Is Some Guy Protesting?
Someone's making noise on CNN. Did the attendees receive some signal to stand and drown him out?

Liveblogging the Inaugural: What an Awful Song
What on Earth is that man singing? A nice voice and all that, but what an inappropriate selection for this sort of occasion. Let us have Sousa, obnoxious though he is.

Moron
Philip Nobile was on Bill O'Reilly's show Tuesday night, discussing this theory going around that Abraham Lincoln was gay. O'Reilly was obviously deeply troubled at the very notion ---and loudly reminded Nobile several times that he, too, was an "historian" ---and that the whole thing was just bunk.

This annoyed me for several reasons.

First, Bill O'Reilly isn't an historian in any meaningful, legitimate, or actual sense of the word. And it's fucking nonsense for him to say so and not be kidding about it.

Second, I would be utterly astonished to learn that Bill O'Reilly is any kind of an expert on the life of Abraham Lincoln. Is there any reason to believe he is? I'll bet I could kick his ass in "Double Jeopardy" on that topic ---and I wouldn't call myself an expert on Lincoln or an historian.

Third, it takes a high degree of egotism for a former gossip-peddler to sit there in front of an actual investigative journalist ---and, I daresay, an historian--- and presume to match wits with him on any historical subject. Philip Nobile is a well-respected writer and a great debunker of myths. His legendary 1993 Village Voice article exposing Alex Haley as a fraud had a huge impact on me ---and I've been an admirer of his work ever since. (If anyone reading this knows how I can come by a copy of that article, please drop me a line.)

Lastly, it seemed to me that O'Reilly's only interest in the subject of Lincoln's homosexuality is to use it as a cudgel on the Log Cabin types in his audience. It wasn't an historical question for him; it was a current events topic. And, as such, invalid.

If Lincoln was gay ---and I don't believe he was--- it would be a very interesting fact of his life ---and would have absolutely no effect on his stature among America's Great Men. History is full of great men who were as gay as Isaac Mizrahi at a dance recital ---and the world is a far greater place for their existence. So stop politicizing that stuff, Mr. and Mrs. Republican. It doesn't flatter you.

Not incidentally, Nobile thinks the Gay Lincoln theory is bullshit, too. But Nobile hardly needs the bloviating Bill O'Reilly to help him make his case ---except as a conduit to the size of audience his work deserves.

Commentary Would Be Superfluous
Mood:  don't ask
Go visit Captain Ed and read about this request found at ABC News' website today:

Jan. 19, 2005 -- For a possible Inauguration Day story on ABC News, we are trying to find out if there any military funerals for Iraq war casualties scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 20. If you know of a funeral and whether the family might be willing to talk to ABC News, please fill out the form below[...]

What can one say? As the Power Line notes:

Note that only the families of Iraqi war dead need apply. If a soldier died in Afghanistan, or aiding tsunami victims in Indonesia or Sri Lanka, or in a training exercise, never mind. That isn't the "balance" ABC is looking for.

And Captain Ed adds this:

The sheer chutzpah and shallowness doesn't surprise me as much as the laziness that this demonstrates. It's not enough that some bloodsucking leech wants to use the grief of some poor family as entertainment and political theater. They are too freakin' lazy to go out and find one themselves, so they want someone to get them an invitation to the funeral.

Whoever posted this at ABC needs a soul transplant. Disgusting.

Remember: last year, Ted Koppel dedicated an entire episode of Nightline to nothing but a roll call of all the American military deaths sustained in Iraq to that point. Not the deaths of our fighting men in Afghanistan or elsewhere, but Iraq only.

And this isn't supposed to be seen as a partisan decision? Goddamned propagandists. Don't even have the courage to show that they pulled the request off their site.

More on Boxer's Lies
Via Professor Reynolds, go see this excellent post at CrushKerry.com wherein Barbara Boxer's nonsense spouted to Dr. Rice about WMD being the sole reason for the Congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq is refuted:

BOXER: Well, you should read what we voted on when we voted to support the war, which I did not, but most of my colleagues did. It was WMD, period. That was the reason and the causation for that, you know, particular vote.

