September 12, 2005
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Is it me, or are ALL tennis players hot? A fatwa has been issued against Sania Mirza, who became the first Indian woman to reach the fourth round of a Grand Slam at the US Open last week.Mirza's crime? I guess she just looked way too hot in that tennis outfit. I've posted a Sania Mirza image gallery below. For a tennis player, her outfits aren't all that revealing at all.
The fatwa - in effect, a demand that she cover up - was issued by a senior cleric of the Sunni Ulema Board, a little-known group. Similar fatwas have been issued against Mirza, who comes from a devout Muslim family, but none has ever gained popular support among India's 130 million Muslims.Hat tip to Greg at Rhymes With Right who has more as well as a blog roundup. more..."The dress she wears on the tennis courtsÂ…leaves nothing to the imagination," Haseeb-ul-hasan Siddiqui told The Hindustan Times. "She will undoubtedly be a corrupting influence."
He said she should follow the example of Iranian women who wore long tunics and headscarves to play in the Asian Badminton Championships.
Posted by: Rusty at
11:19 AM
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Some Arab and hardcore Leftist presses have often repeated the claim that the U.S. is using chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons in Iraq. [related story here]
Zaraqawi's audio speeches have often come at times when it appeared that al Qaeda was on the run. This tape comes as US forces have launched an all out offensive against al Qaeda in Iraq, with a large measure of success. A similar audio tape emerged after reports that Zarqawi had been shot and after the fall of Fallujah to U.S. forces. Both tapes promised the immenent defeat of the U.S. at a time when al Qaeda was on the run.
On the audiotape, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is heard to say:
The Crusaders mobilised their big armies and used the most destructive and lethal weapons and the most deadly and hurtful poison gas together with their stooges. But God made them drink at the hands of the mujahedeen the different kinds of death and made them face horrible things that they will never forget. [source]Zarqawi is also heard urging his fighters to be prepared for 'a final battle' with the Americans who he calls 'cowards'. Even though it is al Qaeda that uses the tactics of hit and run attacks, IEDs, murdering hostages, beheading, and hiding among the civilian population, Zarqawi is heard calling US forces 'cowards who always seek to run away."
Tel Afar is now controlled by the Coalition troops and al Qaeda forces are reported to have fled the city. Who was it that ran away Zarqawi?
SITE has a partial translation here, in which Zarqawi claims that hurricane Katrina was an act of Allah brought about by the prayers of the faithful:
I believe that the destructive hurricane which hit America, within its own house, was nothing but the result of a prayer of a father or a mother whose son was killed, or of boy who became an orphan, or of a woman whose honor was violated on the lands of Afghanistan, Iraq or others”.According to Centcom, the Tel Afar offensive continues. 41 suspected terrorists were captured in that city on Sep. 10th as a result of 'Operation Restoring Rights'. Other media reports indicate that as many as 157 al Qaeda linked insurgents were killed in the Tel Afar offensive.
This morning, another operation was launched to root out al Qaeda linked terrorists in Iraq's al Anbar province. The new offensive, Operation 'Cyclone', targetted the terrorist safe haven of Rutbah.
For the past several months, terrorists within Rutbah have escalated their intimidation and murder campaign against the local populace and city government officials. The resulting effect was an increased ability to move freely within the area and a base for them to launch attacks against innocent civilians, Iraqi Security Forces and Coalition Forces.
In recent days, Coalition Forces have also captured Ammar ‘Abd-Al-Hafiz ‘Abd Muhummad (aka Ammar Amam Wakhtif or Sheik Ammar), an admitted terrorist and leader of the lnu’man Brigade, in a raid earlier in September in the Ramadi area. Sayf-al-Din Yahya 'Anad (aka Sheik Sayf or Abu Hamza), a Nu’man Brigade cell leader, was also captured during the raid. He was responsible for organizing and directing attacks against Iraqi Security and Coalition Forces.
Abu Zayd, (above right) identified as the current Al Qaeda in Iraq military emir of Mosul, was also killed in a raid.
Others: In the Bullpen
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Of course a stunned press asked him to elaborate on his remarks, he simply stated "We thought it was time to take out the trash. Maybe that'll teach them no-good negros about not voting Republican."
Later, CNN's Wolf Blitzer was able to get an exclusive interview with the President and received some elaboration on his remarks.
Blitzer: So, Mr. President, are you stating, for the record, that you are responsible for all of the deaths in New Orleans?
Bush: No, not all the deaths, but if we'd known that police were going to have to start shooting looters, we'd have sure gotten the Army in there quicker so we could have been responsible for a lot more.
Blitzer: Mr. President! That's horrible! But you do finally admit that your criminally negligent environmental policies are the root cause for this hurricane?
