Ann Coulter: TERRORISTS WIN: DEODORANT BANNED FROM AIRPLANES

She makes a good point in today's column, and more people are joining her in pointing it out:

What stopped last week's terrorist attack was ethnic profiling. We don't know the details of the British intelligence work that nabbed the 24 Muslims because The New York Times has not been able to obtain that classified information and publish it on its front page yet. But it is a fact that you could not catch 24 Muslim terrorists by surveilling everyone in Britain equally.

Without the ethnic profiling going on outside of airports, no security procedure currently permissible inside airports would have prevented a terrorist attack that would have left thousands dead.

Airplanes, ports, bridges, subways and shopping malls cannot ever be sanitized against every type of attack that can be dreamed up by fanatics engaged in asymmetrical warfare. We have to target the fanatics themselves. Baby formula doesn't kill people. Islamic fascists kill people.

Jonah Goldberg makes a similar point:

The TSA’s more established security system, Screening Passengers by Observation Technique, or SPOT, relies on human intelligence instead of the artificial kind. Teams are trained to scrutinize passengers for more than 30 questionable behaviors, according to the Journal: “They look for obvious things like someone wearing a heavy coat on a hot day, but also for subtle signs like vocal timbre, gestures and tiny facial movements that indicate someone is trying to disguise an emotion.”

This apparently is unacceptable for civil libertarians.

“Our concern is that giving TSA screeners this kind of responsibility and discretion can result in their making decisions not based on solid criteria but on impermissible characteristics such as race,” the ACLU’s Gregory T. Nojeim told the Journal.

In other words, while our enemies are coming up with ingenious ways to murder Americans, we’re coming up with ingenious ways to search for our enemies in the nicest manner possible. No amount of training, it seems, can immunize against the real threat to America: the possibility that somewhere, at some time, a TSA cop might pull an Arab or South Asian out of a line at an airport unfairly and talk to them for five minutes.

Note: We’re not talking about training security personnel to racially profile passengers. Quite the opposite. The ACLU’s problem is with training officers not to racially profile if that training nonetheless gives them enough autonomy so that it’s theoretically possible to take race into account.

What is so infuriating about this is that the ACLU favors policies which discriminate against all sorts of people—old people, women, children and others who, under random searches and other idiotic numerical formulas, are pulled aside for literally no reason at all.

The Virginian Pilot: an Oude Hoor.

The Virginian Pilot is taking great pleasure in telling us what “macaca” means. Did you know? Well, it’s a word used by George Allen to describe a James Webb supporter who was videotaping him at a campaign rally. And we are supposed to be terribly offended and conclude the Allen is a closet (or not so closet) racist.

I was brought up Dutch, and there was an expression used by my parents that had a double meaning. It was “oude hoor” and it describes the Virginian Pilot editors and reporters to a T. I invite anyone to tell me the two meanings of this old Dutch phrase.

Glenn Reynolds on Bias in Reporting

When I was a little boy, I read a book on magic that explained how to perform some simple tricks. Then I decided to put on a show. My first trick was “mind reading.” Unfortunately someone else must have read the same book because I was exposed as a fake immediately. I was humiliated and my reaction was defensive and angry.

This old memory reminds me of the press as it’s faked and posed pictures and stories are revealed to an increasingly cynical audience. The reaction is not: “thanks for pointing this out, we welcome our readers’ help when we make mistakes.” Instead, it’s like mine when I tried to hoodwink my friends: anger and denial that I was faking.

Glenn Reynolds makes the point well when he states that the media can no longer depend on a public that is totally dependent on it for its news. That can be gulled into believing virtually anything as long as it’s accompanied by pictures.

Excerpt:

We've seen this kind of fakery before, of course, and not just where Israel is concerned. The Boston Globe ran fake rape photos purporting to show U.S. troops raping Iraqi women. The photos turned out to come from a Hungarian porn site. Nor does the fakery stop with photos. Rutten's own L.A. Times ran a nasty piece about Paul Bremer's departure from Iraq, saying that he didn't even give a farewell speech and suggesting that he was afraid to look Iraqis in the eye. In fact, Bremer had given a speech that was nationally televised in Iraq. As columnist John Leo observed in response to this bit of bogosity: "What's new about the press is that so many people who follow it with a critical eye now have an outlet to howl about inaccuracy and partisanship. The big media used to be able to shrug off critics like this. Now they can't."



