Rants of a Fuzzy Curmudgeon

And Joel Mowbray is confirming exactly what I thought two nights ago watching O’Reilly browbeat his guest.
However, to give O’Reilly his due, I’m not 100% convinced that these two women, after so many years in Saudi starting in early childhood, haven’t in fact gone native to the extent of not wanting to go back to their mother. One is married with a baby, for heaven’s sake, even discounting the hostage value there.
At any rate you don’t find this out with a representative of the Saudi government sitting there taking notes on what the women say, and in that, I agree with Mowbray that O’Reilly was flat out wrong to ignore this aspect of the case.

From R. Emmett the Terrible his own bad self.

To be a prime minister or a president or a chancellor in any of the European countries, especially any of the western European countries, is even better than being a tourist on a thousand-dollar-a-day budget. The Europols live the good life day and night: wine with lunch, champagne with dinner, and posh pageants in between. Europe’s capitals are the most relaxing places on earth, and the Europols have been relaxing there for years, while Washington supplies the military security.

It gets better.

Isn’t Cynthia McKinney’s father’s runoff election today, down in the great state of Georgia?
UPDATE: No, it’s September 10th (next Tuesday). For some reason I had it in my head that it was this Thursday.

Perhaps the real story of the Jackie Mason/Ray Hanania squabble is coming to light.

Read Lileks. What more can I say…

Via the Professor, Andrea Harris Fisks the Times of London.
Interesting to note that the Kitty Hawk is the American warship with the longest total period of active service afloat today. As such, since 1998, and before the May directive regarding the First Navy Jack which I blogged about below, she was the only ship in the Navy entitled to fly the First Navy Jack.

NEVER FORGET.

The flag at the top of the main index is the First Navy Jack, which the Secretary of the Navy has ordered to be flown from all U.S. warships for the duration of the War on Terrorism. You can read a copy of the official announcement at FoundingFathers.Info.
Link via Best of the Web.

I missed this yesterday — Charles Krauthammer’s “Year One: We Didn’t Change At All”
Great piece.

BOTW also notes an article on EUObserver.com that suggests ex-French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing is reading up on the making of the US Constitution.
Since Giscard is the President of the Convention on EU Future, this may be interesting to watch; that would make him kind of like the George Washington of our Constitutional Convention.
Tellingly, the article is entitled “Giscard Suspected of Taking Interest in USA System” and includes the line “Members of the European Parliament suspect Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, president of the Convention on EU future, of taking too much interest in the American institutional system, with a view to introducing it in the European Union.” Nah, this will be fun to watch; our own Constitutional Convention had no authority to write a Constitution at all, but was convened to repair the Articles of Confederation. And my goodness, did the fur fly over that…there were threats to secede all over the place, primarily from New England…
I wonder if M. Giscard was reading “Miracle at Philadelphia” by Catherine Drinker Bowen, which is quite possibly the best — or at the very least, most accessible — single-volume account of the Convention ever written…
You could look it up.