108557724348938414

Once again, Moore is a confirmed liar

As if the bundled lies in his first waste of good video storage, Bowling for Columbine wasn’t enough, Michael Moore has once again produced a film purporting to be a documentary called Fahrenheit 9/11. And again, he’s lying through his teeth. Not that this is stopping the “I hate Bush” crowd from lauding his work and producing 20-minute standing ovations for him at Cannes. Well, it isn’t the 1st time Moore’s been caught in a lie.

Space Here

A FEW YEARS AGO Michael Moore, who’s now promoting an anti-President Bush movie entitled Fahrenheit 9/11, announced he’d gotten the goods on me, indeed hung me out to dry on my own words. It was in his first bestselling book, Stupid White Men. Moore wrote he’d once been “forced” to listen to my comments on a TV chat show, The McLaughlin Group. I had whined “on and on about the sorry state of American education,” Moore said, and wound up by bellowing: “These kids don’t even know what The Iliad and The Odyssey are!” Moore’s interest was piqued, so the next day he said he called me. “Fred,” he quoted himself as saying, “tell me what The Iliad and The Odyssey are.” I started “hemming and hawing,” Moore wrote. And then I said, according to Moore: “Well, they’re . . . uh . . . you know . . . uh . . . okay, fine, you got me–I don’t know what they’re about. Happy now?” He’d smoked me out as a fraud, or maybe worse. The only problem is none of this is true. It never happened. Moore is a liar. He made it up. It’s a fabrication on two levels. One, I’ve never met Moore or even talked to him on the phone. And, two, I read both The Iliad and The Odyssey in my first year at the University of Virginia. Just for the record, I’d learned what they were about even before college.

Space Here

Fred Barnes isn’t calling Moore a liar because he heard something that someone else heard, etc., etc., etc. He is the man Moore is talking about. Add to that the known lies, fabricated visuals, and deceptive editing in the aforementioned Bowling film and you get a man who can’t be trusted to tell you the time of day when he’s looking right at the Atomic Clock. Yet this is the man the Left hails as a genius. He’s only making them look bad.

108557050064444332

More Vigilance?

I’m all for keeping alert and I really do appreciate that the government is trying to let us know when they really think someone’s going to blow up a building. A warning is only as good as the details it contains, however, and telling us that somewhere, somehow, at any time over the summer, some terror group might decide to attack something doesn’t do much for us. I am holding out final judgement on this one until after the press conference with Atty. General Ashcroft and Director Mueller.

Update to follow.

108539767363999256

Bill Whittle hits the nail

Bill Whittle over at Eject! Eject! Eject! has written up a number of excellent essays and his latest, titled “Strength” is possibly the finest. (It’s a 2-part essay. You can read it as a whole at his main blog page or hit part 1 and part 2 separately by following these links.) I consider myself to be fairly articulate, but this one has captured precisely something I’ve felt for over 2 years now and have been unable to find the words to say. He hits the nail squarely on the head and drives it all the way through the board on a single strike. Bravo!

108516908735671201

Welcome to the weekend

Left the office a little early this afternoon in the vain attempt to miss some of the traffic. I arrived home to find the painters still here painting 4 rooms of our house as we prep it to go on the market. We’ve lived here 10 years. One of the 1st things we did was to paint over the antique white decor in the living room, giving it some color and really making the (also antique white) fireplace mantle stand out. As I walked back in today, I see it again as it was when we moved in. I’d forgotten…

This is the 1st house we ever owned. We’ve come a long way since we were living in the 1 bedroom apartment in the basement of that building over in town. She and I were making, together, less than half what she makes alone today. Feels like a long time ago, but like last week, also. Being married this long feels that way, I hear, and I’m glad for it. It was 16 years ago, today, that we say “We do” up there in front of the priest. Here’s to lots more….

108490097285642479

It’s Official: It was Sarin

Tests on the artillery shell suspected of containing sarin nerve agent have been completed and confirm that it did, in fact, hold the chemical. The coalition also confirms the report that a shell containing mustard gas was found on May 2. Both shells were tested by the Iraqi Survey Group.

As expected, the presence of these chemical weapons has resulted in quite a bit of spin from the folks who have been loudly proclaiming that no such weapons exist. Now, it’s not that they never existed (it is established fact that they did, and now confirmed fact that they do), it’s just that there’s not enough of them to count. I’m already hearing from people that this doesn’t indicate a real threat or that it was just a stray and was to be expected.

Excuse me? Tell you what: I’ll take any group of folks who feel that way and have them gather in the largest banquet room at the local Sheraton or Hilton, place a container with the same 3-4 liters of sarin within in the middle of that room and then pop it off. They can then tell me if it doesn’t qualify as a WMD. Obviously, I’m kidding. By definition, sarin gas shells are WMD, as are mustard gas munitions. I would also point out that if we found a shell with mustard gas mixed in with some Mark-82 bombs in, say, Norfolk, nobody would be dismissing it as an inevitable foul-up.

It remains very much to be seen if this is the start of a trend or simply dumb luck on the part of some terror squad who thought they were going to get a big explosion instead of a gas cloud. Vigilance, as ever, required.

108489927120072308

Sasser author has gained some idiot groupies

Seems the kid who wrote the Sasser worm that blazed across the Internet, chewing up bandwidth and rendering infected desktops unusable, has gathered a following who are trying to raise money for the kid’s legal defense. In one of the most solid examples of level-headed reasoning yet, the group’s spokeman said:

Space Here

“The entire world is angry with him, so we think he could use some friends,”

Space Here

Oooo, good reason, folks. The team claims to think the German youth, Sven Jaschan, had a good idea in that he was only trying to point out the horrid state of Microsoft’s products’ security stature.

