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KT Cat's marketing analysis of the New York Times fine, fine business sense and strategy for publishing national security secrets.

We Got Ring Girls!

Our brand new bestest friend in the whole world, KT Cat from The Scratching Post has brought us the long wished for ring girls we have been calling for to announce the rounds in the Kos/TNR cage match. A big round of applause for KT!

Oh, and do click the pictures to see the glorious hi-res versions!

The (Non)Persistence Of Memory (Redux)

James Wolcott defending Kos:

Admittedly, I don't circulate as much as Mickey Kaus, who I gather is moonlighting as the Jerry Zipkin for fright-night bachelorettes, but you would think that by now I would have come across some of those Angry Bloggers I keep reading about, those tommy-gun typists who have escaped captivity and eschew the finer points of etiquette, not to mention spelling and punctuation. I'm so hoping to meet a few of these hotheads someday, and watch gnaw on their own arms out of frustrated spite; it'd be something to tell the folks back home about on my next Greyhound visit. But so far, no luck. I briefly met Kos, for example, and was quite disappointed by how genial and low-key he was. Perhaps he was having an off-day, since those more astute than I perceive an angry radioactive core. Had a brief chat with Steve Gilliard when the vile Republicans were in town in '04, and he failed to put his fist through the nearest window in my presence or break innocent pencils in two. Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise–another liberal blogger whom I'm sorry to say failed to snap and hiss like a cobra. I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Tom Watson or Lance Mannion, but based on their blogs I doubt that they would go psycho loco at the slightest provocation.

James Wolcott describing YearlyKos participants:

But all of Las Vegas's top dominatrixes cleared room and clung to the walls last week when Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher hit the neon strip for Yearly Kos, her arrival heralded by whipcrack lightning and the baying of distant coyetes. Now Jane Hamsher looked amiable and sweetly accessorized hosting a panel on C-SPAN, almost schoolteacherly in her glasses; but cross her, displease her, and the cruel lash will be one's crimson reward.* She has visited her wrath upon the former Wonkette, shown here flanked by a jovial pair of freeloaders. But even that pales beside the rejoinder she offers a critic in the comments section. It's quite a pithy exchange.

We report, you figure it out for yourself.

All I Can Say Is

Shazam. I really didn't get into this aspect of the Armstrong business but it's getting, quite frankly, too funny not to at least link to Tom Maguire and his coverage. He was not the first on the story as he points out. Dan Riehl and Redstate were on it first. But a stock analyst who used astrology turned political consultant who used astrology just deserves a bit of attention.

Using astrology to pick stocks and political candidates for heaven's sake. What a fool.

Everyone knows you use phrenology for those things.

Enough Already

Well, we have another former CIA officer writing a book and yet another screaming headline. This time it's in the Washington Post. "Warnings on WMD 'Fabricator' Were Ignored" the headline screams. I'm quite sure there will be much storm and fury from the left about how Bush lied.

Only the story details events that, if true, indicate the problem was in the CIA, not in the White House.

Drumheller instantly recognized the source, an Iraqi defector suspected of being mentally unstable and a liar. The CIA officer took his pen, he recounted in an interview, and crossed out the whole paragraph.

A few days later, the lines were back in the speech. Powell stood before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 and said: "We have first-hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails."

The sentence took Drumheller completely by surprise.

"We thought we had taken care of the problem," said the man who was the CIA's European operations chief before retiring last year, "but I turn on the television and there it was, again."

While the administration has repeatedly acknowledged intelligence failures over Iraqi weapons claims that led to war, new accounts by former insiders such as Drumheller shed light on one of the most spectacular failures of all: How U.S. intelligence agencies were eagerly drawn in by reports about a troubled defector's claims of secret germ factories in the Iraqi desert. The mobile labs were never found.

If you take the time to read the whole article, what emerges is that the upper level people at the CIA may not have heeded the warnings from junior people. There are some problems with Drumheller's assertions, though. Nobody else is verifying that he did actually give the warnings. This descends into he said, she said territory and can't be verified one way or the other with the material in the story.

But the story, overall, points to intelligence failures, not White House fabrication.

UPDATE: Captain Ed thinks there is at least a possibility that this was a "good" leak. He may be right, but I tend to think that any information leaked about plans for troops put my son at risk, so I have a really low tolerance for this kind of stuff. I think it's still breaking both law and basic common sense.

