Sadly, No!

Get Your War On has some new comedy jokes posted.

In other news, please don’t tell John Derbyshire about this.

The Miami Herald reports:

WASHINGTON – Despite nearly a year of searching, the Navy has no new intelligence to resolve the fate of a Navy pilot who was shot down on the first night of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and is still missing, the Navy’s top admiral said Tuesday.

Lt. Cmdr. Michael Scott Speicher’s FA-18 Hornet was shot down in western Iraq on Jan. 17, 1991. Speicher, 33, originally was listed as killed in action, but the Defense Department changed his status to ”missing-captured” in January 2001, after Iraqi defectors claimed that Speicher had survived the crash.

The Bush administration used alleged sightings of the Navy pilot, some of which were provided by Ahmad Chalabi’s exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, to help bolster the case for invading Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein.

[snip]

But a senior administration official, who also asked not to be named, said
all the defectors who provided information about Speicher came from
Chalabi’s INC.

According to the official, one defector told Pentagon officials: “I know
where he is. I know he is alive. I know which prison he is being held in.
Give me a special forces team, and I will go in with them and get him.” [Emphasis added]

If you can’t give me a special forces team, he then added, just give me 100,000 soldiers and we can at least get Saddam and become heroes.

[Thanks to Blair for the link.]

Richard Poe, the author of Hillary’s Secret War: How Hillary Got My Girlfriend to Dump Me, My Landlord to Kick Me Out From My Apartment and All My Credit Cards Canceled, about which we made a number of sarcastic remarks last week (as is our wont,) is angry. So angry in fact that he wastes no time in reaching out for his thesaurus:

Gadzooks! I’ve been Mel Gibson’d.

Taking a page from the Abe Foxman School of Clairvoyant Criticism, an anonymous blogger sporting the handle “Sadly, No!” has mocked, ridiculed, and excoriated my forthcoming book — Hillary’s Secret War: The Clinton Conspiracy to Muzzle Internet Journalists — without even bothering to read it.

[snip]

God only knows what Hillary’s myrmidons will say once they actually get around to cracking the binding. Well, who knows? Maybe they’ll learn something from it. One can always hope. [Emphasis added.]

If anyone needs us, we’ll be in the living room myrmidoning.

We can’t wait to see what SullyWatch has to say, but we were struck (to put it kindly) by this latest from Andrew Sullivan’s seemingly never ending willingness to rationalize away the inexcusable:

It was a fascinating CNN interview, in which the vice-president pointedly didn’t renounce his previous beliefs about letting civil marriage be dealt with by the states. When asked if he supported the president’s decision to ban gays from equal rights in the constitution itself, Cheney didn’t say he supported the amendment. He said he supported the president. It struck me as a very careful use of words. [Emphasis added.]

So, Cheney didn’t say he supports the amendment — he said he supports the President. And what is the President doing? Well, last week Andy put it thusly:

The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. […] He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens – and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself.

You found Cheney’s support for the above fascinating Andy? Just when you thought Andy was going to stick up for what’s right, he rolls over and plays dead. [For our earlier comparison of Andy’s different treatment of such “clever instances of obfuscation,” click here.]

Added link.

A blog goes out of town for a while and it turns out that one of its heroes, and the inspiration for the Dickification of the Western Female essay, is in its city:

We’re in Stuttgart now, on the first official stop of the Du Toit World Tour 2004 (last week in Munich was vacation).

Let’s just hope he’s not staying too long — we’re supposed to be back on Friday. Maybe when we’re there again we’ll stop by those Turkish restaurants where they serve pork:

Lots of Turkish restaurants — only difference being that the kebabs and shwarmas are filled with pork or veal, and not lamb (“The lamb here sucks!” the counter guy told me* when I asked him).

Uh, right. It surely isn’t beef or anything like that. By the way Kim, if all Turks in Stuttgart speak “fluent German” chances are they aren’t going to tell you this:

*”Der Lammfleisch ist schrecklich.”

Fleisch.

According to Andrew Sullivan, this is what passes for an intellectually stimulating evening at the American Enterprise Institute:

More significantly, the economic stresses on Germany, Niall argues, will make it unlikely that German subsidies can keep the EU afloat indefinitely. And that’s always been the central reality of the EU: German largess toward other member states in return for political legitimacy and economic union.

We read that passage many times, trying to make sense of it. Frankly, it just defies any attempt to even achieve the appearance of accuracy. Do German subsidies keep the rest of the EU afloat? Sadly, No! Indeed, this argument isn’t just wrong, it’s Amber Pawlik wrong.

The EU’s entire budget for 2003 was approximately $100 billion. Germany contributed 26% of the total, so let’s say $27 billion. Even if we assumed that the other member states contribute zero (they do not,) and that EU funds are entirely distributed to the other member states (they are not,) this would represent a net contribution of $74 (yes, seventy four dollars) per resident of all EU members besides Germany. If the EU is staying afloat on $74 per resident per year, that’s news to us. [Besides, economic union has done more than benefit Germany.]

We can’t help but add, on an unrelated note, that a man who constantly expresses outrage at any and all Bush/Hitler comparisons has a lot of nerve throwing in the following remark on Germany’s declining population:

Perhaps the most striking statistic he [Niall] provided (and there were many) is that, on current demographic trends, there will only be 67 million Germans in 2050 – down from over 80 today and slightly more in Hitler’s day.

Slightly more in Hitler’s day? What the fuck kind of yardstick is that?

Added bonus: Andy’s numbers are, in any case, wrong. Besides, pre-war Germany only managed to boast of a large population because it invaded and annexed its neighbors:

In the 1930s, during the regime of Adolf Hitler, a period of expansion added both territory and population to the Third Reich. Following the annexation of Austria in 1938 and the Sudetenland (part of Czechoslovakia) in 1939, German territory and population encompassed 586,126 square kilometers and 79.7 million people, according to the 1939 census.

Germany’s population was roughly 64 million before WW1, 10 million fewer after the war, and back at 64 immediately after WW2. [A number that was to increase quickly following the expulsion of ethnic Germans.]

Added: Having endured much too much of the webcast of this event, we’re stunned to report that Ferguson’s “big number” (“one of the most striking facts that I can offer you” he said) is that Germany has, since the beginnings of the EU, paid 132 billion DM in net contributions. That would be US$ ?67 billion. Total. That works out to $442 per non-German EU citizen over the course of the EU’s history. This is what keeps the EU going. And after 30 minutes he claims “I didn’t come here to make a purely economic argument.”

Good thing too because your argument, economics wise, is worth shit.

Richard Perle’s resignation letter

Well, looks like my work here is done.

Added: Doug offers his own version.

Last week, it seemed Andrew Sullivan had finally figured out that the Republican party/Bush & Co. just plain don’t like gay people. Today he goes back to pretending you can have a productive discussion with David Frum:

So my question back to Frum is simple: which of your 1,049 civil marital privileges would you be willing to grant a married gay couple?

Andy:

Frum doesn’t want there to be any married gay couples!!!

How hard is that to understand???

Come back tomorrow when Andy starts taking Bush’s deficit reduction “plan” seriously again.

[Added link.]

NEW YORK (AP) – Despite the potential of turning every Internet user into a publisher, relatively few have created Web journals called blogs and even fewer do so with regularly, a new study finds.

Some bloggers indeed update their journals often, in some cases several times a day. But it’s clearly a minority who are taking advantage of the blog and its potential to steer the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life. [AP]

Sadly, No! — Part of the minority steering the online discourse with personal musings about news events and daily life.

No, this isn’t about Kyle Williams’ latest column. Instead, let’s take a look around blogtopia (yes, skippy coined that term!) and see what the really cool kids are writing about:

World O’Crap turns her attention to Kyle Williams, who appears to have been skipping school lately if his reading skills are any indication.

uggabugga compares the amount of time Bush spent on vacation pre-September 11 with the amount of time he will spend with the commission investigating September 11. Hint: One of those numbers is much larger than the other.

Brad DeLong posts excerpts from briefing memos Paul O’Neill gave Ron Suskind for The Price of Loyalty. The issues are complicated, but fortunately (?) the memos are nice and short.

Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog writes about the state of scientific research in the great state of Oklahoma. Or lack of we guess.