Boyd

Beith:

An Iraqi soldier is running across the street, an automatic weapon in one hand, firing blindly down the alley towards the enemy, apparently unaware of his fellow soldiers in the line of fire. “Somebody slap that f---er,” yells U.S. Army Capt. Josh Brandon. The Iraqi, grinning, safely reaches Brandon on the far side of the square. The captain isn’t smiling. About 45 minutes into what would turn into a two-and-a-half-hour firefight with suspected terrorists in the central Baghdad neighborhood of Adhamiya, this is no time for the Iraqi troops to start playing cowboy. “A lot of their training comes from watching American movies,” he mutters.

I'm surprised that three years after Bush hasn't encountered more criticism on this aspect of the war. Although I suppose at some point criticism is like money or sex - enough is enough and a little more doesn't matter. Scratch that. Where was I? The exit strategy, according to Bush, has always been for the Iraqis to take over and for us to get out of there as soon as they're ready. Sounds sensible. So how do we know when that will be? If there is any one metric available to gauge our success in Iraq, this is it.

CNN:

CNN has confirmed that Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has placed a hold on a bill that would require the government to publish online a database of federal spending.

Abraham Lincoln:

Politicians are a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men.

Kelly:

Because you know what? Life is too bloody short and I'm buggered if I'm going to waste any of it trying to keep up with the inane tweaking and upgrading and outdating and superseding of things that worked perfectly well already that's going to be continuing ad infinitum until the whole pointless system of getting and spending comes crashing down around our arses.

Tracy's birthday is today (Happy Birthday Sweetheart!). She wanted an iPod. I was happy to get one for her. One of the ultra-small cool ones. Perhaps as she's listening to it tonight whilst surfing the Internet on her ultra-thin laptop via her high speed wireless connection and occasionally glancing at the high definition flat-screen television, I will draw some water from the well and heat it over an open flame for her bath.

Kelly again:

...iPods per se are completely pointless, but if instead of spending days on end cramming 8000 bloody inane songs on it and sitting there gloating and lisping, 'Mine, all mine, all my pretties in one place, they cannot escape me now', and 'So small, so small and portable, my iPod, mine, all mine, it cannot escape me now', and 'Oh, I hope someone asks me what is on my iPod, I hope they do, I can tell them all my favourite songs,' - if instead of that you were a hormonally-enhanced Ukrainian assassin who'd been expelled from an obscure neo-KGB splinter faction and you walked into a bank in Singapore that's a front for a rogue Yakuza-Triad-KLF hybrid and you steal some overalls and a mop and a trolley and pretend you're a janitor and you sneak down to the black science labs on the secret sub-level and you come out of the lift listening to an i-Pod and the guard says, 'Hey, you're not allowed down here' and you ignore him and start to mop the floor and pretend you can't hear him because you're listening to your iPod and he comes and turns it off and then you kill him with the mop and hack into the computer and download the RNA sequence of a gene-targeted virus that will kill every albino in the world onto your iPod and then you take it home and make the virus and use it to blackmail every albino in the world into working for you so you have this really cool army of albinos and you gather them all together in your base and sit there gloating and lisping 'Mine, all mine, look at all my albinoes, they cannot escape me now' - that would be a pretty interesting use of science.

Protein Wisdom on the Shelby Steele article:

...a medievalist, pre-modern mindset like the one animating the Islamofascist movement is, ironically, quite adept at using postmodern observations about the nature of truth to sustain a rhetorical advantage over the West. And it does so by playing to the West’s arrogance—its idea that, because it has embraced the tenet of multiculturalism, it is somehow showing itself to be tolerant and nuanced in its dealings with the Other.

But recent history has shown us that all this Western “understanding” is a ruse. Instead, it is a mindset that pretends to an understanding by deferring to the Other, a maneuver that serves only to undermine Enlightenment principles and ideas of universal rights while simultaneously giving control of the identity narrative to groups it purports to “understand”, who are then able to use that control to affect victim status, define and shame their enemies, and bracket out unfriendly criticisms.

But this only works because the premises have been accepted by many in the western intelligensia, and have, from there, made their way into public and social policy. I have noted time and again how this process proceeds from (or is reinforced by) the acceptance of certain linguistic assumptions—precisely those favored by political and social movements that are collectivist in nature.

