From the Associated Press via Yahoo!News:

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito came under aggressive questioning Wednesday from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee who accused him of inconsistencies on issues ranging from voting rights to ethics to his membership in a conservative organization.

(a) IN GENERAL.--No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

Also posted at The Dread Pundit Bluto.

Posted by: Bluto at 10:44 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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The American Civil Liberties Union has officially announced its opposition to the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court:

NEW YORK -- The American Civil Liberties Union announced today that it will oppose the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the United States Supreme Court.

The bad news for Dems and their co-conspirators at the ACLU is that Alito is turning the confirmation hearings into a wonkfest - a solid, masterful recitation of relevant law in response to antagonistic questioning, with no emotional fireworks to attract much in the way of mainstream media attention.

Some sort of publicity stunt will be necessary to pull off the Borking. I expect that sometime soon, a mainstream media accomplice will discover some bit of old news to try to drum up a lynch mob among the leftwing loonie fringe.

Thanks to Jay Stephenson of Stop the ACLU, who has more, including a petition supporting Alito's nomination.

Also posted at The Dread Pundit Bluto.

Posted by: Bluto at 10:11 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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I'm thinking that maybe she was just drinking beer at noon again. Sheryl Crow's time would be much better spent peeling labels off of beer bottles than entering a philisophical discussion on neo-imperialism. Here she is via Michelle Malkin:

Like his father, the President has sought to turn America into "an imperial power and create strongholds over oil-heavy countries in order for us to control and manipulate them," she told us. "Now, if we pull out [of Iraq] we are going to leave a complete and total mess. We don't even know who we're fighting over there

Posted by: Rusty at 01:28 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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KKK or Nation of Islam? Six of One, Half Dozen of Another. The main difference being, of course, that the Nation of Islam is a bunch of American nutballs who only seem out of place because their actions are being done in the U.S. and not in Muslim countries where such thuggery is par for the course. The Klan-nuts no longer have a single country devoted to Aryan supremacy. Not even South Carolina or West Virginia.

Via Dhimmi Watch.

They weren't your ordinary thugs. Dressed in bow ties and dark suits, nearly a dozen men carrying metal pipes entered a corner store, shattered refrigerator cases and smashed bottles of liquor, wine and beer, terrifying the clerk but stealing nothing.

The just wanted to leave a message: Stop selling alcohol to fellow Muslims.

Posted by: Rusty at 09:13 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Bryan S. and I were on our way to Stone Mountain on Thursday afternoon and I asked Bryan to find us some talk radio to kill some time. It must have been somewhere between 3-4 p.m. local time. Being unfamilliar with Atlanta radio, Bryan found the local Air America affiliate. Big mistake.

The host (some one filling in for Randi Rhodes?) was going on-and-on about what a brave peacemaker Ariel Sharon was. Then, out of nowhere, he inserts a question that went something like this:

"Some might wonder if they did this to Ariel Sharon for the same reason they did the same thing to Yassir Arafat?"

Get it? This is one of those "I didn't accuse any one of trying to murder Sharon, I only asked the question", thus, absolving himself from all responsibility of making the accusation.

Remember to wear your tin-foil helmut while you listen!

Posted by: Rusty at 11:21 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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The AP-Ipsos Poll making the mainstream media rounds claims that a majority of Americans want the administration to obtain warrants for all "eavesdropping":

WASHINGTON - A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows.

Party affiliation is a factor, too. Almost three-fourths of Democrats and one-third of Republicans want to require court warrants.

REGISTERED
VOTERS
Strongly Republican .......................... 13
Moderately Republican ..................... 27
Definitely Independent/neither........... 8
Moderately Democrat........................ 32
Strongly Democrat ............................ 20
Refused/not sure............................. -
Total Republican ............................ 40
Total Democrat ............................... 52

So why did AP-Ipsos choose to magnify that split by 300% in their poll? Three guesses, and the first two don't count.

Also posted at The Dread Pundit Bluto.

Posted by: Bluto at 01:20 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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1 Er, to give lil' ernie a new factoid to screech about?

Posted by: hondo at January 08, 2006 01:53 AM (3aakz)

2 AP and Pew measure party ID very differently. Both methods are defensible but you cannot compare the results the way you have. There was much discussion of party ID measurement before the 2004 elections; check the archives at mysterypollster.com for details.

Posted by: Joe Incognito at January 08, 2006 09:58 AM (Yw+ky)

3 So, Joe Incognito, what you're saying is that Ipsos makes a reasonable claim that only 40% of the electorate is Republican compared to 52% Democrat? I disagree. Btw, AP is the news agency; Ipsos does the polls. Therefore, you "cannot compare" AP and Pew the way you have done.