Aftermath

NYT Now Publishing Classified Military Plans

Well, the last line has been crossed. The New York Times is now publishing secret military troop displacement plans. The are actually broadcasting the plans General Casey has drawn up for how the military is planning to draw down troop levels. This was a classified briefing and someone gave all the details to the NYT to publish.

That way the terrorists have advanced warning and can plan accordingly.

According to a classified briefing at the Pentagon this week by the commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the number of American combat brigades in Iraq is projected to decrease to 5 or 6 from the current level of 14 by December 2007.

Under the plan, the first reductions would involve two combat brigades that would rotate out of Iraq in September without being replaced. Military officials do not typically characterize reductions by total troop numbers, but rather by brigades. Combat brigades, which generally have about 3,500 troops, do not make up the bulk of the 127,000-member American force in Iraq, and other kinds of units would not be pulled out as quickly.

American officials emphasized that any withdrawals would depend on continued progress, including the development of competent Iraqi security forces, a reduction in Sunni Arab hostility toward the new Iraqi government and the assumption that the insurgency will not expand beyond Iraq's six central provinces. Even so, the projected troop withdrawals in 2007 are more significant than many experts had expected.

General Casey's briefing has remained a closely held secret, and it was described by American officials who agreed to discuss the details only on condition of anonymity. Word of the plan comes after a week in which the American troop presence in Iraq was stridently debated in Congress, with Democratic initiatives to force troop withdrawals defeated in the Senate.

This is beyond belief.

H/T Crosspatch Chronicles

Differences

The headline reads "Lieberman, Lamont differ on Iraq". The article describes the essential difference, too.

"In the morning he said he was against the Kerry Amendment for an immediate withdrawal," Sen. Lieberman said. "By the end of the day he said he was for it."

Lamont, who was at the pizzafest on the New Haven Green Friday, said that Lieberman was distorting his position again.

"I think the Senator sounds more like George Bush every day," Lamont said. "I thought both of those resolutions were good. They both said loud and clear that stay the course is not a winning strategy."

"That kind of irresolution, uncertainty, is not what I've tried to give the voters of Connecticut whether they're against my position or not," Lieberman said.

"I support the Levin/Reid Amendment," Lamont said. "I think it made sense. It says we're going to start bringing our troops out now and more important, I also would have supported the Kerry Amendment because it put a deadline out there."

Lieberman says he wants the troops home too, but an early pull-out would be a disaster and he's not going to change his opinion just because Lamont is gaining on him in opinion polls because of anger over the war.

"I've always tried to level with the people of Connecticut and I don't believe in playing politics with our national security," Lieberman said. (Emphasis added)

I've posted about Lieberman's courage to hold his convictions even in the face of the attacks from the left. That is the difference. Lieberman has convictions. Lamont has positions. More than one, it would seem.

101st Blog Of The Day

Today my ongoing mission to visit one member of the fighting 101st each day led me over to Pekin Prattles. The Duke of DeLand is not at all happy with the New York Times. Or the ACLU. Stop over and take a look.

Right Cross To The Wallet

Patterico has canceled his subscription to the LA Times over their printing of the story about the legal and effective anti-terrorist money tracking program.

I explained to the person who answered the phone that I was cancelling because I am outraged that the newspaper revealed classified details of a successful anti-terror operation.

They put me on with a “specialist,” and I repeated the reason for the cancellation. He said they were sorry to lose me as a subscriber. “I’m sorry, too,” I said. And I am. I’ve had my differences with the paper — plenty of them — but I’ve been subscribing since 1993. That’s thirteen years.

He said: “Of course, different people have different opinions about what’s written in the newspaper . . .”

I told him that this has nothing to do with disagreeing with what I read in the newspaper. I disagree with the newspaper all the time. This is different. The newspaper made a deliberate choice to print classified details of an anti-terror operation that, by all accounts, was effective and legal. Key members of Congress had been briefed on it and had no problem with it. Strict controls were in place to prevent abuse, and those controls appear to have been effective.

Moreover, the program had been successful. The government had used it to capture the mastermind of the 2002 bombing of a Bali nightclub. That bombing killed 202 people, I said. I felt myself getting angry all over again as I continued the explanation. That’s more people than died in the Oklahoma City bombing. It’s the equivalent of catching Timothy McVeigh.

