Courtesy of Professor Reynolds, try this fun-filled link to the "underappreciated art of firecracker labels."
Courtesy of Professor Reynolds, try this fun-filled link to the "underappreciated art of firecracker labels."
On March 18, 2003, the day before ground forces entered Iraq, the president confronted a broad range of concerns regarding Saddam's weapons programs, his connections to terrorist organizations, his history of aggressive behavior, his use of poison gas, and his failure to comply with the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire agreement and subsequent U.N. resolutions.I don't know what happened to all of this stuff, except to guess that some of it is now in Syria. Maybe some of it is in the Bekaa. But we could only have learned about these weapons in one of two ways: by actively going and seizing them ---or by becoming passive victims of their use.
American intelligence and other foreign governments concluded at the time that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Senior Clinton administration officials stated that the regime possessed stockpiles. Saddam has "stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country," declared former Vice President Al Gore on September 23, 2002. And even a month after the invasion Defense Secretary William
Cohen believed we would find weapons: "I am convinced that he has them. I saw evidence back in 1998 when we would see the inspectors being barred from gaining entry into a warehouse for three hours with trucks rolling up and then moving those trucks out. I am absolutely convinced that there are weapons. We will find them."
On top of this were the findings contained in detailed U.N. reports. For example, on March 6, 2003, the United Nations issued a report on Iraq's "Unresolved Disarmament Issues." It stated that the "long list" of "unaccounted for" WMD-related material catalogued in December of 1998--the month inspections ended in Iraq--and beyond were still "unaccounted for." The list included: up to 3.9 tons of VX nerve agent (though inspectors believed Iraq had enough VX precursors to produce 200 tons of the agent and suspected that VX had been "weaponized"); 6,526 aerial chemical bombs; 550 mustard gas shells; 2,062 tons of Mustard precursors; 15,000 chemical munitions; 8,445 liters of anthrax; growth media that could have produced "3,000 - 11,000 litres of botulinum toxin, 6,000 - 16,000 litres of anthrax, up to 5,600 litres of Clostridium perfringens, and a significant quantity of an unknown bacterial agent." Moreover, Iraq was obligated to account for this material by providing "verifiable evidence" that it had, in fact, destroyed its proscribed materials.
I revealed in yesterday's taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine's emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source. I have known this for months but didn't want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury.I still don't think outing someone's spouse as a CIA operative would have been a particularly effective way of taking revenge on a Saddamite sympathizer, but maybe it is.
McLaughlin is seen in some markets on Friday night, so some websites have picked it up, including Drudge, but I don't expect it to have much impact because McLaughlin is not considered a news show and it will be pre-empted in the big markets on Sunday because of tennis.
Since I revealed the big scoop, I have had it reconfirmed by yet another highly authoritative source. Too many people know this. It should break wide open this week. I know Newsweek is working on an 'It's Rove!' story and will probably break it tomorrow.
Nothing is better than when a giant company makes an attempt to be cool with their marketing, only to do something that is completely moronic causing the very audience it is chasing to mock them.
[...]
[W]hen I headed over to Page2 on ESPN.com[,] I instantly was hit with a great McDonalds ad that can be seen below. Although I firmly believe that McDonalds is not advocating hot man on sandwich action, it is quite obvious that they did not do their homework on urban slang. If they had, it is likely that they would have realized "I’d Hit It" is not exactly the catch phrase to use when selling fast food.
A Hamas-led town council in the West Bank has banned outdoor music and dance performances planned as part of a summertime Palestinian festival.Gee, it's almost like Ashcroft draping a cloth over a statue, but not quite. I'm trying to think of the difference...
A Qalqilya council spokesman said it was partly to avoid damaging the grass.
But he also said the council had been elected to protect the conservative values of the city, which included not approving of men and women mixing.
In May the militant Hamas won the West Bank town's elections, ousting the mainstream Fatah party.
[...] creating a new word for Islamic terrorism changes how we perceive it, which affects how we fight it. This is especially true when the new word is actually a contraction of two other words, Islamic and fascism, into Islamofascism. The shortening restricts the ability to think critically about the alleged connection, short-circuiting rational thought and heading straight for the emotional centers.Nonsense. I don't use Islamofascism unthinkingly as though it were some tossed-off slur; I use it deliberately because it conveys exactly the notion these murderous Submitters have of a new global Caliphate. They do not draw any distinction between their religion and the world-state to which they aspire; therefore, Islamofascist pretty much covers it. They wish to put Sharia ---their law of militant domination of everyone from women to the dhimmis in their midst--- at the pinnacle of all human government. It is a legal and ideological system of spiritual repression, political illiberality, and genocidal xenophobia. Sounds like certain other fascist systems I've heard of.
