Nice Try, Instapundit!

February 22nd, 2011

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds was forced to get a new campus ID, so he showed his readers the 20-year “before and after pics.” Actually, he looks older but pretty much the same, almost as if he has a painting of himself hidden away in his attic that ages instead of him.

However, my sources at the University of Tennessee have uncovered the shocking fact that the “after” picture up on his blog is in fact a shameless lie. Thanks to their efforts, I can now reveal the horrifying truth.

Here’s the before picture:

And here’s the real portrait of what you look like after teaching law school for 20 years:

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Libyan Revolt Continues Apace

February 22nd, 2011

As for what the hell is going on in Libya right now, I’m not sure I know. Rebel forces appear to control the eastern part of the nation, including Benghazi and Tobruk, while Gadhafi seems to be maintaining his grip on Tripoli, at least for the time being.

  • Al Jazeera continues updating. “The interesting thing is that Libya has no constitution but [Gadhafi] has threatened the death penalty for people who fail to follow the constituion.”
  • Reports of Gadhafi unleashing foreign mercenaries on his people. I’d take that with a grain of salt.
  • No signs of Libyan troops at the Egyptian border.
  • Benny Morris in The National Interest believes that the region’s most brutal dictators will weather the storm, while the region’s least oppressive leaders will be replaced by Islamists.
  • More on the triangle between Gadhafi, aspiring democrats, and Islamists.

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    A Few Quick Libyan Updates

    February 21st, 2011

    Before I hit the hay:

  • Some of Moammar Gadhafi’s own diplomats are disowning him.
  • Two Libyan pilots have evidently defected to Malta rather than attack civilians.
  • Gadhafi himself says he hasn’t fled the country.
  • You know who Gadhafi says is behind the protests, don’t you? That’s right: the Jews. Man those guys get around. With all this protest-leading, when do the Elders of Zion have time to sleep?
  • Pretty much everyone in America (with the possible exception of the Obama State Department) supports toppling Gadhafi. Unfortunately, so do the Islamists.
  • Including the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
  • Ace of Spades asks: should we intervene militarily?

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    Both NRO and DailyKos Call for a No Fly Zone Over Libya

    February 21st, 2011

    No, really. Daniel Foster at National Review Online and “azizhp” at DailyKos both call for the U.S. military to impose a No Fly Zone over Libya to prevent the slaughter of civilians.

    And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood…

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    So What the Hell is Going on in Libya?

    February 21st, 2011

    As a much more closed society, news is harder to come by, but depending on who you believe, there are conflicting reports that:

  • The Libyan Air Force is bombing protesters trying to enter an army base.

  • Gaddafi has fled Tripoli.
  • How strong are Islamists in Libya? Well, given the fact that they’re the ones seizing military bases, I’d say pretty strong.
  • Michael Totten offers some background.

    • As usual, the BBC has live updates.

    A popular uprising that toppled Ghaddafi would be great news, but I’m not sure I’m willing to believe he would be that easy to topple. Ghaddafi seems like the sort of dictator who would happily slaughter tens of thousands of his citizens if he thought he needed to to stay in power.

    Of course, one big difference was between Egypt and Libya is that Egypt’s military is (by Arab standards) professional and pretty competent, and even though they lost the Yom Kipur war, Egyptian troops in Sinai bloodied the Israelis enough that Egyptians felt they had sufficiently restored the nation’s honor that Anwar Sadat was able to sign to Camp David accords. (The previous three Arab-Israeli wars had resulted in Israel delivering a complete ass-kicking to all the Arab armies, so only receiving a partial ass-kicking was indeed a vast improvement.)

    By contrast, Libya’s army seems pretty incompetent: they got their asses kicked by Chad in the Toyota War, in which Chadian forces armed with Toyota-pickup-mounted anti-tank guns left a billion dollars worth of Soviet equipment burning in the Aouzou Strip. It would not surprise me at all to find that the Libyan army is too poorly trained to suppress a real popular uprising.

    Whether they want to or not, it looks like people all across the Middle East are fated to live in interesting times…

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    LinkSwarm for February 20, 2011

    February 20th, 2011

    A small Sunday Linkswarm for you:

  • What the hell is going on in Libya? Good question. Moammar Gadhafi isn’t having any of that foolish “Democracy” talk, as clashes have left over 200 dead in Libya’s second-largest city. I don’t think Gadhafi will hesitate to slaughter protesters if he thinks he has to, and unless they can flip someone high up in the military against him, it’s tough to see them managing to oust him.
  • What’s the proper way to great a wheelchair-bound Iraqi veteran who spent two years recovering from wounds received fighting for his country? According to liberals at Columbia University, it’s booing, hissing, or calling him a racist.
  • And speaking of racism, AlterNet called Godfather’s Pizza founder Herman Cain a “a monkey in the window” for daring to be a black conservative.
  • An speaking of liberal racism, Ohio Democratic Representative Robert F. Hagan called a black Tea Party supporter “Buckwheat.”

    • (Hat tips: Ace of Spades, Instapundit, Etc..)