And so we have Islamic fascists exploiting the postmodern rhetorical assumptions of a western socialist / progressivist left in order to bring about the spread of totalitarianism.

War seems to be a state of being for terrorists. Taking the other side in order to prove you're the smartest kid in the class seems to be a state of being for 'western intelligensia.'

However, imagine all that Western brain power directed at current Islamic trendsetters. Instead of continuing to disprove the existence of God to the good people of the southern Christian US, let's see how those arguments might work on our knife wielding antagonists where the stakes are a little higher.

Which brings us to the French Intellectuals in Afghanistan thing (any excuse, you know?):

The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.

Of course, if we accept Steele's statement that terrorists fight just to fight, then arguments, even those that speak to the fundamental nature of the universe and of our existence, are more than useless. Osama and Ahmadinejad don't want to wipe out Manhattan and Jerusalem to pay tribute to Allah by destroying infidels. Allah is a vehicle. Osama and Ahmadinejad want to do it to do it. Take a shot. Why not? Be a cool diversion in their otherwise miserable existence. It's like walking up to the biggest kid in school and punching him in the mouth. You might get beat up, but your buddies are going to respect you a little more and you're going to walk a little taller.

WFB:

Dr. King did not live to see the day...when the United States pulled out from Vietnam the last of our flags. That was in 1973. And he did not live to see the day, two years later, when Saigon fell and the Communist victors killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and forced more than 1.5 million into re-education camps, causing 2 million others to flee Vietnam.

Lawrence Kaplan is a senior editor of The New Republic. He wrote last week, "U.S. troops are the only thing standing between what we see on our television sets today and butchery on a scale that would rival the worst of Saddam Hussein's depredations." Good men will perhaps not be finally governed by consideration of the moral question in Iraq, but they will not conceal that the point is there for men of good will to weigh.

What if we'd found nuclear weapons in Iraq? We'd probably still have the same problem of impending slaughter upon our leaving, but we likely wouldn't mind as much. As it is, we've put ourselves in the worst of all positions - we have no good options. Leave and watch unimaginable brutality made possible by our actions. Stay and spend money and lives for an indefinite amount of time and an uncertain outcome.

Steele:

...the fighting of Islamic terrorist groups is oddly self-referential, fighting not for territory or treasure but for the fighting itself.

JP:

Israel had prepared to launch a "stunning, surprise" war against Hizbullah in October, but moved it up and used the capture of its soldiers as a pretext, Nasrallah said: "They had planned to kill people while sleeping in their homes with their wives and children."

If you're married to a terrorist and have had his babies, you have to think that, at some point, if he continues in that occupation, sleeping next to him might become a liability.

Aljazeera:

Hours before the release, Fox News said it received a videotape in which the two men said they had converted to Islam.

In the video, Wiig and Centanni read from prepared statements in which they slammed Western intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, the BBC reported.

I suppose you do what you think you have to do to save your neck, but seems to me that our enemies probably view this sort of thing as a win and don't really emphasize the pragmatic angle of the action to their followers and recruits.

It's unquestionable, they're fighting a war and we're not. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

It's hard to be too skeptical.

TSG:

8:09 -- Milwaukee's Billy Hall ties the game with a homer, followed by Bernie Brewer sliding down his slide in right field and landing, feet first, on a catwalk. Wait, why didn't he land in the mug of beer? Chip informs us that they jettisoned the mug a few years ago for PC reasons. You know, because Bernie Brewer landing in a mug of beer was causing the teen drinking rate in Wisconsin to skyrocket. I'm beginning to hate living in this country.

I loathe few people like I loathe Bryant Gumbel. Arrogance without reason. Always nice when he gets beat down. I don't mind Greg though. Greg's OK.

TMQ:

...Bryant Gumbel of the NFL Network said NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue should show his replacement, Roger Goodell, "where he keeps Gene Upshaw's leash," because "the docile head of the players' union" has become the commissioner's "personal pet."

and the evidence...

