Fine? Why Fine?

A Little Too Excited

Somebody get Bill Press a hooker quick, I think the Viagra's kicked in.

...Press should clean himself up read something a little more serious about what his little "smackdown" of George Bush could really mean.

...Allah skims and recaps.

UPDATE 6/30/06 4:50pm

Love the Bull Moose's take.

Iron Mike

Totten calls out Hezbollah.

I know you’re still monitoring my Web site. At least you kept monitoring me long after the two of us stopped talking – if that’s the right word. One of my colleagues said you told him I’m blacklisted because of what I wrote about you in the LA Weekly. You won’t give me quotes anymore. You won’t give him quotes anymore either because he’s tainted by his association with me.

What do you people expect?

Ex-Prez

Jimmy Carter:

The preeminent obstacle to peace is Israel’s colonization of Palestine.

Oxblog fisks.

Fatwas Forthcoming

(Via Malkin.) This could end up being one of the watershed moments in the whole thing.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man's domination of woman, the Islamists' domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

It's brief, read it all.

UPDATE 5:35pm

Quoting Kipling, Wretchard hits on something here.

And I think Ace is on point in this post as well.

Head's Up

Well this ought to bring down more than just Ronald McDonald.

Thinskinned

It was only a matter of time before the Jews took the hit on this whole cartoon thing. TigerHawk looks at the manufactured nature of this controversy and Omar sheds a little light on the natural and understandable double-standard of making fun of your own.

You know that those cartoons were published for the 1st time months ago and we here in the Middle East have tones of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers.

Beer & Cheese

Yeah, so last night we did some shopping for the Super Bowl party we're hosting and I did in fact purchase some weird cheese from Denmark that I've never heard of before. Will also probably pick up some Carlsberg when I do the beer run on Saturday.

Small contribution to be sure but the right thing to do.

Good Line, Bad Result

Tim Blair kicks off a mega-roundup of the Hamas victory with the line of the day.

Elections in the US are sometimes won in the Bible belt. This may the first election on earth to be won by the suicide belt.

There & Back

I had to shoot over to Long Island City to drop off a check at a car dealer there and actually had a great ride. Without traffic, driving in the NY/LI area can be pretty enjoyable. During the week the ride would have taken easily an hour and half but I cruised this morning in under an hour.

I put the Reynolds's latest Podcast on the iPod and found it to be their best one yet. Not that Glenn and Dr. Helen aren't interesting in their own right, but the entire half-hour (approx.) is taken up by their guests Jim Dunnigan and Austin Bay. The hosts ask maybe a total of 3 or 4 questions--they even laugh when Dr. Helen's attempt to ask a question is completely talked over and missed by the guests--Dunnigan and Bay just banter about the Iran situation and the Insta's know better than to interrupt the natural flow of the conversation. Colonel Bay is excellent as always but Dunnigan is really entertaining. He was all over cablenews after 9/11 and in the lead-up to OIF, but I haven't seen him on much in last few years. The man's a character and he has a distinct voice--possibly a minor speech impediment--that I find puts an everyman quality to his always insightful analysis. Anyway, I recommend you make the time to listen to the whole thing.

Once that was over and I flipped back to the music on my iPod I caught a slew of great tunes while on random. Sure, I skipped some others but the first three were back-to-back-to back.

• "Land of a Thousand Dances" by J. Geils Band--In honor of Wilson Pickett.
• "Surfin' U.S.A." by The Beach Boys--Went through a big Beach Boys phase about 5 years ago.
• "I Just Wanna Make Love To You" by Etta James--Whoa. Seriously.
• "My Babe" by Narvel Felts--A few years ago I bought a 3-disc set of original Sun Studio recordings with the idea that I'd brush up on my early rock n' roll history. I haven't really immersed myself in it the way I had planned, but I put the discs on the iPod and made it a rule that when a song comes up on shuffle I have to listen to the whole thing.
• "Personality Crisis" by New York Dolls--"Personality, wonderin' how celebrities ever mend, looking fine on television"
• "Hold On" by Tom Waits--Althouse had a post up this week about Waits and his battle against imitators.
• "Not For You" by Pearl Jam--That line: "Like Mohamed, it's the truth" doesn't seem as cool as it once did.
• "Bernadette (Instrumental)" by The Funk Brothers--If you haven't seen Standing in the Shadows of Motown yet, buy it, rent it, Netflix it, do whatever you can do to see it. It's a great documentary. The music is the best and story is important as a piece of American history.
• "Cold Gin" by KISS--Saw them do this live, with full make-up, a few years ago. Althought the most memorable moment may have been when they played "I Was Made for Lovin' You" and a bunch of hardcore anti-disco mullett-heads held up their middle fingers and turned their backs to the stage. Ha.
• "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" by Jerry Lee Lewis--Also on the Sun Records compilation. If I had to choose I guess I'd take Lewis over Woody Allen in the incestuous pedophile category.
• "Change The Locks" by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers--A Lucinda Williams cover from the She's The One soundtrack.

Now since I don't know when it's going to be almost 60 degrees again here this winter, I have two cars to wash.

Who We Got

Dan Darling gets the world up to speed on the guy we did take out last week.

IF KHABAB CAN BE SAID to have had a lasting effect on the development of Islamist extremism, it would be that he moved the possibility of Islamists using unconventional weapons out of the theoretical and into the practical. Those wishing to view his legacy need look no further than the extremely crude but deadly chemical and biological experiments set up under the auspices of Ansar al-Islam in northern Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion.

As Darling also notes, this guy will best be remembered by most people for the work he did with on animals.