Mar
31
Posted at 21:43 by Travis G.
LYNCHBURG, Va. – American military hero and Arizona Senator John McCain’s three-month hostage ordeal ended Thursday when he was left on a Lynchburg street in front of the Thomas Road Baptist Church. He appeared composed and eager to talk about his 82 days held captive in a tiny room.
“It’s important people know that I was not harmed,” he said. “A strong mutual respect developed between myself and my captors. They called me ‘Maverick.’â€?
McCain with unidentified captors
Wearing an ill-fitting “Gary Bauer for President� T-shirt and a sheepish expression, the Republican senator was dropped off at midday near Liberty University. He walked inside and was then driven 20 minutes to a local Republican Party headquarters, where he called his family and gave an interview to Fox News.
The 69-year-old Navy veteran said his kidnappers confined him to a small, soundproof room with frosted windows but treated him well. Although his captors issued televised threats to kill McCain if Moderate Republican lawmakers did not back some Bush administration policies, the Senator said, “They never said they would hit me, never threatened me in any way. Sometimes they gave me Snickers bars and let me watch ‘The 700 Club.’”
McCain said he did not know who his kidnappers were, where he was held or why he was set free. Shortly before he was released, the senator said, “They just came to me and said, ‘OK, we’re letting you go now,’ and gave me a deck of playing cards. That’s all. They didn’t say anything about donating money to my presidential campaign, but I would hope the relationship we developed might encourage some of them to support my presidential campaign, instead of that two-faced Bill Frist, or Rick Santorum, who reminds me of the Grand Canyon filled with dillweed.”
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman said there was no ransom paid by the GOP, but his remarks left open the question of whether “arrangements” were made by others. None of the kidnappers has yet been identified, police say.
McCain said that he was eager to get back to normal life. “I’ll be playing a lot of solitaire,” McCain said. “Something about the game fascinates me.”
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Mar
31
Posted at 21:20 by Gavin M.
3Bulls uncovers the latest development in the Americablog controversy.
It is impossible to continue living without visiting 3Bulls right now. (When the paramedics have left, also see Tristero, at Digby’s.)
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Mar
31
Posted at 18:14 by HTML Mencken
…Andy, are you goofin on Nixon?
Are you losing touch?
I begin to belieeeeve,
That you are a looon,
(You are a looon–ooon)
Andy McCarthy has really started to lose it all — wits, sanity, composure:
With most Democrats not wanting to get within a million miles of this, Sen. Feingold has John Dean, of Watergate fame, testifying in favor of his censure proposal this morning.
It’s actually very good symbolism (however inadvertently orchestrated) for how times have changed. Feingold has obviously dragged Dean out there because the latter represents all that Nixon connotes for the civil liberties lobby — domestic spying, corruption, the conceit that our imperialist government is much worse than our “enemies,” the self-image of liberals as the guys in the white hats, etc.
Uh huh, yeah, contempt, exaggeration, and heavy sarcasm noted. But such things are par for the wingnut course and would merit little of our attention. Fortunately, it gets “better”:
But for people who care about the security of the country and about stopping what we well know al Qaeda is trying to do, what Dean and the Watergate legacy symbolize are the shackling of the executive branch, the notion that we just have to accept threats to public safety, FISA, the Wall, the decline of the CIA, etc.
There it all is, in wingnutty spades: A sneer to the effect that the obsolete post-Nixon, post-Watergate concerns of civil libertarians are not only quaintly retained by liberals, but contemporary objections levelled by Nixon hacks at anti-Nixon reformers were valid all along! See? Andy’s implying that Nixon was right! The filthy liberals did mean to shackle the poor executive branch, which only wanted to protect good Amurikans from whatever enemy was in vogue that week. And now they want to do it to Dear Leader, who, like Nixon, would never abuse executive power. Traitors! Sentimental traitors!
Read the rest of this entry »
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Mar
31
Posted at 11:50 by HTML Mencken
First, a fun fact: did you know that the “Shorter” routine has become so popular that even wingnuts are “shortering” their own posts? It’s true:
“Shorter Jeff Goldstein: ‘I eat paste and the A-rabs, they make me a-scared!’�
Well, yes.
Anyway, down to business:
Shorter David Frum:
If only the Mexicans would embrace voodoo economics, and sell some of their national resources to our oil companies, so many of them wouldn’t be forced to emigrate.
Shorter Mark R. Levin:
Dear Leader, Your Worshipfulness, I know you are a great judge of character, but please pay no attention to Vicente Fox’s promises.
Shorter Jay Nordlinger:
The Chinese, so inscrutable! Killing people in order to harvest their organs? Why can’t they just kill people for revenge or ideology or to steal their national resources? You know, like normal people do.
Shorter Flashback:
Thank God John Hinckley didn’t derail the Reagan Revolution’s momentum: now when the President recovers, we can get on with selling off national parks, supporting South African apartheid, and obstructing “crazy requirements” for cripples.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Mar
31
Posted at 3:10 by Gavin M.
