Suburban Cowboy

Another Blog: Memory Hole

2006-02-26T19:42:00.000-05:00

Although I will continue to post articles in this blog concerning issues of culture and politics, I have created another blog, called Memory Hole, in which I post articles and thoughts about linguistics and language-related topics. The address is: http://memoryhole1957.blogspot.com/ It's a doubleplusgood read, comrade!

Georgetown U Staff Forgets Their Diversity Training

2005-05-06T13:39:00.000-04:00

Georgetown sued for anti-hetero job bias
Lawsuit says gay supervisors favored ‘young handsome men’

By LOU CHIBBARO JR.
May. 06, 2005

Georgetown University’s computer services department allegedly violated the D.C. Human Rights Act by giving an unfair advantage to good-looking young men in its hiring and promotion practices before it eliminated the jobs of older, mostly female employees in a 2003 staff downsizing move, according to a lawsuit filed last week in D.C. Superior Court...

http://www.washingtonblade.com/2005/5-6/news/localnews/antihet.cfm

Breaking News: Amsterdam Not Gay Paradise

2005-05-06T11:24:00.000-04:00

From the Washington Blade, the local Gay and Lesbian etc. newspaper, an article entitled "Looking hate in the face".
In a nutshell: The author, a gay man, was walking through a park in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with his boyfriend. Amsterdam, according to the author, is "arguably the "gay-friendliest" place on the planet." While strolling along in this socialist paradise, ("There are laws protecting against discrimination based on sexual orientation, there are hate crime laws, and Holland is one of only a handful of countries where gay couples can legally marry") they are attacked and seriously beaten by a mob of 7 to 10 men with "Moroccan features" who "spoke with a heavy accent(s)". While being attacked they are called "fucking fags" by their assailants.

But what is outstanding about this article is this:
a. The word "Muslim" is never used in the article to describe the "Morrocan-featured", "accented" homophobes; and
b. The author writes, "As a child of the South, where "fag" and "queer" were everyday insults, I would have expected a fist to the face somewhere back home for sure."

Conclusion: You can't even beat sense into the heads of Liberals.

http://www.washingtonblade.com/blog/index.cfm?blog_id=523

Afghan Woman Tortured to Death by Members of Evil Death Cult (Nothing Surprising Here)

2005-05-06T08:13:00.000-04:00

Today's WaPo attempts a whitewash of Muslim savagery--blaming the cruel and usual punishment of stoning meted out to an adulterous woman more on "tradition" than on Islamic (Sharia) law...See,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/05/AR2005050501563.html

An Appreciation

2005-05-04T10:37:00.000-04:00

This blog would not be what it is today without the contribution of its top correspondent, El Naar Haninah. :-)

Their Jihad, and Mine

2005-05-04T10:26:00.000-04:00

John McCandlish injects a rare note of sanity into the delusional Leftist worrldview of America's Al Jazeera Franchise, the Washington Post:

When Columnists Cry "Jihad"

By John McCandlish Phillips
Post
Wednesday, May 4, 2005; A19

I have been looking at myself, and millions of my brethren, fellow evangelicals along with traditional Catholics, in a ghastly arcade mirror lately -- courtesy of this newspaper and the New York Times. Readers have been assured, among other dreadful things, that we are living in "a theocracy" and that this theocratic federal state has reached the dire level of -- hold your breath -- a "jihad."

In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word "frightening" and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market.

I come at this with an insider/outsider vantage and with real affection for many of those engaged in this enterprise. When the Times put me on its reporting staff, I was the only evangelical Christian among some 275 news and editorial employees, and certainly the only one who kept a leather-bound Bible on his desk…

The opening salvo of the heavy rhetorical artillery to which I object came in on March 24, when Maureen Dowd started her column in the Times with the declaration "Oh my God, we really are in a theocracy." …

Three days later Frank Rich, an often acute, broadly knowledgeable and witty cultural observer, sweepingly informed us that, under the effects of "the God racket" as now pursued in Washington, "government, culture, science, medicine and the rule of law are all under threat from an emboldened religious minority out to remake America according to its dogma." He went on to tell Times readers that GOP zealots in Congress and the White House have edged our country over into "a full-scale jihad." If Rich were to have the misfortune to live for one week in a genuine jihad, and the unlikely fortune to survive it, he would temper his categorization of the perceived President Bush-driven jihad by a minimum of 77 percent. If any "emboldened minority" is aiming to "remake America according to its dogma," it seems to many evangelicals and Catholics that it is the vanguard wanting, say, the compact of marriage to be stretched in its historic definition to include men cohabiting with men and women with women. That is, in terms of the history of this nation, a most pronounced and revolutionary novelty.

From March 24 through April 23 (when The Post twinned Colbert I. King's "Hijacking Christianity" with Paul Gaston's "Smearing Christian Judges"), I counted 13 opinion columns of similarly alarmist tone aimed at us on the Christian right: two more in The Post by the generally amiable and highly communicative Richard Cohen headlined "Backward Evolution" and "Faith-Based Pandering"; one by his colleague, the urbane Eugene Robinson, "Art vs. the Church Lady" (lamenting that "the pall of religiosity hanging over the city was reaching gas-mask stage"); and three by Dowd, two by Paul Krugman and three by Rich in the Times.

In "What's Going On" [March 29], Krugman darkly implied that some committed religious believers in our nation bear a menacing resemblance to Islamic extremists, by which he did not mean a few crazed crackpots but a quite broad swath of red-staters. In "An Academic Question" [April 5], Krugman, conceding the wide majority of secular liberals over conservatives on the faculties of our major universities, had the supreme chutzpah to tell us why: The former, unfettered by presuppositions of faith, are free to commit genuine investigative work and to reach valid scholarly conclusions, while the latter are disabled in that critical respect by their unprovable prior assumptions. So they are disqualified as a class from the university enterprise by their unfortunate susceptibility to the God hypothesis…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/03/AR2005050301277.html

And while America suffers under the weight of Christian theocratic oppression, the rational, peaceful religion of Islam presents us with the following enlightened experiences:

Islamic court sentences 7 gamblers to flogging
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AFP) - An Islamic sharia court in the staunchly-Muslim Indonesian province of Aceh has sentenced seven men to a public lashing for petty gambling offences, a report said Sunday…

http://www.brunet.bn/news/bb/mon/may2w5.htm

Captured Iraqi Terrorist 'Adnan Elias: We Beheaded a Policeman, Filled His Corpse with TNT, and Used It to Blow Up Others…

http://memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=650

PA Media and Universities Promote Terrorism, Hatred, and Jihad.

Despite Abbas’ well-polished image as a moderate, his administration has been presiding over an incessant campaign of incitement against Israel that spans the media and university centers.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=81139

The Way, The "Truth", and The Lie (of the Left)

2005-05-04T09:49:00.000-04:00

"Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world,
and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."
--Karl Marx, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

The Way of the Cross and Abu Ghraib

29 April 2005
St. Paul's Episcopal Church in East Norwalk, Connecticut, has installed controversial new Stations of the Cross that include paintings depicting the war in Iraq and the abuses at Abu Ghraib alongside traditional Christian images in a contemporary exploration of crucifixion iconography. New York City artist Gwyneth Leech, who was commissioned for the work last year, explained that the photographs of torture and abuse of both detainees and U.S. soldiers and contract workers "'turned the Way of the Cross into a contemporary narrative.'"
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2005/4/emw234099.htm

Liberal Humanism...Leftist Reality

2005-05-04T09:32:00.000-04:00

"Everything that exists deserves to perish." – Karl Marx, quoting Goethe's devil in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon"

Why America needs to be Defeated in Iraq
By Mike Whitney
May 1, 2005, 12:35

The greatest moral quandary of our day is whether we, as Americans, support the Iraqi insurgency. It’s an issue that has caused anti-war Leftists the same pangs of conscience that many felt 30 years ago in their opposition to the Vietnam War. The specter of disloyalty weighs heavily on all of us, even those who’ve never been inclined to wave flags or champion the notion of American “Exceptionalism”.
For myself, I can say without hesitation that I support the "insurgency", and would do so even if my only 21 year old son was serving in Iraq. There’s simply no other morally acceptable option...
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_17271.shtml

Memory Hole Blog Entry

2005-05-02T15:41:00.000-04:00

I posted a new entry in my Memory Hole blog today (see address, above).

Questions for the Blue Staters

2005-04-28T11:56:00.000-04:00

Do you think that outside-of-the-US travel makes you worldly? Do you think that eating at the latest trendy restaurant makes you a sophisticate? Do you think that going to the Opera give you elan? Do you believe that visiting a museum exhibit demonstrates that you have a high IQ? Do you feel that atheism and/or a mindless "acceptance" of Islam makes you compassionate?

Sadly, this is what passes for a true life among the Blue State Elites. When they talk about the troglodytic lifestyles of the Red State hordes--that is, whenever they talk about the Red Staters, period--they mean that those unfortunate rustics do not or will not avail themselves of such urban pleasures as listed above.
I have personally known such human being manques as this. They think they are the cultural ne plus ultra...but I call them middlebrows.
Socrates probably never traveled far from Athens. da Vinci is not remembered as a gourmand. Isaac Newton probably couldn't tell a Merlot from a Chardonnay. Dante Alighieri despised Islam.
I guess they'd be called rednecks today!

