The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

On Mr. Rumsfeld

Posted on | February 25, 2011 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

By the power of Kindle, I’m about 2/3 through Rumsfeld’s book, and I highly recommend it to all Americans. The initial chapters about the ’60s and ’70s alone are highly educational for the GenX and younger crowd.

Jon Stewart tries to interview and dangles very close to an important point about the effort to build support for the Iraq invasion.
Read more

Category: Foreigners

LIVE AT FIVE – 2.25.11

Posted on | February 25, 2011 | 4 Comments

TOP NEWS
Pentagon Awards Tanker Contract To Boeing

Artist's concept of Boeing's NewGen tanker, based on the 767

Gulf states lawmakers disappointed by the decision

Libya Clashes Continue; Gadhafi Blames Al-Qaeda (Video)
Rebel militia takes control of Misrata
Former Libyan Diplomat: Killing Khadafy Only Way To Stop Violence
Qadhafi Retaliates As Rebels Gain Ground

Shuttle Discovery Clears The Tower For The Last Time
The beginning of the end for NASA’s manned space flight program

Assange Handed Resounding Defeat By British Court
Will be remanded to Sweden for questioning and trial



POLITICS
Providence School Board Votes To Dismiss Teachers

Teachers gather at the board meeting as the board votes to fire them.

1926 teachers to be terminated at the end of the school year in response to budget crisis

Wisconsin Troopers Seek AWOL Senators

Gay Marriage Waning As A Conservative Issue?
Or is the economy more important?

White House Grooves To The Motown Sound

No Council Wars Sequel For Alderman Burke, Mayor Emanuel



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
High Oil Prices Stabilize Despite Continuing Mideast Crises
GM Returns To Profitability
AIG’s Chartis Unit Faces Questions After Latest Loss
MacBooks With Better Processor, Graphics Unveiled
Google Tool To Move Microsoft Files To Web
Sea Turtles’ Migration Mystery Solved



SPORTS
Celtics Shake Up Roster With Deadline Moves

Perkins going to hang with the Thunder after Thursday's trade

Kendrick Perkins and Nate Robinson headed to Oklahoma City for Jeff Green, Nenad Krstic, and a draft pick

Cards’ Wainwright Getting Tommy John Surgery, Out For Season (Video)

Bulls Prove They Can Beat The Heat, 93-89

Crawford Notches Third Shutout Of Season As Hawks Down Predators 3-0

That Was Fast: Mickelson, McIlroy Out Of Match Play Championship

Wings’ Problems At Home Continue With Loss To Stars

Giants Enjoy Series Afterglow, But Rangers Hit Speedbump

Who Won Baseball’s Offseason?



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
CBS Cancels Production On “Two And A Half Men” For Remainder Of Season After Sheen’s Radio Rant; Actor Fires Back

Who else?

The Eleven Most Inexplicable Quotes From Today’s Charlie Sheen Radio Meltdown


Charlie To Chuck Lorre: Let’s Fight In The Octagon!



“Hangover Part 2” Teaser Trailer Arrives

Lily Allen Lashes Out At Kanye West Over Abortion Tweet

Faye Dunaway Joins “Dancing With The Stars”

Randy Quaid Wins Fight To Stay In Canada



ELSEWHERE IN LIBYAFOREIGNERS
NZ Quake Toll Rises As Hope Fades For Survivors
Is There A Future For WikiLeaks Without Julian Assange?
Algeria Lifts 19-Year-Old Emergency Law
Final pleas by Irish parties as nation votes in crucial election



BLOGS & STUFF
Nick Gillespie: Why The Evil Koch Brothers Must Be Stopped
Gateway Pundit: Recall Efforts Begin Against 7 AWOL Wisconsin Senators
Dan Riehl: Why Social Conservatives Need To Be Quiet
Atlas Shrugs: “You’re A Bad Jew”
Babalu: Uh-Oh, Qaddaffi’s WMDs…Wonder If Mo’s Friend Barakeh Is Concerned?
Lonely Conservative: Soros, Obama, And Crony Capitalism
National Review Online: Goldman Sachs Wants More Of Your Money
Peter Wehner: The Most Disturbing Personality On Cable TV
POWIP: Van Jones Calls For MoveOn Marches On All 5750 State Capitols
Yid With Lid: What About Transparency?

