Documentation is a good thing...

Jay Carney in January:

It's all very suspicious-sounding. The provision smacks of a power-grab, an attempt to put a leash on federal prosecutors in the name of efficiency. It looks even worse when it turns out one of the "interim" US attorneys appointed by Alberto Gonzales is Tim Griffin, a veteran GOP operative who worked in Karl Rove's shop at the White House and as director of research (i.e., chief dirt digger) at the Republican National Committee. Not only that, but Griffin was appointed to be the USA in his home state of Arkansas, which can only mean he's being sent by Rove, armed with subpoena power, to dig up fresh dirt on the Clintons in time for the 2008 presidential campaign cycle.

Of course! It all makes perfect conspiratorial sense!

Except for one thing: in this case some liberals are seeing broad partisan conspiracies where none likely exist.

Jay Carney in March:

Twelve days ago, after David Iglesias went public, I said that if there turned out to be a broad conspiracy behind the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, "I will take my hat off to Marshall and others in the blogosphere and congratulate them for having been right in their suspicions about this story from the beginning."

My hat is off. Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo and everyone else out there whose instincts told them there was something deeply wrong and even sinister about the firings, and who dug around and kept writing about them while Iglesias decided whether to talk to the press or go quietly on to his next job, deserve tremendous credit.

When this story first surfaced, I thought the Bush White House and Justice Department were guilty of poorly executed acts of crass political patronage. I called some Democrats on the Hill; they were "concerned", but this was not a priority. The blogosphere was the engine on this story, pulling the Hill and the MSM along. As the document dump proves, what happened was much worse than I'd first thought. I was wrong. Very nice work, and thanks for holding my feet to the fire.

How to fire USAs

Drat, I can't upload the picture. Oh, well. Check this PDF, and see what it says on pages 16-18.

http://judiciary.house.gov/media/pdfs/DOJdocsPt2070313.pdf

Gonzales and the Anklebiters

So, Schummer amd fellow Dems are screaming for Alberto Gonzales to resign because of the firings of 8 U.S. Attorneys.

Yet no one raised an eyebrow when Janet Reno fired all 93 of them in 1993.

Reno to U.S. attorneys: Hand in your resignations, please Date: March 24, 1993 Publication: The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution Page Number: A/11 Word Count: 752
Attorney General Janet Reno on Tuesday asked all of the country's U.S. attorneys, including the three in Georgia, to submit their resignations, saying the Clinton administration wants to build its own team of federal prosecutors. U.S. Attorneys Joe Whitley in Atlanta, Edgar Ennis in Macon and Jay D. Gardner in Savannah said Tuesday that they will comply.

Typical Democratic tactic of screaming about something perfectly acceptable and hope that no one notices their own far more aggregious behavior in the same area in the past.

Update

I guess my analysis is not unique. From the Wall Street Journal:

Also at the time, allegations concerning some of the Clintons' Whitewater dealings were coming to a head. By dismissing all 93 U.S. Attorneys at once, the Clintons conveniently cleared the decks to appoint "Friend of Bill" Paula Casey as the U.S. Attorney for Little Rock. Ms. Casey never did bring any big Whitewater indictments, and she rejected information from another FOB, David Hale, on the business practices of the Arkansas elite including Mr. Clinton. When it comes to "politicizing" Justice, in short, the Bush White House is full of amateurs compared to the Clintons....

As for some of the other fired Attorneys, at least one of their dismissals seemed to owe to differences with the Administration about the death penalty, another to questions about the Attorney's managerial skills. Not surprisingly, the dismissed Attorneys are insisting their dismissals were unfair, and perhaps in some cases they were. It would not be the first time in history that a dismissed employee did not take kindly to his firing, nor would it be the first in which an employer sacked the wrong person.

No question, the Justice Department and White House have botched the handling of this issue from start to finish. But what we don't have here is any serious evidence that the Administration has acted improperly or to protect some of its friends. If Democrats want to understand what a real abuse of power looks like, they can always ask the junior Senator from New York.

