Screech

Yes, it exists. Yes, it's graphic. Yes, you'll be able to download it soon.

The sportsbook Website BetUS.com is claiming to be the unlikely frontrunner in an even unlikelier bidding war over the distribution rights to a homemade sex tape featuring Dustin "Screech" Diamond.

Dirk [before he became Dirk-what was his name?]: Jack, I was thinking about my name, y’know?
Jack Horner: Yeah?
Dirk: I was wondering if you had any ideas.
Jack: I’ve got a few, but you tell me.
Dirk: Well, my idea was, y’know, I want a name, I want it so it can cut glass, y’know, razor sharp.
Jack:: Tell me.
Dirk: When I close my eyes, I see this thing, a sign, I see this name in bright blue neon lights with a purple outline. And this name is so bright and so sharp that the sign, it just blows up because the name is so powerful…it says, “Dirk Diggler.”

"You don't listen to losers like your know-it-all teacher. She wants you to go slow, but it's the fastest who gets paid, and it's the fastest who gets laid. "

-Reese Bobby

Max Boot: Muslims' Complicity With Violence

Unless it clamps down vigorously on fanaticism, the Islamic world risks validating its worst caricatures. Max BootSeptember 27, 2006

EVER SINCE 9/11, a dark view of Islam has been gaining currency on what might be called the Western street. This view holds that, contrary to the protestations of our political leaders — who claim that acts of terrorism are being carried out by a minority of extremists — the real problem lies with Islam itself. In this interpretation, Islam is not a religion of peace but of war, and its 1.2 billion adherents will never rest until all of humanity is either converted, subjugated or simply annihilated. Is the war on terrorism really a "clash of civilizations"? The overreaction to Pope Benedict XVI's relatively innocuous remarks at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12 would seem to lend weight to this alarming notion. As part of a plea for combining reason with religion, the pope cited a 14th century Byzantine emperor who condemned Muhammad's teachings as "evil and inhuman" because of "his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The pope subsequently made clear that these were not his own views, but this did not stop an explosion of animosity across the Muslim world. Amid calls from angry clerics to "hunt down" the holy father (a.k.a. "the dog of Rome" and the "worshiper of the cross"), various hotheads have taken to the streets and attacked Christian churches. This recalls the over-the-top outcry this year after a Danish newspaper dared to print cartoons depicting Muhammad as an instigator of violence. Muslim spokesmen claim that these are unconscionable slurs. Yet, while demanding respect for their own religion, too many Muslims accord too little respect to competing faiths or even to competing brands of their own faith.Where are the demonstrations in the Muslim street when the president of Iran denies the Holocaust and calls for the destruction of Israel? Or when Palestinian kidnappers force two Western journalists to convert to Islam at gunpoint? Or when Sunni terrorists in Iraq bomb Shiite mosques and slaughter hundreds of worshipers? All too many Islamic leaders prefer to harp on the supposed sins of the "infidels," however exaggerated or even fictionalized (no, the CIA didn't bomb the World Trade Center to create an excuse for invading Afghanistan), rather than focusing on the problems within their own umma (community). And yet it would be a mistake to conclude that the woes of Islamic society today, serious as they are, are endemic to the religion itself.It is true that, alone of the world's major faiths, Islam was founded by a prophet who used force to win converts. "I was ordered to fight all men until they say, 'There is no god but Allah,' " Muhammad proclaimed in his farewell address to his followers in AD 632. Countless Muslims since then have followed the path of jihad — literally, "exertion in the path of Allah" but usually taken as an injunction for waging holy war. But countless Muslims also have been willing to trade with unbelievers, to live peaceably alongside them, to learn from them and even to enter into military alliances with them against Muslim rivals. Religions are not monolithic. They have no fixed, eternal identity. Until the 18th century, Christianity was a militant faith whose adherents did not hesitate to kill "heathens." Throughout the Middle Ages, Islamic states usually offered greater tolerance to religious minorities and were more open to secular learning than their Christian neighbors. Even now, most Muslim countries — from Senegal to Indonesia — are far more pluralistic and much less fundamentalist than Iran or Saudi Arabia. And even in the most militant Muslim societies, clerics are able to maintain a rigid orthodoxy only by force. Left to their own devices, the Saudi or Iranian people would opt for a less monastic existence — a danger that the guardians of official morality are keenly aware of.The real enemy we face is not Islam per se but a violent offshoot known as Islamism, which is rooted, to be sure, in the Koran but which also finds inspiration in such modern Western ideologies as fascism, Nazism and communism. Its most successful exponents — from Hassan Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden — are hardly orthodox interpreters of Islam. They are power-mad intellectuals in the mold of a Lenin or a Hitler. The problem is that the rest of the Muslim world, by not doing more to curb the radicals — whether out of fear or sympathy — lends credence to the most objectionable caricatures of their faith.