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Category: Live at Five

Texas Terrorist Romeo, Khalid, Recounts Love for His American Juliet, Sarah

Posted on | February 24, 2011 | 14 Comments

The story of Texas college student Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, a Saudi national accused of plotting terrorist attacks, took a startling turn this evening when it was learned that Aldawsari had written of his infatuation with his university “language partner,” Sarah Rice Stender.

Eric Dondero discovered a May 2009 diary on what is believed to be Aldawsari’s personal blog, in which he wrote that he was in love with Stender and prayed to Allah that she could be converted to Islam (Aldawsari’s grammar and spelling uncorrected):

I met my language partner Sarah Rice Stender and she was nice and pretty, so I like her so much. Me and my friend Adbullrahman Alhamdi were with her today for out first meeting with her and she asked us to discuss about a topic, yet she likes to talk about religioun so we did. I think she has a good point about Islam and she is knowing better about this great faith and religioun.
I am reading this day a lot of my prophet mohammed ( peace be to upon him ) to build my knowledge about my religioun and about him…
I am falling in love of her…..
She is goregeous that I cann’t forget her just right away…
I am asking Allah the great to covert her to Islam and marry me.

Dondero’s discovery of the May 2009 post on Aldawsari’s blog followed identification of the Saudi student’s online activity by Bryan Preston of Pajamas Media.

UPDATE: Aldawsari (or al-Dawsari) was reportedly a student at Southern Plains College, a community college 30 miles west of Lubbock, where Aldawsari reportedly lived. The New York Times:

According to an affidavit filed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the student, Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, indicated in online research and in a journal that he was considering attacking the Dallas residence of former President George W. Bush as well as hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, nightclubs and the homes of soldiers who were formerly stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Mr. Aldawsari, a business major at South Plains College in Lubbock, Tex., is in the United States legally on a student visa, the bureau said. He came to the government’s attention on Feb. 1, when a North Carolina supply company reported that he had tried to order five liters of a chemical that can be used to make an explosive.
A subsequent investigation found that he had already obtained large supplies of the other two chemicals needed for the explosive compound — trinitrophenol or TNP — in December, court documents said.

The government’s accusation that Aldawsari turn to terrorism contrasts sharply with his earlier blog entries. As Preston notes at PJM, Aldawsari wrote:

This is an opportunity to be in the US to achieve my dream that I am working very hard and I am doing my best to catch it, that dream is mainly and simply to be an employee in google which is not impossible to achieve even if it is hard…

So he went from wanting to work for Google to wanting to kill President Bush? Or was his blog (part in English, part in Arabic) part of an elaborate ruse to hide his actual intent? Here’s an Associated Press video report about Aldawsari’s arrest.

For more background and commentary check the first Memeorandum thread, and the second Memeorandum thread.

UPDATE II
Eric Dondero adds another update to his original post confirming that Aldawsari and Stender have a Tennessee connection.

Category: Eric Dondero, Islam, Terrorism, Texas

Ace on ‘Context’

Posted on | February 24, 2011 | 6 Comments

The thuggery against Tabitha Hale compels him:

The media slips an awful lot past the public with the word “context.” They frequently claim they don’t carry stories like this because the “context” doesn’t support making it worthy of mention. . . .
1. We don’t have to patrol the left for violence because the left is entirely non-violent and law-abiding. This assumption is of course false on its face and absurd even in postulation.
2. We don’t have to patrol the left for violence because we have such moral certitude about the goodness of our ends that we are justified in using otherwise-immoral means, such as violence, to attain them.

Go read the whole thing, because Ace is awesome when he’s really pissed off. And it pisses me off, too.

Ten years ago, I did a news article for the Washington Times examining the dearth of coverage about the murder of Jesse Dirkhising, an Arkansas teenager who was raped and suffocated by two men. One of the two killers had just been convicted, and another was still on trial. Why had the murder of Matthew Shepard merited wall-to-wall coverage while the death of Dirkhising — an equally horrendous and senseless crime — got no national coverage at all? I called up the networks to ask, and one response was particularly memorable:

“We’ve been watching the trial and will continue to monitor it,” ABC News spokesman Todd Polkes said Wednesday. “Currently, we have no plans to report it in our national newscasts. It appears to be a local crime story that does not raise the kind of issues that would warrant our coverage.”

