Bill's Bites -- 2006.10.10
Contributed by Bill Faith
The webmaster's blog-within-a-blog.
Continuously updated, newest items at the top.
Destitute Dog -- Please read this and help if you can.
Video: Vets for Freedom co-founder Wade Zirkle on “freeSpeech”
Allhpundit
Anyone with a resume like this is worth hearing out. Thirty thousand more troops, he says, and we should be able to finish the job.
Listen to the man. He knows what he's talking about.
Explosions, Fire Rip U.S.
Ammo Base in Baghdad
Fire at U.S. ammunition depot in southern Baghdad caused a series of massive explosions; no word on cause, injuries
• Video: Explosions, Fire at Ammo Supply Point
Breaking:
Fire at Baghdad ammo depot sets off chain reaction of explosions
It’s on Fox and CNN right now. One flash after another for the past five or ten minutes, some of them enormous. Omar’s liveblogging it at Iraq the Model.
A metaphor for the whole war, really.
Update: No injuries reported yet but it’s hard to believe that’ll hold. Explosions are still going off.
Update: It’s happening at FOB Falcon: ...
Video:
Arizona 9/11 memorial designers wanted to commemorate hijackers
Allahpundit
Why wouldn’t they? There are no enemies in their cosmology (except Bush). Violence itself is the enemy.
Which means the hijackers are victims too.
Oh, and we also sort of deserved it because of our “total support of Israel.” And the Afghan civilians who were accidentally killed in a bombing run ten months later belong on the memorial because they’re all “part of the tragedy of war, terrorism, hatred, [and] mistrust of everyone else.”
We’re going to lose. You know that, right?
[video link]
*** 19:22 The Arizona 9/11 memorial disgrace, contd.
Michelle Malkin
Just when you think the story couldn't get any worse and had died down, Fox News Channel's Special Report with Brit Hume uncovers this appalling news about the Arizona 9/11 moonbat memorial. Ace: Some of the commissioners actually wanted to add 19 more characters to represent the deaths of the 19 terrorist murderers who killed the victims.
The commissioner interviewed, Paul Eppinger, defends it wholeheartedly, claiming that the inscription about "Middle East Violence Causes Attacks" reflects the "fact" that "our foreign policy for years has focused on total support of Israel."
Don't believe it? ...
al Qaeda aims for the White House
Michelle Malkin
Via Reuters: A man believed to be a top al Qaeda militant who escaped from a U.S. jail near Kabul was shown in a new videotape broadcast on Tuesday exhorting followers in Afghanistan to fight on until they attack the White House.
"Allah will not be pleased until we reach the rooftop of the White House," Abu Yahya al-Libi was shown telling fighters in the tape aired by the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television. ...
Fauxtography updates
Michelle Malkin
Two interesting items for you:
[image]
Tyler Hicks, photographer of the fake Lebanese Pieta, explains himself in a short piece at PDN and posted at the Lightstalkers website (hat tip - Solomonia): My caption, as filed to The New York Times, was verbatim as follows: ... The problem came later when this photograph appeared among a slide show of my photographs on The New York Times website. The web published the following caption: ... As you can see, the caption was totally misleading. I received an apology from the person responsible at the website, ...
Video: The Zucker ad;
Flashback: Zucker ad goofed on Kerry in 2004 (H/T)
Might as well link. Everyone else will.
Says Drudge: The DRUDGE REPORT has obtained an exclusive copy of a “scary” campaign advertisement created by Hollywood producer and director David Zucker that was intended to be used by GOP organizations in the closing weeks of the 2006 campaign.
However, the advertisement was deemed “too hot” by GOP strategists all across Washington, DC who have refused to use it!…
One GOP strategist said “jaws dropped” when the ad was first viewed. “Nobody could believe Zucker thought any political organization could use this ad. It makes a point, but it’s way over the top.”
But according to Jewish Journal in a report dated October 6: ...
Video: Outrageously outrageous airport security ad
The Freepers are in heaven.
Look out, there’s a guy in a headdress! ...
[video link]
Harper’s: Dem operative gave us Foley e-mails back in May
Gateway Pundit’s excited and thinks he and Red State might have identified who that operative is. The guy they’ve fingered left Rodney Alexander’s office in 2004, though. The e-mails that were provided to Harper’s — the creepy but not sexual “send me a picture of you” messages — weren’t written until 2005.