Breaking News: WaPo Gets It Half Right

2005-04-25T12:05:00.000-04:00

Let’s see: Tamarlane was “famously devoted to Islam”, but “His name still reeks of butchery.” Interesting…

History's Pages, Limned In Blood and Stardust

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, April 25, 2005; Page C01

In the news, Afghanistan looks like an arid and impoverished place whose bearded mountain warriors have mud-brick houses, AK-47s, daughters who can't read, poppies and not much else. In "In the Realm of Princes" at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Afghanistan one visits doesn't look like that at all.
It isn't arid. Multicolored flowers sprout beneath its trees. And it isn't poor. Its sophisticated rulers dwell in columned halls that are floored with cool glazed tiles and hung with Chinese silks. And it isn't illiterate, it's the opposite of illiterate. Its 15th-century pages -- many from the courtly studios of Herat in northwestern Afghanistan -- are deeply bookish works of art.
…His name still reeks of butchery. When Timur brought his armies against some noble city (Damascus or Aleppo, Babylon or Baghdad) he'd sometimes spare the women and the most accomplished artists, but he'd slaughter the men, and then build columns of their skulls.
…The Timurids were famously devoted to Islam. They built enormous mosques, they enriched theologians. But they didn't ban dancing or outlaw music or declare war on sweet luxury. The Taliban they weren't. One sees that in their art…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/24/AR2005042401448.html

Media Elites Examine Red Staters...And Find The Expected Freak Show

2005-04-25T11:55:00.000-04:00

Pa. Cousins Try to Overcome Taboo of 'I Do'
To Bypass Ban, Relatives Wed in Md. After Years of Seeking Acceptance

By Fredrick Kunkle

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 25, 2005; Page B01

ALTOONA, Pa.

They settled down in their blue-and-white mobile home with three dogs, a cat, two guinea pigs named Beavis and Butt-Head, and an iguana that loves to eat kiwi.
Andrews collects disability payments from the government. Amrhein works at the courtesy desk at Wal-Mart.
"I tell people I married her for the health benefits and the Wal-Mart discount card," Andrews said, only half-joking.
She slapped his thigh.
"Yeah," she said, eyes rolling.
They kid each other a lot and share many interests, such as camping and fishing. They agree to disagree on other things. He smokes Jacks 100's; she prefers Marlboros. He hunts. She loves animals.

…And don't ask her about eating groundhog. "It smells like a pork chop frying. Tastes like chicken," he said, helpfully.
Six years ago, he proposed to her at the jewelry case in Wal-Mart after they spied a pair of wedding bands on sale.
"I said, 'Are you prepared to go through the Hell we're going to go through?' " he said.
Yes, she said, accepting the engagement. But because of a host of concerns, they locked their rings away until last month. After a Pennsylvania court clerk refused to grant a marriage license, the couple challenged the refusal in open court, as allowed by law, and lost.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/24/AR2005042401406.html

Liberal Atheist Elites Baffled By Affection For Pope

2005-04-25T11:36:00.000-04:00

American Catholics Approve of Pope Benedict XVI

By Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 25, 2005; 8:51 AM

If this is true...

An overwhelming majority of American Catholics approve of the selection of Pope Benedict XVI and predicts that he will defend the traditional policies and beliefs of a church that many members say is out of touch with their views, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The survey found that more than eight in 10 Catholics broadly supported the selection of former German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to replace Pope John Paul II.
Nearly as many, 73 percent, said they were "enthusiastic" about the new pontiff, though only one in four said they were strongly enthusiastic about the choice.

How can this also be true?...

The poll suggested the magnitude (Huh?) of the challenge facing the newly installed pontiff in the United States as he attempts to lead a congregation deeply split between those who want the church to maintain its traditional policies and beliefs, and those who say the church needs to change in order to reflect the way Catholics live today.
Half say they want the church to adhere to traditional values and policies, while almost exactly the same proportion believe the church must change its policies to reflect modern lifestyles and beliefs...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042500202.html

"...one large, unified, Jew-threatening juggernaut."

2005-04-21T13:23:00.000-04:00

I am not a Roman Catholic. In fact, as a conservative, Orthodox Lutheran (Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod) my religious beliefs stand in radical opposition to Roman Catholic dogma and practice. But nevertheless I admire the new Pope, Benedict XVI for his strong stance on the primacy of European (i.e., Western) culture. He is right; the primary dilemma facing the Christian Church today is that of Moral Relativism.

This idea eludes today’s liberal, post-modern atheistic elites. They worship at a different altar—that of so-called “socials justice”. To people of that persuasion, the Christian Church is just another institution that of course needs to be torn down and reassembled to conform to their idealized quasi-Marxist Dictatorship of the Know-It-All Do-Gooders (I jest—but really, this is a serious problem).

In today's WaPo, Richard Cohen uses his opinion column to advocate the destruction of Christianity. Oh, on the surface it seems that Cohen is actually just calling for a "reform" of the existing Roman Catholic Church...but he actually has a darker, more sinister agenda in mind.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6178-2005Apr20.html

As atheists (that is, as people who do not believe in the literal existence of a transcendental God) Liberals like Cohen claim to want to “fix” Christianity by the imposition of plethora of trendy (since the late ‘60s, that is) programs, chief among them the issues of gay rights, birth control, and the Ordination of married persons.

In other words, all that matters to the Leftist elites is the adoption, by the Roman Catholic Church, of their own secular agenda.

Why would a Jewish atheist like Richard Cohen be so concerned about these issues of Catholic dogma? Cohen would tell you that because he is so concerned about the spread of AIDS in the third world that he supports any policies that advocate the use of birth control (chiefly condoms). As for the ordination of women, well, that’s just his knee-jerk support for boilerplate rhetoric from Leftist feminism—i.e., by abjuring the ordination of women, the Catholic Church is being horribly, unreasonably discriminatory. I’m not sure what Cohen would say to defend his support for a married Priesthood. Presumably he is concerned about the deficit of parish priests in the United States...

So let’s examine these points a bit more deeply. Ask yourself the following questions:

Would the advocacy of a birth control and especially condom use by the Papacy affect the spread of AIDS in Africa? What about the widespread cultural disdain of condom use n traditional African culture? Does Cohen think that condom use among the poor in the third world would spread, given a Papal Blessing? What is Cohen’s true motive?
Does Cohen advocate the “ordination” of female Muslim Imams? What about female Orthodox Rabbis? What about a female Dalai Lama? Or only for Catholic Priests and Nuns? What is Cohen’s true motive?
Why on earth does Cohen care if Catholic priests were permitted to marry? What is Cohen’s true motive?

Indeed, what is Cohen’s true motive? There is only one answer, and that is the destruction of the venerable Roman Catholic Church, and by proxy, all Christendom. Leftist ideologues like Cohen discern no difference between the Catholic, Methodist, or Eastern Orthodox Churches—they are all repressive, to varying degrees, and must "reform or die".

This point has been made succinctly by Rabbi Daniel Lapin (an Orthodox Jew) in his wonderful book, “America’s Real War”. Writes the Rabbi, “Similar observations over the years have convinced me that most American Jews are highly ignorant about Christians, their beliefs and their practices. I am quite sure that the majority of Jews, even if capable of distinguishing between Catholicism and Protestantism, would be utterly without a clue as to the differences between Baptists, Lutherans. Mennonites, and Presbyterians. Let alone do they realize that these are but a small sampling of Christian groups. This Jewish failure to understand the diversity within Christianity turns the entire non-Jewish world into one large, unified, Jew-threatening juggernaut. Ignorance is always the seed of bigotry, and a stepping stone to hostility”.

Amen, Rabbi, Amen.

Breaking News: Common Sense Deteted Amidst European Intellectuals

2005-04-19T08:07:00.000-04:00

Europe weak on rights abuses by Muslims: Humanists
Web posted at: 4/19/2005 11:44:50
Source ::: Reuters

GENEVA: The main global humanist organisation on Monday accused European countries of ignoring violations of human rights in their Islamic communities to preserve “multi-culturalism”.
In a presentation to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and at a separate news conference and a seminar, they also argued that Muslim countries were trying to use the body to quash any discussion of their own rights record.
“Western society tends to turn a blind eye to the plight of European Muslim women and girls because ‘Muslim culture is different’,” Roy Brown, president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), told the 53-member Commission.
“Yet in Europe many women find themselves subject to domestic violence, undergo forced marriages or are even killed by family members because of some belief that they have tarnished the family honour,” Brown declared.
That view was echoed later by Somali-born Dutch member of parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Iranian exile rights activist Azam Kamguian, Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, historian of Islam Ibn Warraq and French intellectual Caroline Fourest.
Hirsi Ali, who fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to escape an arranged marriage, told the news conference she condemned “the moral relativism in Europe whereby women from Third World countries do not enjoy the same freedoms as native European women enjoy.”

http://www.thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=World_News&subsection=Rest+of+the+World&month=April2005&file=World_News20050419114450.xml

Conservatives? BIASED! Liberals? MISUNDERSTOOD!