What kind of issues do “warrant coverage”? And why are some issues so transparently more equal than others? Who decides these things?

No one ever satisfactorily answered those questions, and here again we see how media bias involves preconceived ideas of what issues “warrant coverage.”

Look, just from the standpoint of sensationalistic “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” newsworthiness, isn’t “Brutish Man Attacks Pretty Girl” kind of a catchy story? You don’t have to politicize the story in order to tell the story, yet reporters seem so afraid of what the story’s political impact might be that they refuse to tell it.

Just like poor Jesse Dirkhising.

Category: Ace of Spades, Media Bias, Tabitha Hale, Unions

Tax Time

Posted on | February 24, 2011 | 4 Comments

Please excuse the relative shortage of blogging this afternoon, because I’ll be at the accountant’s office, going through my annual ordeal. If there’s one thing a self-employed freelance journalist/blogger dreads, it’s tax time.

Back in the old days, when I had a regular job with a salary, my taxes were simple enough that I could do it myself. But now I have to collect up records of my various sources of income and (the really hard part) my expenses. Keeping track of my expenses is especially tricky, in that I did so much travel in 2010. In order to help me match receipts with trips, I compiled this list of my 2010 travels:

JANUARY
California (BCS Championship, Altadena Tea Party) Jan. 5-11
Boston (Massachusetts Senate special election) Jan. 14-21
Washington, DC (Brown campaign victory event) Jan. 28

FEBRUARY
Alabama (Rick Barber, Tim James campaigns) Feb. 4-9
Washington, DC (CPAC) Feb. 18-21

MARCH
Washington, DC (Premiere, “Generation Zero”) March 16
Vegas/Searchlight/Phoenix (Tea Party, Hayworth, Parker) March 25-31

APRIL
New Orleans/Huntsville (SRLC/Les Phillip campaign) April 7-13
Washington, DC (Tax Day Tea Party) April 15
Johnstown, PA (Tim Burns, PA-12 election) April 28
Washington. PA (Tim Burns, PA-12 election) April 30-May 1

MAY
Washington, DC (American Spectator office) May 2
Washington DC (Interview Liz Carter, GA-12) May 11-12
Washington, PA (Tim Burns, PA-12 election) May 18-19 (430 mi.)

JULY
Las Vegas (Right Online Conference) July 22-July 26

AUGUST
Washington, DC (YAF/First Friday) Aug. 6-7
Los Angeles (Mattie Fein CA-36 campaign, Ladd Ehlinger) Aug. 13-19
Anchorage/Wasilla, AK (Joe Miller Senate campaign, Palin) Aug. 30-Sept. 4

SEPTEMBER
Washington, DC (Blog Con/Tea Party rally) Sept. 10-12
Dover, DE (Christine O’Donnell, Senate campaign) Sept. 14-15
Washington, DC (Charles Lollar, MD-4 campaign) Sept. 24

OCTOBER
Boston, New York, Pennsylvania (Congress campaigns) Oct. 9-19
Virginia, Georgia, Florida (Congress campaigns) Oct. 28-Nov. 6

NOVEMBER
Washington, DC (American Spectator gala) Nov. 9

Of course, that’s not a complete list of my travels. I’m certain I made a heck of a lot more trips to D.C. (about 150 miles round-trip from my home in the Maryland hills), but these were the trips I was able to document scanning the blog archives to determine the departure and return dates of the longer trips. Generally speaking, however, I consider it better to low-ball my expenses rather than try to get every penny. If the IRS ever decides to audit me, I hope a complete examination of the record will show that they actually owe me money, rather than the other way around.

Anyone who owns a small business or does contract work can relate to the special woes the IRS imposes on independent entrepreneurs. All the keeping track of receipts, paperwork hassles, etc. The vast majority of Americans, of course, can’t relate to this. They’re like I used to be: Wait for your W-2 to come in the mail and file. So when they hear businessmen complaining about the IRS, they don’t get it: “What’s the big deal?” 

