Diana West is angry that our television shows don't hate Muslims enough: 

After these and other obvious blunders — a terse exchange of "Allahu Akbar" between terrorists, for instance — the creative types behind the hit series managed to get their act together and save the world for political correctness. How? Two things: They laid down a suitably distracting Chinese subplot, and cast a bunch of mid-Westerners, instead of Middle Easterners, to wear the key black hats. There was the ex-Air Force pilot — obviously blond, obviously disgruntled — who shot down Air Force One; a nefarious ex-Marine; and a Patty-Hearst-like commando who just shot whatever.

My question is, once the War on Terror is won, who will be left to designate an enemy for these people.  I know that the end of the Cold War was a terrible time for these people.

Bill Frist is the worst bean counter the Senate has ever seen.  Mark Schmitt had it right in his excellent Frist's BlackBerry Spring.  The man cannot keep the troops in line and he doesn't know when not to call a vote.  Take tonight--he called a cloture vote on the Bolton nomination without having the votes.  And he predictably lost.  Dumb.  It just makes you look stupid when you lose.

His other problem is that he just doesn't have any pull with the White House.  Right now the Democrats have him by the balls on Bolton.  The Administration refuses to turn over some NSA intercepts on Bolton the Democrats want.  If they would just turn over the intercepts, the vote would go forward.  Instead, the Democrats get to drag it on longer and longer, raising more and more doubts about Bolton as time goes on.  If Frist could push the Administration, they would hand over the intercepts and the vote would go forward.  Instead they hand over a tailor-made issue that makes the Administration look terrible and Frist look worse.  Thank God we have these idiots.  Got a feeling '06 is going to be a good year.

Update, Friday May 27 11:30 AM: The LA Times calls on Frist to resign.

From Instapundit, tonight a story EASONGATE II CONTINUES.  Wow!  An outrage franchise!  What an opportunity--stores are opening now!

Read that small print before buying:

Retired Air Force General Thomas McInerney, a Fox News military consultant, was "frankly astonished."

"It may be legitimate to investigate whether there may or may not have been an incident in which U.S. troops have targeted journalists, but there is no question at this point that major media figures are targeting the men and women of the United States military in Iraq, repeatedly and with no evidence," he said.

Really?  So your admitting that "there may or may not have been an incident in which U.S. troops have targeted journalists."?  Please, do tell more.  Is there something we should know?

Stopping over at Powerline, that home of all things d-i-v-o-r-c-e-d from reality. (Thanks, Tammy [Real Player]).  They get an E-mail from Chrenkoff, an Australian blogger so far from the fighting in Iraq, that he never met an Iraqi offensive that didn't tell him "the insurgents are desparate," a guy who understands that in order to fully participate in the bullshit culture, "you've got to believe, brother."  But tonight, Cherenkoff hits it right on the head as he gripes about having to blog against Ted Koppel reading off the names of the U.S. war dead once again.

Why don't you read one day the names and show the pictures of the 170,000 or so American servicemen and women stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan who every day are working their hardest to ensure that democracy takes root, terrorists are defeated, and these two countries have a chance to build a better future for their people.   That might convince a cynic such as myself that you really care for the troops generally.

Brilliant, I say.  I do think that the world needs to be reminded that what we are trying to say isn't about the one thousand six hundred and forty-seven Americans who have died in service to their country.  Its about the fact that there are currently one hundred thousand thirty-five thousand four hundred and twenty-seven U.S. troops there today.   In fact I think it is so important that the shows really should start off reading the names of the living because those are the people who can get saved. 

Iraq is the biggest story of our generation--bigger than 9/11 by far.  September Eleventh involved three thousand people.  Iraq involves millions of human beings every single day.  Let's start readin' 'cause I guarentee you, it aint going to have the desired effect, I'm afraid.

Looks like we got a deal folks.  Owen will advance to a vote.  We won't filibuster except in "extraordinary circumstances."  You can drive a truck through that one, I can assure you.  In fact, if we want to highlight one of these wingnut's records, all we need to say is that it is extraordinary.  The loser in all of this?  Frist of course.  Look for Dobson and co. to bail on him any day now.

However, Weinberg described the current system being deployed in Alaska and elsewhere by the Bush administration to defend against a limited ICBM attack as "a system which has no capability at all."

Note, that's Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Steven Weinberg.

Rick Santorum, March 3, 2005:

Senator Byrd's inappropriate remarks comparing his Republican colleagues with Nazis are inexcusable," Santorum said in a statement yesterday. "These comments lessen the credibility of the senator and the decorum of the Senate. He should retract his statement and ask for pardon.

Rick Santorum, May 19, 2005:

The audacity of some members to stand up and say, how dare you break this rule. It's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 "I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It's mine."

Audacity indeed. 

I've been intrigued by talk of some sort of Centrist compromise to take the Nuclear Option off the table but when I read the details given by this article I wonder what kinda moderate Democrat would go for this:

Senate centrists hope to avoid both options. If they can get 12 senators — six Republicans and six Democrats — to agree on a deal they can prevent Frist from banning judicial filibusters and keep Reid from filibustering Bush appointees.

Under the most recent Republican-crafted offer, Democrats would have to allow the confirmation of six Bush nominees: Owen, Brown, and former Alabama Attorney General William Pryor, as well as Michigan nominees Susan Neilson, David McKeague and Richard Griffin. The Senate would scuttle the nominations of Idaho lawyer William Myers and Michigan nominee Henry Saad, aides said.

But more importantly, both sides would have to operate on "good faith" when it comes to future nominations. The aides spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are being held behind closed doors.

So basically the Republicans get the nominees they want, with the help of a handful of Democrats and we're suppose to believe that Republicans will then act in "good faith" during future nominations when their actions during this fiasco and the previous fifteen years suggest absolutely no capacity for acting in good faith.

Why would any self-respecting Democrat, whether liberal, moderate or conservative, go for a solution that only encourages future Republican efforts to steamroll them over judicial nominees yet alone agree to a so-called compromise that futhers the bogus spin that Democratic objections to these nominees are without merit and merely partisan obstruction?

Update:  Looks like Matt Yglesias over at Tapped agrees that compromises like the one above are boneheaded and ass-backwards.

From Michael Terry of Kansas, we learn that Jesse Jackson is a racist.

I guess Michael has a point, because it appears from the post that Jesse has personally been calling him and his entire family and race a racist for years:

As a Caucasian man I have grown tired and weary of your use of the word “racist” in relation to me, my family, my ancestors, and my nation. It has not only become trite, but now I find it extremely offensive.

Apparently, Mr. Terry thinks Jesse should answer to him:

Will you, or can you answer the above questions? I think not. You’ll merely cry and whine about how negroes are victims of some invisible evil white cabal who have nothing better to do with their allotted time on this earth than make the lives of negroes as miserable as they possibly can. I do wish you would name the members of this mysterious cabal and get it over with and stop yelping like a dog that got whacked on the nose with a newspaper for crapping on the carpet.

You see, according to Mr. Terry, the problem is that non-whites have no real heroes.

Why is it that negroes, like Hispanics, don’t have too many heroes to emulate like whites do? Mexicans always bring up Poncho Villa and negroes Booker T. Washington. Caucasians have so many people of their own race to emulate it’s hard to pick one. I won’t list them here because I don’t have the time or space.

You see, Jesse just doesn't have the right attitude:

Instead of condemning Caucasians you should be thanking them. You could be in Africa chasing elephants or monkeys with a blow-gun or spear to get your dinner for the day.

Mr. Terry is right about one thing.  Racism never does go out of style, does it?

If you're like me and have been dumbfounded by the mainstream media's total inability to provide even the hint of an explanation as to how the Republicans intend to break Senate rules to do away with the filibuster for judicial nominees yet alone have anybody explain why it is wrong, I refer you to this op-ed by a Vanderbilt University Law Professor.

And if you're still confuse check out Norm Ornstein here and here.