No, they can't. But I have to say that I'm disappointed with their response nonetheless. I had hoped that increased scrutiny from bloggers would make the press more honest, but so far there's no sign of that. And bad or dishonest reporting is destructive and unpatriotic (note that reporting bad news honestly is not, a distinction that dishonest media defenders sometimes try to elide). Can a free press survive if the public concludes that it's in the business of purveying politically motivated propaganda on behalf of civilization's enemies? And, if this kind of thing keeps up, will people be able to resist coming to such a conclusion? The press often responds to business scandals by noting that misbehavior by businessmen is likely to undermine support for free enterprise and lead to public demands for free enterprise. I fear that the same dynamic may lead to reduced support for a free press, and to demands for government regulation of reporting in wartime.

Read the whole thing…

Islamofacists Beware, Some People Are Getting Angry

Ace of Spades is through with "Love & Peace." I'm afraid he may be the vanguard of a new movement:

Excerpt:

But even more anti-American is allowing ourselves to be butchered by a population riddled with killers and saboteurs plotting treason and mass-murder every hour of the day, as well as their moral support system that encourages them.

There is too much equivocation about terrorism. There is too much protection of hate-preachers and actual terrorists. There is too much coordination with the terrorists' message of the day. There is too much support, active support or the sorter sort of moral support, for the terrorists in Muslim communities.

You guys had better get your shit under control, pronto. Because the American Street is growing very angry indeed.

You wouldn't like the American Street when it's angry.

Do you not realize that, due to our compassion, openness, and commitment to tolerance, we have lost more than 3000 lives, spent billions on security measures and unprecendentedly humane military interventions, seen hell wreaked on our economy, and have seen our lives disrupted and inconvenienced and just made generally poorer overall?

At what point do you think the limits of compassion, openness, and commitment to tolerance are reached? Do you imagine our virture -- or weakness, as you would have it -- in this regard is infinite?

Do you not comprehend that at some point the majority of the American, British, Australian, etc. people aren't going to realize their lives could be better and safer were it not for the expensive and dangerous presence of a great many Muslims on their soil? Muslims who seem to place a greater value on loyalty to their correligionists than they do to loyalty to their ostensible country of citizenship, or even to the basic human value that human life shall not be snuffed out maliciously?

When do you imagine the paradigm shifts from "deport only those found beyond all reasonable doubt to be supporters of terrorism" to "deport any and all you legally can, because we are just tired of living in the shadow of death"?

This country stamped out the KKK. It will take less to stamp out the Islamic KKK, because half of the recently-minted Islamic "citizens" in Britain and even America will be found to have, if we look carefully enough (and we will begin looking carefully, very soon) irregularities and small misrepresentations on their visas and citizenship applications that will serve nicely as a pretext for large-scale revocations of citizenship and deportation back to their home hellholes.

Get your vile, racist, hateful, murder-porn culture under control, or we are going to eventually use every legal pretext possible to de-export it back to the shitholes you come from, and quarrantine your vicious madness there.

A commitment to tolerance cannot be stretched to become a suicide pact.

We don't want to do anything like that. Even I, at my most disgusted with Muslim political pornography, still hold out hope for sanity to return to the Muslim population.

But this has to stop. Now.

This is a little hyperbolic, but it's being said, in one form or another by more people.

Associated Press Go-To Guy on Islam

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs shows who the AP goes to as it's "expert" on things Islamic.

One of the most insidious and deceptive mainstream media practices is quoting radical Islamists (or radical leftists) as “experts” without providing any context to evaluate their statements.

Here’s a prime example in an Associated Press article by William J. Kole, promoting the nonsensical, ahistorical view that US/British “foreign policy” is somehow to blame for the global jihad: Plot Shows Rise of Extremism in Europe.