Bush: Environmental policies? No. Heck, we sent a space shuttle mission up just a few weeks ago with 100,000 cans of hair spray. We figured dumping that much aerosol directly into the ozone would surely have some sort of adverse effect. But we never dreamed it would start at Category 5 hurricane. This worked out much better than expected!
Blitzer: I see. So were you attempting to do anything specific with your plan of destruction, or just see where it led you.
Bush: Listen when I'm talkin, you dummy. Our whole goal was to wipe out all the poor negros down there. They're voting Democrat in droves and really putting a hurt on us at election time. The only part that really failed was that it came up short and didn't get the Hispanics in Florida at the same time.
Blitzer: So this is all just about getting Republicans elected.
Bush: Of course it is. Why else would we do anything. Do you think we really care about the people we're ruling, er, ah, here to serve?
Blitzer: Well I find all this to be absolutly horrible! I can't believe our government would do such a thing!
Bush: Why not? You people are ready to believe that we started the war in Iraq just because Saddam tried to kill my daddy (which is true, by the way). If you're going to believe the worst about us anyway, we might as well take advantage and just do it.
Blitzer: Well I never...
Bush: You better get used to it. Oh, and I'd stay out of California for about a month. Our earthquake machine is just about finished.
Blitzer: Well, there you have it people. All your worst fears confirmed. The Republicans are evil and are killing people just because they're poor minorities.
Bush: No, because they won't vote for us. Get it right or you'll be next.
Blitzer: This is Wolf Blitzer, signing off.
Originally posted at Conservative Friends.
Update: One of my diligent CF readers has found unreleased photos of Bush visiting New Orleans. These photos only serve to prove exactly how atrocious our President is. We must call for impeachment now!
Posted by: Drew at
06:49 AM
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But I'm not just an irate customer who had his pocket picked. I'm also a public policy researcher who would just love to find out how many people Classmates has nipped over the past three years, and since I now have a "free" membership, perhaps (as a commenter suggested) I' could put together a brief survey for people in the institutions where I went to school as a young turk. I know no one will pay me to do it, but it's a logical next step.
In the mean time if you or someone you know has had their account raided in this way you now know the policy prescription: One email followed by four irate responses gets a refund. Pass it on.
Posted by: Demosophist at
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September 11, 2005
Yesterday, London and Madrid. Tomorrow, Los Angeles and Melbourne, God willing. At this time, don't count on us demonstrating restraint or compassion," the tape warns. "We are Muslims. We love peace, but peace on our terms, peace as laid down by Islam, not the so-called peace of occupiers and dictators." American intelligence officials believe the man who appears on the tape to be Adam Gadahn of Orange County, Calif. Last year, Gadahn delivered a similar taped communiqué for al Qaeda. That tape was later deemed authentic.
Michelle has the scoop on him.
As does Rusty here and here.
Also see MTP today. Tim takes NO mayor to task. Oh I canÂ’t wait for a transcript. At least Nagin admits he could have done a better job and gives Mr. Bush a fair shake. Kind of adds to the talk this week what while Mr. Bush was talking up the FEMA director privately he was hot. Intresting Nagan did't do the same for the LA Governor.
Also It's cooling off so Howie is starting a new batch of wine. Yes hard times call for tough measures. And I am going to say again. Don't miss the caption contest it's a hit.
Updated: below the break as promised are those MTP quotes. full transcript here.
Also It apprears John Cole also enjoyed Mr. Russert's work. Since one of his commenters points out that Nagin was a Republican before switching parties to run for Mayor, It's fair to point out that Russert is or was a Democrat.
Update II : Mike Brown has resigned. If anyone has not noticed Bush likes to mangle the names of those he is miffed at. He called him brownie.
Update III. R. David Paulison chosen to replace Mik Brown and FEMA.
Posted by: Howie at
11:57 AM
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To get back to the fracas, if I understand Classmates correctly, they're now willing to refund half the money that they extracted from my account without permission. That's a little like offering to return half the toe they've just chopped off, but it's a step in the right direction. It's not a step that suggests they've quite grasped the concept of integrity yet; nor is it very competent from a business standpoint, but it does kind of shred their claim to having an unbreakable policy about refunds.
And there's something else of note. Either "Suzie" is in communication with someone who can make on-the-fly changes in policy (unlikely on a Saturday afternoon), or she's reading from a script that tells her, for instance: "After three irate email responses offer to cut the membership fee in half." But that's not important. What's important is what the exchange reveals about the company's ethical standards, which just aren't very high, and about its business savvy, which also isn't very high. At least, it's not high enough to cope with the very medium that gave them a market opportunity in the first place.
Posted by: Demosophist at
10:53 AM
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I'll start off with my two most distinct memories. When it became apparent that this was a deliberate attack, I turned around to my supervisor and said, "Are they insane? Don't they know there's a Republican in the White House?"