Bill Frist, on the floor of the Senate, on his filibuster of Clinton Appeals Court nominee Richard Paez:

SEN. SCHUMER: Isn’t it correct that on March 8, 2000, my colleague [Sen. Frist] voted to uphold the filibuster of Judge Richard Paez?

SEN. FRIST: The president, the um, in response, uh, the Paez nomination - we’ll come back and discuss this further. … Actually I’d like to, and it really brings to what I believe - a point - and it really brings to, oddly, a point, what is the issue. The issue is we have leadership-led partisan filibusters that have, um, obstructed, not one nominee, but two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, in a routine way.

The issue is not cloture votes per se, it’s the partisan, leadership-led use of cloture votes to kill - to defeat - to assassinate these nominees. That’s the difference. Cloture has been used in the past on this floor to postpone, to get more info, to ask further questions.

Really, Bill?  To paraphrase a great blogger, Sadly, no!  Paez had been pending for four years when Frist voted against clouture.  Here's a record of the vote. The sponsor of the filibuster, Sen. Smith of New Hampshire made it clear why they were voting to block the nomination:  to block it:

Senator Bob Smith (R-N.H.) today led the fight on the Senate floor to block the nominations of two activist Clinton judicial nominees.

I watched this fool debate Byrd and Reid on the same issue last week.  The argument was all hot air and nothing else.  At core, the man knows what he is doing is morally wrong.

 

Watching this video of John Bolton in action, it makes you wonder what he hopes to accomplish as Ambassador to the UN.

Powerline on Abramoff:

In a spirit of honesty, however, I admit that I'd like to see Abramoff left alone in large part because, instead of spending the millions of dollars he raked in on Ferraris and yachts, he lavishly spent it on causes that I think are good and important.

. . . Yes, I have a conflict of interest — and such conflicts, arising from one's political or moral value system, can be more powerful than conflicts that arise from the scent of money. I wish Abramoff's tormentors would be similarly honest. Let them admit their own wish to see the political consequences of the Abramoff affair that they, simulating disinterest, now predict.

Corruption in Congress needs to be punished, whomever does it.  I guess the argument is that if Democrats oppose naked corruption, they should be stopped from ending it because Mammon is serving God now.  And the Republicans wonder how they got here.

As for me wishing poltical consequences--you bet.  Because the party in power is a party of power walking wrapped in the stolen robes of saints.  As corrupt as some Democrats have been, they knew what they were.  That doesn't justify what they did, it just makes the sins of the current rulers so much worse.

We'll be seeing more of this bitter invective as the Republican machine heads for its inevitable crash.  What we won't see is an admission of truth:  that these Republicans never let a moral belief get in the way of the means.

Finally, an Iraqi party gets it:

The meeting noted that the stalemate in forming the government has significant meanings, as it continues under two contradictions: with the occupation forces, on one hand, and with the anti-people and anti-democratic forces, on the other hand. Two years after the fall of Saddam's regime, our country is still in a state of seeking an alternative.  It is an alternative that our party, along with all the forces that truly aspire to liberation and a free dignified life, strive to be the national democratic alternative: a democratic, federal, pluralistic alternative, and state institutions  based on justice and the rule of law".

"The struggle is currently taking place between competing forces and groups, against a background of the negative dimension of elections, manifested in sectarian-nationalist polarization and lack of political and election awareness. This struggle is about visions for Iraq's political future. This is taking place under an unstable balance of forces caused by the lack of participation of broad sections of the population in elections due to the deteriorating security situation in some areas and the refusal by some forces to take part. This indicates a potential re-alignment of forces in the forthcoming phase of the political process".

"Increasing numbers of the electorate now realize, amid feelings of frustration and bitterness, that the bickering between the winners is over the distribution of positions and cabinet posts, in accordance with the infamous rule of dividing up these positions along sectarian-nationalist lines. This rule should have been brought to an end by the elections, rather than being reinforced, in a stark sign of utter disregard for the people's interests, their needs and aspirations.

Too bad they are the Iraqi Communist Party.  Man, when the Communists have a clearer view of what's going on than the U.S. of A., you know we are screwed.