Stupid Trick

Captain Ed owns an idiot left-wing lawyer who thought he was going to own Fred Thompson.

I must be juvenile, too

I laughed.

Physician’s Derb Reference

The Derb is In.

If you treat your dad like old luggage

so will the airline.

Need a Workout?

You can either join Japanese women apparently preparing for a trip to New York, or you can visit an alternate poodleverse.

Sicko

Oh, yeah. Like this is going to happen.

Buckets

There’s a joke they tell in Mexico. An angel is visiting God and sees he has three buckets of frogs, labeled Japanese, American, and Mexican. The first two have lids on them, the Mexican bucket does not. The angel inquires as to why this is. “I have to put a lid on the Japanese bucket,” God explains, “because they’re very clever and figure out ways of escaping. The American bucket has a lid because they figure out how to work together to escape.” The angel wonders why no lid on the Mexican bucket. “Because if one tries to escape, the others pull him back in.”

It now seems that’s even more true of Islamic culture. Read about a man who tried to act a little modern, and got pulled back into the bucket. Well, what do you expect from the Roach Motel of religions?

Grim Milestone Watch

501 and counting.

Dhimmitude in Britain

This is how a culture commits suicide.

“I hope the Islamic world is grateful,” she adds. “I doubt that it will be.”

Indeed.

The Rest of the Story

Michael Yon has posted Part 2 of Bread and a Circus. It includes lots of video. The money quote:

I recalled one of the bureaucrats comments, upon hearing that al Qaeda had scattered like rabbits out of Baqubah. He seemed at first not to believe that news, but once he got confirmation, he made a point to tell us what that news actually meant: if al Qaeda was done in Baqubah, al Qaeda was done in Iraq.

Update:

Michael has a nice column – suitable for forwarding to Senators – at the New York Daily News. And he’s not the only one who sees AQI failing in Iraq.

MSM Meltdown Watch

I haven’t blogged yet about the New Republic’s “Shock Troops” mess. Looks like the Confederate Yankee gets the last word anyway.

Update:

Not quite the last word, it turns out. The Weekly Standard has learned that the same day The New Republic was standing by its man, Beauchamp was recanting under oath.

My New Favorite Lawyer

Go, Tommy, go.

Alms for Jihad

I’m just catching up on all the good work Stanley Kurtz and others are doing on the book-pulping intimidation our friends the Saudis are doing. The target, but by no means the only one, is Alms for Jihad. Note that it is “not available” on Amazon as a book anymore. I’m trying to buy it as a download, but it isn’t working. Amazon took my money, though, so I’m going to insist. This post on Hot Air may mean all I get is a refund.

Kurtz raised the warning last Wednesday. Read that first. His update from Friday is here. Then you can read a list of Muslim libel cases on the Counterterrorism Blog stretching back to 1935.

Michelle Malkin reports on those standing up for critics of Jihad, singling out for praise the Legal Project of the Middle East Forum, which has stepped up to the plate to defend Robert Spencer and the YAF from CAIR’s thuggery. And here’s Hot Air on the efforts of one rich Islamist to silence free speech in America using the courts in the UK.

The situation is appalling.

You may want to consider a contribution to the American Center for Democracy.

Update:

Kurtz has a followup.

The issues at stake include freedom of speech, national sovereignty, the legal and social effects of the Internet, and the war on terror. Several questions present themselves, including: 1) Is mainstream media coverage failing as a direct or indirect outcome of the earlier suits? 2) Did the earlier suits leveled at major newspapers and magazines include specific agreements forbidding future coverage? 3) Are American libraries complying with Cambridge University Press’s letter calling for the withdrawal of Alms for Jihad from their shelves? 4) What, if any, are their legal obligations to comply? 5) Are libraries that chose not to comply in any danger? 5) Why are we not hearing anything more from the American publishing industry about the threat they are under?

That is only a very partial list of questions. But right now I think there is time pressure on the question of the status of Alms for Jihad at various libraries. Within a week it could be too late to save the remaining copies of the book. We need a publicly mounted list of all American libraries containing Alms for Jihad. We need to make public inquiries as to whether the book is being removed or not. We need to know if the books, once removed, are being destroyed. We need to know exactly what is in the letter that Cambridge University Press has sent to American libraries. Does it call for destruction of the book, or merely removal (if destruction, then a campaign to return the books to the shelves will fail). If American libraries have a clear legal right not to comply with the Cambridge letter, and if they can be shown that they are not under any serious threat, they need to be told as much, and quickly.

Above all, we need mainstream media coverage. But that will only happen, if at all, after further discussion on the blogosphere. And as noted, we also need to know much more about what effect, if any, the suits and settlements of the past may be having on media coverage in the present. And we need to encourage financial support for Ehrenfeld.

Another Update:

A commenter says it’s available for download at mobipocket.com – and I got a response from Amazon saying they can download it fine, so I must have a browser problem. So far their suggestions haven’t worked, but it seems to mean they do still have it. Maybe the letter from the publisher “forgot” to mention digital copies.

Last Update:

Do not try to buy it as a download at Amazon. What you get for your $9.95 is a review of the book. All 2 pages of it. Amazon is now refunding my money. And no, I have no idea who pays ten bucks for a two-page book review.

Sometimes I wonder

about the “useful” part.

This One’s For You, Ibrahim

Enjoy this video of Robert Spencer giving the talk CAIR doesn’t want you to see.