2005-04-18T11:35:00.000-04:00

Conservatives? BIASED!

Fox's Sandstorm

By William Raspberry
Monday, April 18, 2005; Page A17

The in-your-face right-wing partisanship that marks Fox News Channel's news broadcasts is having two dangerous effects.
The first is that the popularity of the approach -- Fox is clobbering its direct competition (CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, etc.) -- leads other cable broadcasters to mimic it, which in turn debases the quality of the news available to that segment of the TV audience.
The second, far more dangerous, effect is that it threatens to destroy public confidence in all news.
The latter, I admit, is more fear than prediction, but let me tell you what produces that fear. Fox News Channel -- though the people who run the operation are at great pains to insist otherwise -- is deliberately partisan. It is as though right-wing talk radio has metastasized into cable and assumed a new virulence.
The main difference is that radio's Rush Limbaugh, for instance, doesn't pretend even-handedness. As he has said, he doesn't seek to be balanced but to balance the rest of the media, which he sees as generally dominated by left-of-center attitudes.
Part of the FNC approach, on the other hand, is to promote itself as "fair and balanced." I suppose it does so with a wink and a nod to its far-right audience, who must know it isn't balanced. Certainly those near the center of the political spectrum know it…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61709-2005Apr17.html

Liberals? MISUNDERSTOOD!

Nonexistent Mission
Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer wrote last week that the Bush administration dispatched "self-appointed morals czar" William Bennett in 2003 to tell Vatican officials that the invasion of Iraq would be a just war. This was news to Bennett, who says he never took such a trip and can't understand why Scheer never called him.
Scheer says he was "sloppy" in picking up the tale from the Houston Catholic Worker. "I should have been more careful," he says. Says Times Opinion Editor Michael Kinsley: "I guess I would wonder why a story this juicy would have only been in some Catholic newspaper. That would make me want to check it out."

Premature Journalism
Barbara Stewart, the Boston Globe freelancer dropped over her story about a Canadian seal hunt that had not yet taken place, says she never meant to deceive anyone. She just never checked back to learn that the scheduled hunt had been delayed by bad weather.
"The whole situation, while resulting from an egregious, massive, stupid [screwup] on my part, unbelievable carelessness, was nevertheless not malicious fabrication as in: pretending I was there and deliberately making up a whole scene and attempting to pass it off," Stewart says by e-mail.
"It was stupider and more boring and more flat out dumb on my part. Quite dumb. Remarkably dumb. But not vicious and not really a scandal, for heaven's sake."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61803-2005Apr17.html

Self-pity From the “F*** Bush” Crowd

2005-04-18T11:30:00.000-04:00

For Every Story, An Online Epilogue
Via E-Mail and Blog, Anyone's a Critic

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 18, 2005; Page C01

The growing tide of personal attacks by bloggers and e-mailers "can make you really paranoid," says New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney.
ABC's Linda Douglass says she has "learned that I have not just critics but people who seem to hate me that I don't even know about."
"It's very nasty and personal and scatological," says Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank.
The rise of the blogosphere remains one of the most exciting communications developments in decades, giving ordinary folks the chance to bite back at a media establishment widely viewed as arrogant. It's little surprise that mainstream media types don't like being questioned, challenged and chided by critics typing from their basements and bedrooms.
But the increasingly caustic nature of some online criticism is prompting many journalists to complain that their honesty and motivation are being trashed along with their work.
"You want to pay attention to what legitimate critics are saying out there," Nagourney says. "In journalism, you screw up from time to time. But it's become so toxic -- attacks for the sake of attacks."…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61803-2005Apr17.html

Islamic Republic of Iran Catching Up To "Enlightened" West

2005-04-16T09:16:00.000-04:00

Iran changes abortion law

The Iranian Parliament has approved a bill which will allow women to have an abortion in the first four months of pregnancy, if the baby is mentally or physically handicapped.
Until now, abortion was only allowed if the mother's life was in danger.
The new abortion law was approved by just over half of the members of the Iranian Parliament, but none of the 13 women in the house took part in the debate.
The conditions for allowing abortions still remain very stringent.
Both parents must agree and they need three doctors, as well as the coroners office, to confirm the foetus is damaged or the mother's life is at risk.
Under this new bill, even if a woman is pregnant as a result of rape, she still does not have the right to an abortion (Well, I said that they are "catching up" to the West... - Suburban Cowboy).
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200504/s1343898.htm

Extreme Makeover, Afghan Style

2005-04-16T09:02:00.000-04:00

In search of a little nip, tuck

By Kim Barker the Tribune's South Asia correspondent

Most patients want their scars removed, all evidence of burns, skin diseases and even gunshot wounds erased. But others, hiding beneath their burqas, want nose jobs.
Cosmetic surgery has arrived in Kabul, in the form of the tiny Hamkar Surgical Clinic, across the street from the bombed-out Cinema Theatre building, in need of its own face-lift. In this clinic, tucked away at the top of a dark stairway, people can pay for tummy tucks, although no one has been brave enough yet to try. Women will be able to buy larger breasts, although only one woman has expressed interest so far.
"It's peaceful now in Afghanistan," nurse Mohammad Fazel said. "People can get rid of their wrinkles. They can get rid of their bad figures."
Most Afghans are still too busy surviving to worry too much about appearance. But the existence of such a clinic--which charges as little as $100 for a nose job--shows how much Kabul, at least, has changed since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001.
The harsh regime frowned on people changing their appearances. The Taliban would have closed such a surgical clinic and harmed doctors even thinking about opening such a place. It viewed beauty shops as pure vanity.
The surgical clinic is only one example of the changing face of beauty in Kabul. Now, hair salons thrive across the capital. Last week, a new one opened, with a laser machine to get rid of blackheads, and massages are offered for Afghan women--by Afghan women, of course.
"Everybody feels much better after a massage," said Mahjoba Molaee, who works at the Jewel Beauty Center. "Why shouldn't we have massages for Afghan women?"
Bald men can get hair plugs at the Kabul version of a hair club for men, aptly called The Solution for Losing Hair. Mirwais Salehi, who believes he lost his hair six years ago because of hemorrhoids, was an early client.
"I have no problems with my new hair," said Salehi, 36, whose new hair indeed blends in with his old hair and makes him look years younger. "I'm playing soccer in it. I'm washing it. I'm even swimming in it."
He has acted as a walking advertisement, convincing dozens of acquaintances to come here, including two soccer teammates. The Solution for Losing Hair also received a major boost in business a few months ago after a local TV anchor, once bald, suddenly appeared on air with a full head of hair.
But the Hamkar clinic is probably the biggest surprise in the new Afghanistan. It opened early last year, focused primarily on treating cleft lips, cleft palates and the scars left by skin disease. Doctors fixed injuries from 23 years of war, bullet wounds and burns.
Dr. Aminullah Hamkar has photo albums of before and after pictures, of gruesome burns he has fixed, of faces he has repaired. But in recent months, patients have started demanding other procedures.
A woman first asked for a nose job. A month later, an older man came to the clinic. He had scars removed first from his hand, then from his face. Finally, he asked Hamkar to take away wrinkles near his eyes.
"I joked with him and told him, `You want to have a second wife?'" Hamkar recalled.
The man laughed, but insisted on the surgery. Since then, about 15 people, mostly men, have received eyelifts, Hamkar said.
About 10 patients, mostly women who walk into the clinic in burqas, which cover their faces, have had nose jobs.
Sometimes, Hamkar insists on a letter from a therapist certifying a patient's sanity.
"One man said: `Please get rid of the tip of my nose. When I'm reading, it's in the way, hanging down. When I'm sleeping on my right side, it hangs to the right. When I'm sleeping on my left, it hangs to the left,'" said Hamkar, who got a letter and performed the surgery.
Not everyone in Kabul accepts the clinic. Many Muslims here are conservative, and they believe nothing created by God should be changed.
A taxi driver once threatened to kick out a clinic doctor because he was talking about nose jobs. And a government TV station censored an ad that touted breast surgery and tummy tucks.
Clinic workers acknowledge it could be too soon to start talking publicly about such things.
"No one has come so far to fix their breasts, to make them smaller or bigger, or to get rid of their hanging stomachs," Fazel said. "No one has come so far, because our society is still a little bit extremist."
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=5&u=/chitribts/20050412/ts_chicagotrib/insearchofalittleniptuck&sid=84439559

A hallucination is a fact...