Baseball long-term has had the most confrontational labor relations of the major sports, so let's compare MLB player pay with NFL player pay since the onset of the NFL salary cap in 1994. Adjusting for inflation, the average pro baseball player's pay has risen 71 percent since 1994, while the average pro football player's pay has risen 132 percent. NFL player pay increases have dwarfed all other team sports, which hardly sounds like the union is on a leash. More, there's been no interruption of pay in the NFL, while there have been those unfortunate months in baseball and a full year in the NHL during which players received nothing at all. Gumbel further complained that the NFL Players Association has not won its members fully guaranteed contracts. This is true -- but the lack of fully guaranteed contracts is a reason football pay is rising so fast! Guaranteed contracts in the NBA have been a disaster for quality of play, since players can defy coaches, perform poorly and still receive full pay. If fully guaranteed contracts came to the NFL, the first few years would be golden for players. But then quality of play would decline, ratings would decline and raises would decline.

Right on regarding guaranteed contracts. What sports fan or sports reporter in his right mind would advocate pay regardless of performance? Especially when it comes to football.

Coach: You ready Number 81?

Football player (thinking to self): Well, let me see. You just gave me this four year, $40 million deal. I can either go out there and run across the middle trying to catch a pass and potentially get decapitated by that middle linebacker whose contract is up for renewal at the end of this season, or I can sit here on the bench and when the game is over get in my Maybach and go home in one piece and play my Xbox.

FP: ...

FP: Hamstring's a little tight coach. Better sit this one out.

McCluskey:

...only one thing seems to console oppressed young adults: their conviction that if government would just try hard enough, it could set everything right.

Tomorrow being August 22nd and all, I'm wondering should I change my kid's dental appointment? But then what if the end of the world is tomorrow night instead of tomorrow morning? Might be a big problem getting another appointment. Looking forward to seeing that winged horse though.

Update: Dental mission accomplished. Still waiting on the winged horse.

AP:

Photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his immortal image of six World War II servicemen raising an American flag over battle-scarred Iwo Jima, died Sunday. He was 94.

I recommend Flags of Our Fathers highly.

Warren:

It is getting less and less useful to claim that we are defending a "moderate Islam" that can accommodate the West, against a "fanatical Islam" that can't. The enemy has succeeded in making the issue, Islam versus West.

The plot develops with the progressive takeover of the world Islamist movement, by the ayatollahs of Iran; and has been further thickened by the huge propaganda victory that Iran's client, Hezbollah, has just won over Israel. This has had and will continue to have the same effect on Muslim mass psychology as the Al Qaeda terror attacks. It shows the most virulent and aggressive forms of Islam to be triumphing -- to be, in effect, the wave of the future, the standard around which all Muslims may rally. It leaves all those who reject this standard not in the position of "moderate Muslims", but rather in that of isolated and irrelevant or treasonous holdovers from some "Western imperialist" past.

We keep waiting for moderate Muslims to stand up and take back their religion from the fanatics, but, by this point it's obvious, they either can't or they won't. All the momentum is on the wrong side. Could be the moderates are just being pragmatic and waiting to see who's going to come out. If so, what's that say about their view of our resolve?

Hunt:

Inexperienced individuals are especially prone to error during the planning stage, and bomb construction remains one of the most daunting obstacles. Minor miscalculations in constructing an explosive device can result in significant setbacks, injury, or even death.

The best thing we have going for us in the GWOT is the quality of our competition. If you're inclined to believe that Allah wants you to kill a bunch of women and children, that you'll be rewarded for this effort by having access to 72 regenerating virgins for the rest of eternity and that you're satisfied to live out your days on earth in a cave until being called upon by the guy in the next cave, then you're unlikely to be the wisest of military tacticians.

None of which is to say, of course, that even a blind squirrel will not find a nut from time to time.

Althouse:

The judge is so hot to hold the President to what she sees as his constitutional obligations. You'd think she'd take a little more care to give the appearance of adhering to hers.

Henceforth I shall be known as Cool Papa Boyd.

NLBPA:

(James (Cool Papa) Bell) was once timed on a wet field blazing all the bases in a record 13.1 seconds, beating Evar Swanson's time by two-fifths of a second. The tan cheetah claimed in 1924 to have circled the bases in twelve seconds flat on a dry field, with a time of 3.1 from home to first.

This is the guy of whom it was said (some accounts by Josh Gibson, others by Satchel Paige) that he could turn off the light and be in bed before it got dark.

Hogberg:

(The success of the Netroots) could turn the Democrats into a party that no longer tries to obscure the fact that they favor bigger government and higher taxes. This will make the left-wing patrons of Daily KOS very happy. But it will also provide low hanging fruit for Republicans.

