Favors the Lord
Jimmy Carter has shown up on all the cable news talk shows lately to peddle his new book. I'm sure it's got something to do with how he's morally superior to the current President, but I'll never know since I wouldn't pay a dime or waste even a moment to read it.

Anyway, Carter keeps on saying the same thing about abortion ---and I'd love to hear some of his super-liberal admirers avoid contradicting him. Carter says that abortion is wrong and that Jesus Christ himself would have thought so, too ---except in the case of the mother's health or on account of rape and/or incest.

Really? Turns out that those are the very same exceptions that Carter believes in! How has Carter divined Jesus' position down to those particulars? On what theological or exegetical basis can Mr. Nobel Peace Prize honestly claim such a thing?

It is absurd.

Look: if you don't believe in abortion, don't get one. If you do believe in it, do get one. But try to avoid projecting your own list of mitigating circumstances under which an abortion is acceptable onto the Son of Man. It is literally self-serving. And although the Lord helps those who help themselves, I doubt he meant that people should presume upon his judgement to hedge their own.

The Austin Police Department's Public Relations Scheme: (Too) Well Done
I guess Austin Chief of Police Stan Knee's overwhelming display of force at today's competing KKK and anti-KKK rallies didn't go off as he'd hoped. His plan, I'm sure, was to be as conspicuous as possible in demonstrating that the Austin Police Department stands up for blacks, Mexicans, homosexuals, vegetarians, and everybody else. That's because at least two of those groups have recently questioned his commitment to their communities. The APD was definintely needing some good PR.

Unfortunately, Knee's department did too much to keep the counter-demonstrators separated from the objects of their ire. You understand.

Of course, if Knee had let these losers within spitting distance of each other, there would almost certainly have been some violence, in which case everybody would have criticized the poor bastard for not policing the situation well enough.

Texas Civil Rights Project director Jim Harrington might even sue the city for not letting the hippies he was with get close enough to the skinheaded troglodytes to [engage them in a frank exchange of views]. Oh, just sod off, counselor! They put you on the TV and you kept it real, so just be quiet.

Does anybody know the numbers? It's usually something like a 100:25:1 ratio of counter-protesters to cops to Klansmen, but I couldn't tell from the footage.

Well, I hope everybody got their rocks off and had a nice lunch afterwards. None of you self-consciously tolerant wankers had to go down there today, but you did it, anyway, because, otherwise, people wouldn't have known that the Ku Klux Klan is a despicable organization that deserves to be ignored instead of widely advertised and fussed over.

Pssst...PTSD
I was watching a little bit of Democracy Now! a while ago (as is consistent with my passing interest in abnormal psychology) and this craphound named Mark Crispin Miller comes on and tells Amy Goodman that John Kerry has told him that he now believes that the 2004 Election was stolen but can't come forward because of the sour grapes problem. (Naturally, Kerry confided all this to a pseudo-intellectual paranoiac whose powers of discernment are, shall we say, indiscriminate?)

It's been a year now, so I guess this is the traumatized Left's perverse anniversary celebration of some sort of alternate history.

Some other guy piped up during Miller's explanation of his grand unifying theory and said that Kerry lost because he had run such a poor campaign, but Miller was more interested in the theft angle and dismissed the idea. Or did he also advocate it, but couldn't keep his story straight?

I think George W. Bush won the election of 2004 because people trusted him to destroy our enemies ---and didn't trust Kerry to do it. The election was a referendum on Bush and his War for Iraq. He won it.

Today? He would not.

Why? Because he thinks too much of the old dictum of power: never complain, never explain.

The President needs to complain ---or, at least, get a little salty with these Leftist cowards and tell them how the cow ate the cabbage.

Hire it done, if you have to, sir, but do it. The wrong people are getting the upper hand and you're letting it happen.

Entertainment Tonight
I'm watching Hugo Chavez's endless gibberish from today on CSPAN ---and it is very entertaining.

For one thing, why is he praising John F. Kennedy? That can't sit well with Fidel, can it? He must know it can't because he cuts his remarks with plenty of caveats; still, it's interesting.

Oh, and Chavez also says that illiteracy has been eradicated from Venezuela in just the past two years. That's great. Leave no Marxist paisano behind, I say.

I Just Love Saying the Words: PARISIAN INTIFADA
The Gateway Pundit, who is quckly becoming indispensible, directs our attention to the following absurdity that has arisen from the Parisian Intifada:

Calls for calm by Chirac have largely been ignored. Chirac gave de Villepin a month to report on measures to integrate ethnic minorities and promote equal opportunity. He also called for a plan to crack down on youth gangs.

