Jake Tapper tweeted:

IG: Pentagon “moving forward with a $771.8 M purchase of aircraft even though the Afghans lack the capacity to operate and maintain them”

Which reminded me of a scene from the Chevy Chase movie Deal of the Century where Chase’s character, an international arms dealer, describes selling fighter jets to some nation without pilots who roll the planes down a mountain into the enemy. 

When Chevy Chase movies come true, it’s time to rethink our military strategy, I think.

Ever-angry Alec Baldwin unleashed his fury on a reporter for the Daily Mail yesterday tweeting (I’ve cleaned it up):

If put my foot up your f***ingg ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much

And then. . .

I’m gonna find you, George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna f***…you…up.

This sounds way worse than Paula Deen, no? Will the word-police attack Baldwin with the same vitriol as Deen? Doubtful.

Alec Baldwin has since deleted his Twitter account.

Elise Foley of the Huffington Post has received the American Immigration Lawyers Association 2013 journalism award. Because AILA is a leader in the fight against immigration law enforcement and for effectively unlimited admissions, Conn Carroll from the Examiner tweeted snarkily:

As much as I share Conn’s distaste for AILA (its former executive director was “Jihad Jeannie” Butterfield), Elise is a real reporter who covers the immigration beat, albeit with a point of view and for a journal of opinion. AILA is obviously going to acknowledge people and stories that shed light on aspects of the issue they want highlighted, but that doesn’t automatically devalue the recipient’s work.

After all, NR is also a journal of opinion, and its outstanding team of reporters is no less conscientious or fair because of that. Will AILA ever give its journalism award to, say, our Andrew Stiles or to NRO alum Byron York, who’s also done yeoman’s work in covering the Senate circus for the Examiner? No, probably not. But when you look at the list of earlier recipients of AILA’s award, you can see they’ve given it to a mix of mainstream reporters (Spencer Hsu, Hernan Rosemberg) and crusading advocates (Jason Riley, Anthony Lewis).

My own organization’s Eugene Katz Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Immigration — the instigation for AILA’s establishing its own award a few years after ours — isn’t too different. True, our honorees are much more likely to be straight reporters. Case in point: this year’s receipient, Bob Segall of WHTR-TV in Indianapolis. His investigative reporting exposed fraud and mismanagement at the IRS that had allowed illegal aliens to receive billions of dollars in improper tax credits and refunds. (Motto?: Investigating the stories the Northeast Corridor Media won’t investigate.)

But we’ve also recognized Heather Mac Donald, an intrepid reporter, to be sure, but one who writes for an opinion journal. And one year we gave the award to Lou Dobbs, back when he was hammering away at the issue night after night. (Unfortunately, we can’t take it back now.)

So while AILA would enhance the credibility of its award by focusing it more tightly on real reporters, as we try to do, rather than on political allies (Gary Trudeau?), Elise Foley deserves the recognition for her work as HuffPo’s immigration beat reporter. Congratulations.

I still don’t understand how a “social welfare” organization like Organzing for Action gets away with this stuff:

He’s like the Jason Bourne of nerdy NSA analysts:

A plane took off from Moscow Monday headed for Cuba, but the seat booked by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden was empty, and there was no sign of him elsewhere on board.

An Aeroflot representative who wouldn’t give her name told The Associated Press that Snowden wasn’t on flight SU150 to Havana. AP reporters on the flight couldn’t find him.

[. . .]

It also means up to a dozen journalists are on their way to Cuba without the man they were trying to find. Travel restrictions mean the reporters will have to wait three days before they can fly out again.

The press should visit Gitmo while they’re in Cuba and at least do some work on their three-day holiday.

Well, where is he? Maybe Russia has him writes the NYT.

Stay tuned . . .

Enjoy:

Via Yahoo! News:

I was stopped at the light at Santa Monica [Boulevard], headed south on Highland [Avenue]. I looked down to turn my radio down, and this car just blasted past me through the red light—it shook my car. No telling how fast the driver was going. A taxi driver was in the far right lane and we looked at each other, both saying, “What the hell was that?”… By the time the light changed, I could only see the tail lights of the white Mercedes—it was probably past Willoughby by then which was the next red light that I got stopped at. The Mercedes was flying down Highland. The same cab driver pulled up to the light at Willoughby [Avenue] and I looked over at him again in disbelief. Right as I did, the cab driver said something to the effect of, “He didn’t make it.” The [Mercedes] was all the way south of Melrose [Avenue] at this point.

I looked down Highland and saw a giant fireball at the base of one of the palms that line the medians on Highland. It was surreal. Even from as far away as I was, I could see how violent an impact it had been. I live in the area so parked near my place and sprinted over the the scene of the accident. As I was running, a couple of workers from the service station at the corner of Melrose and Highland were also running over. In broken English, one of them and I traded stories of what we saw as we ran. From what I could understand, he saw the car come off the ground at some point—maybe when [it] crossed Melrose.

A Hancock Park resident was already spraying the car with his water hose when we got to it, but wasn’t making any progress. The car was engulfed. I couldn’t see inside it. Fire trucks and police cars were at the scene almost immediately, it seemed.

I stayed and watched firefighters extinguish the the blaze. Bummed a cigarette from a guy named Jeremy and traded stories about what we saw. He was right around Melrose and Highland when it happened. I gave a statement to police and walked home.

This is a hilarious analysis by Yahoo! News of how many times in the past 444 briefings Jay Carney has dodged a question:

Jay Carney doesn’t have an answer for that. He hasn’t discussed that subject with the president. He will refer you to the Department of [insert agency here]. He refuses to speculate on that. He’ll have to get back to you.