Space Here

“Sasser was intended as a harmless wake-up call to the world,” said the e-mail. “Sven did the right thing by making this alarm call.” It continued: “When will people realise that microsofts (sic) base products are not fit to be subjected to the hostile environment that the internet is these days?”

Space Here

OK, Mr. & Mrs. Brickhead, the damage Sasser caused was far from harmless. From statistics collected, about 30% of the desktops infected by the worm’s worm could not be used, not even to recover themselves. Those systems required intervention from highly-trained IT professionals, not some mindless patch installs from Windows Update. And while those systems were down awaiting repair from people who know more about the system than how to click on the left mouse button, the people depending on those systems were sitting on their butts. Not that you care, since your next comment displays your complete idiocy and disconnection with the reality of the Net these days:

Space Here

“We also like sticking it to the man.”

Space Here

“The Man?” (What are you, stuck in the 60′s?) I’m sure you’d like to think that it was all just the tight-assed $600-dollar-suit crowd, but it wasn’t. Those systems are protected by a few 10-thousand dollar’s-worth of hardware firewalls administered by 3 shifts of paid professionals. Their systems get patched daily because they’ve got an army of geeks who make damn sure they’re patched. No, no… it’s the Mom in Cincinnati, the Granddad in Kansas, the single mother in Colorado that felt the pain of your little “harmless wake-up call.” Those were the folks who tried to get onto a web site to renew a prescription medication but couldn’t because the drugstore’s WAN link was flooded off the wire from so many Sasser attacks. They couldn’t pay a bill on-line and, so, had to hump it to the post office on public transportation and hope the mail runs on time. The tried to see pictures of their newborn granddaughter who lives 2000 miles away but couldn’t get on-line because their system kept crashing.

Getting the point, yet?

And before you start up the tripe about Microsoft, would you still be feeling OK about this kind of action if it had been a loophole in the Linux kernel he’d managed to find? Or a security flaw in Mac OSX? Too much of a stretch? Here’s one I’m sure even you intellect-deficients can grasp: If it’d been old Sven there picking the lock on your front door and disabling your home’s heat, a/c, light, sewage, and water supply for 10 hours, would you be patting him on the back for sending a “wake-up call to the world” that multi-pin door locks “are not fit to be subjected to the hostile environment” that is the world today?

You’re a bunch of elitist jackasses looking for a moment of fame. Congrats, you’ve found it. Now crawl back into the hole your brains have fallen into.

108487803211450189

Follow-up on hold

Yesterday’s note about the sarin-filled shell rigged as a roadside bomb mentioned that I’d follow up. Well, I willfollow up, but I’m just going to be a bit patient about concluding much regarding the shell. Read that carefully, because you’ll note that I’m neither dismissing the report as insignificant nor trumpeting it as a major find. Let’s see the analysis and get back to it then. All the stories on it yesterday, by the way, also refer to the discovery of mustard gas there in Iraq in the last 2 weeks, too, and that report seems quite firm.

108480466618368826

WMD device located in Iraq

CNN and Fox News are reporting that a roadside bomb located by a Coalition Convoy contained sarin nerve gas. No details yet as this story is just breaking. More to come as I get it.

108475447109505704

Astute Thought

Space Here

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.” – Plato (427-347 B.C.)

Space Here

And the prize for “most unsuspected comedian goes to:

Space Here

“If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?” – Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

Space Here

108467342371985848

Reaching for the point

President Bush was in Lebanon, OH on Friday. Lebanon is just north of Cincinnati and sits in a county that voted in favor of electing Bush by 70%. The President’s stop in Lebanon was well received there as evidenced by a crowd of what appeared to be between 100 and 200 supporters who came to listen to him speak. The report on MSNBC showed footage of the President speaking and there were cheers and applause and signs of support all over the square set up for the event. So how did MSNBC choose to cover the event? By giving almost 2.5 minutes of the 3 minute story over to the 1 – yes, even by the admission of the MSNBC reporter narrating the story there was only 1 – opponent in the crowd.

The woman took her oath of citizenship a year ago and disapproves of Mr. Bush’s policies and performance. She points to the Iraq war and to the prisoner abuse as sure signs that he’s not to be trusted. MSNBC made sure she got her say on national television and played the story up as evidence that the President is in huge trouble with the electorate. Not once in the whole story did the reporter even try to solicit opinions of people who were there to show support. Not a single sound bite, not even a quote, of anyone who was standing right there not even 10 feet from the reporter and his crew was shown or aired. But this woman who has things to say against the President was given a platform to speak from the likes of which most of us will never get close to sharing.

There’s plenty of people saying there’s no bias in the media. Episodes like this show it as clear as can be made – that reporter, his editor, and the management of the “news” outlet they belong to decided up front that they were going to come away from that event with a message that showed the President isn’t doing well, and they had to reach right past dozens of supporters to get it. But get it they did, and they made damn sure to pump it up as high as they could.

As another point, the woman in the story was an Iraqi who came here to the US back when Saddam was still in power. Now why would she have done that, if he was such a nice guy to live with? Her points about the prison abuse ring so hollow when compared to the abuse prisoners could expect there 2 years ago. And you can rest assured that the abusing guards would have been getting bonuses and medals, not courts martial and jail time. We’re doing something about it, and it’s not patting the jerks who abused those prisoners on the back. Perhaps if she’d been this outspoken about demanding political change when she was back in Iraq, we might not have had to go in there in the first place. But she’s found her voice now, and our media is all too happy to grant her the spotlight while deliberately denying supporters of the President the same coverage. Real bias, right there.