Open Thread Saturday!

Have fun!

Too funny...

Remember all the "Merry Fitzmas" crap we had to read in the comments on this blog and all other commenting sections of rightwing blogs? Here is the creator of that phrase reaction to all this Armitage stuff.

* I had to add this related post from Michelle. The WaPo has this:

"Nevertheless, it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge, claiming — falsely, as it turned out — that he had debunked reports of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had circulated to senior administration officials. He ought to have expected that both those officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously."

Where have all the feminists gone?

Oh, yeah. That's right. They are standing at the gate defending our right to abortion. Meanwhile....

I remember when I was a young woman thinking I was feminist. I thought women deserved equal pay and equal work and the right to not be treated like a sex object. Here it is all these years later and what do we have? We have Katie Couric, the first woman to anchor the nightly news solo, and what do they do? They photoshop her PR photo to make her 20lbs lighter. There was also a buzz about whether we would be able to see those tanned muscular legs that so many have enjoyed with their morning coffee as they watched the Today Show.

At the same time we discover that Rosie O'Donnell is coming aboard "The View." They too photoshopped the weight off of her because on "The View" it is obviously ok to be a lesbian activiist, you just can't be fat. (Did they decide that after Star Jones?) It's all about the glamour folks.

As I grew older I wondered where the feminists were when I saw the growing trend of mainstreaming porn. Even the R rated movies aimed at young men became more crass and more exploitive of women. The vastly popular show "Friends" constantly referred to the guys on the show watching porn. Hillarity ensued. The internet brought porn into our homes so even our young sons going through puberty could see how easy it is to make women nothing but sexual objects.

I heard a comedian say once that porn actresses and strippers are just girls whose Daddies touched them in bad places when they were young. Not too funny really, and pretty close to the truth if you believe some of the books written by porn stars recently.

Then we have our little girls, whose role models become sexier and wearing less and less clothes every year, and I'm just talking about the Bratz dolls. Don't get me wrong. I'm not against looking sexy. I like looking sexy myself. But there is a world of difference between sexy and being nothing but a sex object. Have we taught our daughters the difference?

It seems we women got the opportunity, the education, and even the jobs. But did we get the respect? When I read stories about girls in Jr. High servicing boys on the school bus, I think not. Which brings us to most deafening silence EVER in the feminist movement. President Bill Clinton. Here was a sitting President who cheated with a subordinate almost his daughter's age (something a CEO would get canned for) and humilated his feminist wife, lied to her about it, lied to the country about it, and then said he did it "because he could." Here was a man accused of sexual harrasment by two women. A man known to be womanizer. And where were the feminists? They were looking the other way because no one had protected their precious right to abortion more than Pres. Bill Clinton.

I suppose they felt that they truly did need the right to abortion since along with the sexual freedom for women came that threat of an unexpected pregnancy. Some women thought they could be as sexually free as men, but they forgot that only one of them actually carries a baby inside them and it isn't the one who gets to walk away.

Men must love the feminist movement. It gave them all the sex they wanted with none of the responsibility. They didn't even have to worry about a child of theirs coming into this world. That abortion backup plan made it more than easy to just move on to the next woman.

So now we have the jobs we wanted as long as we look and act sexy enough. Don't carry weight. Don't speak out against a man in power unless, of course, he happens to be a supreme court nominee that might threaten that precious right to abortion. Because to feminists, nothing matters more than that.

Hillary Clinton will be the first woman to run for President that actually has a chance to win. There is something so ironic in that. A woman who rode the coattails of her husband's political finesse could be our first woman President. A woman who refused to condemn publically her husband's humilating behavior toward her and toward the young woman. Although the Republicans tried to offer some consequences for Clinton, he really didn't suffer. He is as popular as he ever has been in the Democratic party.

To me the message that the feminist movement has been sending for over 25 years now is that men get what they want and women get what they deserve.

And boy, do we.

crossposted TexasSparkle

The MSM's version.

What the AP says Rumsfeld said and what Rumsfeld actually said.

All the quotes and links, edited and unedited. It just makes one wonder how many stories we have read over the years, before the internet, that were simply AP's "version" of what was said.

h/t Bigdog

Ah, what a difference respect makes.

A reminder to me of how grateful I am to have a President who respects the traditions and beliefs of others.

via NRO

Insane.

"This is the dramatic moment when President George Bush is gunned down by a sniper after a public address at a hotel, in a gripping new docudrama soon to be aired on TV.
Set around October 2007, President Bush is assassinated as he leaves the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago.
Death of a President, shot in the style of a retrospective documentary, looks at the effect the assassination of Bush has on America in light of its 'War on Terror'.
The 90 minutes feature explores who could have planned the murder, with a Syrian-born man wrongly put in the frame."

This is from "This is London Entertainment Guide." Alrighty then.

Have we gotten to the point where nothing is off limits? Nothing???

Sick.

via NRO

Funny Quote.

"The peace plan for Lebanon calls for 15,000 peacekeepers led by a sizable French contingent. Turns out in French, sizable translates as 200 guys in rubber dinghies. It's no great loss. Honestly, the difference between 200 French troops and 15,000 French troops is just fewer French prisoners."--Stephen Colbert

via Time Magazine

Good Grief...!

From The Telegraph:

"Pinocchio, Tom Sawyer and other characters have been converted to Islam in new versions of 100 classic stories on the Turkish school curriculum.

"Give me some bread, for Allah's sake," Pinocchio says to Geppetto, his maker, in a book stamped with the crest of the ministry of education.

"Thanks be to Allah," the puppet says later."

via GOP Vixen

What a wicked web we weave......

Olbermann just loves to create a buzz. He says outlandish (and untrue) things on purpose, I think, to get the likes of the Koskids all chattering his praises. When Olbermann uses the word "fascism" it is never Islamic fascism he is referring to. Here is his lates contribution to the world of misleading ranting.

Olbermann Watch won't let him get away with his special editing techniques though:

"The opening spiel featured, of course, Rumsfeld, but also made note of Brian Williams's interview with "Mister" Bush [1] (code phrasing for the Black Box buffoons). It didn't take long for Herr Olbermann to falsify what Rumsfeld said, hyping that he would be offering:

A special comment on his attack on your right to disagree.

Don't waste your time looking through Rummy's speech for where he said there should be no right to disagree. It ain't there. Olby made it a twofer, introducing a clip with this:
Secretary Rumsfeld compared critics of the current war in Iraq to those who tried to appease Adolf Hitler and the Nazis before World War II.

The clip of Rummy began thusly:

once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.... But some seem not to have learned history's lessons.

Ah, the magic of editing. Krazy Keith wants his credulous cretins to take Rumsfeld's comments as relating to "critics of the current war in Iraq". But note those ellipses. What did Olby snip out of the clip?

Today -- another enemy, a different kind of enemy -- has made clear its intentions with attacks in places like New York and Washington, D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, Moscow and so many other places.

Remember, Olby has been whining for months about how Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror. So when Rummy says something about the war on terror, mentioning a number of battlefronts but not Iraq, KO doctors the quote and claims it was all about Iraq. The Hour of Spin, indeed.

via Media Blog

Simply put...no class.

Hugh Hewitt has this:

"Last night, appearing with former Iraq-based Pentagon spokesman Dan Senor on the O’Reilly Factor, Hackett proved that in Charles Johnson’s memorable phrase, for Hackett and his ilk there “are still depths to plum.” During the conversation, apropos of nothing, Hackett referred to Senor as “Herr Senor” and “the Unterfuhrer.” A bewildered Senor could only ask, “Are you talking about me?”

HotAir has the dismaying video evidence of political dialogue, Democratic Party style, circa 2006."

Update: Adding insult to injury here. It turns out that Dan Senor certainly had cause to seem bewildered. His mother is Jewish and a holocaust survivior.

Katrina coverage a year later... still biased

The coverage of Katrina a year later is as bad as it was when it happened. Good grief. I haven't heard one word about the things discussed in this article at Investor's.com:

"Take the idea that the federal response was "inadequate" or "incompetent." Granted, that might be said of some of FEMA's efforts, which were poor. But a big story that never got told was how heroically the National Guard (and Coast Guard) performed before, during and after the storm, saving tens of thousands of lives. The mainstream media basically ignored this.
As reported, the Guard had 2,500 troops in New Orleans during the hurricane. It pre-positioned thousands of liters of water, ready-to-eat meals and other supplies at the Superdome and around the city. The Guard was ready.

Right after the storm hit, Guard troops embarked on one of the largest relief efforts. It included, as a Guard spokesman put it, "10,244 sorties flown, 88,181 passengers moved, 18,834 cargo tons hauled (and) 17,411 saves (of stranded and endangered victims)" by helicopter.
The Guard had more than 200 boats and 150 copters working. Its makeshift medical center at the Superdome handled 5,000 patients and delivered seven babies.

By some estimates, the Guard saved 50,000 lives — maybe more. If a big deal was made of this, we didn't hear about it. We had to search out this information on blogs and through government Web sites. It should have been splashed across TV screens and the front pages of our nation's media. It was a truly heroic moment.

What did we get instead? A lot of false tales, half-myths, rumors and innuendo retailed as news, including:

• Speculation that 100,000 people would die (actually, about 1,300 did, which is bad enough).
• Rumors of dozens of bodies stacked in freezers, killings and rapes of babies in the Superdome (out of thousands there, just six people died, four of natural causes).
• Reports of people shooting at rescue helicopters (that never happened, the Guard says).
• Stories playing up the racial-victim angle. (As a subsequent study showed, African-Americans had fewer Katrina deaths than other groups, based on population.)
• Repeated claims the federal response was "slow." (As the Gateway Pundit blog noted, "The federal response here was faster than (Hurricane) Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.")

We could go on. Days after Hurricane Katrina, the media got caught up in a frenzy of self-congratulation, lauding themselves for their courage and willingness, as some at the time put it, to "speak truth to power."

The real truth is that Katrina wasn't the media's finest hour. As we've seen with recent Mideast coverage, the media have gotten into the strange habit of distorting the news — like reporting deaths of Hezbollah operatives as "civilians" and faking war photographs."

The facts about our brave National Guards being ignored is especially maddening. It happened last year and now it's happening again as we do over it all again. Ugh.

via RCP

He has a point.

Blogs for Bush:

"Just gotta love that ol' Drive By Media - never misses a chance to work an anti-GOP angle in to every story. The AP Headline:

Rove's influence undiminished by scandal

Uh, AP, the headline should read - "Rove's influence undiminished by his scandal-mongering political enemies". There was no scandal - from start to finish, the Plame kerfuffle was an invention of the Democratic Party and the political left to smear out of politics the most effective GOP political operative of the past half century.

You see, it doesn't matter to the Democrats where right and justice lay - the only thing they knew is that Rove was running political circles around them, and therefor he had to go...and if a bit of skullduggery by a liar like Wilson was necessary to do it, then that was a small price to pay.

How many more honorable men and women will have to be dragged through the muck by the Democratic smear machine before we start prosecuting some of these creeps?"

Rick Santorum sums it up.

Hugh Hewitt has this from The Herald Standard:


"In a speech before the Pennsylvania Press Club, the two-term Pennsylvania senator offered a broad historical context to "the enemy of our generation" by saying the war against Islamic fascists didn't begin on Sept. 11, 2001.

Santorum said the U.S. embassy takeover in Iran 27 years was part of this war, as was the Marine killings in Beirut, the bombing of the USS Cole and the 1993 World Trade Center attacks. Today's aggression by Hezbollah against Israel in Lebanon also is part of the picture, he said, as is Iran's efforts to gain a nuclear bomb."

Hugh then says this:

"The insights that Santorum offered in his Monday speech will likely strike few readers here as original. Nonetheless, this is the first time that I’m aware of that a politician has so bluntly, honestly and publicly connected the dots."

That stuck me. Because the bottom line here is either you believe this or you don't. You either believe that radical Muslims have had an ongoing campaign of terror against the U.S. or you don't. You either believe that all the past bombings and attacks directed at the U.S. led toward 9-11 or you don't. You either believe that we are still in danger and our children's future safety is at risk or you don't.

How you can't believe it, I have no idea. But the very dangerous thing, in my mind, is that the Democrats obviously don't believe it.

Good Stuff

Here.

h/t CraigC

Proud Mom

One of my commenters, Linda, is featured in an article today at the Houston Chronicle.
Linda has written proudly of her marine sons (as well she should) and they are reservists who might again be called up for active duty. As I expected, their attitudes are all about service:

"If I get re-activated, I will do it with pleasure," said Matt Winn, who hopes to begin studying criminal justice. "I knew what I was getting into."

