Taliban Bananas
Now Playing: "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" by the Beatles
Sorry I can't remember where I stole this from. Maybe Slate? Anyhow, enjoy this picture of Alexander the Great's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson (and guest).

Snuff
Have a look at this story over at Theodore's World. There's video and stills and everything from Sky News:

Video footage has emerged showing George Galloway shaking hands with Saddam Hussein's son Uday - a rapist, torturer and convicted murderer.

The video, obtained by The Sun, shows the Respect MP having a 20-minute meeting with Saddam's eldest son in an Iraqi palace in 1999.

In the video, Mr Galloway is seen to greet Uday, shaking his hand twice and calling him "Excellency".

He jokes about losing weight, going bald and failing to give up smoking cigars.

Mr Galloway also orders watching journalists not to publish parts of their conversation.

Finally, according to the paper, he taunts the United States and vows to stick with Uday "until the end".

Jeeze. I ain't seen a feller take it on the chin like this since that one week Rush Limbaugh got shitcanned for slagging on Donovan McNabb and then got exposed as a degenerate pill-popper.

Like I always say, you know Galloway's got to be dirty just from the company he keeps: mass murdering psychopaths, brutal rapists, Kerry supporters, et al.

Stop Being Mindless
Mike Warren, the co-anchor on the KTBC early evening news, just got through [rhetorically clarifying] his goofy weatherman's forecast for rain come Saturday by asking whether it would still be possible to "salvage" this weekend if there were to be no rain on Sunday.

What the fuck are you talking about, Warren?!

A couple of days ago, I saw a farmer in Parker County, Texas trying to keep from weeping to the Weather Channel reporter who was at his home to ask if he was happy that we finally got some rain.

Yeah, rain is important, Mike. We need it to make our grass grow and to recharge our aquifers. We need it ---what the fuck this. I ain't gonna explain it to you!

"Salvage" the weekend! Jesus H. Christ! Who knew I still had that much small town left in me?

"God Is Love"
Now Playing: and now down that gloomy hallway away from my brothers and even further from my mother
I heared earlier today that Benedict has issued his first encyclical and that it is called, in English, God Is Love.

I know a few people who will be pleased to hear that.

Testing
At some point, I really am going to have to find a more operator-friendly host for this blog. I just can't understand how to get certain things (like a Technorati Profile) to link here.

Testing, one, two...

Character Assasshole
Now Playing: i am rubber, you are glue...
I'd like to tie a wet burlap sack of dog shit around Keith Olbermann's head and then groinpunt him off a bridge.

I mean, what else can one say? The guy is a propagandite, pseudointellectual moron.

Pollwatchers of the World, Unite!
Now Playing: to say nothing of the anti-american rhetoric
Another way that Duncan Black is like Osama bin Laden is that they both think opinion polls are worth discussing.

Typecast
Now Playing: "Tom Violence" by the Sonic Youth
You'll be amazed to learn this, but Tom? He ain't dead yet.

I know it's unbelievable, but it's really the only explanation I can think of.

After all this time, you know? Whole centuries. But it still breaks down that way.

Amazing.

Slaves to Fashion
Now Playing: and you're defending psychopaths because the president doesn't talk like you?
Can you imagine what a sick and sad existence this must be?

IRAQ’S most wanted man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, goes to sleep every night wearing a suicide belt packed with explosives, according to a leading insurgent who met him two weeks ago.

“He never takes it off,” said Sheikh Abu Omar al-Ansari, leader of a Sunni resistance group called Jeish al-Taiifa al-Mansoura (Army of the Victorious Sect).

“He told me: ‘I would rather blow myself up and die as a martyr — and kill a few Americans along the way — than be arrested and humiliated by them’.”

His account, passed to The Sunday Times by a reliable intermediary, is the first description of Zarqawi in Iraq since Washington slapped a $25m bounty on his head, the same as the reward for the killing or capture of Osama Bin Laden.

What is this Michael Moore-styled "Minuteman" defending with such zeal? Islam? Islam is doing okay, isn't it? It's even started to take on some democratic traits in some places. Like Iraq. Oh? But that's the problem, isn't it? Zarqawi and his nutjob followers know that a self-determined and pro-American Iraq is a huge pain in the ass right there in the middle of the Muslim Middle East. And they don't want it. But they are going to get it.

