Flying Squirrel

If you're a collegiate wrestling fan you'll appreciate this takedown by Ellis Coleman of Northern Michigan at the Junior World Championships. Coleman was competing against an Iranian wrestler named Mehdi Chooli Zeidvand who can probably look forward to being shot for embarrassing his country when he returns home.

The move is called "the Flying Squirrel."

Coleman went on to win the match, and eventually earned third place in his weight class.

Thanks to HuffPo for the tip.

That's Our Joe

Politico reports that Vice President Joe Biden compared the Tea Party Republicans to terrorists in the recent debt ceiling negotiations:

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists,” according to several sources in the room.

This is pretty funny coming from an administration that's reluctant to call actual terrorists terrorists.

In the Orwellian world of Mr. Biden and his associates, apparently, people who maim and kill for political reasons are not terrorists, but people who insist we stop spending money we don't have are.

Speaking of Mr. Biden, we were very disappointed, but not surprised, to learn that he's charging the Secret Service rent for living in a house he owns so that they can better protect him. What this means is that we the taxpayers are actually paying Mr. Biden for the privilege of protecting his life. Perhaps this is what the administration has in mind when they say that everyone should pay their fair share.

I wonder if people demanded an end to this scam if Mr. Biden would consider us terrorists.

Getting bin Laden

The New Yorker has an account by Nicholas Schmidle of what happened in Abottabad the night Osama bin Laden's luck finally ran out. Schmidle's piece has some fascinating details about the raid on bin Laden's compound and is a fascinating read. Here's how he begins:

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU.

A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

One of the details Schmidle discusses is why the president opted for a raid rather than a missile attack. He also points out that this mission was just a night's work for most of the men involved. Most of them had been on dozens if not hundreds of such missions not only in Pakistan but also Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Give it a read.