Mike's Noise

Moonbat porn

It looks like this:

Held up by a secret service bodyguard in his dying moments after being shot in the stomach, this is President Bush being assassinated.

Surrounded by a crowd of panicking onlookers, the American leader is pictured just seconds after being gunned down by a sniper following an anti-war demonstration.

But rather than a repeat of JFK's shooting or Ronald Reagan's attempted assassination, this shocking image is part of a new Channel Four show.

The dramatic scene, which has caused outrage among Americans, has been created by a British film company for a programme about the effect of the War On Terror.

*sigh*

Michelle Malkin has more moonbat porn related to the assassination of President Bush.

Enhanced Star Trek to appear in HDTV

If you are a Star Trek fan, here is a reason to buy a HDTV:

Star Trek purists, take a deep breath! On Sept. 16, the iconic ‘60s series will return to syndication for the first time since 1990, but with a startling difference: All 79 episodes are being digitally remastered with computer-generated effects not possible when Gene Roddenberry created the show 40 years ago. The news could cause Roddenberry loyalists to have a collective cow, but the longtime Trek staffers in charge of the makeover say they're honoring the late maestro's vision, not changing it.

"We're taking great pains to respect the integrity and style of the original," says Michael Okuda, who spent 18 years as a scenic-art supervisor on Star Trek films and spin-offs. "Our goal is to always ask ourselves: What would Roddenberry have done with today's technology?" Okuda's teammates on the two-year project are his wife, Denise Okuda, with whom he's authored several Trek reference books, and 14-year Trek production vet David Rossi.

The upgraded episodes — to be shown out of order and one per week — will kick off with "Balance of Terror," a big fan favorite "that gives us a chance to really show off the ‘new' Enterprise," says Okuda. "The exterior of the ship now has depth and detail, and it will fly more dynamically." Painted backdrops will also be brought to life: Once-empty star bases will have CGI people milling about, while static alien landscapes have been given slow-moving clouds and shimmering water. Okuda notes that a view of Earth in the 1966 episode "Miri" has been "replaced with a more accurate image, now that we've gone into deep space and looked back at ourselves."

More at the Trek Movie Report.

If you want an idea of how the new TV shows will look, check out Daren Dochterman's web site.  Dochterman is a special-effects artist who worked on the DVD release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.  As a hobby, he re-created special effects for the classic Star Trek episode "The Doomsday Machine."  As far as I can tell, these are NOT the special effects that will be used in the new HDTV episodes; they are simply something that Dochterman put together in his spare time.  But still ...

(h/t JayTea at WizBang)

Iranian police enforcing head-covering laws for women

A story a few months ago about an Iranian law supposedly requiring Christians and Jews to wear identification patches on their clothes turned out to be false.

But this new story about women's attire seems to be true:

Police in Tehran have been ordering Iranian women to cover up, stopping those they perceive as "badly veiled."

The crackdown followed the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"We are certainly seeing a return to behavior we haven't seen for 10 years," Hadi Ghaemi of Human Rights Watch told The Telegraph. "Generally, the imposition of strict Islamic codes has been increasing under Ahmadinejad."

Ghaemi said that the penalty for violating a code that requires the complete covering of women's heads and bodies in public depends on the officers involved and the women's political connections.

I wonder, do 'thinly veiled' women get a pass ... if they have good political connections?

Revenge of Grumpy

Sometimes it is the cats who get the upper hand ...

The pet cat, who has been named Grumpy because of his exploits, started entering all the cat flaps on one street in the search for food.

He would make each house his own and would scare off the cats who lived in each of the houses.

And when the surprised owners returned home, Grumpy leapt through the air at them, hissing at them and scratching their hands and arms.

His antics in a small leafy street in Swindon, Wiltshire, have been described as a 'four-month reign of terror' by neighbours, who finally caught the cat and put it in a cage this week.

... Grumpy is being checked over by a vet and will be collected by the RSPCA for re-homing if no owner is found.

Good luck.

Counterfeiting in the news

From the "and they wonder why we don't trust them" files ...

I neglected to mention this past Sunday's revelation that Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's number two man at the State Department three years ago, apparently was the accidental leaker who let Valerie Plame's identification slip in his conversations with reporters, most notably Robert Novak.

Interestingly, Armitage confessed immediately to his boss, Powell, and shortly thereafter both the Justice Department and the FBI were notified that Armitage had confessed to leaking Plame's name and that it was done without malice:

Armitage acknowledged that he had passed along to Novak information contained in a classified State Department memo: that Wilson’s wife worked on weapons-of-mass-destruction issues at the CIA. (The memo made no reference to her undercover status.) Armitage had met with Novak in his State Department office on July 8, 2003—just days before Novak published his first piece identifying Plame.