When I got home to have lunch, I walked in the door, and my wife turned to me with a look of abject horror on her face and said "What the Hell is going on?" I just said "Well, we're being attacked," with a calm that belied what I was feeling inside.
Your turn.
Posted by: Vinnie at
12:48 AM
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September 10, 2005
The movie is adapted from a story by Annie Proulx and stars Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as love-struck cowboys whose forbidden affair begins in 1963 and ends 20 years later. The director described the low-budget indie flick, shot in Canada to save money, as a story of love against adversity. (Reuters).
The AP describes the as being full of sweeping vistas, lonesome men, bucking broncos and smoldering campfires. It also has sex scenes between two men whose lives are changed, disturbed and entwined after being hired to tend sheep for a summer in Wyoming.
As of this writing, it is not known how much pudding is consumed in the film.
Actual South Park dialogue, describing the South Park Film Festival:
Cartman: No dude, independent films are those black and white hippie movies. They're always about gay cowboys eating pudding.
Wenday: No they're not. Independent films are produced outside the hollywood system. They're movies without all the glitch and glamour of Hollywood.
Cartman: Well, you show one independent film that isn't about gay cowboys eating pudding.
Parker and Stone, modern prophets........
UPDATE: Kevin Aylward finds audio of part of the dialogue as well as a very Beavis and Butthead quote to go along with it.
Posted by: Rusty at
09:57 PM
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Of course, it wouldn't be al Reuters if halfway into the article they cut away from it to remind readers that the U.S. hasn't really accomplished anything after 9/11 in Afghanistan.
Here's how our soldiers in Afghanistan are remembering the day that changed the world. God bless them, every one. more...
Posted by: Rusty at
04:20 PM
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Virgin conception? As if Christians weren't going to be offended enough that humans are being cloned for the first time, scientists and their allies in the press decide to name the procedure after a central tenent of the very faith the euphemism is intended not to offend. Brilliant.
But don't worry, scientists at Edingburgh's Roslyn Institute, made famous for cloning Dolly the sheep, are telling us, this isn't really cloning. Far from it.
The difference between 'virgin conception' and 'cloning'? If I understand the technical issues correctly, parthogenesis stimulates a human egg to start dividing like an embryo without the addition of any genetic material. In other words, the cell is induced to begin dividing, splitting, and then growing on its own. Only the mother's DNA is present, but it is the DNA contained in the original cell. The cells are not implanted.
Cloning is when you inject the mother's DNA into an egg to start the process, and then implant the egg into a host womb.
See the big difference here?
Posted by: Rusty at
03:37 PM
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CDR Slamander has some more great ideas, like starting with flying a Nazi flag over the Holocaust Museum.
Posted by: Rusty at
03:11 PM
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Death toll for Hurricane Katrina in N.O.: 300 plus.
Zero deaths would be great, sure, but a ratio of .0025 isn't bad for the "worst natural disaster in US history," as MSM is so fond of saying. Anyone who has updated information on the actual death toll from Katrina (not the hyperbolic "estimates"), especially if it includes the entire Gulf Coast, gets well-earned kudos for reporting it here. The 300 number comes from a PBS report yesterday, issued by a N.O. official.
This is a participatory and self-correcting enterprise, unlike the alternative.
Update: Thanks to the entirprise of Oyster and the Associated Press we can now report that the 300+ figure for the death toll from Katrina is not just for New Orleans, but for the entire Gulf Coast. Granted the comparison of a Hurricane with a Tsunami isn't ideal, but a death toll ratio of 1 to 3,300 suggests that there's something to the notion that you're safer living in a market oriented democracy. A comparison of earthquakes in Iran vs. the US yields a similar ratio. Even going back to 1906 to find a quake comparable in magnitude to the one in Bam, Iran, which killed 41,000 we find that the San Francisco Earthquake--the most devastating in US history--killed 3,000. Death tolls from more modern quakes in the US are in single digits. The death toll from the Northridge quake, the most destructive modern temblor, was less than 60. The difference is probably a matter of construction methods and other engineering interventions, as well as communicatons and disaster response and relief. Winds of Change has more.
Posted by: Demosophist at
01:31 PM
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In the Tal Afar offensive, which had been expected for weeks, coalition forces faced several hundred lightly armed insurgents in the largely deserted city, 260 miles northwest of Baghdad and about 60 miles east of the Syrian border.
There was heavy gunfire in the Sarai district, the oldest part of the city and the major insurgent stronghold." I can see why the terrorists chose this place for a fight, it's like a big funnel of death," Sgt. William Haslett of Rocklin, Calif., said of the twisting streets and alleys in the old city.
While ass wadds in Aswad beg to be next.