Anyway, as Ken Silverstein says: ...
Harvard prof says diversity not an unqualified good
Not just any Harvard prof. Robert Putnam, who argued famously in “Bowling Alone” that Americans’ participation in civic groups and other community social structures had declined dramatically over the past 50 years. Is he preparing to tie that phenomenon somehow to ethnic diversity? Maybe so: A bleak picture of the corrosive effects of ethnic diversity has been revealed in research by Harvard University’s Robert Putnam, one of the world’s most influential political scientists…
The core message of the research was that, “in the presence of diversity, we hunker down”, he said. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”…
Joel Stein: I don’t support the troops but I do sort of support torture
You remember Joel Stein. Sure you do.
As much as righties loathe him, I think most of us grudgingly respect him for his honesty. He proceeds logically about these things: if you don’t support the war, you can’t really support the troops. And if you do support the war, why wouldn’t you support the occasional waterboarding?
And why would you want to bring democracy to a bunch of Arabs? ...
AmSpec hearsay:
Foley story was supposed to break later this month
Another day, another anonymous left-wing source who knows someone who might have overheard something at a party somewhere in DC quoted in the Prowler: According to one political consultant with ties to the DNC and other party organizations, “I’m hearing the Foley story wasn’t supposed to drop until about ten days out of the election. It was supposed the coup de grace, not the first shot.”
So why the rush? ...
John Kerry: Just dumb
Michelle Malkin
Lots of people are e-mailing me John Kerry's remarks on the Bill Maher show last Friday and suggesting he has a Bush assassination fantasy.
I don't think so. He was lamely trying to riff off a metaphor. Not bloodthirsty. Just really, really dumb.
Judge for yourselves. Warning: It is extremely painful to behold. ...
*** 12:18 Video: Kerry jokes about killing Bush
Allahpundit
He’s not homicidal, says the boss, just stupid. True enough, although I think it’s more than that. He likes the tough talk.
Makes him feel like a man.
From last night’s Hannity & Colmes. Say, Alan makes a good point, doesn’t he? ...
Salman Rushdie: "Veils suck"
Author Salman Rushdie doesn't mince words in his defense of former British Foreign Minister Jack Straw, who has been embroiled in Muslim Veil Rage: Prime Minister Tony Blair and author Salman Rushdie praised a British official on Tuesday for raising the difficult issue of whether Muslim women visiting his office should remove their veils.
The comment by Jack Straw, a former foreign secretary who now is leader of the House of Commons, has plunged Britain into a debate over Islamic integration.
"It's important these issues are raised and discussed, and I think it's perfectly sensible if you raise it in a measured and considered way, which he did," Blair said of Straw during an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. television outside his office. "I think we can have these discussions without people becoming hysterical either way about it."
Rushdie, whose book "The Satanic Verses," once led to death threats against him by Islamic clerics, told BBC radio that Straw "was expressing an important opinion, which is that veils suck, which they do. I think the veil is a way of taking power away from women." ....
A Fristful of fence after all
Scott Johnson
Republican National Committee e-campaign director Patrick Ruffini wrote us and others yesterday to assure us that President Bush would sign the Secure Fence Act: There has been some speculation in the blogosphere today that President Bush would not sign the Secure Fence Act, after signing a bill for funding border fencing last week. This is not the case. President Bush will sign the Secure Fence Act. ...
Mexico Wants UN To Block Fence
Ed Morrissey
Mexico wants to take the border fence authorized by Congress last month to the UN, in order to get it stopped. Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez says that Mexican lawyers will research their cause to determine whether the UN can intervene: Mexico's foreign secretary said Monday the country may take a dispute over U.S. plans to build a fence on the Mexican border to the United Nations.
Luis Ernesto Derbez told reporters in Paris, his first stop on a European tour, that a legal investigation was under way to determine whether Mexico has a case.
Bridge To Nowhere Senator Defeats Reform Again
Ted Stevens, who championed the infamous Bridge to Nowhere and threatened to quit the Senate if denied his pork, has quietly undermined another attempt at pork reform. Robert Novak reports that Stevens stripped a key requirement in the Defense appropriation that would have required a review of all earmarks: Sen. Ted Stevens, considered the Republican king of pork, just before the pre-election congressional recess killed a requirement for the Defense Department to evaluate unauthorized earmarks imposed by members of Congress on the Pentagon. ...
