against the paid liars in the media.

And HERE'S MORE from Captain's Quarters.

Clone Cynthia McKinney!!!

By Vanderleun:

As the week that wasn't rolled along in the ant farm of Congress, a joke and a lyric kept running through my little head.

The joke was, "I bought an ant farm. Watched it for three months and I want my money back. Those ants didn't raise shit."

But this morning, while shaving and humming that tune, I thought, "Nothing happening in Congress? Why is that a bad thing? Nothing is what almost always happens in Congress. When nothing happens in Congress, all Americans should rejoice. When something actually does happen in Congress is when we all need to increase our holdings of canned goods and ammunition.

"Congress is the one area of the economy where wise Americans should insist on dependably declining productivity. After all, it is not as if we've got a critical shortage of laws and legislation in the country. We've got laws, legislation, and regulations that, piled up into an all-American heap of "Made in America" bullshit, make all the butter mountains of Europe combined look like a gnat's pimple.

"Our task as Americans is to make sure that even less gets done in Congress than the nothing that is currently being done.

"But how?" I asked myself.

"Self," said I, "how can patriotic Americans of every race, color, creed, national origin, or self-assigned gender, make sure, make certain to a quantum level of granulation, that Congress does less than nothing; that all accomplishment in Congress moves from Zero into negative numbers?"

And then it came to me like a revelation, like a bush bursting into flame, like a pillar of fire lighting my way out of the wilderness of potential congressional action into the Promised Land of utter congressional paralysis: Clone Cynthia McKinney!

Read the whole thing....

Saddam 2008, Democrat for President

Whales have suffered more under the Bush regime than any other living creature except me. I promise that once elected, I will hunt down the Republicans and their supporters whereever they hide, including in the Arctic, by using whales on martyrdom operations. I will train them to hone in on the sound of Ann Coulter's voice, then trigger a small nuclear device, thereby incinerating all Republicans in the viscinity and guaranteeing 72 whale virgins in Whale Paradise.

Rethinking International Law

The Belmont Club begins a debate over how we should change Internaional Law engendered by a speech given by John Reid, UK Secretary of State for Defense: "20th-Century Rules, 21st-Century Conflict".

This is vitally important since America's ability to defend its citizens depends very much on it's political figures ability to detect and react to threats before thousands of us are killed.

The Liberal position defense parallels the Hollywood version of the shootout in “westerns:” the good guy always drew last (and the bad guy was either slower or always missed.) This is not only not the way gunfights happened in the real old west, it’s not the way I want our government to act.

Excerpt:

Mr Reid said that the strategic landscape and its threats were new and unprecedentedly complex, with interlocking uncertainties in the ecological, economic, political and social spheres. The barbarism and lack of constraint of our terrorist opponents made it necessary to consider considering the legal framework in which they and we operated .[snip]

Reid's points taken together comprehensively call into question the international constitutional system. It is unlikely the issues raised by those questions will be resolved any time soon because those issues are typically addressed by the victors after a war (Utrecht, Westphalia, Vienna, Versailles, etc) to codify a consensus that has emerged in the course of events. All one can say with the conflict still in progress is that current concepts of the Rules of War, pre-emption and territorial sovereignty will be called into question; that they will change under the pressure of future events is all but certain; but what they will change into is anybody's guess.

Read the whole thing...

Ken Bazinet, The Virginian Pilot and Other Paid Liars

Ken Bazinet is a “journalist” in the currently accepted meaning of the word. In other words he is a paid liar.

He begins his lies with: “President Bush vowed to fire anyone caught blabbing classified information to the media, but he himself was the leaker-in-chief, a former top White House aide testified.”

Unfortunately for this paid liar, the testimony of Lewis Libby does not say this.

The only people who use the word “leak” in the document entitled “Government’s Response to Defendant’s Third Motion to Compel Discovery” are the prosecutor and various press accounts. Furthermore, the President has the power to classify and declassify information and his decision to allow Mr. Libby to discuss a National Intelligence Estimate of the dangers posed by the Saddam regime is not a “leak.”

Paid liar Bazinet continues the “leak” theme throughout his story. Only in the bizarre world of “journalism by paid liars” is this kind of corruption rewarded. If you have the stomach for it, you can read the whole twisted mass of lies HERE.

Paid liar Bazinet is not, of course, the only member of the “journalism” community to repeat this refrain. My own Virginian Pilot has an editorial on this subject.

Why this sudden and super-hypocritical “journalistic” attacks on “leaks?” It all gets back to George Bush and the war in Iraq. The press hates Bush and hates the war on poor Saddam and his murderous thugs. So when the press attacks Bush’s credibility on the war, on terrorism, and the dangers posed by Islamofacism, he is supposed to shut up and take it. Declassifying and providing intelligence estimates to reporters to prove the threat are forbidden. The almighty “press” is the only medium by which the American people should be allowed to have their information delivered and their opinions spoon fed and pre-digested.

In their dreams.

Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom has more:

Now we witness the astonishing spectacle of newspapers trying to spin a scandal out of a legal disclosure of information to the press. GayPatriot aptly describes it as “the Orwellian worldview of Bush-haters where releasing facts means having something to hide.” Maybe we can’t expect better from political partisans, but journalists are supposed to stand for the neutral principle of the public’s right to know. If they pervert that principle in the pursuit of a partisan program, they will find it harder to assert it when it serves their purposes, whatever those purposes may be.

And from Captain Ed:

Why did George Bush release the NIE at all? Because Joe Wilson had busied himself by spreading misinformation via leaks to Nick Kristof and Walter Pincus, and then finally under his own by-line at the New York Times twelve days prior to the release of the NIE information. The media had demanded answers to the charges leveled by Wilson and his supporters, and those answers were found in the NIE. The decision to declassify it and publish it came as a result of that demand. Once the decision is made to declassify information, it can be released in any number of ways. This was both leaked and openly presented in the same fortnight.

More on Jill Carroll

From Debbie Schlussel:

I met Carroll in Cairo two summers ago in an Arabic language training school (Kalimaat).
I admit I was struck by her anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments. From the comments she made she seemed to detest America more than Arabs did. She was pleased that I mistakenly identified her as Canadian and expressed a wish to deny being American. I was surprised knowing how proud Americans normally are of their identity. She refused to use the name Israel but called it 'that state' with some venom, which made me feel uncomfortable as she knew I was Jewish.
What's really funny, considering that she works for the CS Monitor, were the comments she made about the Bible "that shit book" .