Assuming, of course, that Republicans can stop favoring bigger government themselves.

Klein:

Given that voters are left to choose between two big government parties, Slivinski sees gridlock as the only way to keep spending even remotely in check. The logic is that if the government is divided, the parties are more likely to try to block each other's agendas, which will tend to produce relatively lower spending.

As far as I'm concerned, a 'do-nothing Congress' is not necessarily a bad thing when what they would otherwise be doing is increasing the power of government.

Interesting editorial in the WSJ yesterday. They claim that the average federal worker makes $106,000 a year. The average for the private sector is $53,000. What's worse is that federal employees don't give up their jobs. Turnover is a quarter of what it is in the private sector. Hell, for $106k a year and all those benefits and no threat of going out of business or getting laid off, sign me up.

Cone found the video on You Tube:



Here's the most simple definition:

a genus of Old World monkeys including the rhesus monkey (M. mulatta) and other macaques

Here's a recap of the flap:

A volunteer of Indian descent working for Democrat Jim Webb's U.S. Senate campaign said Monday he felt insulted when Sen. George Allen called him a name that sounded like "Macaca" during a rally in western Virginia.

It didn't sound like. It was. There is no question. He said it twice.

Here's some advice for conservatives everywhere:

Don't waste your political capital on Allen. Given his history with the confederate flag and other racially sensitive issues, if he didn't know any better than to conduct himself with the utmost composure on the road to the primaries in front of a video camera held by a member of the opponent's camp or he knew better and didn't care, then he's unworthy and ultimately toast anyway.

And even if all that could be forgiven or overlooked, there's still the problem of his having the most ham-handed handlers of all time. Mohawk? Please. If you can't surround yourself with better talent than that, you're doomed.

And if you're not doomed, contradicting them by saying it was just a made up name after the original explanation falls flat pretty much ends the discussion.

Ahmadinejad:

During the era that nobility was a prestige and living in a city was perfection, I was born in a poor family in a remote village of Garmsar-approximately 90 kilometer east of Tehran.

How about that. Who would've thought that a charter member of the Axis of Evil would appeal directly to the people? The Hammers really have no excuse now.

Update: Maybe someone ought to invite him to Converge. Might even trump Mr. Sun's outing.

Brilliant last night. Just brilliant. He throws in the mid-eighties the whole time and you wonder how it's possible that these professional hitters used to seeing stuff in the mid-nineties can look so bad.

Kaufman:

I think I speak for everyone, and by everyone I mean Cubs fans, when I say: What's the freakin' deal with Greg Maddux?

Carroll:

Their "success" was granted by God, they believed, and they issued thanks repeatedly. "Allah Akbar" they said, "God is greatest."

A bunch of geniuses we're dealing with here. I'm tempted to think they don't really believe the nonsense they spew, but then that would be overthinking the problem and overthinking is in abundant supply when it comes to the motivations of terrorists and criminals.

Thornton:

Delusional is too weak a word to describe this resolution. Does anyone really believe that U.N. troops, no matter where the soldiers come from, are going to use force against Hezbollah?

Whatever happened to someone surrendering and the other side dictating terms?

AP:

“T-Rac,” the Tennessee Titans’ raccoon-like mascot, hit Saints quarterback Adrian McPherson with a golf cart as he walked onto the field for the second half Saturday night, bruising him and knocking him out of New Orleans’ 19-16 victory in the teams’ exhibition opener.

That's one way to take out opposing QBs.

I don't want to give anyone any ideas that they may not have already had, but what is it with terrorists and airplanes? They've been targeting air travel around the world for forty plus years and they've succeeded at making it a big hassle to board. Congratulations, fellas. Your strategic thinking is second to none. Maybe the bureaucrats at the TSA will put up a plaque in your honor someday.

Seriously, might be time to rethink your career choice. Perhaps take a tip from Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart and so forth and our own version of fundamentalism over here and parlay that end-of-the-world schtick into some scratch. It's a lot less dangerous than smuggling nitroglycerin in your Gatorade and if you get lucky, you might find yourself in the middle of a sex scandal.

Gore as our environmental conscience here.

Schweizer:

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Lewis:

A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing. "I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead--hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

Looks like a no-lose for them.