Most of the militant Islamist groups around today simply have no economic ideas, plans, or principles. Yet the distinguishing characteristic of fascism -- what differentiates it from garden-variety socialism, racism, and antisemitism -- is intensely economic: fascism is totalitarianism that operates through corporatism.So what? There's more aspects to fascism than economics or an actual affinity with Mussolini or Hitler. There's also the hatred of pluralism and the psychotic adherence to orthodoxy and even the far-reaching control over the aesthetics of cultural being. Is there any more precise a term than Islamofascist to apply to a government like the Taliban? No. It captures what they are perfectly.
In his newscast tonight, "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams compared America's first presidents to the president-elect of Iran, alleged hostage-taker Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying they were "certainly revolutionaries and might have been called terrorists by the British crown."At best, Williams is a dilettante who was told by an intern that such a question would be clever. At worst, he is a news anchor.
At least six of the Americans held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran as hostages for 444 days claim Ahmadinejad was one of the leaders of the captors, having recognized him on television reports.
Williams' comment came in a question to reporter Andrea Mitchell.
At the end of Mitchell's report, Williams asked, "What would it all matter if proven true? Someone brought up today the first several U.S. presidents were certainly revolutionaries and might have been called 'terrorists' by the British crown, after all."
"This is the guy. There's no question about it" [...] "You could make him a blond and shave his whiskers, put him in a zoot suit and I'd still spot him."I wish I had the skills to PhotoShop that.
The mainstream media continue their faux outrage over the link that President Bush drew between September 11 and the Iraq war in his speech Tuesday night; here is one of countless examples. This is, frankly, mystifying; as one of our readers pointed out yesterday, the connection between the Iraq war and September 11 was made explicit in the text of the Congressional resolution that authorized military action in Iraq.Go ahead and read them. At least for a few hours there, the lying assholes in Congress who are [mad] at Bush right now thought that there was a link between the Saddamites and the atrocities of 11 September 2001.
One would think that administration critics like Joe Biden, John Kerry, Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer would remember what was in the resolution, since they voted for it. I can understand why it would be convenient for the Democrats to forget that the resolution that authorized the Iraq war specifically and repeatedly linked the rationale for that war to the September 11 attacks. It is not so clear why mainstream reporters and commentators are so willing to share the Democrats' amnesia.Does anyone remember how we first took on Hitler's Third Reich? By invading North Africa. If only we had sent in more troops and sent them into Fortress Europa from the start, all our boys would have been home in a couple of months and basking in the light of victory! Those idiots Roosevelt and Marshall and Eisenhower. What incompetence!
Q. Later this morning, many Members of the House Republican leadership, along with John Cornyn from the Senate, are holding a news conference on eminent domain, the decision of the Supreme Court the other day, and they are going to offer legislation that would restrict it, prohibiting federal funds from being used in such a manner.The only reasonable question a person could ask at this point is what the fuck? What the fuck is this woman talking about?
Two questions: What was your reaction to the Supreme Court decision on this topic, and what do you think about legislation to, in the minds of opponents at least, remedy or changing it?
Ms. Pelosi: As a Member of Congress, and actually all of us and anyone who holds a public office in our country, we take an oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Very central to that in that Constitution is the separation of powers. I believe that whatever you think about a particular decision of the Supreme Court, and I certainly have been in disagreement with them on many occasions, it is not appropriate for the Congress to say we're going to withhold funds for the Court because we don't like a decision.
Q Not on the Court, withhold funds from the eminent domain purchases that wouldn't involve public use. I apologize if I framed the question poorly. It wouldn't be withholding federal funds from the Court, but withhold Federal funds from eminent domain type purchases that are not just involved in public good.
Ms. Pelosi. Again, without focusing on the actual decision, just to say that when you withhold funds from enforcing a decision of the Supreme Court you are, in fact, nullifying a decision of the Supreme Court. This is in violation of the respect for separation of church -- powers in our Constitution, church and state as well. Sometimes the Republicans have a problem with that as well. But forgive my digression.
I'm wearing my badge of honor. Proudly.
suaveMEXICO CITY, June 29 - Just weeks after President Vicente Fox made an offhand remark that angered many African-Americans, the Mexican government has taken another action that shows the gulf in racial sensibilities between the countries: it put cartoon caricatures of a black boy on a series of stamps.As my little brother once said, "Way to go, Ex-Lax!"
Mexican postal officials on Tuesday unveiled the series of five stamps, a total of 750,000 stamps, depicting a character known as Memin Pinguin, a broadly drawn comic figure with thick lips, big eyes and protruding ears.