In an update he mentions that the Armed Liberal has also canceled his subscription (they did not coordinate the actions). If it becomes a trend and enough people do it, it will beat heck out of the newspapers in the one place they really can't stand it. Their figurative glass jaw - the wallet.

UPDATE: You have got to see the new money making scam scheme Mark In Mexico has come up with.

TNR Vs. Zuniga - Not Even Fair

Lee Siegel at TNR has been getting the full Koz Kidz deluge after a piece he wrote about Kos. He's not impressed with the thuggishness.

At the end of my post yesterday, I wrote, "The blogosphere's fanaticism is, in many ways, the triumph of a lack of focus." It just so happens that on his blog today, none other than Andrew Sullivan, hardly an ideological soulmate of mine, quotes Santayana: "Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim." Sure enough, fanaticism ruled in the responses to what I wrote yesterday.

"Moron"; "Wanker" (a favorite blogofascist insult, maybe because of the similarity between the most strident blogging and masturbating); and "Asshole" have been the three most common polemical gambits. A reactor even had the gall to refer to me as a "conservative." Another resourceful adversarialist invited me to lick his scrotum. Please send a picture and a short essay describing your favorite hobbies. One madly ambitious blogger, who has been alternately trying to provoke and fawning over TNR writers in an attempt to break down the door–I'm too polite to mention any names–even asked who it was at TNR who gave me "the keys to a blog."

All these abusive attempts to autocratically or dictatorially control criticism came about because I said that the blogosphere had the quality of fascism, which my dictionary defines as "any tendency toward or actual exercise of severe autocratic or dictatorial control." The proof, you might say, is in the puddingheads.

Well, I think Siegel may be painting with too broad a brush. It's really not the whole blogosphere, I think. Just a certain portion. However, Kos and Kompany may be sustaining some long term damage here to their credibility with the mainstream media. The post I put up earlier about the Martin Peretz smackdown plus this bodyblow from Siegel are hurting Kos and his followers. The longer they keep up the full attack mode, the more shrill and out of control they will be seen by more people. I don't think that will be a winning strategy.

I still want some ring girls, though!

Details On Miami Arrests

Today's New York Times has some more details on the arrests made in Miami. The plot is described as still being in the talking stages. CAIR is insisting the men are not Muslims - which has never mattered to me, anyway. But the Times seems almost dismissive because the authorities moved in before the threat was imminent.

News of the arrests touched off widespread television coverage of the plot against the Sears Tower, one of the tallest buildings in the world. But details of the indictment disclosed Friday at news conferences in Washington and Miami presented a less alarming picture. The indictment made clear that a pivotal role was played by an unidentified undercover F.B.I. informer who posed as a Qaeda member and met repeatedly with the reported ringleader of the group, Narseal Batiste.

Last month, after months of meeting the fake Qaeda representative, Mr. Batiste told him that "he was experiencing delays because of various problems within his organization" but still hoped to continue his mission of building an "Islamic army" to wage jihad against the United States, the indictment said.

In Chicago, Police Superintendent Philip J. Cline said there was "never any imminent danger to the Sears Tower or to the city of Chicago."

Florida officials emphasized that the reported attack plans apparently never passed the discussion stage.

The seven defendants, 21 to 32 years old, include five Americans, a legal immigrant from Haiti and an illegal Haitian immigrant. They voiced grandiose goals in the yearlong investigation by the federal agents and the police, officials said.

The indictment charged that Mr. Batiste recruited the others beginning in November "to wage war against the United States government." Mr. Gonzales said the men said they wanted to "kill all the devils we can" in attacks that would be "just as good or greater than 9/11."

Frankly, I thought the Canadians got a bit too close by actually delivering the ammonium nitrate fertilizer to their conspirators. It may make for a great case, but there's always a chance something can go wrong, too. Stop them early and take them out of circulation seems a better course. Sort of the way Rudy Giuliani cleaned up NYC. Which appears to be the course the authorities are following.

At a later briefing, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty answered critics who have said terror prosecutions have often picked out seemingly unsophisticated extremists who are more talk than action. Mr. McNulty said the goal was "prevention through prosecution."

Rather than allow a genuine threat to take shape, he added, investigators move in as soon as there is sufficient evidence to prosecute.

"Today's example is a good example of that approach," he said.