Gunmen on Saturday opened fire on workers heading to their jobs at a U.S. military base in Khalis and killed four people, police said. The incident took place in the village of Aswad nearly 30 kilometers (20 miles) northwest of Baquba. The dead were described as civilians. Four other people were wounded as well. Baquba and Khalis are in Diyala province north of Baghdad.
The more things change the more things stay the same.
Hugo caused $7 billion ($9.4 billion in 2000 dollars) in damage in the US (plus $3 billion in the Caribbean). At the time it was the costliest hurricane in US history, but was exceeded in 1992 by Hurricane Andrew in south Florida. In South Carolina, which bore the brunt of the storm on the continent, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was slow in responding and Senator Fritz Hollings referred to them as "a bunch of bureacratic jackasses." An investigation was launched, which led to some reforms in FEMA procedures that helped the agency do a somewhat better job during Andrew, the next catastrophic hurricane to strike the United States.
So are you telling me that since 1992 Democrats have known FEMA was slow and did very little, not even with 8 years of Bill Clinton in the White House? Excuse me for thinking about that. It seems to be the larger the organization the slower and less flexible. That's why little old churches get there first. They are small and flexible no red tape required. It could also be related to the fact that many roads were cleard by a rednecks with a package of Red Man in the hip pocket and a chainsaw in the pickup.
Posted by: Howie at
12:20 PM
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So I'm giving them a little more "free" publicity, understanding fellow that I am.
Just in case it's not obvious, the implications of their claim that a "terms of service" contract--agreed to during the initial sign up of every client--covers any access to their customer's accounts that isn't vigorously and consistently resisted, basically amounts to a license to steal. Fundamentally what it means is that anyone who has ever signed up with this company had better have access to a good lawyer, or resign themselves to the possibility of having their pockets picked once a year, from now on... more...
Posted by: Demosophist at
11:52 AM
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September 09, 2005
So what's all this inaccuracy about? Well, it's about the fact that the Left realizes it can't make a case for its analysis and prescription of social problems using just plain old logic and argument, so it has to use emotion. And in that situation anything you can do to raise the emotional stakes "helps the cause." So Cokie is compelled to say that Katrina was worse than the Tsunami even though an objective analysis puts it at a very small fraction of the Indian Ocean event. With this sort of logic the earth is larger than the sun, and my home town in rural Washington state is a major metropolitan area. So when does Wilbur get its share of the pie, huh? We're waiting...
Posted by: Demosophist at
10:38 PM
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Awhile ago an opinion research team conducted a survey in small-town Iowa, asking the question: "What security issue is the most urgent?" (This was long before 9-11.) Of the options, which included terrorism, bad weather, a crop blight, and a disease attacking livestock, the one most frequently mentioned was "crime in the streets." This was rural Iowa, remember. So the interviewer asked a followup: "What crime, in what streets?" Turns out they were afraid of crime in the streets of Chicago, because most read Chicago papers like The Trib or watched Chicago TV News. They were definitely over-estimating that threat, and probably under-estimating the threats to their livelihood from crop blight and livestock disease.
Continue Reading The Sum of All Threats
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05:37 PM
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The Washington Post had earlier reported that eye witnesses were claiming that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Iraq flag was flying over the city, that a sign reading "Welcome to The Islamic Kingdom of Qaim" hung over a mosque, and that an accused prostitute had been murdered in the city under harsh new Islamic law.
The Marine Corps, deployed in the area, is now denying those reports.
Maj. Neil Murphy, a spokesman for II Marine Expeditionary Force, told The Marine Corps Times that reports detailing an all-out al-Qaida takeover in Qaim were a “crock of crap.”
“Sure, anyone can hang up a poster. That does not mean anything,” Murphy wrote in an e-mail response to questions. “We have a battalion there. [The insurgents] are continually moving to try and find safety, but we are rooting them out and we’ll root them out of Qaim, too.”
Centcom has made no official statement about the developing situation in al Qaim. However, off-the-record, an official at Centcom was wary of denying these reports to The Jawa Report.
The area in and around al Qaim is a well known route used by al Qaeda terrorists between Syria and Iraq. In recent weeks, Iraqis loyal to the government have been fighting tribes loyal to al Qaeda. The US military has been supporting our allies on the ground in the area through an intense aerial campaign.
Posted by: Rusty at
04:50 PM
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The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that terrorist traitor and general rat bastard Jose Padilla can be held as an enemy combatent. The ruling means that Padilla does not have claim on US courts for relief and that his hippie-dhimmi allies at the ACLU will just have to continue to annoy us with lawsuits aimed at getting the gays married instead of trying to spring terrorists from the pokie on technicalities.Two in one day. Dayum it feels good to be a gangsta........ more...
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02:58 PM
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