Created in 1943, the comic-book character was inspired by a Cuban child, its creators said. He is well-intentioned but hapless, and his mannerisms and speech reinforce 1940's stereotypes of blacks as lazy, mischievous and uneducated, anthropologists and civil rights advocates say. Comic books featuring the character are still being published in Mexico.
The stamps are part of a series that pays tribute to Mexican comic books. Memin Pinguin, the second in the series, was apparently chosen for this year's release because it is the 50th anniversary of the company that publishes the comic.Ha, ha, ha!
Publisher Manelick De la Parra told the government news agency Notimex the character would be a sort of goodwill ambassador on Mexican letters and postcards. "It seems nice if Memin can travel all over the world, spreading good news," de la Parra said, calling him "so charming, so affectionate, so wonderful, generous and friendly."
happyA hostage held alongside Australian Douglas Wood in Iraq has hired bounty hunters to track down his former captors, promising to eliminate them one by one.Fuck. Yeah.
Swede Ulf Hjertstrom, who was held for several weeks with Mr Wood in Baghdad, was released by his kidnappers on May 30.
Mr Hjertstrom has since claimed he shared information with US and Iraqi troops about Mr Wood which led to the release of the 63-year-old Australian engineers two weeks ago, after 47 days in captivity.
Now, he wants to find those responsible.
“I have now put some people to work to find these bastards,” he told the Ten Network today. “I invested about $50,000 so far and we will get them one by one.”
If you attended the University of Texas at any time during the past 15 years, you've probably had an encounter with TEX - Telephone Enrollment eXchange.What a funny little relic to ponder.
But because of new technology and more students turning to online registration, the TEX system is going out of service.
The carefully enunciating male voice is familiar for hundreds of thousands of UT students and alumni. They heard the greeting every time they registered, dropped or added a class or even checked a grade. Associate Registrar Mike Allen said TEX averaged 1 million calls per year.
The end of TEX has former students calling the famous number for one last listen.
His most famous last words actually came about by accident. When you end a call with TEX, he always wishes you “Good-bye and good luck.”Yes, indeed. Take care, Bill.
"And just out of the blue I said into the microphone ‘good-bye and good luck.’ It became part of the lure of TEX and the lure of Bill Livingston," Livingston said.
He's a person many haven't met, but almost everyone has a story about hanging onto his words when it’s time to call for final grades.
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For my own part, I believe that, if someone wishes to burn a flag, he should be free to do so. In the same way, if Democrat senators want to make speeches comparing the U.S. military to Nazis and the Khmer Rouge, they should be free to do so. It's always useful to know what people really believe.And that's the thing: if you hate this country so much that you would burn her most precious symbol, go ahead. Show us your ass.
[...]her family and friends worked assiduously to promote the image of her as a youthful idealist passionately moved by despair and injustice. ''My Name Is Rachel Corrie,'' a play about her, was a huge hit in London. Well, OK, it wasn't so much a play as a piece of sentimental agitprop so in thrall to its subject's golden innocence that the picture of Rachel on the cover of the Playbill shows her playing in the backyard, age 7 or so, wind in her hair, in a cute, pink T-shirt.We don't need to ban flag-burning. We just need to give these people enough rope.
There's another photograph of Rachel Corrie: at a Palestinian protest, headscarved, her face contorted with hate and rage, torching the Stars and Stripes. Which is the real Rachel Corrie? The "schoolgirl idealist" caught up in the cycle of violence? Or the grown woman burning the flag of her own country? Well, that's your call. But because that second photograph exists, we at least have a choice.
Have you seen that Rachel Corrie flag-burning photo? If you follow Charles Johnson's invaluable Little Green Footballs Web site and a few other Internet outposts, you will have. But you'll look for it in vain in the innumerable cooing profiles of the "passionate activist" that have appeared in the world's newspapers.
surprisedThe Arab TV news network criticized by the new Iraqi government and others for its anti-American bias and willingness to carry the messages of terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida, is headed for the U.S.-Mexico border to document how easy it is to enter America illegally.That's pretty mindblowing, isn't it? Somehow, it's even worse than the Mexican government producing pamphlets and DVDs for the edification of its own citizens who wish to illegally enter our country.
Al-Jazeera has contacted Minuteman Civil Defense Corps leader Chris Simcox to try to arrange interviews. Simcox, who rejected the request for cooperation with the TV network, says al-Jazeera, seen by millions throughout the Arab world and elsewhere, is producing an hour-long documentary news special on lack of security at the U.S. southern border.
Simcox has contacted the offices of Arizona's two Republican U.S. senators – John McCain and Jon Kyl – to invite them to do interviews with al Jazeera, "so perhaps they can explain to the viewers of this news outlet just how secure America's borders really are."Dang.