We're being put in a very bad position here. It's a whole different thing to not be able to operate under the premise that the contra-party in a conflict doesn't care whether they live or die.

Davis:

I came to believe that we liberals couldn't possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us.

Cry me a river.

Suprynowicz:

If war is evil, how much more evil is it to impose on anyone an endless stop-and-start war, which the righteous and aggrieved victim is never allowed to pursue to a victorious end -- the aggressor always allowed to rest and refit and then to come again at a time of his choosing, pecking relentlessly at the victim's liver?

King:

The outrageously monstrous Ford F-650 SuperCrewzer, owned by Tennessee defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth, has a 107-gallon gas tank.

Let's say Haynesworth is running on empty and he pulls into a Nashville gas station to fill 'er up, at $2.999 per gallon. The truck runs on diesel fuel.

It would cost Haynesworth $320.89 to fill the tank.

Something tells me fellow Volunteer-stater Al "An Inconvenient Truth'' Gore would have a little problem with Haynesworth's mode of transportation. Gore, I'm guessing, would puke at the monster trucks and supersized vehicles in NFL parking lots.

Maybe Gore would puke. Maybe he'd also puke knowing about all the jet fuel that's used to fly the Tennessee Titans from coast to coast? Wonder how King feels about that bit of 'wastefulness?' Football, after all, is a decidedly non-essential activity no matter how many overrated sportswriters it keeps employed.

We're all complicit in this and we're all wasteful in our own ways. No need to get all self-righteous on us there, Peter. For example, what's the difference in an SUV that gets 20 mpg and whose owner has a ten mile commute versus a Honda that gets 40 mpg whose owner has a twenty mile commute? Or the difference in an F-650 driven by a football player to practice versus Peter King flying and driving all over the country to visit training camps?

Steyn:

But, when an army goes to war against a terrorist organization, it's like watching the Red Sox play Andre Agassi: Each side is being held to its own set of rules. When Hezbollah launches rockets into Israeli residential neighborhoods with the intention of killing random civilians, that's fine because, after all, they're terrorists and that's what terrorists do. But when, in the course of trying to resist the terrorists, Israel unintentionally kills civilians, that's an appalling act of savagery.

TSG:

First ... and I'm ashamed to admit this ... I was stunned when George Michael came out. After the "Freedom" and "I Want Your Sex" videos, he had me fooled. What can I tell you?

Me too except that it was the Father Figure video that did the fooling in my case. When George Michael came out or got busted or however we found out about his condition, it was at that point that I thought there might be something to being born gay. I mean you're George Effing Michael and you don't like girls?

Coll:

As the culture’s interest in TV shows such as “24” demonstrates, people are aware that nuclear proliferation is perhaps the biggest threat that countries like the United States face since the demise of the Soviet Union. It’s an unusually difficult subject for journalism because of its international character; the pieces are spread all over the place, and it takes time and resources to run them down. Also, the details are complicated: they involve engineering and science. And, finally, these networks, by their nature, try to remain hidden, so they are difficult to report on even where they occasionally surface, in police investigations.

Edwards:

Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) and fellow reformers on Capitol Hill have so far met with limited success in their efforts to cut government waste, but they have garnered a lot of attention from popular websites and blogs. And that's about to become the basis of their strategy. Mr. Coburn has proposed a bill to create an Internet database that would track hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts, grants, and other payments.

I'm afraid Landis is going to turn out guilty. If the condition is natural as he first claimed, it would have shown up in previous tests and he'd have offered those up as evidence. If the condition was caused by maximum effort as is now being claimed by his flailing lawyer, all cyclists would have higher than normal levels of testosterone.

I don't think I can ever recall a case of someone doing something so heroic and then being exposed as a cheater. It defiles the nature of sport and proves once again that it's hard to be too cynical.

VDH:

For about the last half-century, globalization has passed most of the recalcitrant Middle East by -- economically, socially and politically. The result is that there are now few inventions and little science emanating from the Islamic world -- but a great deal of poverty, tyranny and violence. And rather than make the necessary structural changes that might end cultural impediments to progress and modernity -- such as tribalism, patriarchy, gender apartheid, polygamy, autocracy, statism and fundamentalism -- too many Middle Easterners have preferred to embrace the reactionary past and the cult of victimization.

It's easier to embrace the reactionary past and the cult of victimization. Way easier. We do it here from time to time.