The (new) Iran Hostage Crisis

It seems like people barely noticed this. I mean its up top in the Google news, but no one was talking about it over the past few days at work. Probably because it was UK servicemen and woman who were snatched: imperialists. For those arguing that Iran would be deterred from using a nuke, think again. They openly crossed into Iraqi wars and took UK soldiers prisoners. This is at least an open act of war against the UK, Iraq, and the US. What consequences have they paid? None. If you want to deter your enemy, you actually have to strike back against acts of aggression.

The fact that the senior service's ROE didn't allow defense of personnel is ridiculous. The ROE should have demanded that the sailors and marines aboard defend themselves, and that the nearby ship and helicopter take measures to prevent the return of the Iranians into their native waters. In fact they should have tried to reverse things and take the Iranians captive, or kill them.

If the Iranians made a mistake, it was capturing British servicemen. The US media barely cares about the US servicemen and women and this incident cannot be pinned on Bush. If they wanted to weaken our resolve they would have been better off capturing some State department people and maybe leaking the name of a non-undercover CIA employee and identifying Karl Rove as their source. Instead this news will remain just marginally above the overall war news, a testament to the fact that people have already accepted that Iran and the coalition forces in Iraq are at war. That is until the media figures out a way to blame it on Bush.

(Side note: I can't help to think that the move was designed to get the US/UK to show some of their hand by enforcing an embargo or maybe reacting with ground troops, which would have been followed by a quiet release of the hostages - under some premise that the UK had apologized and Iran was being nice, and we'd owe them later. Perhaps by not showing an immediate macro level force reaction we prevented the Iranians from gathering the intelligence we seek. Frankly if it was the US' people, I'd hope cruise missiles would be falling on the mullahs and key members of the government and military.)

Well I guess that's why he didn't invent the internet...

So this guy made the 1984 Obama add

The funny thing about this article is this:

De Vellis said he used footage of an updated Apple ad that portrayed the female athlete wearing an iPod. He said he used standard Apple equipment to modify the video and edit Clinton's image into the clip.

And then this:

"Frankly, given what it looks like, we don't have the technical capacity to create something like this," he said. "It's pretty extraordinary."

Really? You guys couldn't get a simple add made that didn't require anything beyond standard apple hardware and software? I guess that's better than claiming you invented the internet.

What Ann Coulter Said...

I'm sure you've heard about what Ann Coulter said.

If you are a grown up, you don't cry when someone calls you a name. You laugh that they had to resort to name calling. If you are a grown up, you don't resort to name calling, and you also tailor your humor to be acceptable to the company you are in.

Ann's joke really wasn't half bad in theory: PC police have taken over the language, Edwards is completely lame, and an actor going to rehab for language is completely foolish. However, even if the term she used is taken as just a generic pejorative, and not a bigoted slur, it's still impolite, and therefor inappropriate to say in that setting. It was CPAC and not an HBO Comedy special.

Now as for Paul Campos, why I'd say he has beclowned himself, but...