Almost every week...

..I stumble upon something on the net where I say, "Ok, well that's the end of the line, it doesn't get more disgusting than that." And then I go on to the next week and discover something even more disgusting.

This week's winner!:

It's "modern porn rock." It's a rap about a guy who clones himself, then screws and murders the clones he made.

Lovely.

via boing boing

So Strange.

KENNER, Louisiana (CNN) -- A man who pulled a hoax on Louisiana officials and 1,000 contractors by presenting himself as a federal housing official said Monday he intended to focus attention on a lack of affordable housing.

"We basically go around impersonating bad institutes or institutes doing very bad things," said the man, who identified himself as Andy Bichlbaum, a 42-year-old former college teacher of video and media arts who lives in New York and Paris.

"That would be HUD. At this moment, they're doing some really bad things."

Masquerading as Rene Oswin, an official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Bichlbaum followed Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to the lectern Monday morning at the Pontchartrain Center in Kenner.

In a speech to attendees of the Gulf Coast Reconstruction and Hurricane Preparedness Summit, he laid out grandiose plans for HUD to reverse course.

Does it surprise anyone that he was a college teacher?

"Does the mainstream press ever wonder why conservatives distrust them so much?"

This is the question Mary Katherine Ham asks over at Townhall.com. I can answer her. No, they never wonder. They don't care.

But if you want to see just about every (recent) reason we don't, you have to read her article.

John Karr didn't kill Jon Benet

DNA didn't match.

via Not Exactly Rocket Science

It's the Right that is beholden to Big Corporations, right?

Wrong.

NRO has this:

That’s not what David Hogberg and Sarah Haney found when they looked at the donation history of the charitable arms of Fortune 100 companies. Dividing the recipients between ideological left and right, they found that in the last tax year available (2004 in most cases), the left received a whopping $59 million compared to the right’s $4 million. Even taking aside Goldman Sachs’ huge $35 million gift to the mildly liberal Wildlife Conservation Society (which still demands taxpayer support of $5 million for its Bronx Zoo), the left still outpaced the right by 6 to 1. Hogberg and Haney comment:

If the Fortune 100 represents corporate America, then the belief that
corporate America is more generous to public interest and advocacy groups on the
right is clearly wrong. Unfortunately, that misperception is embedded in
American consciousness. How often are groups on the left derided as “corporate
lackeys”?

Will the pattern change? Corporate foundations could make a start by
better monitoring their matching grants. But real change requires that they
commit themselves to free-market principles that are the basis for the liberty
that lets enterprise grow and prosper. If corporations use their foundations to
stifle competition and buy off opponents, there is little hope that they will be
bulwarks of freedom—no matter what liberal commentators believe.

4 million compared to 59 million. Wow. That isn't even CLOSE. Now, which is the party of the rich again?

Why Libby and not Armitage indicted?

Byron York has a great informative piece on it.

Interesting.

LONDON - Some leading English soccer players are storing stem cells from their newborn babies as a potential future treatment for their own career-threatening sports injuries, the Sunday Times reported.
Players are freezing the cells taken from the umbilical cord blood of their babies as a possible future cure for cartilage and ligament problems. Stem cells can be used to regenerate damaged organs and tissue because they are the earliest form of cells.

This reminded me of something that I know is to come. How long do you think it will be (or perhaps already occurred) where athletic stars "sell" their sperm and eggs to the public so that the many sports obsessed parents I see can "pick" just the right sperm and egg to produce the just the kind of gifted sports child they dream of? Then there will be those who will choose a person's egg or sperm who has a high IQ. A mix and match sort of a thing.

One can already choose from a variety of factors. Check out this egg donor list. You can pick from the Ethnic origin, hair color, eye color, height, weight and education of the giver. This sperm donor clinic "allows you to select key characteristics that you are looking for in a donor and our computer system will provide you with a list of our donors that meet those characteristics."

Oh, it's coming folks. And the "Aryan race" will have nothing on this.

via NRO

Time Magazine's big sloppy kiss for Pelosi

"Nancy Pelosi leads the Democrats with a fiery style that could make her the first woman Speaker of the House"

She constantly discusses her five grandchildren, makes sure her office is stocked with Ghirardelli chocolates, perpetually smiles and never swears in a business in which almost everyone else does. She even has a few cute quirks she and her staff would love to tell you about: a diet consisting mostly of chocolate and chocolate ice cream, and so much energy, she rarely sleeps. Just the other night, she will tell you, she was up watching MTV after midnight.