Serious Lapse in Parenting

Here’s the voice mail left by a 10-year-old girl who was in that schoolbus on the bridge that collapsed.

I have two questions for her parents:

• What is a girl that age doing with a mobile phone?
• What kind of parent releases their kid’s voice mail messages to the media?

I’ll bet that she has both a TV and a computer in her bedroom.

I’m glad she’s alive. I’m sorry she has such lousy parents.

Down the Memory Hole

George Orwell, call your office. How the Dems think they can get away with such shenanigans with cameras rolling eludes me.

Update:

Hoekstra’s press release.

This Just In

Nihad Awad, executive director of unindicted con-conspirator CAIR, has been placed at a 1993 Hamas meeting. I can’t imagine anybody being surprised at this, but it’d be good to get his reaction to it on the air some time.

You gotta love the response CAIR got from Young America’s Foundation when they had their lawyer threaten them with a lawsuit if they allowed Robert Spencer to speak at their gathering today. Somehow it’s even nicer when Brit Hume reads it. I think there’s a good tee-shirt design in there.

Build a Better World

By Destroying Wealth!

“Tort costs were $880 per U.S. citizen in 2005, meaning the average American family of four paid a ‘litigation tax’ of more than $3,500 due to increased costs from lawsuits and other liability expenses that force businesses to raise the price of products and services. That cost is equivalent to nearly an 8 percent tax on wages.”

I’ve now added “rent seeking” to my vocabulary. What a useful way to describe why so many lawyers are worse than unproductive citizens.

Even Rolling Stone Gets It

They’re calling ethanol what it is: A fraud and a scam.

So now we have a Republican President on the side of a stupid, wasteful, enviro-nut program, while the counter-culture rock and roll magazine is on the side of common sense.

And was that a white rabbit who just ran through my office?

Islam and the First Amendment

Hitchens was right when he said unindicted co-conspirator CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper hasn’t “read nor understood” the First Amendment. Islamists have been using the threat of lawsuits to have books destroyed. The books just happen to be about how Islamic terror gets funded.

Here’s a story with huge implications for freedom of speech (all negative), and it’s apparently gone almost entirely unreported in the mainstream press. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, under threat of a law suit, Cambridge University Press has just agreed to pulp all unsold copies of the 2006 book, Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World. According to the Chronicle, this is the fourth such book on terrorism funding to be pursued by a libel action. The Chronicle quotes Rachel Ehrenfeld, director of the American Center for Democracy, whose own book, Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed–and How to Stop It is one of the four books.

Publishers who cave to this kind of pressure are despicable weaklings. But, then, if you publish a book critical of any other religion, nobody threatens to behead you. So radical Islam is the most despicable party in this.

John, meet Ross

Someone has been slipping Paranoid Juice into the Breck Girl’s hairspray.

“They want to shut all of us up, Ed. That’s what this is all about. I’m amazed you’re still able to talk on the radio.

They don’t want to hear this stuff. And what we have to make clear is we’re gonna stand up and fight and we together, all of us, we will not be silenced.”

“They” do a lot of despicable things, don’t “they”? Whoever “they” are…

Hitchens and Prager vs Hooper

Hitchens and Prager have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.

Trying to argue with the spokesman for the unindicted co-conspirators is like arguing with a woman. He interrupts, ducks the question, makes fallacious arguments, and accuses his opponents of doing what he’s actually doing. Oh, how I wish Hitch could be there every time Hooper gets air time. But he’d probably finally get fed up with being interrupted. He’s a better man than I am for keeping his cool in this broadcast.

Meanwhile, Jihad Watch is not taking Hooper’s smears lying down.

Petition for Property Rights in California

Tom McClintock, ever fighting the good fight, and the Howard Jarvis folks have teamed up to put an initiative on the ballot to reign in the obscene abuses of eminint domain. Do you vote in California? Read the initiative and sign up on their web site.

When we’re out for walks I teach my daughter that you can’t respect somebody if you don’t respect their property. The government needs to understand that simple lesson. I’ve already ordered my petitions.

Get on it!

Child Abuse

The Religion of Peace continues to abuse its own children in “Palestine”, and then try to whitewash it for American audiences.

What a sick, reprehensible, morally-bankrupt culture.

Take the Democrat Quiz

Good news from Iraq would be:

1. Good for America
2. Good for Iraq
3. A problem

Bread and a Circus, Part 1

Michael Yon’s latest dispatch just puts everything in the MSM to shame. He knows where the story is. And a lot of it will be in Part 2.

Three Jeers for McMinnville, OR

Apparently mistaking pranks for crimes is rampant all over the country. This time it’s not sharia, at least. No, it’s just another object lesson in the real crime of letting government run schools.

The principal, vice-principal, cops and district attorney should all be fired for this. But they won’t be.

Well, the citizens of McMinnville can sleep easy knowing that there is so little crime there that the cops have nothing better to do.

I’m always suspicious

When a story like this fails to identify the perp by name or give a description, it used to mean it was someone of a protected race. Now it more likely means his name was Mohammed. Sure, it could turn out to be a disgruntled Bubba. But holding back info just makes me suspicious.

Meanwhile, some fruitbats are voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool. And Seattle finally has a good idea.

I see no downside. Let’s hope these ideas catch on.

Speaking of Scotland

Not only are the taxi drivers ready for Jihad, so is the musical theatre.