Yes. The "causation." What a fucking lightweight.

Anyway, the guys at CrushKerry.com give it to her with both barrels. After going through the full text of the resolution, boldfacing the multiple reasons why we went to war for Iraq, they sum it up:

1. Iraq's harboring of Al-Queda terrorists
2. Iraq's support for International Terrorism
3. Iraq's "brutal repression" of its citizens
4. Iraq's failure to repatriate or give information on non-Iraqi citizens detained and captured during Gulf War I, including an American serviceman;
5. Failing to properly return property wrongfully seized during the Kuwait invasion
6. The attempted assassination of former President Bush in 1993
7. America's national security interests in restoring peace and stability to the Persian Gulf

I didn't get to watch but maybe an hour of the hearings, but the above remark made by Boxer to Rice happened to have caught my ear. Weapons of mass destruction certainly were a major cause of our intervention, but they were never the sole cause. But that is how the anti-war Left chooses to remember things. It is in keeping with their hyperlegalist mentality ---which, rather than being a matter of principle, is intended only to obstruct. As in the insistence that only United Nations resolutions authorizing force are legitimate or that the Geneva Conventions apply to terrorists. Both of these legal avenues are littered with the anti-war Left's desperate garbage.

Crush these hypocrites. They are friends to monsters.

Barbara Boxer, Lying Craphound
Barbara Boxer's performance yesterday at Condoleeza Rice's confirmation hearings was rude and moronic. It was also, when she began to attack Dr. Rice for supporting the war for Iraq, hypocritical. According to a story at NewsMax.com, Boxer was just fine with Bill Clinton's bombing of Baghdad:

[...]six years ago, Boxer enthusiastically backed President Clinton's decision to attack Iraq after he argued that Saddam Hussein was prepared to use chemical, biological and nuclear weapons against the world.

A lot of Democrats went in for that then. Anything to give their "Big Dog" some bite for his bark.

In December 1998, however, after Clinton launched four days of air strikes on Iraq's suspected WMD targets, the California Democrat had a different reaction.

In quotes unearthed Tuesday afternoon by radio host Sean Hannity, Boxer claimed that Saddam had forced Clinton's hand.

"The president had no choice but to act today," she said in a statement issued by her office. "Anyone who questions the timing of his decision ignores the fact that we committed a month ago to act if [chief U.N. weapons inspector] Richard Butler reported that Saddam was not cooperating."

"These critics are blinded by political considerations," Boxer added.

It's stuff like this that justifies my utter contempt for the Democratic Party ---an organization so traumatized by Lyndon Johnson's legacy of a half-hearted war that they are no longer able to understand our country's long-term strategy in the world.

If we can fight to establish legitimate self-rule in Iraq, it will be the cause of more democratic reforms throughout the Muslim Middle East. That is a huge and noble goal ---something worthy of a great power like ours. There shouldn't be any question of its value among those of us who think, but among the others is constant pessimism and subversion ---the merest partisan hackery of the Democratic Party. Where is their idealism? Where is their commitment to ending the rule of tyrants and theocrats? Once again, the far Left in America has demonstrated that its infatuation with Castro, Guevara, Ho, and Mao was no mistake: they are, at heart, totalitarians.

Which is why craphounds like Boxer are so afraid of Bush: because he is the great liberator of the age ---the surest prophet of the power of democracy.

Played?
Via The Corner at NRO comes Roger L. Simon's suggestion that the Bush Administration may be using Seymour Hersh to scare the mullahs with tales of targeting Iran.

When I heard about his latest infusion of goo in The New Yorker this morning, to wit that the US is spying on Iranian nuclear installations and trying to figure out what to do about them (planning special ops, air raids, etc.), I thought "Here he goes again, leaking top secret information!" But then I thought - duh, what top secret information? Is it possible that any US administration, Democrat or Republican, at this juncture in history would not be directing its intelligence agencies to take a long hard look at Iranian nukes and game plan how to deal with them?

