Breaking News! Al Qaeda Number 3 Killed!

Breaking news! Callooh! Callay!

From ABC’s number one fake reporter, Jake Tapper:

Political Punch

Power, pop, and probings from ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper

Officials: Al Qaeda No. 3 Killed

May 31, 2010 9:30 PM

US officials tell ABC News that al Qaeda’s No. 3 — Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu al-Yazid, known as Shaikh Sa’id al-Masri and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid – has been killed. Al Qaeda released a eulogy of Shaikh Sa’id tonight, officials said.

“Word is spreading in extremist circles of the death of Sheikh Sa’id al-Masri, widely viewed as the number three figure in al-Qaeda,” a US official told ABC News. “We have strong reason to believe that’s true, and that al-Masri was killed recently in Pakistan’s tribal areas. In terms of counterterrorism, this would be a big victory.”

US officials believed him to have been killed about a week ago in Pakistan.

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri are the spiritual founders, and considered No. 1 and No. 2 of al Qaeda list, but Shaikh Sa’id is considered the link between those two and rest of the operation, and for all intents and purposes the one running the organization day to day. [...]

How many #3′s is that? Five? Ten? Twenty?

Why I Refuse to Watch American Idol (conclusion)

[Our Story So Far: Stuff about playing the viola and its clef. Above.]

Fourth Movement

Sound can be louder than the voice, but sound cannot be more living than the voice.

Knowing this the Hindus of ancient times said that singing is the first art, playing the second art, and dancing the third art which make music. The Hindus who have found that by these three different aspects of music one attains to spirituality much sooner than by any other way, have discovered that the shortest way to attain spiritual heights is by singing.

– Hazrat Inayat Khan, “The Voice”

Now, old Hazrat said something that stuck with me for a long time that didn’t quite compute. The exact quote eludes me, but it was something on the order of there is a difference between real music, and technically accomplished noise. Children and animals can tell what it is but very few human adults can. Here’s a parallel quote:

Why I Refuse to Watch American Idol

Evidently, for the ninth time, American  Idol crowned another karaoke champion last night. In Rupert’s obscene pandering to the masses that he despises, eternally locked in a vicious love/hate cycle with the Lowest Common Denominator, actual musicians were trotted onto the stage, which is meet and proper. As Mike Finnegan says, “A gig is a gig.”

Mike Finnegan on keyboards on American Idol
during Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help From My Friends”
(click to view)

Overture

There are different kinds of music, each kind appealing to certain souls according to their evolution. For instance, children in the street are very pleased when beating the time, because that rhythm has a certain effect upon them.

– Hazrat Inayat Khan

I was raised by a church pianist and her sister, as far as  musical pedigree goes. Mom was the “classical pianist” — i.e. the touch typist who could play whatever spots you stuck in front of her nose on the music stand. Aunt Mary was the “street” pianist, the ”ear” musician, who could fake any song, long before “fakebooks” — which I first discovered on her piano stand many many years later.

Caribou Barbie – How Quickly She Forgets

Uh-oh. Sarah Barracuda is on Facebook again.

Pot, meet Kettle; Kettle, this is Pot.

No. Not the creepy stalkery story about her new next door neighbor.

She’s castigating Obama for his “close ties” to the oil industry. You know: About the British Petroleum (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? [emphasis added]

Mrs. Ayn Rand Paul’s Fishiness Sticks

[Note: I have been working on completion of -- an evidently timely -- book about just such matters, which is why I've been absent. HW] UPDATED BELOW

No. He wasn’t named after Ayn Rand, although he ought to have been. Suddenly, the media seems to “get” that powerful quasi-libertarian and libertarian forces are at work.

Ayn Kampf

What they DON’T seem to get is the part about the Richie Riches believing that they can finally take over a dispirited and disunified Republican Party. Maybe, if I blog for another several years, they will. But they DO begin to “get” that radical libertarianism is, for most Americans, left and right, a “bridge too far” in its application.

Ross Douthat — usually a reliably conservative (i.e. apologist for greedism) — makes an excellent observation on the so-called “racism” scandal of Dr. Rand Paul. The scandal that broke on a Nashville newspaper’s YouTube video, then on National Public Radio, then in a live interview with Dr. Paul on The Rachel Maddow Show [emphasis added]:

Your Name Here, Sheriff of Wall Street, 25¢

So. Guess which fifty percent of Americans didn’t pay any income taxes?

Hint: It wasn’t because they could afford to hire top-flight accountants and tax lawyers, or relocate to the Cayman Islands, or Zug — yes, ZUG — Switzerland.

Tic tic tic tic.

OK?

Republicans Who Hate and their Gardeners

Yes. At twenty-four years of age, I was conned by slick political marketing. mea culpa.

US-Mexico Border Fence near El Centro, California last week

Quote:

But I wish [Lyn Nofziger] were still alive so that I could ask him about this statement on his site of his core belief:

“I am a Republican because I believe that freedom is more important than government-provided security.”

It is time to reprint this piece from 2006, which speaks to the fundamental contradiction in the hatred of the “illegal aliens” by their Republican Overlords. And I’m putting it up permanently on the “top posts” lists in the sidebar.

Odyssey’s End

Ansel Adams: Japanese farm workers at Manzanar Relocation Center, 1943

Have returned from California desert.

Vacation Blogging from San Diego

Madness. After a long, magical voyage through the desert backcountry of Oregon, Nevada and California, we emerged somewhere East of Barstow, and joined California’s perpetual Death Race 2000. I am so happy that it’s illegal to carry a gun and shoot imbeciles and dangerous assholes — else there would a trail of carnage down Interstate 15 that would rival the Battle of the Bulge. California’s highways are populated, seemingly, by selfish, homicidal morons whose actual driving credentials are questionable at best, and an act of criminal negligence on the part of the State at the very least.

Symbolism Falls On Deaf Eyes and Blind Ears With The Alter Boys

Politico:

U.S. Supreme Court door closing sparks dissents

By FRED BARBASH | 5/3/10 2:45 PM EDT

POLITICO 44

With two dissents, the U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday that, for security reasons, the public will no longer be able enter the court through the majestic doors at the top of the steps beneath the inscription “Equal Justice Under Law.”

Instead, people will be directed to a new ground floor entrance….

Because, you know, symbolism isn’t related to “reality” in any meaningful manner. Here’s the press release.

Enter Title Here

Mystery Wallpaper ( click for larger download 1152 x 864)

I, your Wizard par ardua ad alta, am about to embark upon a hazardous and technically unexplainable journey into the outer stratosphere. To confer, converse, and otherwise hobnob with my brother wizards.  — The eponymous Wizard in The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939)

I am mysteriously absent on hush-hush business.

But help yourself to some free wallpaper. Just click on the image above. B back soon.

Courage.