Paper Trails At The Voting Booth
Ed Morrissey
E. J. Dionne tackles the controversy over electronic voting machines that has arisen since their rushed implementation following the 2000 presidential election. Dionne argues that a little paranoia isn't always a bad thing: Sometimes, paranoids are right. And sometimes even when paranoids are wrong, it's worth considering what they're worried about.
I speak here of all who are worried sick that those new, fancy high-tech voting systems can be hacked, fiddled with and otherwise made to record votes that aren't cast or fail to record votes that are. ...
For most of us, the perfectly obvious thing was to question why a balloting process that had been in use for decades had to be tossed aside simply because one party didn't like the outcome of the race. In California, we had used the butterfly ballot for decades; we had one in every election in which I voted. The punch-card ballots made it very easy to ensure that my vote was recorded correctly, and booth instructions warned voters to check that all chads got properly cleared from the ballot before filing it.
All of a sudden, because of one close election, American voters suddenly discovered that the venerable punch-card ballot was the gravest threat to democracy since Huey Long and J. Edgar Hoover. ...
Saddam's Trial Resumes
The trial of Saddam Hussein continued today, and the testimony painted a grim picture of life and death under his regime's grip: Prison guards under Saddam Hussein used to bury detainees alive and watch women as they bathed, occasionally shooting over their heads, a former female prisoner testified Monday in the genocide trial of the ex-president.
Speaking in Kurdish through an Arabic interpreter, the 31-year-old witness recalled what she saw as a 13-year-old girl who was detained during Saddam's offensive against the Kurds in the late 1980s. ...
*** 11:29 The Saddam Hussein show trial
Michelle Malkin
Crikey, can they hurry up and get this over with? Now, he's shouting Koran verses and inciting violence from the courtroom when he isn't snacking on Cheetos in his cell. It's a circus and a nightmare: The chief judge at Saddam Hussein's genocide trial has expelled the former Iraqi leader from court after he shouted out a verse from the Koran.
It is the fourth time in recent weeks the former dictator has been ejected from his Baghdad trial for alleged war crimes and genocide against the Kurds. ...
PressPlay: Political Ad Don'ts
Is Bush going to veto the border fence?
Update: Bill not formally presented yet;
Update: Mexico to take up fence with UN?
[Major updates since I linked yesterday. Keep scrolling.]
Video: Michelle on the Columbia Minutemen debacle
Allahpundit
The Factor’s on the road this week so the boss was treated to a free trip to Chicago and a live studio audience tonight. She was initially told she’d be talking about John Mark Karr of all things, but thankfully O’R settled on a better idea.
Her point about no one ever throwing pies at Michael Moore is well taken, but I can’t help thinking there’s an easy fat joke in there somewhere that she missed. Too bad.
[video link]
As for the lovely KP, I’m reliably informed that she and the boss had dinner together tonight — a fact which should by itself be enough to have her banned from the party. ...
Garry Trudeau slams Mohammed cartoons;
Update: Two Danish teens in hiding
Allahpundit
Doonesburied: Q. What did you make of the Danish cartoon mess? I understand that you said you would never play with the image of Allah. But did you feel you should have done so out of a sense of professional solidarity, or to make a statement about freedom of speech?
A. What exactly would that statement be? That we can say whatever we want in the West? Everyone already knows that. So then the question becomes, should we say whatever we want? That, to me, is the crux. Do you hurt people just because you can? Because you feel they shouldn’t be deeply hurt, does that mean they aren’t? Should the New York Times run vicious caricatures of blacks and Jews just to show the First Amendment in action? At some point, common sense and sensitivity have to be brought to bear.
Yeah, the thing is, not everyone does know that. Or else ...
Video: “Death of a President”
Allahpudit
It debuted tonight on Channel 4 in the UK. Think British lefties were excited? Front page of today’s London Paper:
[image]
Our pal kasper kasper has already ‘Tubed the moment of truth for posterity. With the possible exception of Colbert bombing at the correspondents dinner, it represents the absolutely zenith of nutroots porn. Keith Olbermann, eat your heart out:
[video link]
Bill's Bites --- 2006.10.09 Soft Bites -- 2006.10.09
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