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    This Week in Jihad for February 17, 2011

    February 17th, 2011
  • Weapons of mass destruction found in the U.S.?
  • Not news: Woman convicted of blasphemy against Islam. News: In Austria.
  • Adding insult to injury: Being repeatedly sexually assaulted while your assailants shout “Jew! Jew!”
  • Tunisia’s revolution ushers in new era of harmony and tolerance. Ha, just kidding. They’re standing around outside synagogues asking for death to the Jews.
  • Slowly but surely, free speech is being snuffed out in Europe when it’s critical of Islam.
  • The real face of the Muslim Brotherhood.
  • So why was the federal government spending $1.3 million to trying to make Arabic language mandatory at a Mansfield school district Middle School? More Arabic classes as electives at the high school and college level are probably a good idea, as the army will need more translators. But mandatory for a middle school?
  • Interesting Michael Totten interview with Paul Berman, author of The Flight of the Intellectuals, in which they discuss the contradictions of “moderate” Islamist Tariq Ramadan.
  • “French President Nicolas Sarkozy has declared multiculturalism a failure.” Finally.
  • “Although Muslim anti-Semitism is a widespread phenomenon in Oslo, as in other European cities, Savosnick says that most of the anti-Semitism she’s experienced has been directed at her by ethnic Norwegians. Jew-hatred is the only civilized option for an educated, right-thinking Scandinavian.”
  • Refusing to hate non-Muslims in your madressa classes? That’s a smacking. Bonus: In Yorkshire. Police have actually acted in this case, but look at the “fears of far-right attacks” spin the far-left Guardian puts on the news, with theoretical right wing violence trumping actual left-wing violence.
  • “The Islamic fifth column present throughout the West is far larger, better funded, and more dangerous than any domestic pro-fascist movement was in any democratic country in the 1930s, with the possible exception of the Czech Sudetenland. The appeasement we see all around us is more profound and will prove much harder to root out.”
  • 503 women publicly flogged in Bangladesh.
  • Human Rights Watch adds a “former” member of the terrorist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to its Middle East Advisory Board.
  • Roland Shirk thinks we’ve just seen the Czar abdicate in Egypt, and bad is about to be replaced with much worse.

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    Miscellaneous 2012 Texas Senate Race Tidbits

    February 15th, 2011

    Things are pretty slow on the 2012 Texas Senate race (which happens when you’re more than a year away from the primary).

  • Both Michael Williams and Ted Cruz were at CPAC, and evidently Williams came off the better of the two. Also, I must not have been paying attention enough attention to Cruz’s resume, as I was unaware he was born in Canada.
  • Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert is evidently edging closer to a run.
  • And speaking of Dallas mayors, that piece also suggests that former mayor and current U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk will make a run for the seat on the Democratic side. The last time he ran for the Senate, he lost to John Cornyn to replace the retiring Phil Gramm.
  • And speaking of Democrats, the John Sharp campaigns continues to be virtually invisible, except for those occasions when it’s actually worse than invisible, with http://www.sharpsenator.com/ being squatted by a company selling, ahem, “male enhancement.” Of course, this report says that he called off his campaign last year, but that was before Hutchison announced her retirement.

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    Obama’s Handling of Egypt: The Reviews Are In

    February 14th, 2011

    And they’re every bit as warm as those for Spiderman: Turn off the Dark:

  • Mary Steyn: “For the last three weeks, the superpower has sent the consistent message to the world that (as Bernard Lewis feared some years ago) America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”
  • Niall Ferguson in Newsweek (yes, it’s evidently still being published):

    “Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity … and missed it completely….This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried….The defining characteristic of Obama’s foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so. A succession of speeches saying, in essence, ‘I am not George W. Bush’ is no substitute for a strategy.”

  • Michael A. Walsh in the New York Post: “No matter how things shake out in Egypt, one thing has become depressingly clear: Something is very wrong with the American intelligence services.”
  • Investor’s Business Daily:

    “As our once-stable ally Egypt hurtles down a path leading into the dark unknown, the U.S. can blame itself. The White House apparently did little after our intelligence agencies warned late last year that President Hosni Mubarak’s government was wobbly. Like Jimmy Carter’s handling of Central America, the U.S. backed a revolution, hoping it would make the revolutionaries our friends.”

  • Victor Davis Hanson in National Review: “For nearly three weeks, the Biden/Clinton/Obama policy concerning the tottering Mubarak regime was contradictory, incoherent, and predicated entirely on the perceived pulse of the demonstrations.”

    • Like Julie Taymor’s production (which I have not seen, but I have seen enough of Ms. Taymor’s previous work to trust the reviews of it I’ve read), Obama’s foreign policy is far more concerned with flash and spectacle than the boring matter of actual substance. Unfortunately, there’s no chance that Obama’s foreign policy will fold in previews, and we can’t make things better by getting Bono and The Edge to write us a few new tunes…

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    Mubarak Resigns, Hands Control Over to the Military

    February 11th, 2011

    According the latest news flash. I’m guessing the military finally told him they’d had enough.

    What’s next? Anyone’s guess. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say talks with some elements of the opposition together with a crackdown against others.

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