At this point, according to his own explanation, Novak simply picked up his copy of Who's Who and noted that Joseph Wilson was married to the former Valerie Plame.

Obviously the mainstream media (and I am thinking specifically of the New York Times) with their extensive network of deeply-ensconced governmental "anonymous sources" had to have known about Armitage since the fall of 2003, yet they refused to publish anything -- the same people who squealed like giggling schoolgirls about the NSA data mining program and the SWIFT bank monitoring program.  To them, obviously, it was more important to hamstring the Bush administration over the Wilson-Plame affair and to let Joe Wilson continue to smear Karl Rove than to print the truth.

ADDED: Remember Judith Miller?  She was the New York Times reporter who spent three months in jail for refusing to answer questions about conversations she had with Scooter Libby.  Her case adds an even odder dimension to this story -- could the New York Times have spared her the embarassment of going to prison simply by publishing what it obviously had to have known about Richard Armitage?  But again, such a blockbuster story would have neutered the indepent investigation into the Plame leak, and would have vindicated Karl Rove.  So Judith Miller did jail time instead.  Pitiful.

Sister Toldjah rounds up the flaccid end to the Wilson-Plame story here and here.  Christopher Hitchens writes the epitaph.

(PS- I hear that Johnny Depp probably won't be starring in a movie about John Mark Karr.  Maybe he'll be available to play Joe Wilson now ... though it's too bad we won't be seeing Sharon Stone as the beautiful Valerie Plame.)

Mary Katherine Ham's latest Townhall.com piece is a comprehensive roundup of shoddy mainstream media reporting from Lebanon, complete with a treasure trove of links.  Read it and weep.

Meanwhile, Myrtus, Dan Riehl, and others have been examining the crisp, new $100 bills handed to Lebanese citizens by Hezbollah and are wondering ... is it "funny money"?  Not surprisingly, TV footage of Israeli bomb damage in Lebanon (you'll need Internet Explorer 6 and Media Player 10 in order to watch it) accidentally revealed a room filled with stacks of paper that looked suspiciously like sheets of uncut US $100 bills.  Naturally MSNBC couldn't be bothered to investigate.

It's all about counterfeiting, folks.  And they wonder why we don't trust them anymore.

...

Here's an interesting postscript to the whole Wilson-Plame affair.  Remember this quote from President Bush:

There are too many leaks of classified information in Washington. If there's leaks out of my Administration, I want to know who it is, and if the person has violated the law, the person will be taken care of.

Liberals went nuts, demanding that Karl Rove be "frog-marched" out of the White House in handcuffs, stuffed into a police car, locked away in prison, and tried for treason.  Maybe blindfolded and shot before dawn.

But notice the awful silence now that someone has been named, and that person is not Karl Rove or Dick Cheney -- in fact he is a staunch critic of Bush administration foreign policy.  Anyone calling for Richard Armitage to be "frog-marched"?  Tried for treason?  Obviously this scandal was not about 'justice,' it was simply about sacking the Bush administration.  Don't look for liberal "porn" like this to appear on Daily Kos anytime soon:

Katrinamania

This is the one year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  In a few weeks it will be the five year anniversary of 9/11.  Interestingly, when it comes to discussing that awful day of terror, five years is "too soon."  Yet there seems to be no apprehension about discussing the death and destruction of Hurricane Katrina after only one year.  My opinion?  It's a chance for Democrats to dominate the news cycle for 24 hours and continually remind you that "George Bush hates black people."  And no one is going to give up an opportunity like that.

...

(ADDED: Actually, most of the coverage I saw was pretty much devoid of anti-Bush bias, which I found rather surprising.  So I'll admit I was wrong about that prediction.)

...

If you want to really know what happened a year ago, check out my Hurricane Katrina blog archive.  Click the link, scroll down to the bottom and start reading.  You'll find pretty much everything there:  the utter failure of the City of New Orleans to evacuate its indigent citizens, the complete collapse of New Orleans police and emergency response network, the grossly misleading and inaccurate reporting of the mainstream media (babies being raped and bodies stacked to the ceiling at the Superdome), the heroic and downright awe-inspiring rescue missions mounted by the National Guard, the idiocy of Sean Penn, the kooky conspiracy theories of Louis Farrakhan and Spike Lee, the failures and waste of FEMA, the utter incompetence of the Army Corps of Engineers, and egregious finger pointing by federal, state, and local officials.

