Abu Wabu

This is the Power of Power Line: referring to the disastrous Jennifer Loven's Alternative Reality at the Associated Press.

A short-lived Palestinian group held a presser announcing its entry into the Destroy Israel Sweepstakes whilst vowing to clean up Al Aqsa's bad reputation. I kid you not.

Problem: Israel typically hunts down and kills people who enter the Destroy Israel Sweepstakes. And that's exactly what happened to these assholes.

Proportionality at work.

HT Ace

Valerie Plame has by turn both taken credit and disavowed responsibility for her employer's choice of her husband to "investigate" and then "debunk" the famous Niger-Iraq yellowcake story. Somehow, a Republican Senator has finally noticed that little conflict.

Sen. Christopher Bond:

Mrs. Wilson told the CIA Inspector General that she suggested her husband for the trip, she told our committee staff that she could not remember whether she did or her boss did, and told the House committee, emphatically, that she did not suggest him.

NRO's Byron York is Fact-Checking Valerie Plame Wilson. 1 2 3 4 .

Ace's Thoughts On Amnesty:

Those who want to say "both the left and right are against this so it must be good" should be reminded that the left and right are both against implementing a full-on jackbooted police state, too. That doesn't make the 2007 Jackbooted Police State Omnibus Fascism Bill a "good compromise."

UPDATED

Let's hope so. There can be no doubt about the MSM's agenda when it ignores this story in favor of trashing three innocent white men in the Duke fabrication; refer to the Tawana Brawley fiasco for further evidence. As Michelle Malkin points out on Hot Air, the Christian-Newsom story simply doesn't fit the MSM's narrative, a component of which is that a white-on-black crime story is sensational and should be trumpeted from the rooftops, even if it hasn't been proven true; the converse is to be supressed. There are other examples of the MSM's tunnel vision not having to do with race, such as when Newsweek tried to bury the Monica Lewinsky story because it might bring down "their" President, or the passes given Diane Feinstein, William Jefferson, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, etc. And that's a big etc.

I invite the MSM's leading lights, all of whom have supressed this story by ignoring it, to explain why.

The list of new media lining up to do the MSM's work for them:
La Shawn Barber
Newsbusters
Flopping Aces
InstaPundit
Mitchieville
The Conservative Voice
Ace Of Spades

UPDATE
FOX is finally stepping up to air the story; I hope it reaches prime time.

There is some (mostly irrelevant) debate about whether or not this monstrosity consitutes a hate crime. Narrowly speaking, it can't because there is no such thing under American law as a hate crime, as far as I know. But to the people quoted in this story, I think it must be a hate crime, because their gleeful celebration of the deaths of the victims, based on their color, can only come from a deep-seated hatred for "the other", in this case "privileged whites".

That black leadership is not immediately stepping in to vilify these racists speaks volumes.

A dead one. Coalition and Afghan forces continue to work Allah's will.

From the NYT:

Afghan government officials showed the body of Mullah Dadullah, the top operational commander for the Taliban insurgency, to reporters here Sunday morning, saying he had been killed in a joint operation of Afghan and coalition forces.

Pretty In Pink

The Taliban, still unclear on the whole "forensic" "evidence" thing, denied the news, promising a “fresh voice recording” of Dadullah.

Yeah, well, I don't think so.

4,000 Terrorist Kills

Progress. Since January 1, 2006.

You sure as hell won't read about it on the front page of the New York Times.

Although...

Ace:

I hear that ABCNews is going with a full-court press on this watershed number, and will feature Chris Bury reading the names of the terrorist dead for four straight nights on Nightline.

Myself, I pictured Olbermann on that gig.

Arab-hater Mark Steyn catalogues the madness infecting western responses to Islamofascist violence and intimidation, all in Steynian fashion, of course:

Do you remember that little difficulty a few months back over the Pope’s indelicate quotation of Manuel II? Many Muslims were very upset about his speech (or his speech as reported on the BBC et al), so they protested outside Westminster Cathedral in London demanding “capital punishment” for the Pope, and they issued a fatwa in Pakistan calling on Muslims to kill His Holiness, and they firebombed a Greek Orthodox Church and an Anglican Church in Nablus, and they murdered a nun in Somalia and a couple of Christians in Iraq. As Tasnim Aslam of the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad helpfully clarified, “Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.” So don’t say we’re violent or we’ll kill you. As I wrote in National Review at the time, quod erat demonstrandum.

But that’s a debating society line. Islam isn’t interested in winning the debate, it’s interested in winning the real fight – the clash of civilizations, the war, society, culture, the whole magilla. That’s why it doesn’t care about the inherent contradictions of the argument: in the Middle East early in 2002, I lost count of the number of Muslims I met who believed simultaneously (a) that 9/11 was pulled off by the Mossad and (b) that it was a great victory for Islam. Likewise, it’s no stretch to feel affronted at the implication that you’re violently irrational and to threaten to murder anyone who says so. Western societies value logic because we value talk, and talks, and talking, on and on and on: that’s pretty much all we do, to the point where, faced with any challenge from Darfur to the Iranian nuclear program, our objective is to reduce the issue to just something else to talk about interminably. But, if you don’t prize debate and you merely want to win, getting hung up on logic is only going to get in your way. Take the most devastating rapier wit you know – Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward – and put him on a late-night subway train up against a psycho with a baseball bat. The withering putdown, the devastating aphorism will avail him nought.