2005-04-12T13:02:00.000-04:00

A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
--Betrand Russell, “On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism,” (1914)

This week’s New York Magazine features a strange story about secular saint Seymour Hersh, of the holy New York Times. Hersh, it seems, is really two journalists in one: “There are two Hershes, really. Seymour M. is the byline. He navigates readers through the byzantine world of America’s overlapping national-security bureaucracies, and his stories form what Hersh has taken to calling an “alternative history” of the Bush administration since September 11, 2001. Then there’s Sy. He’s the public speaker, the pundit. On the podium, Sy is willing to tell a story that’s not quite right, in order to convey a Larger Truth. “Sometimes I change events, dates, and places in a certain way to protect people,” Hersh told me. “I can’t fudge what I write. But I can certainly fudge what I say.” http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/features/11719/index.html

It’s Seymour M. who interests me. Note that New York Magazine blithely lauds Hersh for his dedication to exposing an “alternative history” of the Bush administration. Alternative History: the Watchword of the PoMo Left. Howard Zinn has made a career out of repeating (or is it fabricating?) such biased folderol. Ditto for Noam Chomsky and his legions of dilletantish acolytes. Ham-fisted monstrosity Michael Moore made a mint off of it. Even the MSM has gotten into the act, as evidenced by a recent fantasy-cum-journalistic exercise published in the Los Angeles Times under the byline of antediluvian Leftist Robert Scheer. Writes Scheer, “ Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman? Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist?”
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0111-31.htm

Lest you think that Scheer is having a florid LSD flashback, consider that fact that Scheer’s “article” is actually a shill for a film aired on BBC in 2004, The Power of Nightmares by academic disinformationist and MSM darling Adam Curtis. Says the London Observer, “"if there has been a theme in Curtis's work since, it has been to look at how different elites have tried to impose an ideology on their times, and the tragi-comic consequences of those attempts." http://www.answers.com/topic/adam-curtis. Adds Curtis, “The central claims are that politicians have exaggerated the scale of the terrorist threat, from which they offer to protect us; that the fortunes of neo-conservatism and radical Islamism are closely connected; and that popular beliefs about these groups are inaccurate.” http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery;jsessionid=1m394abcnt6i9?method=4&dsid=2222&dekey=The+Power+of+Nightmares&gwp=8&curtab=2222_1&sbid=lc03a

What is the root cause of all of this paranoia? Simply put, the people who subscribe to such beliefs—and there are millions of them; they are called Leftists in Europe, Liberals in the US—have a worldview based in Post-Modern Identity Politics and Neo-Marxist Analysis, topped with a generous dollop of emotional instability.

The worldwide Left has been gelded. The God That Failed (see, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0231123957/102-3860228-9248124?v=glance) has failed them, indeed.

Characteristically, the Left cannot conceive of the possibility that it is their beloved socialism that is flawed. The Leftist thinks—knows!--that it has to be lies, damnable lies fomented by the “Neo-Cons” that has placed the Left permanently into the losing role.

And therein lies the real tragedy of the Left.

Who Are The "Good Guys" Here?

2005-04-12T08:50:00.000-04:00

China accused of crushing campaign against Muslim Uighurs

Tue Apr 12, 2:25 AM ET

BEIJING (AFP) - China is directing a crushing campaign of religious repression against Muslim Uighurs in the name of anti-separatism and counter-terrorism, a report by two US-based human rights groups said. "At its most extreme, peaceful activists practicing their religion in ways that the Party and government deem unacceptable are arrested, tortured, and at times executed," said the 114-page report by Human Rights Watch and Human Rights in China...

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20050412/ts_afp/chinaxinjiangusrights

Feminism, 2005

2005-04-11T11:43:00.000-04:00

"...But Alba defends the film (Sin City) from accusations that it is misogynistic. "The women are completely empowered," Alba said. "It's not just women being victimized. It's everybody."

http://entertainment.msn.com/movies/article.aspx?news=187134&GT1=6428

Frank Rich: Still Off His Rocker

2005-04-11T08:37:00.000-04:00

Whenever I read the hate-and-rage filled rantings of Frank Rich in the New York Times, I think of the quote by Gunnery Sargeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket: "What is your major malfunction, numbnuts? Didn't Mommy and Daddy show you enough attention when you were a child?" And I wonder what Rich's problem is.
In today's NYT the Limousine Liberal par excellence lets loose with another characteristically loosey-goosey shambling rambling anti-"right" diatribe, mocking, disrespecting, and outright condemning: The Papacy; the Roman Catholic Church, Mel Gibson; "The Passion of the Christ"; Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, authors of the 60-million selling "Left Behind" novels; the NBC Miniseries "Revelations"; Fox News; Sean Hannity; Shepard Smith; Rupert Murdoch; Sky Italia TV; Geraldo Rivera; Dr. Michael Baden; Tim Russert; Julie Andrews (?!); Tom DeLay; Keith Olberman; Prince Rainier of Monaco (!?!); Jesse Jackson (for siding with Terri Schiavo's parents); Terri Schiavo; and of course President Bush...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/opinion/10rich.html?pagewanted=1&8hpib

The Problems Faced By The Liberal Elites...

2005-04-10T19:43:00.000-04:00

An odd twist for an ex-dominatrix
S&M specialist-turned-bureaucrat says she endured harassment from her superior--a former client

By Elizabeth Fernandez, SF Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 10, 2005

When Susan Peacher hung up her latex evening gown and wooden paddle for a job with the federal government, the former dominatrix thought she was done with abuse.

She went to work for the Treasury Department in San Francisco, but when she arrived at her new job, she found that one of the office managers was a former client.

This man wouldn't leave her alone, she said in a sexual harassment and retaliation lawsuit, charging that he sexually harassed her, attempting to kiss her in the elevator, telling her she had "luscious lips,'' and repeatedly asking for "sessions.''

When she objected to the salacious advances, Peacher says, the manager manipulatively became her direct supervisor and downgraded her performance evaluation. When she complained to higher-ups, coming out of the closet about her previous line of work, she says she was retaliated against and given little to do.

Rather than sit idly at her desk, Peacher spent her time studying workplace harassment and labor law. She also accumulated an arsenal of damning evidence: phone logs, e-mails, documentation of encounters with her alleged harasser.

Last month, Peacher, 45, reached a settlement with the government, which did not admit liability or fault. She will receive $35,000 in compensatory damages, $25,000 in attorney fees, a job transfer, approval to work at her South Bay home one day a week, and the restoration of almost 800 hours of assorted leave...
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/04/10/MNGDHC62EP1.DTL

Nov 1998 - "I think I'll take a bath in his blood."

2005-04-09T19:20:00.000-04:00

Mar 1988 - "When I fight someone, I want to break his will. I want to take his manhood. I want to rip out his heart and show it to him."
18 Jul 1991 - In his hotel room, boxer Mike Tyson rapes Desiree Washington, a Miss Black America contestant.
28 Jun 1997 - During the third round of a title fight, boxer Mike Tyson is disqualified after biting off a one-inch portion of Evander Holyfield's right ear.
14 Sep 2000 - "I'm on the Zoloft to keep me from killing y'all. ... It has really messed me up, and I don't want to be taking it, but they are concerned about the fact that I am a violent person, almost an animal. And they only want me to be an animal in the ring."
1 May 2002 - During a press conference, boxer Mike Tyson tells reporters: "I wish that you guys had children so I could kick them in the fucking head or stomp on their testicles so you could feel my pain because that's the pain I have waking up every day."
21 Jun 2003 - Mike Tyson allegedly beats the crap out of two autograph seekers in the lobby of the Brooklyn Marriott.

El Naar and I were in Borders Books & Music, at White Flint Mall in Rockville, Maryland, today, perusing magazines and books—when there in front of me was Mike Tyson, holding the hand of a cute little girl of about 8 years. I said, “Hey, Champ…how about an autograph?” El Naar handed me a pen and Tyson said, “What’s your name?” He gave me the autograph, which he had to write a second time because he spelled my name wrong the first time. He seemed like a really nice guy, though.

"Rapacious Capitalism", The Washington Post, and the Papacy

2005-04-06T17:58:00.000-04:00

The Leftist punditocracy consistently uses a form of blithe intellectual laziness as a replacement for actual thinking--and as shorthand for their pronouncements of Leftist agenda. In the Liberal Style Book, to take one common example, the "right-wing" leader of a nation (i.e., a leader who is not a communo-fascist, or who is pro-USA) is routinely--and lazily--referred to by the soubriquet "strongman". Thus, in the MSM Augusto Pinochet is referred to as the former Chilean "strongman", yet the abominable Fidel Castro is his nation’s "leader" due to his superstar status in the Leftist pantheon. Now we can add another phrase to the mix, “Rapacious Capitalism”.

Masochistically perusing Richard Cohen's column in yesterday's WaPo ("The Whole Picture on John Paul II" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26525-2005Apr4.html), in which Cohen excoriates the late Pontiff for (yawn!) his opposition to birth control and other such Liberal cultural touchstones, I came across the following sentence: "He (the late John Paul II) was that abstraction (sic-ed.) very close to my heart -- a political (not cultural) liberal -- who hated communism and disliked rapacious capitalism and confronted authoritarian regimes wherever he found them."
"Rapacious capitalism". What or who is he talking about? Is Cohen referring to, say, Halliburton (double-yawn!) as an example of this odious political philosophy? Or is he saying that while he basically approves of the capitalist economic system, he is against it in its “rapacious” guise? Typically, he’s unclear. It’s a Leftist manifestation of the Big Lie—say something—anything, no matter how preposterous--with enough authority, and it becomes enveloped in the aura of truth.