To advance this theory (which is really a thinly veiled threat), Kole opened his Rolodex and found an “expert” to opine on the matter—Azzam Timimi, one of the most hard-core Islamists currently operating in Britain. But you won’t find this out from Kole’s article.

Read the whole thing and then click on the link that shows the AP's "expert" ranting about "eradicating the cancer." You can guess who the "cancer" is. It's Israel. "It's a matter of time" until Israel is eradicated.

Well, Timini is an expert.

Point Five: Exclusive Preview: Mike Wallace Interviews Ahmadinejad

Click on the link. Heh.

Historians: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Was Overreaction. European Leaders Blame Jews for Disproportionate Response

Groupthink: If today's NY Times editors were in charge in 1943

Guns in the Closet
At home in a town in southern Germany, an SS fighter waits to be called to action.

Hamburg, 1944 - Plumes of black smoke begin to fan out over the coastline in the distance. We ask someone in town what has happened. He tells us it's the power plant; the Americans have struck it with a missile. But it's impossible to confirm because the roads leading to it were bombed early in the offensive.

In fact, Germany's main north-south road is so pocked with bomb craters, blown-out bridges and blasted highway spans that there is only one route left for drivers headed into Berlin.

It is in this unfortunate but familiar reality for Germany that the new landscape is being formed - deepening current loyalties rather than shifting them.

Nowhere is that more clear than in the area I am traveling today, a Nazi stronghold north of the city of Duesseldorf. Here, I am told, few families have fled. Instead, they are waiting for the call of Nazi leader Adolph Hitler to come south to fight the Americans.

It's not a difficult or even particularly mysterious undertaking to meet members of the National Socialist Party. Politically, they are part of the current German government and have been highly visible throughout the country, particularly for the millions of der volk in Germany. But it is the Nazis with which America says it is at war.

Even its critics concede that the Nazis are a well-organized politically and highly disciplined militarily, and the two are woven together through common religious, cultural and social threads.

"They are an integral part of the fabric of German society here," a source with an intimate knowledge of Nazis who did not want to be identified told me. "It's a fallacy to think they can be cleaned out or eliminated."

We meet "Heinrich" at his home and sit down to talk in his living room, while his four-month-old baby daughter lies on a blanket on the floor. He is in his late 20s and has a calm face. He is polite but has a resolute sense about him that creates a cautious distance. Like many fighters, he says, he has another job and only joins the SS when he's needed.

But even though he's not on the front lines now, he says there is still a lot of work to do in the village — like looking for American spies. "We caught someone last night, he says, "sneaking around in the middle of the night."

"What do you do with 'spies' after you catch them?" I ask. "We question them for a while," he says, "then turn them over to the (German) army."

As for the fighting in the south, he says it's not necessary for him to leave yet. "I have a job to do and if the Americans want to come inside," he says, "then we'll do our job and defend our families."

Read the rest...

Flying Pig Alert: The UK Guardian: "These ludicrous lies about the West and Islam "

This is incredible. The Guardian is possibly the most Lefward of Britain's major papers:

The first Islamist terrorist plot against New York's World Trade Centre was carried out on 26 February 1993 with a car bomb under one of the twin towers. It killed six people but failed in its aim of bringing the whole building down. To achieve that, another plot was hatched.

Meanwhile, British and American foreign policy was focused not on the Islamic world, but on the unstable transition of former communist countries to democracy. Twice during the Nineties, Nato launched military interventions in the Balkans, both aimed at protecting Muslim populations in Bosnia and Kosovo. What Middle East policy there was focused on diplomatic efforts, led by President Clinton, to negotiate lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

This was hardly a Western war against Islam. Britain and America spent much of the Nineties trying to prevent conflicts or to resolve them. At worst, as shamefully in Rwanda, they simply ignored them. They were transparently not running a conspiracy to trample the Muslim faithful underfoot. The people who depicted it that way were a tiny minority telling lies to justify murder.

But things have changed. The argument that terrorism is, in fact, a response to Western actions overseas has gained currency. It was voiced most recently on Saturday in an open letter by a number of influential British Muslim leaders to Tony Blair. The Prime Minister's policy in the Middle East, they said, puts British lives at risk. The implication is that the young Britons who last week were accused of plotting to blow up passenger planes in mid-air would have been less susceptible to al-Qaeda recruitment had Britain not fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Policy should be changed, they said, to avoid giving ideological 'ammunition to extremists'.

There is indeed a plausible argument that military action in recent years has made Britain less, not more, secure. In particular, the conduct of the war in Iraq, regardless of the virtues of removing Saddam Hussein from office, has been riddled with error. The absence of weapons of mass destruction, removal of which was the premise for war, has undermined trust in the Prime Minister. Meanwhile, engagement in Iraq has made it harder to secure victory in Afghanistan, where the anti-terror justification for war was rock solid.

But even within the bleakest possible analysis of Mr Blair's foreign policy, it is still simply not true that the West is waging war on Islam. Just as it is not true that the CIA was really behind the 11 September attacks or any other arrant conspiratorial nonsense that enjoys widespread credence in the Middle East and beyond. It is also a logical and moral absurdity to imply, as some critics of British policy have done, that mass murder is somehow less atrocious when it is motivated by an elaborate narrative of political grievance.

If young British Muslims are alienated, that is sad and their anger should be addressed. But anyone whose alienation leads them to want to kill indiscriminately has crossed a line into psychopathic criminality. Policy cannot be dictated by the need to placate such people.

British Muslim leaders are entitled, along with everybody else, to raise questions about the conduct and consequences of Mr Blair's foreign policy. But they have a more immediate responsibility to promote the truth: that Britain is not the aggressor in a war against Islam; that no such war exists; that there is no glory in murder dressed as martyrdom and that terrorism is never excused by bogus accounts of historical victimisation.

Lebanon About To Fall

Does anyone else find it interesting that the real Israeli push into Lebanon begins AFTER the UN cease-fire agreement is passed? Have the US and the Israeli governments pulled a fast one on Hezbolla and the Islamofacists? Is all the wailing and gnashing to teeth on the Right wrong? Is it possible to mislead Charles Krauthammer?

The cease-fire agreement appears to have created a crisis in Lebanon's government, as a Cabinet meeting of Siniora's government has been abruptly cancelled. The Cabinet was supposed to vote on a plan to deploy their army into southern Lebanon and to displace Hezbollah. That has now been indefinitely delayed -- which means that Israel is not bound by the agreement to stop fighting:

Read Captain's Quarters, icluding the comments...

Day By Day

The Corruption of the Media

EU Referendum begins a summary of the media event at Qana.

It is apt that an organisation that has become a purveyor of lies should respond to that charge by producing yet more lies. And that is precisely what Associated Press have done today, in their faux eulogy of "Green Helmet", picked up by Little Green Footballs, amongst others

The picture produced with the story, itself is a lie. Divested of his trade-mark green helmet, and orange high-visibility waistcoat, Salam Daher, as we now know him, is shown with blue helmet and flack jacket. This, as any observer of the scene will know, is the garb adopted by media personnel in the field, which makes it highly probable that "Green Helmet" has been loaned the gear for yet another staged shot by an AP photographer.

Read the rest. It's a truly heroic effort.

LA Times in Reutergate?

The LA Times Tim Rutten takes a look at the faux journalism coming out of the Middle East and asks why the MSM isn’t looking at this issue.

THE controversy this week over Reuters' distribution of digitally manipulated, falsely labeled and — probably — staged photos of the fighting in Lebanon hasn't been nearly as large as it should have been.
...
There are, however, two problems here, and they're the reason this controversy shouldn't be allowed to sputter to its inglorious conclusion just yet: One of these has to do with the scope of what strongly appears to be wider fabrication in the photojournalism Reuters and other news agencies are obtaining from their freelancers in Lebanon. The other is the U.S. news media's grudging response to the revelation of Hajj's misconduct and its utter lack of interest in exploring whether his is a unique or representative case.