Doesn't Jacques know how deeply that's going to cut into Dominique's poetry-writing time?

Get to lovin' it, honkies. You thought you could stay on Mo's good side by taking a piss on Uncle Sam's shoes? Try again.

Oh, and here's a sou: go call Charles Martel and tell him you've undone his good work.

Cold, Blue Eyes
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: "Bells for Her" by Tori Amos
I've always felt that those who abuse History ---most especially those who would liken what my country does to what was done in Nazi Germany--- should live just long enough to experience the difference for themselves.

A lot of this abuse comes from ignorance, naturally, but let us remember what the great liberator of South America, Simon Bolivar, said of his own people in 1815:

As long as our countrymen do not acquire the abilities and political virtues that distinguish our brothers of the north, wholly popular systems, far from working to our advantage, will, I greatly fear, bring about our downfall.

I think Bolivar realized nearly two centuries ago that the Latin American people have a great deal to learn from their political betters. It isn't enough to simultaneously depend upon and piss upon the state. It isn't enough to smash out the windows of a Burger King in Buenos Aires to protest a war you have no part in. These stupid peasants are going to have to mature as a political culture before anyone's going to pay attention to them.

I hear that Hugo Chavez tells his people all the time that Uncle Sam is just itching to invade. Right. We'll just wait out his sorry Marxist ass like we've done all the others. But, for now, let these impotent protesters make a mess of their own cities. It'll give the trash collectors something to do next week.

Uncle Toby's Voter Guide (Texas State Constitutional Amendment Edition)
Well, I finally got down to studying the nine proposed amendments to the Texas State Constitution that we'll be voting on next Tuesday, and I am confident in recommending that you vote NO on all nine of them.

The one getting most of the attention is the ban on gay marriage, but there's also a few other fragrant amendments, including one that basically gives private railroad interests the taxpayers' money and another that makes it easier for con artists and moneylenders to screw old people out of their houses.

Vote NO on all nine amendments, kids. Trust me.

This Is Going to Come up Again
During their love-in last night on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann asked Joe Wilson the following questions regarding the forged documents that led to his Nigerien vacation (visit link from preceding post):

Do you know from even dating back to your trip to Niger where those documents came from? Was that, could that have been a forgery by somebody in this country, in this government? Was it necessarily international? Do you have any conclusions or theories?"

Wilson replied with lawyerly language (emphases mine):

"At the time that I was briefed, before I was asked to take this trip, the documents were not in the hands of the U.S. government to the best of my knowledge. I was briefed that an officer, a U.S. officer, had either seen the documents or had been briefed on their existence. And my briefing was based upon the transcript or his report about the existence of those documents. And that's what precipitated the Vice President's query that the CIA follow up on this that led to my trip, but also led to two other reports being done at roughly the same time -- one by a four-star Marine Corps general for the Defense Department, and a third report being done by our ambassador on the ground in Niger. All three of us concluded that there was nothing to that particular allegation. But as to the providence [sic] of those documents, where they came from, I didn't know until I read about it in various articles by Mr. Hersh and Dana Priest of the Washington Post."

What is Wilson talking about? Is he talking about what his wife called "this crazy report" about Iraq talking to Niger about the sale of some yellowcake? I'm not too sure, but let us not forget the following excerpt from the Report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

The former ambassador also told Committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article (“CIA Did Not Share Doubt on Iraq Data: Bush Used Report of Uranium Bid,” June 12, 2003) which said, “among the Envoy’s conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because ‘the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.’” Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the “dates were wrong and the names were wrong” when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports. The former ambassador said that he may have “misspoken” to the reporter when he said he concluded that the documents were “forged.” He also said he may have become confused about his own recollection after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported in March 2003 that the names and dates on the documents were not correct and may have thought he had seen the names himself. The former ambassador reiterated that he had been able to collect the names of the government officials which should have been on the documents.

This is going to come up again, you know. Wilson can't keep his story straight and tools like Olbermann aren't going to press him too hard to do so, anyway.

I think there's some truth to the notion that the anti-war Left is searching for martyrs. They are doing their damnedest to make Wilson and his wife into victims crushed by the Bu$hitler Imperial War Machine, Inc. ---and it's just stupid. The Wilsons are willing partisans who were angling for this job from the start. They are propagandists who are only in it for the fame and fortune.