It Sucks to be Al Sharpton

From Neal Boortz, a libertarian talk show host based in Atlanta:

Imagine you're Al Sharpton. OK ... I know, you might find it hard to imagine that you're a fat, bigoted lying blowhard who's irresponsible rants have more than likely led to the deaths of innocents in New York City ... but try to imagine you're Al Sharpton anyway. You know you have absolutely nothing working for you other than your ability to manipulate the pandering media into giving you some face time on TV by simply spouting the dogma of black victimization.

Now .. here you are, standing as little more than an object of amusement for many, and an example of a depraved race pimp to most, trying to compete with someone who carries himself with the dignity of Barack Obama. What can you do? Get rid of the pompadour hairstyle? Suddenly develop an aura of respectability? Hardly. You really only have one option ... either you manage to get Barack Obama to legitimize you and elevate you to something close to his level by begging you for your endorsement; or you start ripping into Obama in the faint hope that you can somehow bring him down to play with you in the sty.

Yup .. .it sucks to be Al Sharpton. Finally Americans have seen what a bona-fide black candidate for the presidency looks like and talks like --- and he bears no resemblance whatsoever to you.

And if sucks to be Al Sharpton, think about how much it sucks to be Jesse Jackson right now. Why, this Obama upstart hasn't even established his credentials by blackmailing a major corporation ... and here he is being taken seriously! Life's tough, Jesse! How ya gonna keep the money flowing into your secret coffers when you aren't the leader of the pack any more?

Washington Post on the Pelosi Iraq Plan

Blasted as vote-mongering at the expense of geopolitical reality. Unusual for the WaPo to go after the Dems but...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/12/AR2007031201198.html

A Classic

South Park.....pseudo-conservative humor for 10 years

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/south_park_still_sick_still_wrong/page/1

Michael Moore and Honesty

Turning the tables on Michael Moore

By Michelle Malkin · March 10, 2007 04:42 PM

What goes around, comes around. A new documentary unmasking Michael Moore debuts today at the South by Southwest film festival:

The cameras get turned on Michael Moore for a change at the South by Southwest film festival, where the documentary Manufacturing Dissent will have its world premiere.
The film from directors Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk, playing March 10 at the Austin festival, follows Moore during the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 and questions many of his tactics.
Among its revelations: that the confrontational documentarian did interview former General Motors Chairman Roger Smith, the elusive subject of his 1989 debut Roger & Me, and simply chose to leave it out of the finished cut.

Moore, who won an Academy Award for 2002's Bowling for Columbine, has not responded to e-mail and phone requests for comment.

"The people who can attest to this are extremely credible and do attest to this in the film," said John Pierson, the independent film veteran who helped sell Roger & Me to Warner Bros. and now teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. "I've always loved Roger & Me. I loved working on it. I really believed in it, and that's really bad. The fundamental core of the film is how his mission to get Roger Smith fails and, P.S., Michael spent 18 years since then swearing he never interviewed Roger Smith."

More details:
In "Manufacturing Dissent" Caine and Melnyk — whose previous films include "Junket Whore," about movie journalists, and "Citizen Black," about Conrad Black — note that the scene in "Fahrenheit 9/11" in which President George W. Bush greets "the haves, and the have-mores" took place at the annual Al Smith Dinner, where politicians traditionally make sport of themselves. Melnyk and Caine received a video of the speeches from the dinner's sponsor, the Archdiocese of New York. "Al Gore later answers a question by saying, 'I invented the Internet,'" Caine said. "It's all about them making jokes at their own expense."

For once, Michael Moore has no comment.

Fitz on slow boil?

Is he waiting until February 2009 to make sure his work isn't wasted?