But he appreciates the question.

A Yahoo News analysis of the 444 briefings that Carney has held since becoming White House press secretary has identified 13 distinct strains in the way he dodges a reporter’s question. Since Carney held his first daily briefing with reporters in the White House Brady Press Briefing Room on Feb. 16, 2011, for example, he’s used some variation of “I don’t have the answer” more than 1,900 times. In 1,383 cases he referred a question to someone else. But will he at least speculate on hypotheticals? No. In fact, he has refused to do so 525 times.

In the following interactive, you can browse all 9,486 of Carney’s most-used responses and verbal crutches.

The main function of a White House press secretary is to shape messaging for the administration, which often requires stymieing questions as a form of damage control. The referral to another agency or person is one of Carney’s favorite evasive maneuvers. Over the course of the 43-minute briefingon Jan. 25 alone, for example, Carney referred reporters to the Justice Department four times, the National Labor Relations Board twice, the State Department twice, once to the historic precedent of recess appointments, once to a New York Times article, once to a speech that President Barack Obama delivered earlier in the week, and once to the Defense Department.

The rest here.   

In the “Style” section? But hey, he’s on the front-page of the website and that’s all that matters:

Meet Alex, the first muppet on Sesame Street with an incarcerated parent. I find Alex’s red skin incredibly insensitive to Native Americans. Why didn’t they make Alex a neutral, non-offensive color? Shame on you Sesame Street, shame on you. . . 

Via Reuters, in reference to the viral-video of a Syrian rebel taking a bite out of the heart of a Syrian soldier:

Putin warns West not to arm organ-eating Syrian rebels

Seems like good adivce to me.

Ed Bott of ZDNet has compared the original Washington Post piece on PRISM with a newer version, highlighting the key areas changed. And as @GabrielMalor points out on Twitter, “Did you notice that WaPo made major stealth-edits to its PRISM story that completely undercut it?”

Do read Ed’s entire analysis. I wonder what else is going to change over the coming days? Maybe we’re looking at Dan Rather 2.0, with a fake-but-real PowerPoint presentation?

What’s more interesting than her first tweet is her trying-to-be-hip profile. She lists “wife” first? Do Bill and Hillary even live together anymore? 

Basically Greenwald called Mika Brzezinski a flack for the White House. Enjoy:

Shuster tweeted yesterday:

To sum it up, Shuster is asking a dark-money 501(c)(4) — Organizing for America, which uses the Twitter handle @barackobama — to pardon “@EJosephSnowden,” a fake Twitter account.

But, other than that David, keep up the great work!

Note: Mother Jones uses “dark money” to describe 501(c)(4) organizations similar to OFA, so I can, too.

Rachel Abrams, sister of former Cornerite and current editor of Commentary John Podhoretz, died yesterday at age 62.

At a recent Seder, I read one of her Facebook posts — of all things — on the meaning of Passover which brought many in my family to tears. She was a powerful writer and will be greatly missed.

Page Six just won’t be the same without him. He posted this on Facebook:

“Almost 23 years ago, I took a temporary 3 month job cartooning for The New York Post. Nearly 6,000 cartoons later, I’ve drawn my last cartoon for the paper. I’ve accepted a buyout,” Mr. Delonas posted on his Facebook page. “I’d like to thank all my colleagues for the great memories. I have nothing but gratitude for Mr. Murdoch and the Post. I believe the paper has a bright future and I look forward to reading it for many years to come.”

Hilarious. Real Clear Politics has the video.

So the tech companies allegedly involved all deny it, and the PowerPoint that all of this is based on says the project only costs $20 million per year. Is there a single government program that only costs $20 million per year? 

Via the Guardian:

Two different versions of the PRISM scandal were emerging on Thursday with Silicon Valley executives denying all knowledge of the top secret program that gives the National Security Agency direct access to the internet giants’ servers.

The eavesdropping program is detailed in the form of PowerPoint slides in a leaked NSA document, seen and authenticated by the Guardian, which states that it is based on “legally-compelled collection” but operates with the “assistance of communications providers in the US.”

Each of the 41 slides in the document displays prominently the corporate logos of the tech companies claimed to be taking part in PRISM.

However, senior executives from the internet companies expressed surprise and shock and insisted that no direct access to servers had been offered to any government agency.

The top-secret NSA briefing presentation set out details of the PRISM program, which it said granted access to records such as emails, chat conversations, voice calls, documents and more. The presentation the listed dates when document collection began for each company, and said PRISM enabled “direct access from the servers of these US service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple“.

Senior officials with knowledge of the situation within the tech giants admitted to being confused by the NSA revelations, and said if such data collection was taking place, it was without companies’ knowledge.

The rest here.

Hacks. Via Politico:

The New York Times editorial board has quietly changed the language in the most widely cited line from Thursday’s scathing editorial about the Obama administration’s surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The line — “The administration has now lost all credibility” — was changed Thursday night to read, “The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.” No correction or explanatory note was appended.

“The change was for clarity’s sake,” Andrew Rosenthal, the Times editorial page editor, told POLITICO on Friday morning. “It was clear from the context of the editorial that the issue of credibility related to this subject and the final edit of the piece strengthened that point.”

I don’t get what was “strengthened,” however. Here is a larger excerpt from the editorial, with my highlight of their change:

Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

To what issue is the Times referring? Transparency and accountability? National security? Domestic surveillance? Executive power? 

What’s more frustrating is the Times doesn’t bother to let their readers know a change was made. The Public Editor should question why an editorial of this magnitude was published and edited without a note to the readers.