Of course, if Iran were to lash out against us or the Israelis or anybody else, the evil Bu$hitler War Machine, Inc. would be branded a bunch of incompetent and unprepared idiots who hadn't planned on such an obvious contingency. And don't tell the kids putting flowers in their hair and in the rifle barrels around them that we have plans in place to go to war with Sweden, if need be. We've only been thinking that way for the past 60 years, you know.

So then why The Big Leak? Well, if I were someone in the government who wanted to announce that we were taking a tough line and had some nasty surprises for the mullahs (to scare them, of course), but didn't want to make this an official public policy statement, what would I do? I'd leak it to Seymour Hersh and count to five.

It sounds like a plan to me. What did Lenin say about useful idiots?

"A Microphone Listened for Thunder"
Mood:  a-ok
It's all good in the Solar System today with the successful landing of the Cassini-Huygens probe on the surface of Saturn's moon, Titan.

Titan is [...] the only moon in the solar system to retain a substantial atmosphere, one even thicker than Earth's.

The 703-pound, battery-powered Huygens probe parachuted through Titan's clouds of methane and nitrogen for two-and-a-half hours, sampling gases and capturing panoramic pictures along the way.

Huygens hit the upper atmosphere 789 miles (1,270 km) above the moon at a speed of about 13,700 mph (22,000 km/h). A series of three parachutes slowed the craft to just 15 mph (24 km/h). Chutes and special insulation protected Huygens from temperature swings and violent air currents. Strong winds -- in excess of 311 mph (500 km/h) -- buffeted the craft.

Its sensors deduced wind speed, atmospheric pressure and the conductivity of Titan's air. Methane clouds and possibly hydrocarbon rain was analyzed by an onboard gas chromatograph. A microphone listened for thunder.

Is that not bad-ass?

Man, I've got to go listen to some Pink Floyd!

The Principled Atheist, a Rectal Probe
Now Playing: "One Toke over the Line" by Brewer & Shipley
As an atheist, I find the vast majority of other atheists to be obnoxious. Or maybe it's just the ones who are religiously and politically devoted to being atheists. They are, in fact, worse than politically active gay rights types because their cause is usually infused with a kind of nihilism that offends a polite society, whereas the homosexual agenda is something that's life-affirming (as well as fabulous).

Take, for example, this worm named Michael Newdow, who got his 15 minutes a few years ago during his fight to keep his precious daughter from having to hear the phrase "under God" incorporated into the Pledge of Allegiance. Now this rectal probe is going for another shot at the big time with a lawsuit seeking to preclude the invocation prayer at the President's Inauguration next week.

"I am going to be standing there having this imposed on me," Newdow told the court by phone on Thursday. "They will be telling me I'm an outsider at that particular moment."

Michael Newdow, you absolutely need to go fuck yourself. You don't have a Constitutional right to not be subjected to religion. This is a pluralistic society, full of religious traditions and the people who observe them. What kind of a sterile, fucked up world do you live in when you are so intolerant of the Christian religion that you can't bear the thought of seeing others practice it?

You need to make peace with these people, dumbass. You need to be charitable ---in the best sense of that word--- and realize the power of their beliefs in their lives and in the life of this nation. It wasn't godforsaken Mohammedans or Oriental navel-gazers who founded this country's political and economic culture; it was Christians. Learn some History and know that this was no accident.

Reconstruction of the Fables
Here's a neat story at CNN.com:

A Roman statue of Atlas -- the mythical titan who carried the heavens on his shoulders -- holds clues to the long-lost work of the ancient astronomer Hipparchus, an astronomical historian said Tuesday.

The statue in question is known as the Farnese Atlas, a 7-foot tall marble work which resides in the Farnese Collection in the National Archeological Museum in Naples, Italy.

What makes it important to scientists is not the titan's muscular form but the globe he supports: carved constellations adorn its surface in exactly the locations Hipparchus would have seen in his day, suggesting that the sculptor based the globe on the ancient astronomer's star catalog, which no modern eyes have seen.