He seems to be saying that like the Pope, he, the virtuous Cohen, is against “rapacious capitalism”. But what makes Cohen think that the Pope would agree with him?

That John Paul II’s writings on the capitalist economic system, found in his encyclical, Centesimus Annus, are PRO-Capitalism, is just an inconvenient reality to the fellow travelers of the Left. Writes the Pope, “It would appear that, on the level of individual nations and of international relations, the free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs…” and “The Church acknowledges the legitimate role of profit as an indication that a business is functioning well. When a firm makes a profit, this means that productive factors have been properly employed and corresponding human needs have been duly satisfied.” See, http://www.tompaine.com/articles/papal_legacy_questioning_capitalism.php?dateid=20050404 Yes, the encyclical makes the case that the wealthy have a duty to help the poor—but that is a basic Christian virtue. But nowhere in the encyclical does the Pope use the phrase “rapacious Capitalism”. See, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html

So, then, what is the genesis of this phrase, endorsed, according to Cohen by the Holy See itself?

The phrase “rapacious Capitalism” is found in the writings of the extreme leftist sociologist Henry Giroux, a leading exponent of the trendy pseudo-philosophy called “Critical Pedagogy.” “Critical pedagogy can best be described as…the neo-Marxist examination of the relationship between power and culture, aimed at addressing issues of class, race, gender, and social justice through the remaking of societal institutions—to the realm of schools…In the Committee for Economic Development’s 1994 report, Putting Learning First,” Giroux states, bizarrely, that the Academy is a place where “anyone who does not believe that rapacious capitalism is the only road to freedom and the good life is dismissed as a crank”. That statement is sheer lunacy, and gives you an idea of the tenor of Giroux's writings, but a discussion of the generally Left-of-Mao political beliefs of Academe are outside the scope of the present blog posting. For an overview of "critical pedagogy”, see, http://www.educationnext.org/20034/77.html

I don’t know if Cohen is familiar with the writings of Henry Giroux, or his colleagues Peter McLaren, and Michael Apple. A quick Google search of the phrase “rapacious capitalism” leads to numerous links, but the fact remains that the phrase has gained a certain status as (falsely) attributed to Pope John Paul II. Thus, through the filter of Leftist Doublespeak, the Papacy becomes allied with the causes championed by Liberal atheists everywhere.

So, here we are faced with the spectacle of columnist Richard Cohen taking the neo-Marxist epithet “rapacious capitalism” and linking it to the Vatican, as Cohen—standing as a surrogate for the Left—basks in the Pope's mojo and thinks that he is thereby lending moral authority to his case.

Through a chimera of intellectual vacuity and ingrained Leftist delusions, Cohen (and his cohorts) use the words “rapacious capitalism” as if the two components were inseparable. But then, the extreme Leftist intelligentsia is incapable of seeing the world through anything but the Red-Colored glasses of Marxist Economic Analysis.

Peanut Butter and Jelly. Love and Marriage—Horse and Carriage. And to the Leftist pundits, “Rapacious” and “Capitalism". It’s a natural.

Snappy!

2005-04-05T21:06:00.000-04:00

Roy Orbison, Slim Whitman and the Westerners, 1954

Leftwing Catholics Spew Hatred of Fallen Pope

2005-04-04T17:02:00.000-04:00

A leftwing Catholic group in France has issued a statement denouncing the late John Paul II as a bloodthirsty reactionary, according to Agence France-Presse. The group, whose French name "Nous Sommes Aussi l'Église" (NSAE) means, "We Are Also The Church," accused the deceased Pope of a "total rejection of democracy," of "supporting, even giving his blessing to, Latin American dictatorships" and of involving the Vatican in "powerful – even Mafia-like – financial systems, and in financial and economic oppression." (via FreeRepublic)

NSAE was founded by Jacques Jean Edmond Georges Gaillot, who was formerly bishop of Evreux in Normandy. John Paul II stripped Gaillot of his bishopric in 1995 after the rebel cleric repeatedly refused to cease his public denunciations of the Church, of which the above quotations provide characteristic examples.

Nicknamed the "red cleric" for his communist sympathies, Gaillot has delighted the left with such antics as chaining himself to a tenement to protest homelessness, and shipping out with a Greenpeace vessel to harass French naval forces engaged in nuclear testing in the Pacific. Needless to say, Gaillot is an impassioned apologist for Palestinian violence.

Following his demotion, Jacques Gaillot took to the Internet, with a Web site called Partenia.org. His group NSAE claims 400 members.

Despite the venom gushing forth from Gaillot's 400 acolytes, John Paul II was a true friend of the poor, both in word and deed. As John Zmirak notes in the FrontPage article, "Why the Left Hates the Church" – the same article, by the way, which Steven Plaut cites below:

"One of the most surprising aspects of the contemporary Left is its inveterate hostility to the Catholic Church around the world. You’d think that a political tendency whose ostensible purpose is the betterment of the poor would look with favor on the single largest provider on earth of private charity, health care, free education and housing for the needy. … Instead, the Left has focused on issues which really appeal to its privileged constituency—namely, preserving and extending the sexual libertinism that became respectable in the 1960s."

John Paul II is widely known for his role in toppling the Soviet empire. Less well-known are the warnings he issued against an "unbridled capitalism," unrestrained by charity, humility, justice and compassion.
Posted by Richard Poe @ 2:57 PM Eastern Time
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/index.html

Worst of the Worst

2005-04-04T16:47:00.000-04:00

PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Michael Goldfarb
917-353-5408 (Geneva mobile/dial U.S.)

WORLD'S WORST REGIMES UNVEILED
Several of the World's Greatest Human Rights Violators Sit on UN Human Rights Panel

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND, March 31, 2005 -- Freedom House today released its annual list of the world's most repressive regimes at the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Six are members of the UN body, charged with monitoring and condemning human rights violations.
The report, "The Worst of the Worst: The World's Most Repressive Societies 2005," includes detailed summations of the dire human rights situations in Belarus, Burma (Myanmar), China, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Laos, Libya, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Chechnya, Tibet, and Western Sahara are included as territories under Russian, Chinese, and Moroccan jurisdictions respectively.
The report is available online.
Significantly, six of the eighteen most repressive governments--those of China, Cuba, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe--are members of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), representing nearly 11 percent of the 53-member body.
"Repressive governments enjoying CHR membership work in concert and have successfully subverted the Commission's mandate," said Freedom House Executive Director Jennifer Windsor. "Rather than serving as the proper international forum for identifying and publicly censuring the world's most egregious human rights violators, the CHR instead protects abusers, enabling them to sit in judgment of democratic states that honor and respect the rule of law," she said.
A report issued March 21 by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan acknowledged that the presence of these nations on the CHR has dealt a severe blow to the UN body's credibility. Mr. Annan recommended that states elected to a reformed "Human Rights Council" be chosen based on their compliance with the "highest human rights standards."
"The Secretary General's recommendation is welcome: the solution to restoring the UN human rights panel's credibility lies in the establishment of strict membership criteria," said Ms. Windsor. "In the short-term, however, it is incumbent upon the CHR's democratic member states to work together as an effective bloc that upholds the Commission's mandate by strengthening and promoting human rights and democracy."
An additional nine countries Freedom House rates as "Not Free" enjoy membership on the Commission: Bhutan, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Swaziland, and Togo. Together, "Not Free" countries comprise just over one quarter of the Commission's membership. A breakdown by Freedom House ranking of CHR members available online.
The "Worst of the Worst" report is excerpted from Freedom House's forthcoming annual global survey, Freedom in the World 2005. The countries deemed the most repressive earn some of the worst numerical ratings according to the survey's methodology, which measures the state of political rights and civil liberties worldwide, and classifies countries as Free, Partly Free, or Not Free.
Freedom House is a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the United Nations.