My head hurts

Let's recap: a corrupt Israeli PM - has a stake in a corrupt Israeli bank- owned by a corrupt Wall Street global hedge fund - which owns a corrupt US defense contractor - which contributes to corrupt GOP Congressmen - who also receive money from another corrupt defense contractor - that defense contractor produced faulty intel under contract to a corrupt CIA Assn't Director - that faulty intel was used to justify a corrupt US Administration's case for invading Iraq - that was planned and executed by corrupt neocons inside DoD who had written a proposal years earlier to wage wars to privatize the Israeli economy.

More Than a Feeling

Brad Delp is dead at 55. Nooooo!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17543043/

Liberal overreaction

No, really. This is just stupid, if that's all there was to it...

Boggles the Mind

Literally. First, from Dr. Robert Lanza

Without perception, there is in effect no reality. Nothing has existence unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further influences that reality. Even time itself is not exempted from biocentrism. Our sense of the forward motion of time is really the result of an infinite number of decisions that only seem to be a smooth continuous path. At each moment we are at the edge of a paradox known as The Arrow, first described 2,500 years ago by the philosopher Zeno of Elea. Starting logically with the premise that nothing can be in two places at once, he reasoned that an arrow is only in one place during any given instance of its flight. But if it is in only one place, it must be at rest. The arrow must then be at rest at every moment of its flight. Logically, motion is impossible. But is motion impossible? Or rather, is this analogy proof that the forward motion of time is not a feature of the external world but a projection of something within us? Time is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.

Find the rest of this article here

You want experimental proofs? Check this out (here's an excerpt)

The results, reported this week in Science, prove that the photon does not decide whether to behave like a particle or a wave when it hits the first beam splitter, Roch says. Rather, the experimenter decides only later, when he decides whether to put in the second beam splitter. In a sense, at that moment, he chooses his reality.

Congress back on duty

Oversight. Gotta love it.

Within a week it emerged that as many as a half-dozen other U.S. attorneys had been forced out under similarly unexplained circumstances at roughly the same time. That was enough to get Bush administration critics asking questions. But the story might well have languished there, in the netherworld of Bush White House quasi-scandals, had it not been for questions asked of Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty at a Senate hearing early last month.

The eight fired U.S. attorneys seemed inclined to go quietly until McNulty told the Senate that they’d been let go for “performance-related” problems. A review of the attorneys’ performance evaluations quickly cast doubt on that explanation. And it was also enough to get the fired attorneys talking.

The Last Flight of Lieut. Landaker

From the blog post on BlackFive...

On board, 0600: "Good morning folks this is the Captain. This morning we have been attending to some additional duties and I apologize for being 10 minutes late for pushback but believe me we will be early to LAX. This morning it is my sad pleasure to announce that 1st LT Jared Landaker USMC will be flying with us to his Big Bear home in Southern California . Jared lost his life over the sky's of Iraq earlier this month and today we have the honor of returning him home along with his Mother, Father, Brother and uncles. Please join me in making the journey comfortable for the Landaker family and their uniformed escort. Now sit back and enjoy our ride, we are not expecting any turbulence until we reach the Rocky Mountains and at that time we will do what we can to ensure a smooth ride. For those interested you can listen in to our progress on button 9."

Anatomy of a Botched Joke

A good perspective, for once. From opinionjournal.com

Anatomy of a Botched Joke

Remember when John Kerry made disparaging comments about the U.S. military and then claimed, with an absurd self-righteousness, that it was all a "botched joke"? Now, thanks to Ann Coulter, we know what an actual botched joke looks like.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Coulter said:

I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word "faggot," so I--so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards.

This joke failed, for three reasons:

The pop culture reference is too obscure for most people to get. We knew about it only because Kathryn Lopez linked to an article about it: It seems Isaiah Washington, a TV actor, checked into a "residential treatment facility" after a dispute with a fellow cast member in which Washington used the word "faggot."

Although Edwards has what people back in 2003 used to call a "metrosexual" demeanor, as well as a history of gay-baiting, it is not clear why implying that he is gay would be funny.