And don't forget the efforts of conservative bloggers to raise money for Katrina victims, while the left half of the blogosphere was engaged in full-tilt foaming-at-the-mouth Bush-bashing; the suffering of thousands in Alabama and Mississippi and in the suburbs surrounding New Orleans, who lost everything but whose stories were ignored because they failed to ignite a sufficient amount of Bush hatred; the thousands of volunteers who donated money, facilities, clothes and commodities, and time to help Katrina survivors; the cities like Houston who opened their doors to over 100,000 Katrina evacuees; the thousands of volunteers, mostly from churches, who have journeyed to New Orleans over the last 9 months and have helped hundreds of families clean out and rebuild their homes; and the struggling survivors who have returned to New Orleans and faced mold, slime, garbage, and a host of other ills as they try to rebuild their lives.

God bless the people of New Orleans.  Keep them in your prayers; they are still going to need them for some time.

ADDED: WizBang blogger Paul, an engineer and New Orleans resident, has compiled perhaps the best archive of writings about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina on the web.  His ultimate Katrina post presents a smoking gun home video that shows, conclusively, that the water levels at 17th Street Canal Floodwall were NOT at a critically-high level when the floodwall broke.  The wall was -- literally -- undermined by only a slight increase from the normal level of water.  It began seeping from underneath, then began to erode away and finally collapsed completely.

Besides the now-accepted (but criminally under-reported) conclusion that the Army Corps of Engineers built a poorly designed floodwall system -- and was therefore responsible for the flooding of New Orleans -- this video seems to underscore the fact that Katrina actually saved lives in New Orleans.  Why?  The approaching hurricane spurred the activation of emergency shelters and evacuation efforts before the flood occured.  Had the wall broken at another time (which now seems very likely) then tens of thousands would have died and rescue operations would have taken weeks longer.  Frightening indeed.

(Several WizBang commenters pointed out that other areas of the city were flooded by overspill or storm surge occurring at other containment walls.  Although Katrina caused only a moderate amount of wind damage in New Orleans, it did pack a pretty good storm surge.  But Paul's post seems to clearly show that the 17th Street floodwall, the one whose breach flooded most of the heart of N. O., collapsed without a significant increase in the water level.)

God's justice and the politics of Jesus

Scholar and author N. T. Wright notes,

"I often meet people in this country who tell me, 'I love your books on Jesus. I really enjoy your work on Paul. But how can you criticize our president because God has raised him up to bring justice to the world?'"

I don't have a problem with President Bush.  I voted twice for him.  I understand that he is the President of the United States -- a secular nation -- and not the President of Christendom.  He has also been fair in his dealings with rogue nations by giving them ample warning and clearly defined opportunities to cooperate with us before using force to deal with them. 

But I do have a serious problem with the belief that God's idea of "justice" is the same as mankind's: "smacking down" the bad guys.

Far too many Christians in the American evangelical movement share this belief, rather than the Biblical view of God's justice which is rooted in mercy for the poor and grace for the sinner.

President Bush is doing the work required of him as the leader of a secular world superpower.  He is not administering divine justice.

And writing at RedBlueChristian.com, Rob Ashgar asks,

[As a Christian] can you allow yourself to be too politically active? After all, politics involves broad, pluralistic and secularized constituencies—and most of these constituencies have not signed up for a communal, Church-governed covenant of forgiveness, holiness, and so on. Nor can the state carry out its responsibilities effectively in domestic or foreign policy if “charity” and “unearned grace” are mandated as the key tools of such policy.

... If followers of Jesus are meant to express God’s power as ambassadors of reconciliation, as proactive forgivers, can that be balanced with the manner of foreign policy that many evangelicals have endorsed – i.e., “If the ‘evil’ nations of the world will still not be peaceful, let us simply bomb them earlier and longer and harder”?

It is obvious that the Church cannot promote forgiveness as a foreign policy weapon. But its leaders and members have been too timid or too feckless to tell others that divinely inspired forgiveness is necessary precisely because conventional approaches to war and peace and love and hate are so utterly inadequate. (emphasis added)

I agree ... just as long as we realize that offering peace to rogue nations is not the same thing as sucking up to them and glossing over the evil that they do.

Jesus socialized with sinners, but he did not suck up to them.  Rather, he provided an example of grace that challenged the way that they lived their lives, and as a result many of them were moved to repent of their sins.

Hezbollah leader apologizes to Lebanon

Michael Totten (who has been living in and blogging from Lebanon) thinks that Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, failed to convince a majority of the educated and independent-thinking Lebanese population that Hezbollah really "won" the recent war with Israel.  So to save face, Nasrallah recently declared:

“[W]e did not believe, even by one percent, that the captive operation would result in such a wide-scale war, as such a war did not take place in the history of wars. Had we known that the captive operation would result in such a war we would not have carried it out at all.”