Mr. McNulty said 261 people had been convicted or pleaded guilty in "terrorism or terrorism-related cases" since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. An additional 180 people have been charged and are awaiting trial or have been acquitted, had their charges dismissed, are awaiting extradition or are fugitives, according to statistics released Friday.

Maintaining Unit Discipline

The British Army has always been long on tradition and stubbornly clings to those traditions, no matter what. It is important to them that unit discipline be maintained, especially when they are on parade. So it's really no surprise that lance corporal William (Billy) Windsor has been busted a rank for failing to march in step during a unit parade held to honor the 80th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II.

The 1st Battalion lance corporal's lack of decorum landed him in hot water during the bash at Episkopi British military base outside the southern resort of Limassol in Cyprus.

"He was charged with disobeying a direct order… the commanding officer had no other option but to reduce his rank to fusilier," Captain Crispin Coates told AFP.

The change in rank means that the other fusiliers will no longer have to stand to attention when Windsor passes them. It's completely appropriate that Billy is being made the goat here. Billy is a goat, after all.

Six-year-old Billy is on his first overseas tour since joining the regiment in 2001, and according to one parade onlooker is unlucky to be in the dog house.

"I thought he was immaculately turned out on the night and marched quite well, but Billy does have a reputation for being a bit frisky and temperamental," he said.

Goats are not mascots but very much members of the regiment. They have their own serial numbers, and march at the head of the battalion.

The origin of the custom is unknown but is thought to go back centuries.

Queen Victoria presented the regiment with a Kashmir goat from the royal herd in 1844, and successive monarchs have replaced them ever since.

Because he acted the goat, Billy's drop in rank means fusiliers no longer have to stand to attention when he passes by.

You know, I love the Brits, still they do have some really odd customs in some areas.

Despite All The Dire Warnings

Soccer fans in Germany for the World Cup are pretty much keeping it in their pants. The expected (and much ballyhooed) boom in business for prostitutes has not materialized. Only a very few places have seen an increase in business and some are even reporting a drop as regulars stay away because of the crowds and hype.

BERLIN (Reuters) - The hordes of beer-swilling men who have descended on Germany for the World Cup are proving a disappointment for the host nation's sex workers, preferring to party in public rather than spend time with prostitutes.

While some larger red-light establishments in host cities have seen their cash tills ringing, a lot of prostitutes say the anticipated boost for Germany's liberal sex industry has failed to materialize.

"The pent-up sexual demand of horny fans from around the world which has been widely anticipated has not materialized at all," said Karolina Leppert, president of Germany's association for sexual service providers BSD.

"Business is pretty dead, even the regulars stay away because of all the crowds and the hype," said Leppert, who has been working as a dominatrix in Berlin for eight years.

More than a million foreign soccer fans are expected to visit Germany during the four-week tournament, many of them from nations where prostitution is illegal, like the U.S. or Sweden.

In Germany, where it is legal and workers can join unions, get health insurance or a pension plan, expectations have been high that fans would visit prostitutes after a match.

But already facing a steep bill for their World Cup trip, male fans are opting to spend time with fellow fans in host cities' open-air party venues.

Pretty funny, really. All those dire warnings and it simply hasn't happened.

Unusual Escape Vehicle

A man from Crystal Lake, Minnesota led police on a harrowing chase. Well, maybe that's a bit too strongly worded since the vehicle the man was using was a mini-bike.

A call came in reporting that Douglas Lee Menne had wiped out at a downtown intersection. Sheriff's Deputy Jeff Wersal responded, suspecting it was a case of drunk driving.

By the time the deputy arrived at the intersection, Menne had recovered and driven off. After locating him, Wersal tried to get Menne to pull over. The bike had no tail light or license plate.

Wersal pursued Menne to a parking lot where he paused briefly, re-started the bike and zipped out the other side of the lot. The chase continued as Menne put-putted down a nearby street at about 25 mph.

Wersal pulled alongside Menne and yelled at him to stop. The chase slowed to about 10 mph when Wersal pulled in front of the bike.

Wersal then fired his Taser out his squad car window. One dart hit Menne, but fell out. The effort hindered Menne enough for Wersal to get out of his car and push Menne off the bike. It took the help of another deputy to make the arrest, according to the report.

Wow, it's a good thing Menne didn't try this little stunt in Bremerton, Washington! Bail was set at $12,000. One thing the article fails to mention: was Menne wearing a fez?