"Mining Questions"
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who is as much a shill for the Left as any jackass on FOX is for the Right ---and you damned well know it--- was on his little cable access program last night, throwing softballs to Joe Wilson. One of which elicited the following (emphases mine):

Well, first of all, my wife was determined by the Fitzgerald investigation to have been covered by American law covering the protection of classified officers. So I don't believe that there's any other, anything more to say on that. Mr. Fitzgerald looked into it. He has indicted people. He has said that she was a classified officer.

Classified officer? Oh, there he goes again! Oh, sitting on the settee with our scones and our classified officers!

But what happened to Valerie Plame being covert? Is Wilson coming off of that and using Fitzgerald's characterization in a sleight of tongue because he knows that her status was actually not covert and hadn't been for a long time? Lots of stuff is classified in Washington ---and politicians, bureaucrats, military men and women, and reporters trade in it all the time. Do we want to make those communications punishable crimes now, too?

Wilson also rhetorically posed himself a question he commonly gets from his critics:

And, by the way, there are those who ask, 'Why did they send somebody who wasn't a WMD specialist?' The issue on the table was not weapons of mass destruction. Uranium yellow cake is just the ore that comes from crushing the rock. This was a mining question, and it was a question of how the ore gets transported and sold and how a government that's participating in the mining operation, in this case, the Niger government, might make a decision as to whether or not to sell that ore to a foreign government."

Yep. Selling otherwise innocuous rocks to a murderous regime under UN sanctions that may or may not have wanted to transform those rocks into fissible nuclear material was really just a matter for miners and shippers.

I mean, was that a joke that Wilson was trying to tell, but without a laugh from the audience?

Good
Mood:  a-ok
I heard from a commenter at the Leftist blog Eschaton that Aaron Brown is leaving CNN. Good. I don't like Brown. I think he's a smug and smarmy prick.

A Generation from Now, the Notre Dame Cathedral Will Be a Mosque
Overrun and outproduced, the Euro-dhimmis will continue to know only destruction and degradation at the hands of their guests:

PARIS, France (AP) -- Violence erupted for a sixth night Tuesday in the troubled suburbs northeast of Paris with police firing rubber bullets and tear gas as they faced down gangs of youths in Aulnay-sous-Bois, according to witnesses.

A store set afire in the nearby suburb of Bondy, France-Info radio reported.

No trouble was immediately reported in Clichy-sous-Bois, where rioting began last Thursday following the accidental deaths of two teenagers.

These Muslims are unassimilable enemies. Why is Europe committing cultural suicide? What sort of treasonous garbage thought that such influxes of aliens was part of a tenable policy?

[Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy recently referred to the troublemakers as "scum" or "riffraff," and in the past vowed to "clean out" the suburbs.

Even within the conservative government, there were critics.

Such "warlike" words would not bring calm, Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag said in an interview published in the daily Liberation. He told the paper that he "contests this method of becoming submerged by imprecise, warlike semantics."

No, you inexcusably stupid bastard: your country is going to be submerged by the Submitters.

While re-establishing order demands firmness, "it is in fighting the discrimination that victimizes youths that order is re-established, the order of equality," said Begag, raised in a low-income suburb of Lyon.

The president of SOS-Racism, an anti-racism group, called Tuesday for a "massive investment plan" to cure suburban ills.

Yep. There's only one way out of this hell: pay tribute to the Moors and Saracens.

Note to Republican Senators
You're going to get the associate justice you were wanting, so you can go ahead and shut up now about how the right to reproductive choice isn't in the Constitution. All that does is remind people like me why it's such a damned shame that the Democratic Party has no character or coherency because it refuses to stand up for American exceptionalism and the promotion of liberty and free markets and free peoples.

Which is why I won't vote for them again until they do.

Sloppy-mindedness
I realize that this is a sort of petty thing to remark upon, but read the opening paragraph in this CBS News story from earlier today:

(CBS) A federal indictment alleges that Vice President Cheney's now-former chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby committed perjury during, among other things, a conversation he had with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper.

Well, considering that Matt Cooper is neither a jury nor a judge nor a prosecutor, how can Libby have committed perjury by talking to him?

The more interesting part of this story is that, in the very next sentence, we find that Cooper is "not so sure" that Libby committed whatever would be the actual equivalent to perjury when he made the mistake of talking to Cooper in the first place. (Emphasis mine.)

[CBS News personality Harry] Smith pointed out that the indictment apparently alleges that Libby told the FBI and the grand jury that it was reporters, "people like you (Cooper), presumably," who told him Plame's identity. "Could you discern that from your conversation," Smith asked Cooper, "That you suggested it, he confirms it?"