Thus far, only a handful of relatively brief stories on this affair have appeared in major American papers. The Times picked up one from the Washington Post, which focused mainly on the politics of Johnson's website. The New York Times, which ran one of Hajj's photos on its front page Saturday, reported that it has published eight of his pictures since 2003, but none were altered. It then went on to quote other papers about steps they take to detect fraudulent images. No paper has taken up the challenge of determining whether there's anything dodgy about the flow of freelance photos Reuters and other news agencies — including the Associated Press, which also transmitted images made by Hajj — are sending out of tormented Lebanon.

After all, it reflects on the honesty and integrity of their product, something that should be protected with every fiber in their being, not covered up and hidden under the rug. Believability is incredibly important for the business model of the mainstream media. If the content of the LA Times become viewed as reliable as the three headed Venusians baby pictures from the News Of the World or the Globe, it may as well close its doors.

When a bottle of Tylenol was discovered to have been deliberately poisoned, Johnson & Johnson recalled every bottle and did everything it could to reassure the public that in the future, it would package Tylenol in tamper proof containers.

So why is the MSM reacting by generally ignoring the story or changing the subject by focusing on the personality of Charles Johnson? I think that there are two explanations that are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they reinforce each other.

First, the MSM doesn’t really think they have a problem. Since their product is so customized and at the same time so evanescent, their concept of “quality control” is laughably out of date. They believe that when you publish several hundred stories a day, and it’s all done virtually “by hand,” they believe that they do a damn fine job by getting it mostly right most of the time. And if they don’t … well their product is usually discarded or used to line animal cages, within minutes or at most hours of delivery. They ask, how do you run quality control on a picture from the other side of the globe when the paper has to begin printing by midnight? Checking for “photo shopped” images or “staged” photos? Don’t be silly, we have to fill those spaces not already sold by our sales department to the advertisers. And staged or altered photos are usually more visually appealing. “Get your dead girl pictures here!” and sell more papers and sell more advertising at higher rates. So the dirty little secret is that editors have an incentive not to look too closely at the stuff they’re printing. And if there is a mistake, it gets thrown out with the trash; sort of like the surgeon’s mistakes. Except surgeons can get sued for their mistakes while the press can’t.

Second, the press is still run by the people who firmly believe the old saying that you don’t pick a fight with a guy who buys his ink by the barrel. In the good old days, what could the victim of a news error do? OK, perhaps a letter to the editor, which the editor, as the judge, jury and executioner, could deign to print … or not. Especially in the day of media monopolies – which includes most US cities – the reader was at the mercy of the almighty editor. You took what they editor shoveled out or … you did without. Complain about content? Newspapers always claimed to be concerned, but they were really not. What were you going to do, start your own newspaper? That’s funny!

Well, that alternative newspaper has arrived. Sure, it’s small, struggling, and has a lot of flaws. And it’s mostly run by enthusiastic amateurs as a hobby. But its circulation is soaring and its editors and writers are real experts on the subject they discuss, not j-school grads whose forte is English composition. And the j-school grads are having trouble coping.

Know what section the LA Times put Rutten's column? Entertainment News.

NBC-2 Gives Lesson In Biased News Reporting

From Naples News via FreeRepublic:

The scene: A class in “News Reporting for Beginners.” The teacher speaks:

“Class, today we cover how to do a biased, unfair, report. We teach this because it’s a sure-fire way to success in today’s TV news.

“Doing one-sided news has many advantages. It saves time, not having to go get extra facts.

Frankly, being fair is a pain in the rear. It can bog down your report with such tiresome words as ‘however’ and ‘on the other hand.’

“Being fair and too many facts can confuse viewers.”

The teacher shows a video from NBC-2 News. The reporter, Jason Ferrell, tells viewers that “a group of concerned voters wants to make changes in the way Marco Island is governed by giving the city manager less power.” Ferrell explains that “concerned voters” want the city manager to face a voter referendum every two years. If a majority of voters gives him a thumbs down, he’s is fired.

We see a shadowy head shot of City Manager Bill Moss talking, but we don’t hear what he’s saying as the reporter tells us Moss “has recently angered some voters for promoting the city’s controversial sewer system.”