-- end --
http://www.freedomhouse.org/media/pressrel/033105.htm

"It's only a matter of time until they start using guns"

2005-04-02T17:42:00.000-05:00

Yet more left wing thuggery

Pat Buchannan was doused with salad dressing while delivering a speech at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo last night. Shouting, "Stop the bigotry," the attacker succeeded in silencing the speech of which he disapproved.
Regrettably, the free speech suppressor was released on a mere $100 bail, and faces only misdemeanor charges. CNN reports
"He could have faced a felony assault charge, but Pat Buchanan decided to not press that charge," university spokesman Matt Kurz said.
I think this is misplaced compassion on Buchannan's part. I implore him to reconsider, and press felony charges. Why is Buchannan being so soft on serious crime? Yes, serious crime.
My friend and fellow-blogger Steve Bainbridge commented "It's only a matter of time until they start using guns" and he is entirely correct. Thuggery always escalates unless it is severely repressed. That's why we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, isn't it?
But aside from worrying about where this will lead, there is the little matter of where it has already gotten us. Conservative speakers are obviously regarded as fair game. This is the second attack on a prominent conservative giving a lecture in three days. And it is the latest chapter in a long and dishonorable list of supposedly "amusing" incidents directed at conservatives.
I have said before and I will say it again. Cream pies, salad dressing, and other comestible weapons are used to humiliate and ultimately silence political opponents. It is a serious crime against free discourse. The ridiculous weapons employed mask a serious political agenda, one which is totalitarian in aim.
Pat Buchannan should step up and do the right thing. It is not just about him, it is about our freedom of speech.
Thomas Lifson 4 1 05
http://www.americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=1900

Religion of Peace, Part IX

2005-04-02T17:34:00.000-05:00

"As the IDF eases restrictions and removes checkpoints throughout Judea, Samaria and Gaza - Arab civilians continue to be caught smuggling weapons in increasingly creative ways..."
http://www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=79397

It Takes a Tough Man to Make a Tender Chicken

2005-04-01T11:36:00.000-05:00

Frank Perdue Dies at 84 After Illness

SALISBURY, Md. - Frank Perdue, who built a backyard egg business into one of the nation's largest poultry processors using the folksy slogan, "It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," has died, the company said Friday…
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050401/ap_en_tv/obit_perdue

Terri Schiavo: Judicial Murder

2005-03-31T08:28:00.000-05:00

Her crime was being disabled, voiceless, and at the disposal of our media
by Nat Hentoff March 29th, 2005 10:59 AM

For all the world to see, a 41-year-old woman, who has committed no crime, will die of dehydration and starvation in the longest public execution in American history.
She is not brain-dead or comatose, and breathes naturally on her own. Although brain-damaged, she is not in a persistent vegetative state, according to an increasing number of radiologists and neurologists.
Among many other violations of her due process rights, Terri Schiavo has never been allowed by the primary judge in her case—Florida Circuit Judge George Greer, whose conclusions have been robotically upheld by all the courts above him—to have her own lawyer represent her.
Greer has declared Terri Schiavo to be in a persistent vegetative state, but he has never gone to see her. His eyesight is very poor, but surely he could have visited her along with another member of his staff. Unlike people in a persistent vegetative state, Terri Schiavo is indeed responsive beyond mere reflexes.
While lawyers and judges have engaged in a minuet of death, the American Civil Liberties Union, which would be passionately criticizing state court decisions and demanding due process if Terri were a convict on death row, has shamefully served as co-counsel for her husband, Michael Schiavo, in his insistent desire to have her die.
Months ago, in discussing this case with ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, and later reading ACLU statements, I saw no sign that this bastion of the Bill of Rights has ever examined the facts concerning the egregious conflicts of interest of her husband and guardian Michael Schiavo, who has been living with another woman for years, with whom he has two children, and has violated a long list of his legal responsibilities as her guardian, some of them directly preventing her chances for improvement. Judge Greer has ignored all of them.
In February, Florida's Department of Children and Families presented Judge Greer with a 34-page document listing charges of neglect, abuse, and exploitation of Terri by her husband, with a request for 60 days to fully investigate the charges. Judge Greer, soon to remove Terri's feeding tube for the third time, rejected the 60-day extension. (The media have ignored these charges, and much of what follows in this article.)
Michael Schiavo, who says he loves and continues to be devoted to Terri, has provided no therapy or rehabilitation for his wife (the legal one) since 1993. He did have her tested for a time, but stopped all testing in 1993. He insists she once told him she didn't want to survive by artificial means, but he didn't mention her alleged wishes for years after her brain damage, while saying he would care for her for the rest of his life.
Terri Schiavo has never had an MRI or a PET scan, nor a thorough neurological examination. Republican Senate leader Bill Frist, a specialist in heart-lung transplant surgery, has, as The New York Times reported on March 23, "certified [in his practice] that patients were brain dead so that their organs could be transplanted." He is not just "playing doctor" on this case.
During a speech on the Senate floor on March 17, Frist, speaking of Judge Greer's denial of a request for new testing and examinations of Terri, said reasonably, "I would think you would want a complete neurological exam" before determining she must die.
Frist added: "The attorneys for Terri's parents have submitted 33 affidavits from doctors and other medical professionals,all of whom say that Terri should be re-evaluated."
In death penalty cases, defense counsel for retarded and otherwise mentally disabled clients submit extensive medical tests. Ignoring the absence of complete neurological exams, supporters of the deadly decisions by Judge Greer and the trail of appellate jurists keep reminding us how extensive the litigation in this case has been—19 judges in six courts is the mantra. And more have been added. So too in many death penalty cases, but increasingly, close to execution, inmates have been saved by DNA.
As David Gibbs, the lawyer for Terri's parents, has pointed out, there has been a manifest need for a new federal, Fourteenth Amendment review of the case because Terri's death sentence has been based on seven years of "fatally flawed" state court findings—all based on the invincible neglect of elementary due process by Judge George Greer.
I will be returning to the legacy of Terri Schiavo in the weeks ahead because there will certainly be long-term reverberations from this case and its fracturing of the rule of law in the Florida courts and then the federal courts—as well as the disgracefully ignorant coverage of the case by the great majority of the media, including such pillars of the trade as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, and the Los Angeles Times as they copied each other's misinformation, like Terri Schiavo being "in a persistent vegetative state."
Do you know that nearly every major disability rights organization in the country has filed a legal brief in support of Terri's right to live?
But before I go back to other Liberty Beats—the CIA's torture renditions and the whitewashing of the landmark ACLU and Human Rights First's lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld for his accountability in the widespread abuse of detainees, including evidence of torture—I must correct the media and various "qualified experts" on how a person dies of dehydration if he or she is sentient, as Terri Schiavo demonstrably is.
On March 15's Nightline, in an appallingly one-sided, distorted account of the Schiavo case, Terri's husband, Michael—who'd like to marry the woman he's now living with—said that once Terri's feeding tube is removed at his insistent command, Terri "will drift off into a nice little sleep and eventually pass on and be with God."
As an atheist, I cannot speak to what he describes as his abandoned wife's ultimate destination, but I can tell how Wesley Smith (consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture)—whom I often consult on these bitterly controversial cases because of his carefully researched books and articles—describes death by dehydration.
In his book Forced Exit (Times Books), Wesley quotes neurologist William Burke: "A conscious person would feel it [dehydration] just as you and I would. . . . Their skin cracks, their tongue cracks, their lips crack. They may have nosebleeds because of the drying of the mucous membranes, and heaving and vomiting might ensue because of the drying out of the stomach lining.
"They feel the pangs of hunger and thirst. Imagine going one day without a glass of water! . . . It is an extremely agonizing death."
On March 23, outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo was growing steadily weaker, her mother, Mary, said to the courts and to anyone who would listen and maybe somehow save her daughter:
"Please stop this cruelty!"
While this cruelty was going on in the hospice, Michael Schiavo's serpentine lawyer, George Felos, said to one and all: "Terri is stable, peaceful, and calm. . . . She looked beautiful."
During the March 21 hearing before Federal Judge James D. Whittemore, who was soon to be another accomplice in the dehydration of Terri, the relentless Mr. Felos, anticipating the end of the deathwatch, said to the judge:
"Yes, life is sacred, but so is liberty, your honor, especially in this country."
It would be useless, but nonetheless, I would like to inform George Felos that, as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said: "The history of liberty is the history of due process"—fundamental fairness.
Contrary to what you've read and seen in most of the media, due process has been lethally absent in Terri Schiavo's long merciless journey through the American court system.
"As to legal concerns," writes William Anderson—a senior psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard University—"a guardian may refuse any medical treatment, but drinking water is not such a procedure. It is not within the power of a guardian to withhold, and not in the power of a rational court to prohibit."
Ralph Nader agrees. In a statement on March 24, he and Wesley Smith (author of, among other books, Culture of Death: The Assault of Medical Ethics in America) said: "The court is imposing process over justice. After the first trial [before Judge Greer], much evidence has been produced that should allow for a new trial—which was the point of the hasty federal legislation.
"If this were a death penalty case, this evidence would demand reconsideration. Yet, an innocent, disabled woman is receiving less justice. . . . This case is rife with doubt. Justice demands that Terri be permitted to live." (Emphasis added.)
But the polls around the country cried out that a considerable majority of Americans wanted her to die without Congress butting in.
A March 20 ABC poll showed that 60 percent of the 501 adults consulted opposed the ultimately unsuccessful federal legislation, and only 35 percent approved. Moreover, 70 percent felt strongly that it was wrong for Congress to get into such personal, private matters—and interfere with what some advocates of euthanasia call "death with dignity." (So much for the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of due process and equal protection of the laws.)
But, as Cathy Cleaver Ruse of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops pointed out:
"The poll [questions] say she's 'on life support,' which is not true [since all she needs is water], and that she has 'no consciousness,' which her family and dozens of doctors dispute in sworn affidavits."
Many readers of this column are pro-choice, pro-abortion rights. But what choice did Terri Schiavo have under our vaunted rule of law—which the president is eagerly trying to export to the rest of the world? She had not left a living will or a durable power of attorney, and so could not speak for herself. But the American system of justice would not slake her thirst as she, on television, was dying in front of us all.
What kind of a nation are we becoming? The CIA outsources torture—in violation of American and international law—in the name of the freedoms we are fighting to protect against terrorism. And we have watched as this woman, whose only crime is that she is disabled, is tortured to death by judges, all the way to the Supreme Court.
And keep in mind from the Ralph Nader-Wesley Smith report: "The courts . . . have [also] ordered that no attempts be made to provide her water or food by mouth. Terri swallows her own saliva. Spoon feeding is not medical treatment. This outrageous order proves that the courts are not merely permitting medical treatment to be withheld, they have ordered her to be made dead."

