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Friday, August 31, 2007

 
Barking Good Political Cartoon

Found here (warning: language).

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Tony Snow Resigns

Hot Air has video.

Good luck battling that cancer, Tony. And hope you get to sub for Limbaugh again one of these days.

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Today's Personal Insult

Yahoo has a little feature titled Best Places To Buy A Vacation Home. Follow the links and check out the price tag on these homes. Even the bargain-basement Undervalued Vacation-Home Spots cost more than middle-class Americans' first homes.

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Thursday, August 30, 2007

 
NFL Predictions

With a Star Wars twist (link via the Agora).

I hope Cowboys coach Wade Phillips realizes that those Jedi mind tricks don't work against Washington...

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Bad News For Democrats

Economic growth is booming.

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Attorney General Scorecard

Ann Coulter cites some stats for Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, and Janet Reno.

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Wednesday, August 29, 2007

 
Did Larry Craig Break The Law?

Volokh conspirator Dale Carpenter takes a closer look at the allegations.

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Affirmative Action Means Fewer Black Lawyers

Oops.

(Link via Rand Simberg)

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Holy Land Foundation Criminal Case Update

Robert Spencer has the story.

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Tuesday, August 28, 2007

 
I Wonder How Many Other Liberals Would Find This Many Nice Things To Say About Bush?

Bill Clinton has kind words about portions of the Prez's foreign policy::

In an interview with Conde Nast Traveler magazine now hitting newsstands, Clinton said Bush "has done three things that I think the world generally approved of: restoring cooperation with the Latin American countries, making a diplomatic agreement with North Korea instead of continuing to have a frigid standoff, and sending Americans to the conference to discuss the future of Iraq with the Iranians and Syrians.

"Those are, all three, things that signify we're trying to do better in the world."
...

Clinton also praised Bush for pressing for an end to the genocide in Darfur, and for seeking changes in the requirement that food for emergency assistance be purchased and shipped from the U.S.

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Headline Du Jour

Isn’t Being Deified By Atheists Sort of Useless?

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Phrase For The Day

"Lying crapweasel" - via the Malkinator.

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Monday, August 27, 2007

 
You Doity Rat

Hamas airs an animated cartoon that depics the good guy (Hamas) as a lion and the bad guys (Fatah) as rats.

Wait a minute, Hamas kiddie show icon Farfour was a rat...

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Blogging the Qur'an: Sura 4, "Women," verses 17-34

Robert Spencer has the installment here. A cornucopia of topics, including marriage qualifications, suicide, and marital corporal punishment. Read the whole thing.

Click the "Koran" label to see all my posts on this series.

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Sunday, August 26, 2007

 
Quote Of The Day

"My ancestors fought hard to get to the top of the food chain, I'm going to honor that effort by staying there."

- Cecil Trotter, in comments to this Rand Simberg post

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Saturday, August 25, 2007

 
What A Wonderful World

Enjoy.

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Friday, August 24, 2007

 
Vietnam Quotes

James Webb has some (via Glenn).

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Cool Architecture

Samizdata is asking commenters to list their favorites. I offered up these:

  • Acropolis (Greece)
  • Alhambra (Spain)
  • Argonath (Gondor)
  • Forbidden City (China)
  • Grand Canal, Venice (Italia)
  • Hagia Sophia (Byzantium)
  • Neuschwanstein Castle (Germany)
  • Notre Dame Cathedral (France)
  • Pyramids and Sphinx (Egypt)
  • St. Basil's Cathedral (Russia)
  • St. Peter's Basilica (Vatican City)
  • Statue of Liberty (US)
  • Sydney Opera House (Oz)
  • Taj Mahal (India)
  • Vehicle Assembly Building, interior (US)
  • Versailles (France)
  • Westminster Abbey (UK)
  • World Trade Center (US)

  • (In the original I hyperlinked only the Argonath.)

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    Thursday, August 23, 2007

     
    More Musical Assaults From Europe

    Finnish band performs YMCA.

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    Who Has The Highest Cancer Survival Rates In Europe?

    Not England.

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    Wednesday, August 22, 2007

     
    War On Tobacco Advances

    Fort Worth jumps on the bandwagon by enacting a partial smoking ban:

    Smoking will be illegal in most public places, including restaurants. The exceptions will be bars, bingo halls, retail tobacco stores, designated hotel rooms, outdoor patios at restaurants, sexually oriented businesses and private clubs such as fraternal organizations.

    The city won't add inspectors to enforce the rules, and Public Health Director Dan Reimer said last week that the city will probably respond to possible violations only if someone makes a complaint.

    The ordinance defines a bar as any establishment that gets at least 70 percent of its sales from alcohol.