MTV? Yeah. Right.

Would your grandmother ever say, "If people are ripping your face off, you have to rip their face off" (Pelosi's approach to handling attacks from Republicans)

No. no. I can say for a fact that my grandmother would never say that.

Among Democrats in Washington, Pelosi became popular for her prodigious fund raising on behalf of colleagues and her gracious manners; she's often the first person to send flowers if a member's spouse is sick. Staffers also enjoy her largesse. After a lavish meal, she will sometimes say, "Thank God for Paul Pelosi," her investment-banker husband, whose real estate holdings make up much of the couple's $16 million in assets.

Thank God for her husband? She can't afford these things on her own??? Where are the feminists??? Good grief!!! Plus, you gotta love these limo liberals who want us to have universal healthcare for example, because they themselves will never set foot in a public medical facility. If Nany Pelosi ever needed a serious operation, do you honestly think she would wait in line behind MaryJo Nobody? In the article she is so proud to have been a part of shooting down Bush's Social Security plan. And why not? She never has to worry about Social Security. It must be nice to propose things that you yourself will never have to worry about anyway.

Read the rest of the wet kiss. Hillary was last week, Pelosi this week.

Conversion Video

Hot Air has the "conversion video" of Steve Centanni and his cameraman and other video updates. The conversion video is just surreal.

Michelle has all the updates. This is just fascinating.

Careful, the blogosphere will catch you.

I've been meaning to get on this "scandal." Here is Steve Spruiell at Media Blog:

After E&P editor Greg Mitchell attacked bloggers for exposing staged and
altered photographs of Israel's offensive against Hezbollah, Bob Owens at
Confederate Yankee found an embarrassing story that Mitchell had written about
his own experience faking a news story for a small paper in Niagara Falls.
Embarrassing, yes. Funny. But not really that bad. After all, it happened a
long time ago, and Mitchell copped to it.

This, however, is journalistic malpractice:

Someone substantially altered the text of the mediainfo.com
story, after six different bloggers cited the article. If you type in the URL of
http://www.mediainfo.com/ and press "enter" so that you could investigate who
mediainfo.com belongs to, wondering how they could change such an old story so
quickly, the URL will resolve to adweek.com.

Adweek is owned by VNU Business Media, the same company that runs media web sites BrandWeek, MediaWeek and—you guessed it—Editor & Publisher, where Greg Mitchell is the editor on the hotseat.

Read the whole post. If Mitchell altered the text of this article, what he's done is taken an embarrassing situation and turned into one that seriously calls his ethics into question. Nice job.

ALSO: Remember the howls from the left when it was reported that former editor of The American Enterprise magazine (now White House aide) Karl Zinsmeister had altered and then reposted on his web site an interview with another newspaper? (For the record, I criticized Zinsmeister here and here). I'm wondering if they'll hold Mitchell to the same standard.

GOTCHA: I'm not really wondering. They won't.

Safer in Iraq?

You are half as likely to die there then here.

via Instapundit

More here.

The Valerie Plame leaker...

Richard Armitage, according to a new book, according to the new book by David Corn and Michael Isikoff.

via Instapundit

Fox News Steve Centanni safe and.....converted??

Yes, that's right. Converted to Islam:

"Two FOX News journalists were released by their kidnappers Sunday, nearly two weeks after they were taken hostage in the Gaza Strip. ...
"We were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint," Centanni told FOX News. "Don't get me wrong here. I have the highest respect for Islam, and I learned a lot of good things about it, but it was something we felt we had to do because they had the guns, and we didn't know what the hell was going on." ...

Later Sunday, the two journalists made a joint appearance with Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas. Haniyeh, Centanni and Wiig sat in a circle of chairs at the Beach Hotel. Wiig was also accompanied by his wife, Anita McNaught."

How strange it that?

Stanger still. Beth at BlueStarChronicles sent this e-mail last night:

"A new video of the Fox News Reporters has just been released (it's 3:45 am).They are dressed in arab garb and reciting the koran and claiming to have converted to islam. They are appealing to Bush and Blair to convert to 'the religion of peace'. Obviously they are under duress."

Good grief.