In this country, even condemned serial killers are not executed in this way.

http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=62489&page=hentoff&issue=0513&printcde=MzMzNjgyNjQwNA==&refpage=L25ld3MvaW5kZXgucGhwP2lzc3VlPTA1MTMmcGFnZT1oZW50b2ZmJmlkPTYyNDg5

Religion of Peace, Part VIII

2005-03-28T21:32:00.000-05:00

Pakistani Worshippers Attacked on Easter Sunday

One Christian killed, seven injured in village church shooting.

by Barbara G. Baker

ISTANBUL, March 28 (Compass) -- Armed gunmen attacked Christian worshippers as they emerged from Easter Sunday services in a village church near the southern outskirts of Lahore yesterday, killing one young Christian man and injuring seven other congregants.
Irshad Masih, in his early 20s, died in the church yard from a bullet that struck his head during a half hour of indiscriminate shooting by four attackers. The deceased leaves behind an 18-year-old wife and an infant daughter.
Seven other victims suffering severe gunshot wounds in their legs, abdomen and other parts of their bodies were hospitalized at Lahore’s Jinnah Hospital. Attending doctors declared this morning that all were now off the critical list.
Pastor Riaz Gill of Victory Church International had completed Easter Sunday celebrations and then dismissed his congregation at 10:30 yesterday morning. As the people left the church, located in Khamba village in the Wapda Town Phase II sector of Lahore, four young men started shooting at the worshippers.
According to eyewitnesses at the church, police summoned to the scene initially arrested three of the four suspects, recovering at least one rifle and a pistol. But police later told an investigative team from Lahore’s Center for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS) that they had only arrested two of the accused culprits, claiming that another two suspects, who were minors, had escaped...
http://www.worthynews.com/christian-persecution/pakistani-worshippers-attacked-easter.html

nau-se-a (nôz-, -zh, -s-, -sh)

2005-03-25T08:40:00.000-05:00

nau-se-a (nôz-, -zh, -s-, -sh)
noun
1. A feeling of sickness in the stomach characterized by an urge to vomit..
2. Strong aversion; disgust.

Here we go again! Wealthy NY Times left-wing propagandist/columnist Bob Herbert indulges his (and all liberals’) far-out fantasy of collectivist wealth-redistribution, and, naturally!, throws in some gratuitous mean-spirited comments about the American hoi-polloi, who are, apparently, so "distracted" by tabloid TV that they almost deserve to be exploited by the GOP fat-cats. Thank goodness that Bob is there to set us straight:

First, Comrade Bob identifies the "problem"...
“President Bush believes in an "ownership" society, which means that except for the wealthy, you're on your own. The president's budget would cut funding for Medicaid, food stamps, education, transportation, health care for veterans, law enforcement, medical research and safety inspections for food and drugs. And, of course, it contains big new tax cuts for the wealthy. These are the new American priorities. Republicans will tell you they were ratified in the last presidential election. We may be locked in a long and costly war, and federal deficits may be spiraling toward the moon, but the era of shared sacrifices is over. This is the era of entrenched exploitation. All sacrifices will be made by working people and the poor, and the vast bulk of the benefits will accrue to the rich. F.D.R. would have stared slack-jawed at this madness. Even his grand Social Security edifice is under assault by the vandals of the G.O.P….”

…and then he blames YOU for it!
“While the press and the public are distracted by one sensational news story after another - Terri Schiavo, Michael Jackson, steroids in baseball, etc. - the president and his party have continued their extraordinary campaign to undermine the programs that were designed to fend off destitution and provide a reasonable foundation of economic security for those not blessed with great wealth..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/opinion/herbert25.1.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2fOp%2dEd%2fColumnists

"Oh, you're cute... like a velvet glove cast in iron!"

2005-03-24T11:23:00.000-05:00

The Shangri-las...need I say more?

The greatest Girl Group of all time!

DNC Chair Howard Dean Changes Mind: He Really Likes Rednecks, After All

2005-03-23T17:39:00.000-05:00

DNC Chair Howard “Yeeeaaaagggghhhh!!!” Dean seems to have had a change of heart. Back in 2003 the failed Presidential nominee cynically disclosed that despite his obvious distaste for “guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks”, he’d court their votes in order to win:

“Dean's comment on Confederate flags, pickups sparks Iowa dust-up
WASHINGTON (AP) — A comment by Howard Dean about Confederate flags and pickup trucks has embroiled the leading Democrats in Iowa's presidential caucuses in a name-calling donnybrook. "I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," the former Vermont governor said in a telephone interview quoted in Saturday's Des Moines Register. "We can't beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/nation/2003-11-02-dean-flag_x.htm#

But now it seems that the superannuated Preppie has had a change of heart:

“Wednesday, 03/23/05 Democrats must work in state to win it, Dean says By IAN DEMSKY, Staff Writer
Party chairman sees need for respecting South, values If the Democrats want to win in Tennessee, the first thing they have to do is campaign here, Howard Dean told a packed house at Vanderbilt University last night. Dean, national chairman of the Democratic Party, was greeted with a standing ovation from the largely student audience. He said that as the party moves forward it needs to show those who live south of the Mason-Dixon Line that it respects them and the values they hold. ''I don't believe in blue states or red states,'' the former 2004 presidential candidate said. ''I believe in purple states — and some are more purple than others.'' http://www.tennessean.com/government/archives/05/03/67294794.shtml?Element_ID=67294794

And Furthermore...

2005-03-23T17:32:00.000-05:00

Why are the Dems so confused by, and afraid of, “values” (code word for traditional Christianity)? Here’s Dean again, addressing the fellow-travelers at Vanderbilt University last night:

''We need to talk about values and not be afraid of them,'' he said, going on to make two biblical references."

And this from a man who quit going to Church altogether years ago, in a dispute wiith his Church over the route of a bike path!
http://www.tennessean.com/government/archives/05/03/67294794.shtml?Element_ID=67294794

New York Elites Praise Public Sculpture: "Pregnant, Mutilated Virgin Mary with Dangling Fetus"

2005-03-23T16:58:00.000-05:00

What more can I possibly say about this? As Christians throughout the world celebrate Holy Week, the cultural elites give us a 35 foot tall bronze sculpture of a mutilated Virgin Mary, complete with dead fetus...

"Back uptown, a small group of youths gathered around Lever House owner Aby Rosen's newest acquisition, (Artist Damien) Hirst's thirty-five-foot-tall pregnant Madonna (or "The Virgin Mother"), installed on the building's Park Avenue plaza. Staring at her animal-skull head and the fetus dangling from her exposed abdomen, one asked, "What does it mean?" His friend was quick to answer: "It's art, man." Hirst could not have said it better..."
http://artforum.com/diary/id=8568

Chinese Epicures Outraged

2005-03-23T08:19:00.000-05:00

KFC pulls two items from its Chinese menu
Associated Press
Updated: Thu. Mar. 17 2005 7:26 AM ET
KFC outlets in China have apologized to customers and stopped selling "New Orleans" flavor roast chicken wings and chicken burgers after finding a seasoning used in the products contains an industrial dye linked to cancer.
"We feel deeply sorry for this food safety accident and promise it will never happen again," Yum Brands Inc., parent company of KFC, said in a statement received Thursday.
Yum, based in Louisville, Kentucky, did not name the supplier of the contaminated seasoning, which it said contains Sudan I, a red dye used for coloring oils, waxes, petrol and shoe polish that has been linked to cancer...

A local gourmet expresses outrage at the Colonel.
Note delicious canines in pens.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1111062467733_56/?hub=Health

Why Does the Left Want to Kill Terri Schiavo?

2005-03-22T09:32:00.000-05:00

Why does the Left want to kill Terri Schiavo? The reason is not complex—they want her to die because they want the Federal Courts, rather than the Congress, to define and set the parameters of “life”. There are two reasons for this. First, the American Leftist Elite still adheres to the old canard that the typical American KKK-Racist-Idiot-Anti-Semite-Homophobic-Sexist-Xenophobe cannot be trusted to send “progressive” representatives to Washington. And, they reason, if the troglodytic masses continue to vote in Conservatives, their hateful Leftist agenda may never totally emerge from under the rock where it belongs (though I doubt they'd phrase it that way!). Second, and more important, is that by vesting all decisions relating to “life” in the Federal Courts, which are of course already predominantly liberal (think: 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals), the Left has a better chance of seeing its program come to fruition—its program in this case being unfettered access, forever, to abortion on demand. The future Liberal paradise includes Communist Chinese-style Government control of the actual physical population of the United States, apparently.