In the meantime, they live with explosives wired to their bodies. What a miserable and fucked up life that must be!

The Guy from the Respect Party
Now Playing: "Leyenda" by Isaac Albeniz (with guitar transcription attributed to Andres Segovia) ---which I cannot get out of my head
Charles Johnson ruined my mood tonight with this story about George Galloway:

First he shocked TV viewers and his colleagues by pretending to be a cat and lapping milk from Rula Lenska's hand.

Now George Galloway is set to attract further derision after performing a dance routine on Celebrity Big Brother - in a tight-fitting, red leotard.

The Respect MP, already under fire for taking part in the show instead of representing his constituents, ad-libbed a dance routine for his latest stunt.

His dance partner was, of course, Pete Burns. The transvestite lead singer of 1980s band Dead or Alive wore a blue leotard, even though he insisted he would not run from a burning house in it.

Galloway's behavior is nuttier than a squirrel on Viagra. But as long as the anti-American Left want to hitch their wagon to this careening clown car, I'll be here to enjoy a good laugh.

Disgusting.

Corroborative
Andrew C. McCarthy gives us his view of the Constitutionality of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978:

The president is not above the law, but neither is any other branch. The highest law in the United States is the Constitution. Congress is not above that law — and it if enacts a statute, a "law," that undermines or alters the Constitution's structure, it is Congress that has placed itself above the law.

There is remotely nothing novel in this. When Congress enacts a law that attempts to regulate an activity committed by the Constitution to state control, that law is struck down — we do not say the states have put themselves above the law by challenging federal legislation. When Congress enacts a law that attempts to regulate when state action violates the Constitution, that law is struck down as an invalid attempt to exercise judicial power — we do not say the judges have placed themselves above the law. Similarly, when Congress enacts a law that attempts to regulate a power committed by the Constitution to the president, that law is unconstitutional.

You know how the FISA has gone 28 years without being declared unConstitutional? Because it has virtually never asserted itself against that Constitutional authority of the President to be the Commander in Chief. Carter wouldn't have dreamed of "violating" FISA, of course. Reagan's enemies were states and empires somewhere else. Bush the Elder? I don't know if any of his FISA-type searches were disallowed, but who cares, anyway? Bush the Elder went to war and would have had the right to monitor communications between this country and Iraq any minute of the day. Was that something denied to Clinton in the Balkans? I doubt it.

FISA's use (and origin) as a tool in the hands of a vengeful Democratic Party had long been forgotten ---but it was always there.

But now that this President's political opponents wish to characterize him to the American People as a domestic spymonger who is violating the FISA, then I predict a very bleak future for that law. Because there's no reason to pretend any longer that such a sop to the post-Nixon Democratic machine be tolerated. I encourage the Roberts Supreme Court to find a way to strike it down because all it's good for is to be a legal peg upon which the liberal Left can hang this shit about the President "spying" on "Americans."

I get told that FISA is The Law, but it is not the law any more than any other thing that gets passed and then gets ignored is. It is an appendage that no one has ---until now--- bothered to cut out.

I keep waiting for the Left to truthfully describe what it is that the President is supposedly violating. But they know they can't because they know that the technologies and methodologies used to surveil hundreds of millions of people make nonsense of these poor partisan attempts to make Bush out to be Big Brother. It is embarrassing. It is in the nature of these means to intelligence that everything be gone through and that only a small handful of suspicious communications trigger a response. We have no problem with this when we are looking something up on an internet search engine. Maybe information that we ought not so easily know? For a little money, I can know far more about you than I should be able to. What if I'm a stalker? Who are we going to go see about that?

The logical corollary of Warhol's famous dictum that, in the future, we will all be famous for 15 minutes is this: if everybody's famous, then no one is famous. If we are all being spied on, that is essentially the same as none of us being spied on.

Do you feel spied on? Okay. That's good. Because you are being spied on. Grow up and quit acting like you didn't know that and that such a thing surely can't be possible in the United States of Unicorns and Rainbows!