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    Hasta La Vista, Baby

    Illegal alien harbored by church for one year is finally deported.

    I have a question for that church. We know that the Bible says believers must submit to all authority, including that of the State. But there's a notable exception: when the State exercises authority it does not rightfully have. Rightful civil disobedience is a common theme to books such as Daniel and Acts. Tell me, what command of God do immigration controls violate?

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    Headline Du Jour

    Hillary: The Surge is Working, We Should Pull Out Anyway

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    Monday, August 20, 2007

     
    Ted Nugent For Michigan Governor?

    He's thinking about it.

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    Blogging the Qur'an: Sura 4, "Women," verses 1-16

    Robert Spencer has the installment here.

    Spencer begins by tearing down the claim that "Islam recognizes the full human dignity of women." Its proponents cite as evidence the beginning verse, which states that man and woman were created from a single soul. But do those two creations have equal worth? A certain hadith says no:

    AbuHuraira (Allah be pleased with him) reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: Woman is like a rib. When you attempt to straighten it, you would break it. And if you leave her alone you would benefit by her, and crookedness will remain in her. A hadith like this is reported by another chain of narrators

    Next up is polygamy. Verse 3 instructs that men be allowed to take as many as four wives. This highlights one of the distinctions between Christianity and Islam. Christianity claims that God originally intended marriage to consist of one man and one woman (Genesis 2:24), but allowed some legal leeway for a time. He did not intervene to force his agents to disband their polygamous marriages, and the Law of Moses provides some allowance of the practice. What the law allows is not always good for us; the OT is replete with examples of the destructiveness of polygamy - Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon, to name a few noteworthy examples. Jesus preached God's original intent for marriage, directly quoting Genesis 2:24. GotQuestions.org has an excellent article on this issue.

    Islam has to invent a different Jesus for him to serve as a prophet of that faith. Why teach marriage in exclusively monogamous terms if the last and greatest prophet Mohammed will be coming down the pike in a few centuries to preach that polygamy has a proper place?

    Other topics include inheritance guidelines punishments for immorality.

    Click the "Koran" label to see all my posts on this series.

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    Sunday, August 19, 2007

     
    25 World's Weirdest Animals

    Listed here, with pics, of course. (Link via Insty).

    I think some of these look like they should be Pokemón critters:

    • Axolotl
    • Dumbo Octopus
    • Blobfish
    • Platypus (mammalian cousin to Psyduck?)
    • Shoebill
    • Yeti Crab

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    Friday, August 17, 2007

     
    I Could Get In Trouble For This

    If hurricanes could talk...

    "Not only are we going to the Antilles, we're going to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and Haiti and Cuba and the Caymans, and we're going to Yucatan and Texas and Louisiana. And we're going to Arkansas and Tennessee and Kentucky and Virginia, and then we're going to Washington, D.C., to tear down the White House! YEEEARRGH"

    (Cultural reference, for those who need a reminder.)

    Coincidentally, my hurricane namesake followed a path similar to that projected for Dean.

    Full disclosure: I lived in hurricane-prone areas for 27 years of my life, and recall running from two of the storms.

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    Tuesday, August 14, 2007

     
    Rush vs. Hillary

    "I wish the government didn't know who I was."

    - Rush Limbaugh (from his radio show years ago, quoted from memory), expressing the desire that government leave us alone and let us run our own lives.

    "As I travel around America, I hear from so many people who feel like they're just invisible to their government."

    - Hillary Clinton, expressing the desire that government keep a close eye on us and intervene to fix all our problems according to government prescriptions.

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    A Song Dedication For Merv

    You know you've arrived when one of your contributions to American culture is spoofed by Weird Al Yankovic.

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    Monday, August 13, 2007

     
    Blogging the Qur'an: Sura 3, "The Family of Imran," verses 121-200

    Robert Spencer has the installment here. Today's focus is mainly on the battles at of Uhud and Badr.

    Click the "Koran" label to see all my posts on this series.

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    Karl Rove Resigns

    He's leaving his White House gig to spend more time torturing small animals giving campaign tips to Fred Thompson planning the next hurricane strike against New Orleans cutting a rap album shooting pool with Donald Rumsfeld with his family.

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    Merv Griffin (1925-2007)

    I'll take game show pioneers for $200, Alex.

    I never watched his talk show (his competition was pretty stiff), but I spent many many hours watching Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Two of the best game shows around.

    Many condolences for his friends and family.

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    Friday, August 10, 2007

     
    Party Time

    Johnathan Pearce at Samizdata is spreading this meme:

    My question for the weekend is, if you were organising a dinner party and could invite six famous people around, alive or deceased, who would you pick?

    Here are my choices:

    Rush H. Limbaugh III
    Thomas Sowell
    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
    Thomas Jefferson
    John Locke
    Samuel Rutherford

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    A Southern Man Don't Need Them Around

    The Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir perform Sweet Home Alabama.

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    NASA Revises US Warming Data

    Coyote Blog has the story, and implores the reader to remember these issues (emphasis in original):

    • This is not the end but the beginning of the total reexamination that needs to occur of the USHCN and GISS data bases.  The poor correction for site location and urbanization are still huge issues that bias recent numbers upwards.  The GISS also has issues with how it aggregates multiple stations, apparently averaging known good stations with bad stations a process that by no means eliminates biases.  As a first step, we must demand that NOAA and GISS release their methodology and computer algorithms to the general public for detailed scrutiny by other scientists.

    • The GISS today makes it clear that these adjustments only affect US data and do not change any of their conclusions about worldwide data.  But consider this:  For all of its faults, the US has the most robust historical climate network in the world.  If we have these problems, what would we find in the data from, say, China?  And the US and parts of Europe are the only major parts of the world that actually have 100 years of data at rural locations.  No one was measuring temperature reliably in rural China or Paraguay or the Congo in 1900.  That means much of the world is relying on urban temperature measurement points that have substantial biases from urban heat.

    • All of these necessary revisions to surface temperatures will likely not make warming trends go away completely.  What it may do is bring the warming down to match the much lower satellite measured warming numbers we have, and will make current warming look more like past natural warming trends (e.g. early in this century) rather than a catastrophe created by man.  In my global warming book, I argue that future man-made warming probably will exist, but will be more like a half to one degree over the coming decades than the media-hyped numbers that are ten times higher.
    I am curious about one thing: assuming the data are correct (a claim which Coyote Blog's second point challenges), why are the warming trends far less acute in the US than in the world at large? Contrast the global and contiguous 48 US states temperature anomaly graphs.

    Whoa, hold on a sec. NASA's global chart says the global temperature anomaly peaked in 2004. But the Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office (the source for Wikipedia's chart) says the global anomaly peaked in 1998, the same year it peaked in North America. Who's right?

    Update: I was looking through some old global warming posts and I discovered that Wikipedia is now using the GISS data. American Thinker has a chart based on the Hadley data - the global anomaly clearly peaks in 1998.

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    An Anniversary For Guitarists

    Leo Fender would have turned 98 today.

    Update: Fender Guitar Factory Tour, hosted by John Ratzenberger

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    Thursday, August 09, 2007

     
    "Parade Of Victims"

    That's how Rush Limbaugh summarizes the questioners selected for the other night's Democratic debate. He decides to give the answers he would give if the questioners had asked him - and misses one golden opportunity presented by this question:

    MAN #1: After serving in Iraq for a year, I came home to find that my factory job at Maytag had closed and moved to Mexico. What will you do to keep manufacturing jobs like mine from leaving the country?

    This question has two right answers, and Rush gave one of them:

    It should not have come as a surprise to anybody that American corporations are relocating elsewhere. It is going to continue to happen. I have discussed this with many people. They have had similar things happen. This is no different than being fired in late life when your corporation still exists. I mean, it is what it is! You face reality. You have to go out and try to find something else to do. You are far more capable of doing other things than you probably believe, and what my job as president is going to be is to help inspire you and as many people in this country to assume the mantle of greatness the population in this country requires if we are to maintain it. We can all sit around and whine and moan what happened to us, but after a while, we have to get busy getting serious about the next phase of our lives.

    Rush should have added something like this: "While there is nothing that government can do to change the fact that markets constantly change and thus jobs are inevitably lost in the wake of such changes, there is something that government can do to reduce the amount of overall job loss in this economy. We can reduce the excessive taxes and the excessive regulatory restrictions that discourage business startups and injure the profitability of existing businesses."

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    Wednesday, August 08, 2007

     
    Sis Boom Baa!

    Describe the sound made when a sheep explodes.

    (Carnac the Magnificent reference)

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    SIx Candles

    Happy birthday, Instapundit!

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    Tuesday, August 07, 2007

     
    Did He Say Which Country's Military Voters Support Hillary?

    NewsMax reports:

    Former President Bill Clinton says his wife has strong support among military voters and that the Democratic presidential candidate is up to the task of rebuilding the nation's military after years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    "I think she will do better than you think (with military voters) because she has an enormous amount of allies around the country in the military," Clinton told The Associated Press on Monday night following a private, $2,300-a-plate fundraiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Florida Panhandle.

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    Blogging the Qur'an: Sura 3, "The Family of Imran," verses 64-120

    Robert Spencer has the installment here. Today's topics: accusations that the Jews and Christians are heretics.