Jennifer Loven of the AP

QUESTION: Thank you, sir.
Even after hearing that one of the major conclusions of the national intelligence estimate in April was that the Iraq war has fueled terror growth around the world, why have you continued to say that the Iraq war has made this country safer?
BUSH: You want to start?
KARZAI: Go ahead, please.
(LAUGHTER)
BUSH: I, of course, read the key judgments on the NIE. I agree with their conclusion that, because of our successes against the leadership of Al Qaida, the enemy is becoming more diffuse and independent.
BUSH: I'm not surprised the enemy is exploiting the situation in Iraq and using it as a propaganda tool to try to recruit more people to their murderous ways.
Some people have, you know, guessed what's in the report and have concluded that going into Iraq was a mistake. I strongly disagree. I think it's naive. I think it's a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe.
The terrorists fight us in Iraq for a reason; they want to try to stop a young democracy from developing, just like they're trying to fight this young democracy in Afghanistan.
And they use it as a recruitment tool because they understand the stakes. They understand what will happen to them when we defeat them in Iraq.
BUSH: You know, to suggest that if we weren't in Iraq we would see a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement, requires us to ignore 20 years of experience.
We weren't in Iraq when we got attacked on September the 11th. We weren't in Iraq and thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps inside your country, Mr. President. We weren't in Iraq when they first attacked the World Trade Center in 1993.
KARZAI: Yes, sir.
BUSH: We weren't in Iraq when they bombed the Cole.
KARZAI: Yes, sir.
BUSH: We weren't in Iraq when they blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
My judgment is, if we weren't in Iraq, they'd find some other excuse, because they have ambitions. They kill in order to achieve their objectives.
You know, in the past, Osama bin Laden used Somalia as an excuse for people to join his jihadist movement.
BUSH: In the past, they used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was a convenient way to try to recruit people to their jihadist movement.
They've used all kinds of excuses.
This government is going to do whatever it takes to protect this homeland. We're not going to let their excuses stop us from staying on the offense.
The best way to protect America is to defeat these killers overseas so we do not have to face them here at home.
We're not going to let lies and propaganda by the enemy dictate how we win this war.
Now, you know what's interesting about the NIE? It was an intelligence report done last April. As I understand, the conclusions -- the evidence on the conclusions reached was stopped being gathered on February -- at the end of February.
BUSH: And here we are coming down the stretch in an election campaign and it's on the front page of your newspapers. Isn't that interesting? Somebody's taken it upon themselves to leak classified information for political purposes.
I talked to John Negroponte today, the DNI. You know, I think it's a bad habit for our government to declassify every time there's a leak, because it means it's going to be hard to get good product out of our analysts. Those of you who've been around here long enough know what I'm talking about.
But once again there's a leak out of our government, coming right down the stretch in this campaign in order to create confusion in the minds of the American people.
BUSH: In my judgment, that's why they leaked it.
And so we're going to -- I told the DNI to declassify this document. You can read it for yourself. It will stop all the speculation, all the politics about somebody saying something about Iraq; you know, somebody trying to confuse the American people about the nature of this enemy.
And so John Negroponte, the DNI, is going to declassify the document as quickly as possible -- declassify the key judgments for you to read yourself.
And he'll do so in such a way that we'll be able to protect sources and methods of -- that our intelligence community uses.
And then everybody can draw their own conclusions about what the report says.
Thank you.

http://www.thebigrockcandymountain.com/bigrock.html

Just down the road apiece...