Calm Down, Senator, It’s Politics
March 30, 2006
It started the first day. The day Ned Lamont announced his run for the Democratic Senate nomination, Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s campaign put out a blistering press release.
“Attacking Senator Lieberman’s character and integrity was a predictable but dishonorable way to begin this campaign,” it started. “Mr. Lamont is clearly going to run a very negative and angry campaign where the truth doesn’t get in the way.”
Can’t you imagine the sparks flying as they typed that bad boy? What could Lamont have done to poor Joe?
He called him “Republican Lite.”
He said he was “George Bush’s favorite Democrat.”
Vicious stuff, huh?
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Mar
31
Posted at 0:50 by HTML Mencken
Quod Mark Steyn:
. . .But I felt gradually exhausted since September 11th, 2001, [because] it’s very dispiriting trying to keep going in this phase of what is a very long conflict. And the reason I do it is because I want us to win. I don’t particularly like journalism. I don’t particularly like writing newspaper columns. I’m sick of having to make what I think should be an obvious case again and again and again. And I’d much rather pack it in and sit on my porch in New Hampshire and enjoy the view of the mountains. But I do it because I want us to win.
We were waiting on Hugh Hewitt to say something like, “I don’t use the word ‘hero’ very often, but you, Mark Steyn, are the greatest hero in American history.” But instead, he used Steyn’s lead as an opportunity to whine about how lefties were so very mean to him over his Empire State Building comments, directed at Time Mag’s Iraq correspondent, Michael Ware:
I’m sitting in the Empire State Building. Michael, I’m sitting in the Empire State Building, which has been in the past, and could be again, a target. Because in downtown Manhattan, it’s not comfortable, although it’s a lot safer than where you are, people always are three miles away from where the jihadis last spoke in America. So that’s…civilians have a stake in this. Although you are on the front line, this was the front line four and a half years ago.
To which Steyn replied magnanimously:
[W]e’re all, in a sense, we’re all conscripted in this war. Those 3,000 people who died on September 11th, they weren’t serving forces, they were just fellows who got up in the morning and went to work, or went to Logan Airport and got on a plane. And that’s the thing. We’re all conscripted in this war, whether we know it or not.
Must be something in the wingnut water cooler, because Roy Edroso finds Jeff Goldstein exhibiting the same sort of self-aggrandizing self-pity:
…[Tbogg] and his fellow Iraq war critics have started to pretend that the threat from al Qaeda doesn’t exist, and instead spend the majority of their time poking their sticks into the sides of those who aren’t quite so sanguine about al Qaeda’s intentions.
This is almost plaintive: Goldstein only wants to save America, why are we making fun of him? Maybe Goldstein noticed that, too, and quickly butched back up to the belligerent sophistry that is his stock in trade
Anyway, this is yet another episode to add to the Steyn dossier.
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Mar
31
Posted at 0:23 by Gavin M.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Device tells you if you’re boring
MIT Media Lab researchers are building a device to help autistic people determine if they’re boring or annoying the person they’re talking to. The “emotional social intelligence prosthetic device” is a camera that clips on eyeglasses and feeds images to a small computer that uses image recognition software to characterize emotions. If the listener doesn’t seem to be engaged, the device vibrates to alert the wearer.
March 30, 2006
AN ARMY OF DAVIDS: The Mark Steyn review. “It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had in a long time.”
Cool. It doesn’t get any better than that.
posted at 06:52 PM by Glenn Reynolds
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Mar
30
Posted at 21:37 by Gavin M.
Um, we just got simultaneous links from Atrios, Josh Marshall, and Daily Kos, re: Brad’s important photos from his trip to Baghdad, and I’m not aware of this ever happening before, so if the site blows up, we totally didn’t do it.
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Mar
30
Posted at 21:00 by HTML Mencken
Hi, I’m RETARDO Montalban of elementropy and I’m here at Sadly, No! to tell you about a wingnut technological breakthrough: The Gnatella Platform.
Actual photo of RETARDO
Here’s a picture of me, that you may pin to your dartboard find suitable for printing and framing, perhaps to give as a present to your grandmother, for am I not the most scrubbed and respectable-looking Progressive you’ve ever seen? Glad you agree!
Anyway, the Gnatella Platform: it is a peer-to-peer wingnutware device by which stories of pundits’ children are traded amongst wingnuts, then injected into their screeds as needed; the children’s privacy obliterated, their future embarassment, total; their future therapy bills, astronomical; the parents’ hackery, boundless.
Lileks, of course, is not only the wingnutware’s inventor, he and daughter ‘Gnat’ are also clients, while Meghan Cox Gurdon liked the product so much she offered to buy the company. The thing is wildly popular. Lately, one of its prime users has been Cathy Seipp, whose soccer mom mendacities regularly pollute the L.A. Times.