Interesting.  That doesn't sound at all like the rhetoric of a victorious leader doing the will of God.

And RedBlueChristian has much more regarding the pyrrhic victory of Hezbollah:

Mona Fayed, a prominent Shiite academic in Beirut, wrote an article also published by An-Nahar last week. She asks: Who is a Shiite in Lebanon today? She provides a sarcastic answer: A Shiite is he who takes his instructions from Iran, terrorizes fellow believers into silence, and leads the nation into catastrophe without consulting anyone.

Ouch.

While the radical Shi'aa Islam preached by Iranian leaders certainly has a stranglehold on southern Lebanon, it is comforting to know that fundamentalism and extremism is abhorrent to many others in the rest of the nation, and that Hezbollah's $100 bill handouts are seen as an insult rather than as the blessings of Allah.

This is the only way that war in the Middle East can be peaceably averted.

ADDED: don't miss this stunning American Thinker article by Dan Gordon: Prelude to Apocalypse.  A sample:

Much has been made in the Western press of Hezb’allah’s benign social services function in Lebanon, of the hospitals and schools it has built.  Almost no notice, however, has been paid to the large numbers of these hospitals and schools which were built over its military bunkers and rocket launching sites.  This was perhaps both the most cynical and barbaric disregard for innocent civilian lives of all of Hezb’allah’s and Iran’s strategic choices.  It was also the most successful. 

The decision was predicated not on its knowledge of its enemy (Israel) but its true genius lay in its knowledge of the press.  The calculus was simple: launch a rocket from within a civilian population; if you kill Jews that’s a victory. If the Jews hit back and in so doing kill Lebanese civilians, that’s a victory. If they don’t hit back because they’re afraid to hit civilians, that’s a victory. Now repeat the process until you kill so many Jews they have to hit back and in so doing kill more Lebanese civilians.  That’s the ultimate victory, because they know that in striking just those chords exactly what music the press will play. 

Gordon concludes that the only battle won by Hezbollah was the media battle.  Otherwise, their combat strategies were ineffective against Israel, and nearly all of their fortified bunkers, missile launchers, and anti-tank weapons were either captured or destroyed by Israel.  However, the complicity of the press all but guarantees that this war will be but round one of a larger and much more deadly conflict.

Centanni and Wiig released!

Be sure to say a prayer of thanksgiving.

Fox News reporters Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig were released last night by their Palestinian kidnappers.  But before their release, Centanni and Wiig were forced to "convert" to Islam, and videos were made of their conversion statements. Interestingly, there is a Muslim tradition called taqiyya that allows Muslim believers to conceal their true faith when under threat, persecution, or compulsion.  It would seem that Centanni and Wiig used their own form of "taqiyya" when making these completely unconvincing confessions of Islamic faith.

The "no harm -- no foul" aspect of their kidnapping and release is somewhat disturbing.  The Debka File notes:

Shortly after Centanni and Wiig were snatched by masked gunmen in Gaza on Aug. 14, the various intelligence agencies operating in Gaza knew who the kidnapper was: the Palestinian warlord Zakaria Dughmush, who had been hired by the same Hamas group which on June 25 kidnapped and - is still holding - the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit.

Will the kidnappings continue?  They are an effective tool of disruption and intimidation and they make instant celebrities of the kidnappers.  And it seems that the kidnappers won't even get a slap on the wrist by any Palestinian officials.

Or perhaps these kidnappings are a weird evangelism campaign by Islamic fundamentalists.  Perhaps these men believe that if they "convert" key people in the Western media, then Allah will be able to use the Western media as a conduit to win a spiritual victory over the forces of Satan that presently control the West.

As usual, Michelle Malkin has the mother of all blog roundups on this story.

"Liberal" Barry Goldwater?

Editor and Publisher is reporting that this Sunday's New York Times Magazine will profile the late Barry Goldwater as one of the forebears of today's American liberalism.  That's probably fair, given the number of Republicans (especially Rush Limbaugh) who have repeatedly pointed out the numerous "conservative" beliefs of liberal icons like John F. Kennedy.

I suppose that Goldwater holds a certain amount of fascination for today's liberal Democrats because in his twilight years he repudiated the Republican party as a political group that had been taken over by "religious nuts."

For the record, perhaps the best explanation of what the "Goldwater Republicans" actually stood for is the remarkably simple and direct television address that Ronald Reagan gave on Goldwater's behalf in 1964.  This Opinion Journal piece is worth reading as well.