Posted by: The Dread Pundit Bluto at January 08, 2006 10:29 AM (RHG+K)

4 Exactly, Joe Incog, that is the reason we had the networks refusing to call states like No. Carolina for Bush when he had a double digit lead. It was obviously done in an attempt to influence the election in favor of the Democrats. What we needed immediately after the election was an investigation into the pollsters and their methods. I see they are still using their same flawed methods in an attempt to influence public opinion. Of course, they think that reporting the news is no longer their job, but facilitation, now brother, that is what the media is here for. Now we have a media that has entered the realm of Stalinism. And once they embark on their Stalinist adventure, they should not be surprised by the reception they receive from the American people.

Posted by: jesusland joe at January 08, 2006 01:24 PM (rUyw4)

5 Maybe they did it to counter-act the results of last week's Rasmussen Poll: http://mediamatters.org/items/200601030004

Posted by: Drew at January 08, 2006 04:17 PM (UHKaK)

6 Yeah, Dave, Media Matters has a worldwide reputation for objectivity. I would certainly believe anything I read there.

Posted by: jesusland joe at January 08, 2006 05:39 PM (rUyw4)

7 Kinda like that untarnished cradle of objectivity, the DPB

Posted by: Drew at January 08, 2006 06:02 PM (oxMjD)

8 I don't pretend to be objective, Drew. I'm not an oh-so-fashionable citizen of the world. I'm on America's side.

Posted by: The Dread Pundit Bluto at January 08, 2006 11:23 PM (RHG+K)

9 Understood and appreciated.

Posted by: Drew at January 08, 2006 11:38 PM (oxMjD)

10 This is just manufactured outrage. It's an artifact of their coding scheme and the nuances of how people will respond when asked about party identification, which of course is not 1:1 with what they do in the voting booth.

Posted by: Anonymous at January 11, 2006 11:47 AM (CG5Pe)

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BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - Sen. Barack Obama on Saturday said the United States will not be successful in Iraq unless the political landscape better represents the country's minorities.

I keep writing something and then erasing it and writing something else. Then I erase it. So I'll sum my thoughts up with one word:

Idiot.

If you read the whole article, note the minority that is noticeably absent from Monsewer Obama's list.

I'll say one thing, the last thing a fledgling democracy needs is exported American liberal stupidity like affirmative action.

Posted by: Vinnie at 12:09 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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Haroon Rashid Aswat, one of the men who was trying to set up an al Qaeda training camp in Oregon, is fighting his court-ordered extradition to the US on the basis that he might be tortured. Many thanks to liberal imbeciles motivated by partisan politics, notably Senator Dick Durbin, who have so mangled the definition of torture that virtually anything now qualifies.

But that's not the outrageous part.

Read what Aswat's lawyer, Gareth Peirce, has to say:

“It shows the extent to which the United States is manipulating evidence and pressuring witnesses. All that is said about Haroon Aswat is that in 1999 he travelled to a farm in the US which was considering setting up a Muslim community and, after a few days, left. That’s it — that’s the evidence.”

If the Amish and Mennonites were into global terrorism.

Also posted at The Dread Pundit Bluto.

Posted by: Bluto at 12:08 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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In a remarkably disingenuous statement, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NYC), has telegraphed the political shenanigans Democrats will employ to exploit the security leaks that exposed US tactics in the War on Terror. The Justice Department recently announced that they will investigate the sources used by the New York Times in their stories about monitoring of international phone calls and emails between Americans and suspected al Qaeda operatives. And rightly so; whoever leaked to the NYT should spend a few years in Leavenworth.

Schumer is setting up the rationale for excusing acts that damaged national security interests. To put a point on it, he's suborning treason for political purposes.

From the Associated Press via Yahoo!News:

WASHINGTON - The investigation into leaks about a domestic spying program should determine whether the motivation was damaging security or revealing a potentially illegal activity, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee said Sunday.

"There are differences between felons and whistleblowers, and we ought to wait 'til the investigation occurs to decide what happened," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

There is a process for Federal employees to become officially recognized as whistleblowers through the US Office of the Inspector General. Recognition by the OIG protects the employee from retaliatory employment actions, and triggers an OIG investigation of the charges made by the whistleblower.

It's not enough to simply declare oneself a whistleblower. And whistleblower disclosures are never sanctioned to outside agents, including and especially the Press.

Also posted at The Dread Pundit Bluto.

Posted by: Bluto at 11:28 AM | Comments (74) | Add Comment
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