The record-keeping burden involved in working as a contractor or small business owner is, of course, a disincentive to entrepreneurship. People who have regular jobs may think to themselves, “Hey, I bet I could make some extra money selling my skills on the open market, as a contractor or consultant.” But then they think, “Wait, no, because then I’d have to do all that paperwork and record-keeping and maybe have to deal with bureaucratic licensing procedures.”

And so instead they keep slaving away for a salary. The IRS is part of what chains them to their jobs.

Such are the thoughts that cross my mind when I have to deal with this tax-time crap. But there are good thoughts, too. I remember arriving in the Boston train station Jan. 14 last year and meeting Da Tech Guy for the first time. I remember that wild day at Searchlight, Nev., the two nights I crashed on Barbara Espinosa’s sofa in Arizona, all those congressional campaigns in October.

Good times. Good times, my friends.

And, yeah, I had to print out the record of all those tip-jar contributions that helped pay for these trips. You guys are the best blog-readers in the world.

Category: Shoe Leather Fund, Taxes

Hate, Inc.

Posted on | February 24, 2011 | 12 Comments

The Southern Poverty Law Center continues its Exaggeration for Dollars campaign, as Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection documents. They still claim that the Klan is on the march in Rhode Island (???) and 2010 was another banner year for hate groups, says the SPLC:

For the second year in a row, the radical right in America expanded explosively in 2010, driven by resentment over the changing racial demographics of the country, frustration over the government’s handling of the economy, and the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and other demonizing propaganda aimed at various minorities. For many on the radical right, anger is focusing on President Obama, who is seen as embodying everything that’s wrong with the country.

This trick of conflating the scary dangerous “radical right” with, you know, conservative Republicans, is something the SPLC has done more and more since hiring former USA Today reporter Mark Potok 15 years ago.

Note that, in a report entitled “The Year in Hate & Extremism 2010,” the SPLC finds occasion to mention the shooting of Gabby Giffords, which happened in January 2011. So we presume they’ll get two years’ worth of fund-raising “hate” value out of the same crime, committed by a Zeitgeist-obsessed left-wing psychotic (rather than by anyone associated with the right, radical or otherwise.) Note that a search of the SPLC’s site for the terms “Zeitgeist” and “Loughner” yields zero results.

How very convenient . . .

Category: Legal Insurrection, Racism

Our Very Foreign Policy

Posted on | February 24, 2011 | 8 Comments

Yesterday, President Obama managed to say that Moammar Qaddafi’s crackdown in Libya is a bad thing, without actually mentioning Moammar Qaddafi by name.

Look, man: Nobody’s asking you to spell his name, OK? Nobody can agree on how to spell it.

Category: Libya

Koch Brothers: Inside the Left’s Head

Posted on | February 24, 2011 | 15 Comments

John Hinderaker at Powerline: “The most extraordinary story in the news these days is the all-out assault that the Left is mounting against Charles and David Koch and their company, Koch Enterprises.”

The Kochs are to this decade what “Big Oil” was to the Bush era: The Left’s all-purpose villain. Last month I wrote about Koch gathering at Rancho Mirage, which drew a protest mob that included former “green jobs czar” Van Jones.

For all their ranting about Glenn Beck and conspiracy theories, it’s the Left that has a paranoid obsession with enemies and scapegoats whom they depict as sinister forces conspiring malevolently against them.

Back in the 1990s, the Left blamed everything on the “Religious Right,” the NRA and Rush Limbaugh. Then, during the Bush era, it was Big Oil and “neocons.” Now it’s Fox News and the Koch Brothers.

But it’s always something, you see? The Left can never accept the possibility that their policies don’t work, or that their agenda is genuinely unpopular, and so they require a demonized enemy — a hate-object — to explain their political failures.

Union thugs get bussed in for a protest and one of them roughs up Tabitha Hale and no one — no one — on the Left stops to think: “Hey, maybe we’re carried this demonization stuff against ‘teabaggers’ a little too far.”

No, they don’t do that. They can’t do that. Because that would involve accepting responsibility, and considering the possibility that they might be wrong, and if they ever started thinking that way — if they could ever extract their heads from their rectums long enough to realize that the world doesn’t work the way they’ve been told — they wouldn’t be on the Left much longer.

Category: Liberals, Progressivism
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