We hear 11 seconds of three people who want to vote on city managers.

“What makes that report a classic example of how to get ahead in TV news?” the teacher asks.

Read the rest...

Israeli troops reach the Litani River

From the AP - not to be relied upon:

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Israeli helicopters flew hundreds of commandos into the Hezbollah heartland, and some army units reached the Litani River on Saturday as both sides indicated they would accept a U.N. cease-fire plan to stop heavy fighting still raging in southern Lebanon

Child Abuse, Islam Style

Watch this.

Pat Boone: The ACLU: Malignant – and growing

From WorldNetDaily, some thoughts on the ACLU

Look at just a few of the countless things this deviant group supports and even actively promotes:

• Abortion on demand throughout pregnancy
• Eradication of any reference to the Ten Commandments or the Bible from public buildings or hillsides or even cemeteries
• Extended constitutional protection for our sworn enemies!
• Free access to pornography, including Internet pornography access for children
• Freedom to desecrate the American flag
• Tax-exempt status for Satanists
• Actively pro-homosexual school curriculums
• Legalized prostitution
• Legalized drugs
• Nudist camps for teenagers
• Same sex "marriage"

And that's just a brief, partial list of their heavy-handed, activist campaigns!

And what does the Anti Christian Litigation Union oppose?

• "God Bless America" banners in schools!
• "Abstinence before marriage" sex education
• Christian Homeschooling
• Legalized voluntary, majority-approved prayer in schools
• Sobriety checkpoints and drug searches
• Medical safety reporting of AIDS cases
• Parental consent for teen abortions
• Most post-9/11 security measures
• Any Christian display in public
• Any use of religious symbols for even historical displays
• Any reference to God, let alone Jesus, in a school child's speech, paper or essay answer!

Was I exaggerating? I've only scratched the surface!

This group of
U.S.-educated lawyers has proudly filed expensive suits:

• leading to the U.S. Defense Department banning military units from sponsoring Boy Scout troops or even letting them meet on government property;
• supporting an 18-year-old man accused of raping a 14-year-old mentally handicapped boy, arguing that teens should be "free from state compulsion";
• representing the pro-pedophile North American Man/Boy Love Association – at no cost! – after two group members were accused of raping and murdering a 10-year-old boy;
• successfully driving Boy Scouts out of a local park, because Scouts do not permit homosexual leaders; then winning 940,000 tax dollars to cover their attorney fees and court costs!
• successfully pressuring the L.A. County Board of Supervisors to remove a tiny cross from the long-official county seal (though no one had objected to it) – and then pledging to target all other U.S. governmental agencies with any religious symbols on their seals;
• recommending that New Orleans public school officials be "fined or jailed" for failing to stop a prayer before a high-school football game – claiming that prayer at school-related functions is "un-American and immoral"!

JohnHuang2 on the "Civil War"

From FreeRepublic.com JohnHuang2's latest essay:

Have a happy civil war!

Right now, the one question on everyone's lips seems to be, 'Will there be a ceasefire?' The more relevant question is: Can there be peace? If history is any guide, the answer is yes, but only when a clear winner emerges. At any rate, far from a lull in the fighting, the conflict continued to rage this past week, escalating into some of the fiercest battles since the fighting began, with each side vowing to fight to the finish. Even amid rising calls for an immediate halt to hostilities, each side pounded the other side, trading blow for blow, hit for hit. punch for punch, counterpunch for counterpunch.

But enough about Joe Lieberman and Ned Lamont. By the way, do you know how far to the left this guy is? For starters, he denounced Bush's tax cuts. He denounced Bush's marriage Amendment. He denounced Bush on global warming. He denounced Bush's stance on stem cell research. He condemns proposed drilling in Alaska. He's for racial quotas. He's anti-gun. He's pro-abort. But enough about Joe Lieberman.