"Faggot" is an ugly word, redolent of hatred even if employed without hateful intent.

Of course, every time Coulter says something outrageous, the reaction is Pavlovian all around: Liberals get outraged, conservatives get outraged, and liberals get outraged that conservatives aren't outraged, even though they are. Our favorite conservative reaction came from blogger Rick Moran, who wrote:

I urge everyone--right and left--to take the following actions:

1. Never write another blog post about Ann Coulter no matter how outrageous, cruel, or bigoted her language. . . .

I will no longer be a willing cog in her publicity machine.

Well, OK, I will write this 700-word post, and I will update it twice, to the tune of more than 500 words. But once I'm done with that, I will no longer be a willing cog in her publicity machine! Really!

Our favorite liberal response came from the Edwards campaign itself, which sent out a ridiculously over-the-top email attributed to pro-Saddam ex-Rep. David Bonior:

Did you hear about Anne [sic] Coulter's speech this afternoon attacking John? A friend just forwarded me the video and it's one of the worst moments in American politics I've seen. I can't bring myself to even repeat her comments. Her shameless display of bigotry is so outrageous you actually have to see for yourself to believe it. This is just a taste of the filth that the right-wing machine is gearing up to throw at us.

So it's both "one of the worst moments in American politics" and "just a taste of the filth" to come? The Associated Press reports that Edwards himself "said a remark about him by conservative author Ann Coulter reminded him of hateful speech against blacks he heard while growing up in the segregated South." And if you want to show your disgust with Coulter, go here to donate "Coulter cash" to the Edwards campaign.

Edwards seems to be striking a self-pitying tone similar to the one Kerry struck last year when he was the one who gave offense. It's funny how liberal politicians are always the victims, whether someone else says something outrageous about them or they say something outrageous about others.

In any case, you can tell Coulter's botched joke really was a botched joke by the light touch she used when the New York Times asked her about it:

Ms. Coulter, asked for a reaction to the Republican criticism, said in an e-mail message: "C'mon, it was a joke. I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards. That would be mean."

Now that gave us a chuckle.

Great Book: World War Z

How did I ever miss this one? This book is a mockumentary that takes place a few years after humanity has defeated a "Night of the Living Dead" style zombie attack. It is very insightful on how various factions of society would react to such a thing even if the premise is fantasy. Both left and right are skewered for different reasons.

Highly recommended

http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Z-History-Zombie/dp/0307346609

Deconstructing D'Souza

This Kos diary does a good job of showing the danger of the "violent right".

By defining liberals as a "hidden" second front of terrorism, D'Souza's book invokes a very simple, widely held idea in America: that "War on Terror" means first and foremost, "kill terrorists." Thus, The Enemy at Home gives intellectual legitimacy to a widely accepted, rapidly growing Republican tendency to frame national security in terms of killing Democrats....

But D'Souza is a different kind of voice to emerge in the violent right. Neither angry nor animated, D'Souza cuts a media image similar to that of a boring, middle school substitute teacher. He is a quiet, unassuming man using soft tones as he both writes and speaks about the need to battle and destroy liberals with the same ferocity as we kill terrorists....

Americans who dismiss the power and danger of D'Souza's argument do so at great risk to the public sphere of free debate in this country. By the time the arena of public ideas is overtaken by D'Souza's toxic and contagious language of violence, it will be too late to turn it back.

Argument by anecdote

There are those here who need to take note of this point.

UPDATE II: This whole issue raises a broader point: the reliance by idiots and deceivers on the fallacy of argument by anecdote, one of the lowest (and most commonly invoked) forms of fallacious reasoning.

It is hard to overstate how pervasive this lowly and manipulative weapon is wielded by right-wing demagogues to shape our political debates. LGF's simplistic trick, for instance, is to post individual stories every day of Muslims who engage in violent acts ("hey, look - I proved that Muslims are inferior and dangerous!"). Michelle Malkin repeatedly posts individual stories of supposed leftists engaging in illegal or violent acts ("hey, look -- I proved that liberals are unhinged"). Or the right finds a single obscure college professor nobody ever heard of who referred to 9/11 victims as "Little Eichmanns" ("hey, look - we proved that 'the Left' hates America and believes that the 9/11 victims deserved it!").

Those who rely on that cheap, tawdry tactic are really indistinguishable -- just in terms of the methods -- from, say, websites run by white supremacists who, every day, troll the news wires and post individual stories of crimes committed by African-Americans and then think that they've made a broader point. In that context, most people can see how transparently fallacious the tactic is, but in other contexts, they are blind to it.

In fact, because such sloppy, illogical shorthand -- when used against "liberals" -- is easy to both convey and ingest, journalists love it. They use it themselves and are easily manipulated into passing such arguments along (just fathom how quickly this story is going to make the usual rounds -- "'liberals' hate Bush and Cheney so much that they actually expressed sorrow that Cheney wasn't killed in the explosion today").

Glenn Beck Rips On Olbermann

Well deserved, I might add. Beck does show restraint, but he's generally a class act.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUvQ7Slfo-A

The Gore "Pile-On"

This is what happens when your sanctimonious ass gets caught saying one thing and doing another. And Suz, not one word about going after the messengers - in this case they broke a story that the mainstream media should have been all over before anyone else.

From opinionjournal.com (The Wall Street Journal), partially quoted:

The Tennessean reported that Gore buys "carbon offsets" to compensate for his home's use of energy from carbon-based fuels. As Wikipedia explains, a carbon offset "is a service that tries to reduce the net carbon emissions of individuals or organizations indirectly, through proxies who reduce their emissions and/or increase their absorption of greenhouse gases." . . .

But how Gore buys his "carbon offsets," as revealed by The Tennessean raises serious questions. According to the newspaper's report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management:

Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe . . .

Gore is chairman of the firm and, presumably, draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he "buys" his "carbon offsets" from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn't buy "carbon offsets" through Generation Investment Management--he buys stocks. . . .

Meanwhile, Gore runs around the country and the world trumpeting "climate crisis" and blaming man's use of carbon-based energy--burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel as he goes. His efforts have served to put climate change at the top of the national and even global agenda, driving up the value of the stocks and companies viewed as "green" or environmentally friendly. Companies like those his investment management firm invest his own and other peoples' [sic] money in. (You can see a list of Generation Investment Management's holdings here, courtesy of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission.) ...

So, let's sum this up: Here we have a major American politician who is calling for policies that would impose huge costs on society but appears to be profiting handsomely himself; who is leading an extravagant lifestyle while demanding sacrifices from ordinary people; and who is calling on the media to suppress the views of those with whom he disagrees, while at the same time urging more government regulation in the name of "fairness" to his partisan and ideological allies.

Why is it left to think tanks and bloggers to investigate and expose all this?

Update:

Heh. Gets even better. From BillHobbs.com

Gore's huge electric power usage at his Nashville home isn't the only example of how the prophet profit of environmental doom hasn't always lived as if he believes his message. During the eight years Gore was vice president, he voted in four national elections. Every single time, he and his entourage and security detail and accompanying media flew to Nashville on a large government jet, burning thousands of gallons of fossil fuels and pumping huge amounts of carbon emissions directly into the earth's atmosphere, and then drove in a caravan of fossil fuel-burning vehicles from Nashville International Airport east on I-40 to Carthage, Tennessee, so the local and national TV cameras could get video of him at the voting booth. And then the whole caravan headed back to Nashville for the plane ride back to DC. Traffic had to be halted on Nashville's interstates and side streets every time - sometimes during rush hour - idling thousand of vehicles that just sat there, burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon pollution, just so Gore could create a media photo-op.

He could have instead voted by mailing in an absentee ballot