    Ironically, the book condemns the Jews for implementing legalistic dietary laws. For those of you who brought your Korans, turn to today's chapter, and read verses 93-95:

    All food was lawful to the Children of Israel, except what Israel Made unlawful for itself, before the Law (of Moses) was revealed. Say: "Bring ye the Law and study it, if ye be men of truth."

    If any, after this, invent a lie and attribute it to Allah, they are indeed unjust wrong-doers.

    Say: "Allah speaketh the Truth: follow the religion of Abraham, the sane in faith; he was not of the Pagans."

    Click the "Koran" label to see all my posts on this series.

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    Monday, August 06, 2007

     
    Taking The Day Off

    Had a tooth filling replaced today. See y'all tomorrow.

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    Saturday, August 04, 2007

     
    Don't Flush That Koran!

    Mary Katherine Ham appears in this public service announcement.

    Should someone named Ham be allowed to touch a Koran?

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    Low Approval Ratings

    It isn't even close.

    (Link via Glenn)

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    Friday, August 03, 2007

     
    Ban The Burqa And The Niqab?

    Daniel Pipes argues that they "present a security risk," and that they "facilitate non-political criminal behavior." He even cites a health issue:

    British research offers another reason to drop the burqa and niqab, finding that covered women and their breast-fed children lack sufficient amounts of vitamin D (which the skin absorbs from sunlight) and are at serious risk of rickets.

    Is there a parallel in American culture that gives us a clue as to whether this is a good idea? Nuns' habits dont' count, because they don't cover the face. Klan hoods cover the face, though. Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan v. Kerik upheld a New York State statute that prohibits certain public mask-wearing:

    S 240.35 Loitering.
    A person is guilty of loitering when he:

    ...

    4. Being masked or in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration, loiters, remains or congregates in a public place with other persons so masked or disguised, or knowingly permits or aids persons so masked or disguised to congregate in a public place; except that such conduct is not unlawful when it occurs in connection with a masquerade party or like entertainment if, when such entertainment is held in a city which has promulgated regulations in connection with such affairs, permission is first obtained from the police or other appropriate authorities;

    Burqas and niqabs appear to violate the law, since they are not worn for entertainment purposes.

    In a 2004 FindLaw article, Rutgers lawprof Sherry F. Colb stated her objections:

    In particular, the opinion was wrong to reject the Klan's First Amendment claim that masks constitute symbolic speech. And it was also wrong to reject the notion that an organization's members have a right to anonymity that might include appearing in public wearing masks.

    I am an originalist, thus I reject the first claim. "Speech" is what every human in the late 1700s defined as speech: verbalized expression. If the Free Speech Clause were so broad as to cover even nonspoken expression, then the clauses protecting freedoms of the press, religious exercise, and redress of grievances against the government would all be redundant. In fact, just about every human activity can be interpreted as expression.

    As for the latter claim, there is no Constitutional right to public disguise. That is an issue for legislators, not judges.

    I suspect that the NY law also had in mind ski masks. Pipes' chief argument is the disguise-for-criminals concern; he cites specific examples of Islamic dress being used in such manner, and could bolster his case by noting that the burqa and niqab do not draw as much suspicion as the ski mask, making them a superior disguise. However, I suspect that if face-enclosing Islamic wear were criminalized, crooks would find other ways to disguise themselves without drawing attention. A mere hat and sunglasses hide a lot.

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    CAIR's Ties To Terror

    CAIR Executive Director Placed at HAMAS Meeting (link via LGF).

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    Wednesday, August 01, 2007

     
    19 Candles

    It's also the birthday of the Rush Limbaugh show.

    Update: Rush on why the 19th anniversary is such a big deal.

    [RUSH:] I want to bring in a special guest, ladies and gentlemen, to explain the significance. Everybody thinks the 20th anniversary is going to be the big blowout, and of course it will. But the 19th anniversary is no slouch. We have an expert to explain the significance of the 19th anniversary of the EIB Network.

    FARRAKHAN: In the background is the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorial. Each one of these monuments is 19 feet high. Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, Thomas Jefferson, the third president. And 16 and three make 19 again. What is so deep about this number 19? Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today? That number 19, when you have a nine, you have a womb that is pregnant, and when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there's something secret that has to be unfolded. Abraham Lincoln's statute, 19 feet high, 19 feet wide. Jefferson, 19 feet high, 16, and the third president, 19, standing on the steps of the Capitol, in the light of the sun, offering life to a people who are dead.

    RUSH: And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the significance of the 19th anniversary of the EIB Network. That was, of course, special guest, Calypso Louie, Minister Farrakhan, that's from the million man March, October 16th of 1995.

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    716 Candles

    It's Switzerland's birthday.

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