As for Ned Lamont, the pride of the nutroots, he's with Lieberman on abortion, guns, quotas, abortion, global warming, gay rights, abortion, taxes, stem cell research, not drilling for oil. But Lieberman agrees with Bush on one issue -- Iraq. Which makes Lieberman Bush's 'lap dog.' Nothing epitomizes how utterly deranged the Democrat Party has become than the just-concluded Lieberman-Lamont Senate primary race in Connecticut. The Hezbollah wing of the Democrat Party is bound and determined to finish off what remains of the Democrat Party. And it isn't exactly helpful these days to be 'Joooooish' in a party that has a teenage crush on Hezbollah.

(To be fair, most Democrats will concede Jews are people, too . . . people who need to be purged, people who need to be drummed out of the party . . . those kinda people.)

With Hezbo 'fighters' getting their brains knocked out of their rear-ends by those "Zionist Pigs," the Connecticut primary gave Hezbollahcrats a juicy shot at taking down a "Zionist Pig" of their own. Democrats call this a very good start. For peace.

Illustrating the trouble Lieberman was in with the party's psychotic base, in June Lieberman led cable guy Lamont by 15 percentage points, 55%-40%. Then Lieberman is caught red-handed by his party making statements deemed pro-American. Statements like 'Osama is the enemy, not Wal-Mart or Bush.' Couldn't have been slips of the tongue. And there was that image of Lieberman puckering up and kissing pResident Evil. And, of course, the nagging suspicion he watches Fox News. So, the race becomes a toss-up.

Then a Lamont blogger, projecting the party's image of tolerance, posted a doctored photo of Lieberman in blackface. Democrats were appalled. Lieberman's a BLACK JEW?! Or is it Reuters? The blogger, Jane Hamsher, tried to whitewash the whole thing. But the damage to Lieberman was done.

The way things are going with Democrats, Lieberman would've been better off saying he kissed another man because he's gay or puckered up to Arafat's wife, Suha. A Cindy Sheehan rant about 'Jews causing all of the world's wars!', and he'd have won in a landslide.

With Lamont, Democrats return to their roots. Lamont loved his nearly all-white country club, the Round Hill (though, in fairness, he recently dropped his 16-year membership in the racist club to show he's more progressive than Lieberman who never belonged to a racist club.) Lamont told the New York Times he had just discovered the club wasn't 'diverse' enough (although, by 'diversity' and 'people of color,' Lamont probably means white guys in blackface.)

In a true sign he's a man of the people, Lamont's net worth is valued to be somewhere between $90 million and $300 gazillion. The struggling Greenwich proletarian's chief accomplishment in life is being J.P. Morgan & Co. honcho Thomas Lamont's great-grandson.

As for the war in Iraq, Ned Lamont was so distraught at the idea of 'war profiteers' that he decided to become one, buying up to $50,000 in Halliburton stock via one of the more than a dozen accounts handled for him by Goldman Sachs.

Summing up, a war profiteer is the big cheese of the 'peace movement' which also calls itself a 'populist movement' which picked a zillionaire upper class patrician because upper class patricians are where you go for someone in touch with the people. It's a sign that Democrats really learned their lesson from 2004 that they go from John Kerry, who mooched off his wife, to Lamont who mooched off his ancestors.

On issues, after warrantless searches for Bush scandals turned up nothing, Democrats, showing their usual flair for winners, are back to propping up that same dead horse -- the war in Iraq. It proved such a huge success for president Kerry.

Along these lines, the Washington Post noted on Sunday how the 'peace' libbies, who are "driven by their intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph" with Ned Lamont, which is nearly two years after being on the brink of claiming their most significant triumph with John Kerry, which was two years after being on the brink of claiming their most significant triumph with Tom Dashcle. So, four years ago, Democrats went over the brink, the GOP won the Senate back that November (2002) and John Kerry became a footnote in French history two years later. Now, with Ned Lamont to take them over the brink, the 'peace Democrats' can focus on losing decisively to Lieberman in November.

In the meantime, what does the growing civil war between the Shiite and Sunni Democrats in Connecticut and elsewhere mean? If you listen to the mythological talking points of the party grandees, Lamont's win has national implications which can be extrapolated to the entire party but DON'T CALL US THE PEACE PARTY since Lamont's win in one small state can't be extrapolated to the entire party.

E.J. Dionne said on Hardball that he thinks the headline from all this should be, Connecticut Voters Send a Message to Bush and Republicans better start worrying in the Fall. I doubt that's the message you can glean from a closed Democrat primary in a state not widely known for its unswerving devotion to Republicans -- a state where Bush, in a three-way matchup, would lose decisively to Mullah Omar and mad cow disease.

Political scientist Larry Sabato, who "scientifically" predicted Kerry would beat Bush, noted that Lamont's win is terrible news for Republicans. "The real question is what happens with Bush and Iraq through November." Bush may not even get on the ballot! So, let's do the liberal math: Democrats eating their own + split on the war + returning to McGovern roots + shouting match + beating each other up all the way to November = bad news for Republicans. Breaks my heart.

Karl Rove couldn't have planned this any better. Have a happy civil war, libbies.

"NBC Today" Fake Shot

Newsbusters busts NBC's Today Show for this report by Richard Engel on the results of Israel's attacks in Lebanon. NBC shows a picture of an ambulance with a hole in it's roof as "proof" that Israel is attacking ambulances. The problem is that the hole, which is right in the middle of the Red Cross on the roof, could not possibly be the result of a hit by any weapon.

A shell or missile that size hitting the ambulance would not leave the rest of the vehicle intact. All that you would see would be twisted wreckage and a debris field. A more reasonable explanation for the hole is the removal of the emergency light or siren which also explains why the hole is centered precisely on the cross.

Click on the link for the story and pictures.

I called the NBC Today show and spoke to a representative asking for the name of the person who is responsible for authenticating the material that goes out on the air. The representative replied that they do not give out names of anyone on the show. When asked, replied that he did not know of anyone who actually fact checks these things.

Write Your Own “True Story”

From the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler we get:

LC & IB Ace, in honor of MSNBC running with every bit of anecdotal blather without bothering to as much as ask questions (it’s called “professional journalism”, so don’t you DARE question it!), is inviting you all to write up stories of your own, stories that you’ve presumably “heard from somebody” even though it doesn’t really matter if you have or if you just made them up on the spot. Ace, in the time-honored tradition of “professional journalism” and the enormously high ethical standards of the MSM, won’t fact-check them in the least.

We sorta liked the MSNBC “true story” that he posted as an example of the professional MSM standard of printing anything they like to print, except for the fact that the Lebanese telling it were rank amateurs, so we offer up the new an improved version with our additions in italics:

The Horiz family told me they walked for two days as Israel shelled their village, dodging shells and shrapnel for 48 hours straight while IDF death commandos sniped at the weak from every rooftop and every tree, thinning the ranks and doing unspeakable things to the poor unfortunates that weren’t lucky enough to die at first.

“My three-year-old son didn’t have any shoes,” said the father, “they got blown off along with the lower part of his legs, so he had to hump to this place on the two bleeding stumps, pausing every five minutes to staunch the hemorrhage with a burning stick while I fended off packs of ravenous wolves with my bare hands.”

Abeer Baz walked here, too, through 8 feet high piles of snow in a zero visibility blizzard.

“They bombed my neighbor’s house and we had to leave,” she said. “We’d been bombed out of our own house a week earlier and were all living in a crumpled shoe box underneath his staircase, where we had to subsist on a diet of the cockroaches that had been killed by the nerve gas the IAF bombed us with every 30 seconds.”

Just hours after she gave birth to her baby six days ago, Baz walked 10 miles to get here, dragging the infant behind her by the still-attached umbilical cord, left on since the midwife had been raped, bayonetted and eaten by IDF commandos before she could cut it.

In the emergency room, we found 70-year-old Latifa Nasr. Dr. Nabil Harquosa said an Israeli shell destroyed her house, her entire neighborhood, a daycare center and the Hezbollah baby milk factory down the street.

“She stayed from last night until tonight under the destruction,” said Harquosa.

There, much better. You have to leave this stuff to the professionals, you know.

AISH Summary of Media Fraud

Click on the link for an interesting summary of MSM Hezbolla propaganda from the war.