Clinton on Fox

The real Clinton emerges

From behind the benign façade and the tranquilizing smile, the real Bill Clinton emerged Sunday during Chris Wallace’s interview on Fox News Channel. There he was on live television, the man those who have worked for him have come to know – the angry, sarcastic, snarling, self-righteous, bombastic bully, roused to a fever pitch. The truer the accusation, the greater the feigned indignation. Clinton jabbed his finger in Wallace’s face, poking his knee, and invading the commentator’s space.
But beyond noting the ex-president’s non-presidential style, it is important to answer his distortions and misrepresentations. His self-justifications constitute a mangling of the truth which only someone who once quibbled about what the “definition of ‘is’ is” could perform.
Clinton told Wallace, “There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk Down.” Nobody said there was. The point of citing Somalia in the run up to 9-11 is that bin Laden told Fortune Magazine in a 1999 interview that the precipitous American pullout after Black Hawk Down convinced him that Americans would not stand up to armed resistance.
Clinton said conservatives “were all trying to get me to withdraw from Somalia in 1993 the next day” after the attack which killed American soldiers. But the real question was whether Clinton would honor the military’s request to be allowed to stay and avenge the attack, a request he denied. The debate was not between immediate withdrawal and a six-month delay. (Then-first lady, now-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) favored the first option, by the way). The fight was over whether to attack or pull out eventually without any major offensive operations.
The president told Wallace, “I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill bin Laden.” But actually, the 9-11 Commission was clear that the plan to kidnap Osama was derailed by Sandy Berger and George Tenet because Clinton had not yet made a finding authorizing his assassination. They were fearful that Osama would die in the kidnapping and the U.S. would be blamed for using assassination as an instrument of policy.
Clinton claims “the CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible [for the Cole bombing] while I was there.” But he could replace or direct his employees as he felt. His helplessness was, as usual, self-imposed.
Why didn’t the CIA and FBI realize the extent of bin Laden’s involvement in terrorism? Because Clinton never took the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center sufficiently seriously. He never visited the site and his only public comment was to caution against “over-reaction.” In his pre-9/11 memoirs, George Stephanopoulos confirms that he and others on the staff saw it as a “failed bombing” and noted that it was far from topic A at the White House. Rather than the full-court press that the first terror attack on American soil deserved, Clinton let the investigation be handled by the FBI on location in New York without making it the national emergency it actually was.
In my frequent phone and personal conversations with both Clintons in 1993, there was never a mention, not one, of the World Trade Center attack. It was never a subject of presidential focus.
Failure to grasp the import of the 1993 attack led to a delay in fingering bin Laden and understanding his danger. This, in turn, led to our failure to seize him when Sudan evicted him and also to our failure to carry through with the plot to kidnap him. And, it was responsible for the failure to “certify” him as the culprit until very late in the Clinton administration.
The former president says, “I worked hard to try to kill him.” If so, why did he notify Pakistan of our cruise-missile strike in time for them to warn Osama and allow him to escape? Why did he refuse to allow us to fire cruise missiles to kill bin Laden when we had the best chance, by far, in 1999? The answer to the first question — incompetence; to the second — he was paralyzed by fear of civilian casualties and by accusations that he was wagging the dog. The 9/11 Commission report also attributes the 1999 failure to the fear that we would be labeled trigger-happy having just bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by mistake.
President Clinton assumes that criticism of his failure to kill bin Laden is a “nice little conservative hit job on me.” But he has it backwards. It is not because people are right-wingers that they criticize him over the failure to prevent 9/11. It was his failure to catch bin Laden that drove them to the right wing.
The ex-president is fully justified in laying eight months of the blame for the failure to kill or catch bin Laden at the doorstep of George W. Bush. But he should candidly acknowledge that eight years of blame fall on him.
One also has to wonder when the volcanic rage beneath the surface of this would-be statesman will cool. When will the chip on his shoulder finally disappear? When will he feel sufficiently secure in his own legacy and his own skin not to boil over repeatedly in private and occasionally even in public?