But in her latest exploitation she may have gone too far; some readers wrote in to complain:
regardless of whether you had her consent (which, as a minor, she cannot give without your consent – which would be conflicted), your disclosure of your daughter’s personal information was a shocking and unjustifiable invasion of her privacy. I hope it was worth it for you.
To which Cathy tartly if ingenuously replied:
Well, you know, anything for those opinion writing rates.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Mar
30
Posted at 19:27 by Sadly, No!
What’s better worse than a Two-Minute TownHall? It’s a Two-Minute Pajama Stains, sans Hot Dog Tree. Let’s get ready to shorten!
Shorter Anchoress:
Illegal immigration is a complex problem that demands complex solutions. So hopefully God will reveal them to Peggy Noonan in a dream.
Shorter Erik Svane:
The French complain about the media just like we do. Except it’s funny when they do it.
Shorter Drinking From Home:
Some of us are still fixated on that whole Danish cartoons thing.
Shorters Dean Esmay:
Some people don’t have a way with words. Fortunately, I… have way.
and:
If you thought Anchoress was going to beat me at the game of writing a long post without saying anything, guess again!
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Mar
30
Posted at 19:23 by Gavin M.
I just went through nine pages of supposedly “religious” clocks (several of which had pictures of Ben D., or at least his namesake), but there were NONE of Pastor Swank–or even Hillary Swank (either now or the 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer Hillary).
Posted by: Ken Houghton | March 30, 2006 06:17 PM
(Prototype — development still under)
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Mar
30
Posted at 12:50 by Brad
Because no horse is worth beating unless it’s totally dead, here are some more exclusive photos from our last trip to Baghdad:
Look, liberal media! Baghdad is working on a recycling center! Put that in your hippie crack pipe and smoke it!!!
Now let’s go in for a close-up:
They’ve got the Great Pyramid, the Colossus, the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum? Wow! And check out that freshly-painted school right next to the Kremlin! If that ain’t success, I don’t know what is!
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Mar
30
Posted at 9:58 by Gavin M.
Sure, CafePress is lame (not least because it has one of those ‘intercaps’ in the name — a DotCom trend that got OutOfHand and now EveryoneUsesThem without even KnowingWhy), but let’s face it: If you get an idea for a bumper sticker, no longer must you wander around wishing you had an uncle in the bumper-sticker industry. You’re there, baby.
It’s with this in mind that we’re proud to announce the existence of a still-shuttered, yet bustling CafePress StoreFront in which we’re accumulating DumbAssCrap of the nature that swirls around in our heads all day and every day, preventing us from concentrating on any but the most elementary tasks, pretty much.
For instance, this has long represented a big hole in the bumper sticker market:
And this is a natural and necessary addition to the oval Eurosticker canon:
And it’s not just stickers, but also apparel, housewares, knick-knacks, greeting cards, and other junk. There now exists a Pastor Swank wall clock, for one thing. And even uselesser things! Things that NobodyWants! Because WhyNot?
‘Mad,’ they say. ‘Joking,’ they say. We’ll see who they call mad and joking when we roll out the S,N! Mutant Attack Kitten line.
“You are madd und zhoking.”
Are not, either.
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Mar
30
Posted at 4:27 by Gavin M.
Howard Kaloogian
Downtown Baghdad
We originally posted a photograph not of Baghdad, Iraq but from Istanbul, Turkey where our delegation traveled on the way home to the United States. We apologize for this mistake. We have corrected it with a photograph we took from Baghdad.
We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq. Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.
Kaloogian’s campaign office also removed this Baghdad street scene:
And this photo of a troupe of the Baghdad musicians who gaily serenade the bustling nightlife that characterizes this new Mideast magnet for the pleasure-traveler.
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Mar
29
Posted at 23:25 by Gavin M.
Howard Kaloogian,* a leading Republican running for the seat in Congress recently vacated by indicted Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham. . .posted on the official Web site for his campaign a picture taken in “downtown Baghdad,” he said, during his visit to the city, which supposedly indicated that the media was wrong about the level of violence in the city. “We took this photo of downtown Baghdad while we were in Iraq,” he wrote. “Iraq (including Baghdad) is much more calm and stable than what many people believe it to be. But, each day the news media finds any violence occurring in the country and screams and shouts about it - in part because many journalists are opposed to the U.S. effort to fight terrorism.”
In less than a day, it was over. “Jem6X” at the popular DailyKos blog confirmed the street scene was in Istanbul, not Baghdad.
Tipped off by someone who recognized the actual intersection in Istanbul, Jem went through online photo galleries and in a matter of minutes today found a snap taken by a “Faruk” that lined up with the “Baghdad” photo in numerous conclusive ways. Game, set, and match to the blogosphere.
A faked photo? This is a big day for the Internet’s premier suspicious-photo pointer-outer and tireless photo-fakery obsessive.
Read the rest of this entry »
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