I’ve been ignoring the whole Iran-Britain mess, simply because it nauseates me to see the leader of the former “empire on which the sun never set” run crying to mommy-on-Turtle-Bay. Steven noted that the EU prez has “come to the rescue,” and excerpted this quote

EU Foreign policy Chief Javier Solana has now stepped into the row. “I think that what Iran has to do is liberate, immediately, all the soldiers that have been taken, according to our information, in an illegal manner. They have to do it rapidly, and immediately, because we want to have good relations with Iran.”

My first thought was “it’s a sad day when the EU is rescuing the UK.” Then I read it again.

You know, I’d be a hell of a lot more impressed if that last clause had been “…because if he doesn’t, we’re going to come over there and kick the crap out of him and his little toy nuke program.” I mean damn. Is that the worst Europe can do? Iran gets caught smuggling weapons into Iraq, and commits an act of belligerency, compounds it with violations of the Geneva Accords, and then lies about it… and the best Europe can do is pout and say, “it makes it hard to like you when you’re naughty! Please don’t be naughty any more, okay?”

How Fwench of them.

Airplane hits building in Manhattan, everyone thinks “here we go again.” Fighter aircraft scrambled over several cities. Probably not Houston; ours have to come from upstate now.

Fortunately, it appears to be just semi-random stupidity; a small plane, not a major hijacking. That doesn’t mean it’s NOT terrorism, but it’s not large scale terrorism.

I did grin a bit at Steven’s remark, after the worst of the rumors were over:

For crying out loud, man; lousy aim! If you’d gone about a mile and a half southwest, you could have hit the UN building. Jeeze!

Nail the General Assembly, and the average IQ of New York would increase by double digits.

Meanwhile, in more local news, word has reached the office that Stephen F. Austin HS is on lockdown due to an intruder. Office rumor says he/she had a gun, but there’s nothing on that here, at KTRK.

Edit: Oh, and I forgot to include: Hell yes! The treason charge lives!

So I was chilling over at the Megatokyo forums, when I noticed an odd looking .sig file. Usually, they’re quite colorful and have fantasy or anime themes. Sometimes they have bad-ass guys, sometimes they have semi-naked women. Heck, if you know what I mean when I say sig file, you’ve probably seen plenty of variants yourself. But this one was rather simple; just some line drawings.

Given that the forum was for an anime-style webcomic, the picture was entirely unexpected, and it took me a minute to get it.

Most game/comic/lesiure etc. non-political forums don’t like it when you start talking real-world politics. This guy figured out how to silently make his point, and I doubt most folks of the opposite persuasion (as in “Paliapologists”) even notice. Sneaky.

Was this a massive failure of common sense or a bureacratic snafu over who was in charge? My money is on both. In a news story carried by the Chronicle today, we learn that the TSA let a man with bomb components and modified shoes board a flight at Hobby — because an HPD officer said so. In what has to be an example of the chronic short-handedness of HPD, the officer has (so far) only been transferred to a desk job, and predictably, both sides are pointing fingers at each other:

Although the FBI eventually cleared the man of wrongdoing, police officials have transferred the officer involved and are investigating the incident while insisting that the TSA, not police, has the authority to keep a suspicious person from boarding a flight.

TSA spokeswoman Andrea McCauley said screeners have the authority to stop people from going beyond the checkpoint to the boarding areas, but they rely heavily on local police.

“It’s just agencies talking with each other,” Ready said, downplaying the disagreement.

One suspects the talking is being done in loud tones, involves name-calling, and is accompanied by fists banging on tables. So what happened?

The report states that a man with a Middle Eastern name and a ticket for a Delta Airlines flight to Atlanta shook his head when screeners asked if he had a laptop computer in his baggage, but an X-ray machine operator detected a laptop.

A search of the man’s baggage revealed a clock with a 9-volt battery taped to it and a copy of the Quran, the report said. A screener examined the man’s shoes and determined that the “entire soles of both shoes were gutted out.”

No explosive material was detected, the report states. A police officer was summoned and questioned the man, examined his identification, shoes and the clock, then cleared him for travel, according to the report.

A TSA screener disagreed with the officer, saying “the shoes had been tampered with and there were all the components of (a bomb) except the explosive itself,” the report says.

The officer retorted, “I thought y’all were trained in this stuff,” TSA officials reported.

The report says the TSA screener notified Delta Airlines and talked again with the officer, who said he had been unable to check the passenger’s criminal background because of computer problems.

I suppose that someone might take a small battery-powered alarm clock with them on a trip, but why gut the soles of your shoes? I guess what this means is that so as long as you have an accomplice pre-position the explosive and the police can’t check their computer, you can take all sorts of bomb apparatus on board an airplane in Houston. But here’s the capper:

Meanwhile the officer involved in the dispute, J.O. Reece, has been transferred to a desk job, “the same place they send officers who are relieved of duty,” said Chad Hoffman, attorney for the Houston Police Officers Union.

Hoffman said Reece doesn’t understand why he was transferred “when it seems clear from the onset of the investigation that he didn’t have probable cause to detain anybody and that his actions were consistent with the law and HPD policy.”

First, I should think that this idiot would be relieved of duty. Put him somewhere that he doesn’t have to make a decision affecting people’s safety, because he obviously lacks the judgement to to put common sense over some kind of poorly written policy. And on that score, I have only one question:

Did ex-chief Sam Nuchia write that policy too?

Apparently Zarqawi has been bagged and tagged. One more score for the good guys!

Over/under on how long until someone on the left claims we nailed him six months ago but kept the story on ice until we needed it (to derail the Haditha news): 5 minutes.

Edit: Is it just me, or was CNN spending an incredible amount of time (at least 20 minutes) slamming Ann Coulter yesterday? Ann this, Ann that, oh my god, they even showed 9/11 footage to slam her — funny how that never gets shown in any story about, you know, terrorism, isn’t it?

Strange, but I somehow missed the copious wall-to-wall coverage of the Iranian riots against their Islamofacist government.

Best line so far, from Instapundit: “Is it just me, or is the Middle East a lot like 7th Grade with RPGs?” That’s such an insult to 7th graders.

Update: What did I tell ya?

TURNING POINT! TURNING POINT! Look, it’s great that Zarqawi’s dead, and it’s certainly too bad the Bush administration chose not to kill him when they had the chance years ago, preferring to keep him alive since it was useful to bolstering the set of deceptions they used to launch a war in which tens of thousands of innocent people have been killed….

In the history of yellow journalism, little worse has been done to the fine military of the United States than this smear of the Marines. Tips of the hat to Michelle Malkin and The Absurd Report.

The weasaling done by the Times since then has been entirely disingenous and unbelieveable. I’m furious at these bastards, and it’s high time the U.S. starts fighting back. If you’re an American news outlet and engage in this type of yellow journalism, sedition charges should not be out of the question.

Just in case you thought the War on Terror was over, here’s more news that it isn’t.

From the Toronto Star, courtesy of PJM:

“The group arrested yesterday allegedly had a list of targets, sources have told the Star, and the Toronto headquarters of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was one of them.So were the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa and a smattering of other high-profile, heavily populated areas.

But not being in one of those buildings wouldn’t have helped, if their scouting was any clue:

Joe Warmington @ The Toronto Sun on suspicious videotaping in the Toronto subway earlier this week: “One witness told the Sun that these men were timing the frequency of the trains and filming under the seats and the subway system map�

Tie this into the raids in Britian the other day, and it’s clear that the enemy is far from defeated. This war will be a long one, and half-measures won’t work.

That should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention.