God Hates Shrimp.

National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley is reported by Raw Story to be the source who informed the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment and her role in arranging Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger.

Raw Story is an unreliable moonbat site, but…

Front Page interviews Bill Tierney, a former UN weapons inspector, on the missing Iraqi WMDs:

FP: Ok, so where did the WMDs go?

Tierney: While working counter-infiltration in Baghdad, I noticed a pattern among infiltrators that their cover stories would start around Summer or Fall of 2002. From this and other observations, I believe Saddam planned for a U.S. invasion after President Bush’s speech at West Point in 2002. One of the steps taken was to prepare the younger generation of the security services with English so they could infiltrate our ranks, another was either to destroy or move WMDs to other countries, principally Syria. Starting in the Summer of 2002, the Iraqis had months to purge their files and create cover stories, such as the letter from Hossam Amin, head of the Iraqi outfit that monitored the weapons inspectors, stating after Hussein Kamal’s defection that the weapons were all destroyed in 1991…

FP: Let’s talk a little bit more about how the WMDs disappeared.

Tierney: In Iraq’s case, the lakes and rivers were the toilet, and Syria was the back door. Even though there was imagery showing an inordinate amount of traffic into Syria prior to the inspections, and there were other indicators of government control of commercial trucking that could be used to ship the weapons to Syria, from the ICs point of view, if there is no positive evidence that the movement occurred, it never happened. This conclusion is the consequence of confusing litigation with intelligence. Litigation depends on evidence, intelligence depends on indicators. Picture yourself as a German intelligence officer in Northern France in April 1944. When asked where will the Allies land, you reply “I would be happy to tell you when I have solid, legal proof, sir. We will have to wait until they actually land.” You won’t last very long. That officer would have to take in all the indicators, factor in deception, and make an assessment (this is a fancy intelligence word for an educated guess).

The Democrats understand the difference between the two concepts, but have no qualms about blurring the distinction for political gain.

A Passer domesticus or house sparrow, what we in the New World refer to as an English sparrow, and look upon as an undesirable variety of winged varmint, got into a Dutch exposition center, where he made a nuisance of himself, interfering with a domino event by knocking down dominoes that over a hundred people from twelve countries had spent more than a month setting up. Exhibition authorities brought in an exterminator, who delivered retribution via pellet gun, but the Dutch Animal Protection Agency has placed English sparrows on its Endangered Species List (what’s next? cockroaches?) and is investigated the sparricide.

The Point Five blog reports:

Zarqawi, forced against his will to fight by an imperialistic US policy, pauses during his tireless struggle, to reflect on the meaning of good and evil.

Zarqawi, who has been conducting a Iranian- backed resistance against the nascent Iraqi democracy, is believed to have been fundamentally shaken by the prospect of a an official denunciation of torture by his long-time enemy, the United States. He is reportedly holed- up in a safe house in Ramadi contemplating his next move.

“This really has knocked Zarqawi on his heels,” said Peter Welker, a Middle East expert with the Welker Group. “The introduction of this legislation has sent a wave of doubt through the entire insurgency. The United States— the focus of so much of their hate— suddenly seems like a shining example of decency. They’re suddenly stopping in the middle of assembling an IED, or while strapping on a suicide belt, and questioning everything they believe. We expect to see a mass surrender of arms and a huge shift to a more political focus for Zarqawi’s group.”

They have not reformed taxes. They have not reduced federal spending. They have not repaired Social Security. And they are starting to crawfish on the War on Terrror. We may soon lose control of Congress, and when we do, will we really care?

Maybe we can get Ronnie Earle to indict a few more members of the useless, worthless, and invertebrate Republican Congressional leadership which has frittered away the historic opportunity to produce change afforded by the electoral victories of 2004 through lack of principle and sheer cowardice. What do we need democrats for, when we have the so-called Republicans we have?

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Conservative Movement has gotten ahead of itself. We have learned how to win elections, but in too many cases we are just electing the same bloviators and opportunists as the democrats. I’m afraid it’s back to drawing-boards again for Conservatism. It’s not just about winning elections, and securing Congressional majorities. We are going to need to be a lot more certain about whom we are electing.

Scott Johnson at Power-Line deservedly cites as definitive Andrew McCarthy’s column at NRO: Say “No” to the McCain Amendment, which eloquently, and unanswerably, concludes:

We should be asking this question of each and every member of Congress who claims to support the McCain Amendment: If we had credible information regarding an ongoing al Qaeda plot to detonate a nuclear weapon in the continental United States, and we had just taken into custody an al Qaeda militant who was in a position to know where and when the attack was to occur but who was refusing to cooperate, are you saying we would need to let thousands of Americans die rather than harm a hair on the terrorist’s head in an effort to extract the information that might save them?

If the answer to that question is “no,” you have no business voting for the McCain Amendment. If the answer is “yes,” you have no business serving in a government whose first obligation is the security of the governed.

Swiss authorities have impounded 54 extremely valuable paintings loaned by Russia’s Pushkin Museum to an exhibition at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in the Swiss town of Martigny. The paintings seized included works by Pablo Picasso, Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh and had been on exhibit at the Foundation Pierre Gianadda for five months. The property of the Russian Government is being taken on behalf of Noga, a Swiss trading firm, seeking to recover $800 million in unpaid debts associated with food for oil exchanges in 1991-1992. Noga has previously succeeded in having a Russian ship, warplanes and diplomatic property temporarily seized in France, Luxemburg, and Sweden.

The Russian Government characterized the action as a gross breach of international law.

The Washington Post reports that the big secret of Valerie Plame’s CIA employment as an ANALYST, not a spy, was known by leftie journalist extraordinaire Bob Woodward a month before Bob Novak spilled the beans:

Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward testified under oath Monday in the CIA leak case that a senior administration official told him about CIA operative Valerie Plame and her position at the agency nearly a month before her identity was disclosed.

In a more than two-hour deposition, Woodward told Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald that the official casually told him in mid-June 2003 that Plame worked as a CIA analyst on weapons of mass destruction, and that he did not believe the information to be classified or sensitive, according to a statement Woodward released yesterday…

William Jeffress Jr., one of Libby’s lawyers, said yesterday that Woodward’s testimony undermines Fitzgerald’s public claims about his client and raises questions about what else the prosecutor may not know. Libby has said he learned Plame’s identity from NBC’s Tim Russert.

“If what Woodward says is so, will Mr. Fitzgerald now say he was wrong to say on TV that Scooter Libby was the first official to give this information to a reporter?” Jeffress said last night. “The second question I would have is: Why did Mr. Fitzgerald indict Mr. Libby before fully investigating what other reporters knew about Wilson’s wife?”

Fitzgerald has spent nearly two years investigating whether senior Bush administration officials illegally leaked classified information.

Tom Maguire at Just One Minute has been taking point on Blogosphere coverage of L’Affaire Plame.

As promised, the Open Source Media site opened this morning. Many of the most talented voices in the Blogosphere have been involved in this project, and I expect this will quickly prove to be an essential source of news and opinion, one of those first stops on the Information Superhighway every morning.

Congratulations to Roger Simon, Chuck Johnson, and the many others leading the way into a better future.

The anticipated transition of the Blogosphere into established and commercially-oriented institutions is beginning to take place.

Tomorrow, Open Source Media, a web-site described as seeking to “blend traditional journalism with freeform commentary” will be launched. How long can it be before Microsoft buys Instapundit and Fox Television hires Michelle Malkin?

Getting back to the Yale-Princeton game, Emmy Chang writes:

“You know… when you go to the game against Yale here, everybody has stickers and stuff like that with ‘BEAT YALE’ on them. So I was in New Haven for the first time, a few months ago, and I went into the stores to see if they had anything that said ‘BEAT PRINCETON.’ But there wasn’t anything!”
—spoken to me by a genuinely confused Princeton grad student, at a dinner the other night