The quality of your argument is only important if you want to win by persuasion. But it’s irrelevant if you want to win by intimidation.

And that's where the idiots' mantra of engagement and dialogue falls apart: the enemy would simply saw their heads off and the engagement and dialogue would be ferme, much as the rooftop windchimers in Independence Day met their self-congratulatory end in a ruthlessly-applied inferno.

I agree with Mark Steyn. I guess that makes me an Arab-hater, too, at least to those bending toward a self-congratulatory end in a ruthlessly-applied inferno.

James Forsyth writes, in BLACK SHEEP OF THE FAMILY TO THE PRESIDENT:

Tonight isn’t the first time that the Queen and George W. Bush have broken bread together at the White House. But the odds are that the conversation tonight will be more stilted than it was the last time they did.

Rewind to 1991 and the Presidency of George Bush Senior:

“The Queen of England got two George Bushes for the price of one when she arrived at the White House last Tuesday. What she didn't know was that the president's eldest son, George Walker Bush, so unpredictable that the family never knows what he'll say in polite society, was under strict orders from his parents not to address the Queen.

Somehow, though, he and the Queen got to talking anyway. About boots, the new pair he was wearing, made especially for the occasion. Usually he has them printed with something like "Texas Rangers." Was that on these boots? the Queen wanted to know.

"No, ma'am," George replied. "God Save the Queen."

The Queen thought that so jolly good that she further fueled their exchange with another question. Was he the black sheep in the family? she inquired.

"I guess so," he admitted. "

All families have them," observed the queen.

"Who's yours?" asked George.

"Don't answer that!" cut in Barbara Bush, appearing from out of nowhere.”

From The Washington Post, 21st May, 1991

Eric Stacklebeck contributes a clear and ranging assessment of how Anbar's Sunnis are taking the fight to al Qaeda there, and winning. Sunni leaders are also pressuring the government for a constitutional amendment to guarantee against partitioning Iraq.

Could the Sunnis finally be engaging in the process?

HT: CQ and Hot Air

Give One Piece A Chance creator Sheryl Crowe has once more admonished all you uncaring bastards out there who "refuse to acknowledge climate change", to which Jawa's Good Lieutenant replies:

Sheryl, sweetie? People who tour with caravans of three tractor trailers, four buses and six cars shouldn't be preaching to the rest of us about our alleged environmental sins.

Fair advice to Ms. Crowe, whose carbon footprint compared to the average Joe is akin to comparing a chainsaw to a termite.

Captain's Quarters points out the WaPo's dishonesty in reporting a survey of troops in Iraq on torture:

What they found would likely reflect what a similar survey would show here. In fact, it speaks to the discipline of the military that while a third of troops approved of torture in the abstract as a means to prevent an imminent attack, almost none of them put that into practice. In order to get to the ten percent mark, the survey had to include kicking people and breaking possessions, which hardly qualifies in anyone's mind as "torture".

The Post reports that this substantiates the notion that torture is widespread and not just found in isolated incidents in places like Abu Ghraib. That's nonsense. Getting only 10% of soldiers to admit they may have kicked someone or have broken up some furniture does not mean that our troops have reopened Saddam's torture chambers under new management, as Ted Kennedy once put it. It shows that torture, at least in the Army, is very isolated and not tolerated by the vast majority of our troops.

Let me put it this way. The level of support for firm timetables to get out of Iraq, according to Rasmussen, has hit 57%, less than that of troops eschewing torture under all circumstances. Yet war opponents claim that America has made clear its opposition to the war's continuance. Why is 57% dispositive for anti-war sentiment, but 10% dispositive for torture?

The Army has reacted to this survey by expanding training on ethics, which is an appropriate response. We want the troops to maintain strict discipline, and it looks like they have done so except in isolated incidents. In the meantime, perhaps the Post and war critics can receive expanded training on mathematics and statistics.

Emphasis mine. Read the rest.

Iraqi Sunnis Taking Up With U.S. Forces Against al Qaeda In Iraq
More and more, al Qaeda are wearing out their welcome amongst Sunnis fed up with their wanton butchery. That's Good News.

Note To The Goracle: You're All Wet, But It Ain't The Rising Ocean Levels.
Joel Schwartz writes in NRO:

Al Gore presented his Inconvenient Truths at Tulane University in New Orleans a couple of days ago. According to a colleague who was there, Gore claimed that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to his (Gore's) world view.

I'll leave it to others to take on this claim in terms of political philosophy. Regarding the science, there are many articles that show Gore is mistaken. Below are links to 13 of them. All are from peer reviewed scientific journals, and all in one way or another either fail to support or directly contradict the claim that humans are changing the climate in ways that will be catastrophic for human health and welfare. For each article, the title hyperlinks either to the abstract, or, if freely available, the full article.

Below the title is a short description of what each article says. These are just a few of the many scientific articles that contradict the claim that the scientific results support the alarmists. And more such research continues to come out each month. Of course, there are also many articles Gore can cite to support his views on climate change. But when Gore claims there is nothing to debate, it's clear that many climate scientists think otherwise.

More here.

HT: NRO