Photo from a Friend
Now Playing: "New York Mining Disaster (1941)" by the Bee Gees
It's good to be the National Champion.

Mouthbreather
Now Playing: we make holes in teeth
That's what I am just now. My nose is just too stopped up to even bother trying to go that way, so now I am a true sluggard, a Neanderthal.

Talking Points Mimeo
Now Playing: seeming worse than being
I don't know if this is actually John Kerry or not, but it's pretty funny stuff, either way. Here's the junior Senator from Massachusetts, writing at The Daily Kos:

There's something that doesn't sit right with me when, on the day Osama Bin Laden resurfaced in a disturbing audio tape, cable television ends up in a game of name calling as a war protester is compared to Osama Bin Laden.

Ha, ha. You caught that, too, huh, John? Yeah. I thought that was very honest of Chris Matthews, but he's right: Osama does sound like Michael Moore, the notorious traitor/film-maker.

Very clever of you to notice.

Shouldn't the similarity of their rhetoric to Osama's sober my Leftist friends?

Jane Harman's Right
The FISA is an old law. It doesn't adequately account for the changes in technology and scale that our Government must in finding out the activities of our nation's enemies.

Our nation's enemies live here with us and are not only to be found overseas.

In 1978, were people walking around with disposable cell phones?

Time to recognize that FISA is inapplicable at best. It is also, for other reasons, unConstitutional.

Charles Johnson: "The Absurd Dead End of Multiculturalism"
Now Playing: a 1,400 year-old blowfish
Johnson writes:

In Britain, defense attorneys for radical Islamic preacher Abu Hamza have hit on a novel approach. They’re arguing that Hamza’s hate speech and incitement to murder cannot possibly be criminal—because it comes straight from the Koran.

I'm too dull and congested just now to launch into any one of the dozens of responses swimming in my head, but suffice it to say that the Koran could also be offered as a defense of insanity. And is. Five times a day on a billion pair of knees.

I don't want these people on the Mothership anymore. They're a real fucking drag.

Abu Hamza’s remarks, which the prosecution alleges amount to an attempt to stir up racial hatred against the Jewish people, were, [his defense attorney] Mr Fitzgerald said, a reference to the Hadith — sayings of the Prophet Muhammad — in which fighting between Jews and Muslims is predicted.

The Hadith says that the trees will call out to the Muslims “there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him”.

I'm not sure that the Hadith are properly part of the Koran, but it's all the same angry, xenocidal shit throughout. Ever read the Koran? I've read some big chunks of it ---and it's a very angry piece of work. I think it explains a lot about the nature of the Muslim character.

Those people are going to have to be watered down. They're gonna have to lose some of their fight or they're never gonna make it to Mars with the rest of us.

The Exiled Saudi Dissident
Now Playing: clean of moral judgement

Hillary Announces for the Presidency
Now Playing: the bush administration downplayed the threat from iran, which is why they only called its regime evil
That's what that was just then. That speech was an unmistakable message that she is going to run for the White House.

Enjoy yourselves, my Democratic friends. It's gonna be a hell of an election.

CORRECTION: I've been ill the past 24 hours or so and, thanks to huge amounts of time-bending sleep, I didn't realize that HRC gave this speech yesterday.

bin Laden Addresses Democratic Party Faithful
CNN is reporting that the new audiotaped message from Osama bin Laden is genuine.

I keep on dismissing that piece of shit as dead, but that's just wishful thinking.

Dang.

"A 72-Hour Delay Mechanism"
Now Playing: jane harman
The floppy pair of shoes (or is it the big red rubber nose?) on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 is the provision that allows a warrantless search to be conducted and authorized retroactively as late as 72 hours after the initiation of the search.

If, at the actual point in time at which a warrantless search or an act of surveillance is conducted and is presumed legal ---contingent upon that retroactive approval--- then what is the significance of those 72 hours? Why shouldn't it be 72 days or 72 months afterwards?

Considering the vast amounts of collected information to go through in this age of unprecedented global communication, it is unreasonable to restrict the executive in this way. Reasonableness is putatively the guiding principle in that provision of the FISA, but I don't see any in those magical 72 hours that are supposed to make all the difference.