"Yeah," responded Cooper. "I suggested it. He confirmed it. But there was no suggestion, I guess as alleged in the indictment, that he went ahead and, you know, talked to me about how he heard it and such. So, I think you've got a situation where the prosecutor is accusing him of several cases of perjury and obstruction of justice, and you're going to have witnesses or the people who work most closely with Libby in the White House and, potentially, reporters testifying in this case."

This is just incredibly fucking weak. Fitzgerald spent two years on this?

Oh, and the first namby-pamby Leftist I hear complain about the anti-media attitude or silent treatment shown by this Administration in the wake of this nonsense is going to get groin-punted.

Intense
Now Playing: "Lay, Lady, Lay" by Bob Dylan
I just got back from seeing North Country at the Alamo Draft House on South Lamar with a couple of family members, and just wanted to note for you that it is a very intense movie. A large and interesting cast with lots of genuinely interesting emotional arcs. It's not my usual kind of movie, but it was damned good and I recommend it to anyone with a conscience.

Justice Cornyn?
I think John Cornyn, the junior United States Senator from Texas, is a good man and I hope he is on the short list for the next nomination to the Supreme Court. If not now, maybe when Justice Stevens or some other Justice steps down in the next couple of years.

But I think he'd be a great choice for tomorrow morning's announcement ---and I hope the President does the deed. After all, Cornyn already told George Stephanopoulos this morning that he'd "take that call" if it came.

Let's hope so.

And let's also hope that this pisses off some yankees about how Texocentric this White House is.

A Palpable Hit
Mood:  loud
Tina Fey, who is very hot, had the best line last night on Saturday Night Live when she reported during "Weekend Update":

"A new poll shows that 66 percent of Americans think that President Bush is doing a poor job of handling the war in Iraq, and the remaining 34 percent believe that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church."

Snarfalicious!

Not Fade Away

Restoring Honesty, Part 1
In May 2003, at about the same time that he became an adviser to the John Kerry presidential campaign, Joe Wilson also became a rat bastard in the service of New York Times writer Nicholas Kristof. Wilson fed Kristof his own version of the events surrounding his vacation to Niger in February-March 2002, including the factoid that he had been sent there on account of Vice President Dick Cheney.

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger.

That's cause-and-effect. To anyone reading that sentence, the reasonable conclusion to draw is that Cheney sent Wilson to Niger.

Why does this matter? Because it demonstrates that Wilson was using an editorial writer at probably the most powerful newspaper in the world to advance the notion that Dick Cheney and/or his staff were directly involved in sending Wilson to Niger.

But that isn't what happened.

What Do You Tell a Woman with Two Black Eyes?
Mood:  don't ask
Nothing. I done told her twice. This is from Australia, folks:

POLICE are being advised to treat Muslim domestic violence cases differently out of respect for Islamic traditions and habits.

Officers are also being urged to work with Muslim leaders, who will try to keep the families together.

Women's groups are concerned the politically correct policing could give comfort to wife bashers and keep their victims in a cycle of violence.

The instructions come in a religious diversity handbook given to Victorian police officers that also recommends special treatment for suspects of Aboriginal, Hindu and Buddhist background.

Some police officers have claimed the directives hinder enforcing the law equally.

Police are told: "In incidents such as domestic violence, police need to have an understanding of the traditions, ways of life and habits of Muslims."

They are told it would be appreciated in cases of domestic violence if police consult the local Muslim religious leader who will work against "fragmenting the family unit".

Jesus Christ!

(Hat tip to Charles Johnson.)

Gristleheadedness
Now Playing: "Happy" by the Rolling Stones
Last week, before the Libby indictments were issued, professional shitstirrer David Gergen made a strange observation (emphases mine):

"It's not that the abuse of power here is anything like Watergate or Iran-Contra even," says Gergen, now the director of Harvard's Center For Public Leadership. "Rather it is, if indictments come, they may be of the people closest to the president and vice president of the United States. And they will re-open the wounds of Iraq, and people will ask the question, if indictments come, were we led into Iraq by criminal means?"

Gergen is making the same stupid connection between the (supposed) outing of Valerie Plame and the War for Iraq that other dumbasses, like Joe Wilson and Chris Matthews, keep making as well.

That is to say, we went to war before poor little Valerie was "outed." Are we clear on that yet? Gergen is clearly linking the indictments to some bullshit notion of "criminal means" that supposedly led us to war months before Bob Novak finally put two and two together ---which, not incidentally, was Number One on Joe Wilson's wish list. After all, you can't be a martyr if no one nails you.

You just know there's some dishonest shit going on when Democrats are [fretting] about national security and the integrity of the intelligence community. This from the party of Frank Church and Ted Kennedy and John Kerry? Get the hell out of here!