I like stuff like that. Like echoes and adumbrations of unrecoverable things by which we can still know some part. Paintings only known through copies. Different colors of bricks in the walls of an old house, suggesting some now-lost window on a completely different view. It's some sort of fossil-love, baby, and it's all around us: in our etymology, in our genes, and in our faces.

Noah ben David
Mood:  celebratory
Welcome to the world.

Commanist
People don't use enough commas. I've been using and abusing them since at least high school English class, but I've managed to winnow out most of the superfluous ones over time. The one I find missing most often is the one that belongs in what I guess is called a vocative statement where someone is being addressed. People are omitting it from its proper place before the name of the addressee. It doesn't look right and it's confusing in certain contexts.

Don't you agree, gentle reader?

Shitcannery Row
Mood:  happy
The CBS News report is out.

Film at 11.

Precedent
Read this John Fund piece in the Wall Street Journal about the shenanigans in Washington state's gubernatorial election. The most interesting item I picked up from it was (emphasis mine):

Slade Gorton, a Republican former state attorney general and U.S. senator who is advising Mr. Rossi, says a court should order a revote rather than declare valid one of the two earlier vote counts that Mr. Rossi won. "No one can govern effectively under the cloud this race has created," Mr. Gorton says. He notes that state law doesn't require any showing of fraud to contest an election. "That is irrelevant to whether the election should be done over," he says. "The law is quite clear in giving a court the right to void any election where the number of illegal or mistaken votes exceeds the margin of victory, and it has done so in the past."

There it is. That's the precedent. The election of the Governor of the State of Washington ought to be voided.

Channeling Andy Rooney
You know what really annoys me? It's DUMB ASSHOLES who don't know how to back into a parking space. I guess these people are just so cool or busy that they figure they'll need to be able to just drive straight away as soon as they get in their cars to leave. Can't spare those extra seven seconds of motor coordination on your way to the mall or LaKeisha's apartment? Is that why you do it? I don't know.

It's obvious that these geniuses are either such UNSKILLED IDIOTS or such INCONSIDERATE ASSHOLES that that they either don't know how to do it cleanly or don't care if they do. My money's on "all of the above."

Did someone tell these kind of people that they are saving themselves extra work by backing into parking spaces? I wouldn't doubt such a belief in others, having probably held the same one ---for about five seconds of idle thought while sitting in a back seat somewhere when I was eight.

If you can't pull it off and keep it between the lines, you FUCKING DOLT, don't even try. Not when the failure to do so ---coupled with the indifference such people have towards correcting it--- is the difference between my having a good parking space outside my own front door and having to suffer your self-centered stupidity by parking out of my line of sight.

(Note to garage-owners in decent middle-class neighborhoods: I'll be next door to you again soon enough but, in the meantime, go fuck yourselves.)

The Car Swarm People Are Voting
I think the Palestinians' polls have been open for a couple hours now. Abu Mazen is looking to ride the landslide to victory, but he's got too many cooks in the kitchen with him. If he tries to make nice with Sharon, Hamas and the other nutjobs will murder him. If he tries to do an impression of the Arafish, the IDF will send one across his bow. No assassination necessary, but a very communicative moment will suffice.

It's a meaningless election, as many of the Car Swarm People would tell you themselves, but I still hope for a big turnout. And I hope the Israelis make a big deal out of it and get Sharon to shake Mazen's hand and smile for the cameras. These people need to see that their decisions have consequences ---and not always just bad ones.

The idea is to get from the appearance of democratic rule to its actual practice. There are hopeful signs here and there. Assad may be getting the message with respect to his border with Iraq. Mubarak is wishing aloud for full participation in the vote in Iraq. And the Deadline is holding firm. I wish Sistani would come out and finally play a hand for once, but that might take the mystique off his brow. Who knows? Our men and women are doing the Lord's work each and every day. But come hell or high water, the Middle East will be changed. I say for the better ---and why not?

The Thousand-Yard Stare
Courtesy of Blackfive read this great story about a Texas boy named Herbert B. Hancock who is now credited with the longest confirmed kill shot on a terrorist in Iraq.

AR RAMADI, Iraq (Jan. 02, 2005) -- Seen through a twenty-power spot scope, terrorists scrambled to deliver another mortar round into the tube. Across the Euphrates River from a concealed rooftop, the Marine sniper breathed gently and then squeezed a few pounds of pressure to the delicate trigger of the M40A3 sniper rifle in his grasp.

The rifle's crack froze the booming Fallujah battle like a photograph. As he moved the bolt back to load another round of 7.62mm ammunition, the sniper's spotter confirmed the terrorist went down from the shot mere seconds before the next crack of the rifle dropped another.

One down and thousands to go.

"From the information we have, our chief scout sniper has the longest confirmed kill in Iraq so far," said Capt. Shayne McGinty, weapons platoon commander for "Bravo" Co. "In Fallujah there were some bad guys firing mortars at us and he took them out from more than 1,000 yards."

During the battle for the war-torn city, 1/23 Marine scout snipers demonstrated with patience, fearless initiative and wits that well-trained Marines could be some of the deadliest weapons in the world.

"You really don't have a threat here until it presents itself," said Sgt. Herbert B. Hancock, chief scout sniper, 1/23, and a 35-year-old police officer from Bryan, Texas, whose specialized training and skill helped save the lives of his fellow Marines during the battle. "In Fallujah we really didn't have that problem because it seemed like everybody was shooting at us. If they fired at us we just dropped them."

Outstanding work, gentlemen. Your country is proud of you.

Off to Kill Some Americans
Maybe in the carnage of the past few weeks ---whether in Iraq or elsewhere--- I did not make myself aware of a very important fact about the murder of our troops and contractors in Mosul a few days before Christmas. This, according to Stephen Schwartz:

ON December 21, a terrorist blew himself up in the U.S. military mess hall in Mosul, in northern Iraq. Twenty-two people were killed, including U.S. soldiers and contractors.

And now comes big news: The perpetrator was the oldest son of a diplomat from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, our alleged ally in the War on Terror.

On Monday, the Saudi-owned daily Asharq Al-Awsat identified the butcher responsible: 20-year old Ahmad Sayyid Ahmad al-Ghamdi, a Saudi medical student.

The bomber acted as a member of Ansar al-Sunnah (Volunteers of Sunni Islam), one of the most violent terror groups in Iraq, and an al Qaeda ally.

The name "al-Ghamdi" should ring bells; the family is large, and three of its members were involved in the 9/11 assault.

The Saudi daily, and Western media, identified the Mosul bomber, and even said they had spoken with his father. But no one has mentioned who the father is: Sayyid al-Ghamdi, former head of the Saudi diplomatic mission in Sudan, a country ruled by an Islamist regime that once played host to Osama bin Laden himself.

Before the day is done, there shall be a reckoning all over the Muslim world. That is the one thing that will justify us.

A Snoutful of Citrusy Goodness
Mood:  down
Have I mentioned lately that automatic room deodorizer dispensers are the work of the Devil? No? Well, they are.

Inexcusable
Via The Left Coaster, here's a story about the Bush Administration paying black conservative commentator Armstrong Williams almost a quarter of a million dollars to shill for them. Specifically, Williams was paid to promote the No Child Left Behind Act on his TV show and in his newspaper columns.

Williams said Thursday he understands that critics could find the arrangement unethical, but "I wanted to do it because it's something I believe in."

That's outrageous. As Steve Soto observed:

No Armstrong, if you did it because you believe in it, you would have done it without shaking down the taxpayers for it. You did it because you are a conservative who values money above all else. Perhaps you can spout for us how many African Americans have been helped by the passage of NCLB, and why we should ignore the fraud behind this law that took place in W's Texas schools.

Despite Soto's weird implication that it's just conservatives who value money, I wholeheartedly agree with him on this. If Williams is such a great believer in the NCLB, he shouldn't require a Jesse Jackson-style retainer for his work in promoting it. It's inexcusable.