Furthermore, it seems to me to be grotesque that Liberals, who by nature want Government intervention in every aspect of your life (controlling where you can smoke, what you can eat, what your kids need to know about sex, etc. etc. etc.) now suddenly crow that they are the champions of the heretofore unheard of “Right to Die”. Terri Schiavo, they wail and moan, must be “allowed” to die, free from perfidious Governmental interference… It is without a doubt the most sickening display of cynical hypocrisy that I’ve ever seen.

Extreme leftist ideologue William Saletan (Columnist, Slate Magazine; Chief Political Correspondent, Air America Radio; various left-wing blogs, ‘zines, and so on) has a piece in today’s Slate Magazine, Culture Vultures - Terri Schiavo's persistent legislative state. (http://slate.msn.com/id/2115123). As per usual with compassionate, caring, loving, liberals, the article (editorial, actually) is cruel and spiteful, and muddle-headed. The fact is, as even Saletan, reports over and over again, is that Terri Schiavo does exhibit signs of cognizance…writes Saletan: “Schiavo's parents have circulated video clips purporting to show that their daughter responds to stimuli. Skeptics point out that the clips omit hours of unresponsiveness—suggesting that her "responses" may be random—and that doctors who examined her in person concluded that she wasn't really interacting with other people. Still, the videos tell a story. In one, Schiavo gags over an oral swab, and a male voice comments, "She don't like that, does she?" In another, her eyes fail to follow a balloon, and a voice says, "Terri, no, no. Come on." Then her eyes move, and the voice infers, "Oh, you see that, don't you, huh?" Schiavo's eyes bug out in a couple of videos, but only when her head slips—or is moved by her mother—from its resting place. A voice in the background tells her, "Good job!" The videos are agonizing not because they show a woman regaining awareness, but because they show the people around her laboring to interpret every twitch that way. In some scenes, Schiavo's mother speaks to her, kisses her, and shifts her position. The longest video, made surreptitiously by Schiavo's parents in violation of a court order, depicts them fishing for reactions. In the five-minute clip, her mother repeats one word 40 to 50 times. The word is "mommy" or "ma." When Schiavo fails to respond to a cue, her mother prods, "Look over at mommy." "Come on," she tells her daughter. "Over here," she says. "Hey." Not until the mother gets right up in the daughter's face does the daughter make a sound resembling a moan. If the daughter is expressing something about her mother, it looks as close to misery as to joy.”

So despite all this, in the eyes of the dogmatic Left, Terri Schiavo deserves to die. And all this is done in the name of a hate-filled Leftist political agenda.

Freedom vs. Slavery

2005-03-21T07:15:00.000-05:00

The Schiavo case, in all its complexity, and despite the rhetoric, boils down to this:

Individual liberty and freedom versus utilitarian eugenics.

New York Times March 21, 2005

Congress Passes and Bush Signs Legislation on Schiavo Case

By Carl Hulse and David D. Kirkptrick
WASHINGTON, Monday, March 21 - The House early Monday gave final Congressional approval to legislation that would allow a federal court to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, and the measure was signed quickly at the White House by President Bush, who flew back to Washington from his Texas ranch on Sunday.
Despite protests from some Democrats who accused Republicans of inappropriately injecting Congress into medical decisions related to the severely brain damaged Florida woman, the House voted 203 to 58 for the bill at the end of four tumultuous days and an emotional debate that began Sunday night at 9 and ended shortly after midnight.
Voting yes were 156 Republicans and 47 Democrats, while 53 Democrats and 5 Republicans voted no...
http://nytimes.com/2005/03/21/politics/21debate.html?hp&ex=1111467600&en=63c824cee2244482&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Washington Post: Americans Sexually and Racially Pathological

2005-03-20T14:21:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago in an Atlanta courthouse, Brian Nichols went on a murderous rampage. Then he escaped, eventually taking a woman named Ashley Smith hostage. Here's the Washington Post's account: "Nichols, who was on trial for rape and on the run from allegedly killing a judge, two law enforcement officers and a court reporter, shoved Smith into her own apartment in suburban Atlanta at 2 a.m., tied her up and held her at gunpoint. During the next seven hours, while the southeastern United States was the setting for a massive manhunt broadcast on national television, the 26-year-old widow and waitress persuaded him to untie her, then to talk about God and a divine purpose to their troubled lives. She read a bit from Chapter 33 from "The Purpose-Driven Life," the best-selling Christian book by Rick Warren. The chapter is titled "How Real Servants Act" and begins, "We serve God by serving others." Smith cooked him breakfast, pancakes and eggs. And, a few hours later, he let her go and then he peacefully surrendered. Onlookers burst into applause."

BUT: That uplifting, miraculous, and utterly Christian story cannot pass muster with the WaPo editorial staff...

"Still, there are things that lie beneath the surface that are nonetheless part of the world in which we live. Smith is white, Nichols black. In the Deep South, an accused black rapist taking a white woman captive cannot help but carry the baggage of the region's -- or the nation's -- racial and sexual pathologies..."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50148-2005Mar19.html

Well, at least the WaPo editors aren't biased!

Progress?

2005-03-18T21:46:00.000-05:00

Euthenasia Centers, Nazi Germany, 1940

Euthenasia Center, United States, 2005

Hollywood Catches Up With My Imagination

2005-03-18T20:55:00.000-05:00

When I was a young boy--in the fabled 1960s--I used to think that it would be so cool if the Fantastic Four were real...and I guess this is the next best thing! Opens nationwide, 7-8-05.

Aktion T-4 aus Amerika, 18-03-2005

2005-03-18T16:54:00.000-05:00

"…if there is no more power to fight for their own health, the right to live comes to an end." (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p.282). The benefit of eliminating approximately 70,000 handicapped persons was mentioned by Hitler on the NSDAP party conference in 1929.
http://www.deathcamps.org/euthanasia/t4intro.html

Schiavo feeding tube removed
Lawyer for husband calls last-minute efforts to intervene 'thuggery'

Updated: 4:34 p.m. ET March 18, 2005
PINELLAS PARK, Fla. -

Doctors removed Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube Friday despite an extraordinary, last-minute push by Republicans on Capitol Hill to use the subpoena powers of Congress to save the severely brain-damaged woman.
Schiavo’s family issued a statement on their Web site confirming that the tube had been disconnected. It was expected to take one to two weeks for Schiavo to die, provided no one intercedes and the tube is reinserted…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7212079/

Krauthammer Gets It Right--Again

2005-03-18T15:53:00.000-05:00

What's Left? Shame.

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 18, 2005; Page A23

At his news conference on Wednesday, President Bush declined an invitation to claim vindication for his policy of spreading democracy in the Middle East. After two years of attacks on him as a historical illiterate pursuing the childish fantasy of Middle East democracy, he was entitled to claim a bit of credit. Yet he declined, partly out of modesty (as with Ronald Reagan, one of the secrets of his political success) and partly because he has learned the perils of declaring any mission accomplished.
The democracy project is, of course, just beginning. We do not yet know whether the Middle East today is Europe 1989 or Europe 1848. In 1989 we saw the swift collapse of the Soviet empire; in 1848 there was a flowering of liberal revolutions throughout Europe that, within a short time, were all suppressed.
Nonetheless, 1848 did presage the coming of the liberal idea throughout Europe. (By 1871, it had been restored to France, for example.) It marked a turning point from which there was no going back. The Arab Spring of 2005 will be noted by history as a similar turning point for the Arab world.
We do not yet know, however, whether this initial flourishing of democracy will succeed. The Syrian and Iraqi Baathists, their jihadist allies, and the various regional autocrats are quite determined to suppress it. But we do know one thing: Those who claimed, with great certainty, that Arabs are an exception to the human tendency toward freedom, that they live in a stunted and distorted culture that makes them love their chains -- and that the notion the United States could help trigger a democratic revolution by militarily deposing their oppressors was a fantasy -- have been proved wrong.
As an advocate of that notion of democratic revolution, I am not surprised that the opposing view was proved false. I am surprised only that it was proved false so quickly -- that the voters in Iraq, the people of Lebanon, the women of Kuwait, the followers of Ayman Nour in Egypt would rise so eagerly at the first breaking of the dictatorial "stability" they had so long experienced (and we had so long supported) to claim their democratic rights.
This amazing display has prompted a wave of soul-searching. When a Le Monde editorial titled "Arab Spring" acknowledges "the merit of George W. Bush," when the cover headline of London's The Independent is "Was Bush Right After All?" and when a column in Der Spiegel asks "Could George W. Bush Be Right?" you know that something radical has happened.
It is not just that the ramparts of Euro-snobbery have been breached. Iraq and, more broadly, the Bush doctrine were always more than a purely intellectual matter. The left's patronizing, quasi-colonialist view of the benighted Arabs was not just analytically incorrect. It was morally bankrupt, too.
After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself on being the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet, when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.
A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile Gen. Augusto Pinochet eight years after he's left office, and becomes a human rights hero -- a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing -- Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria and, until yesterday, Hussein and his sons -- nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed, virulent hostility to America's courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.
The international left's concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (such as Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel -- an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.
Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading "Thank you, George W. Bush," and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45508-2005Mar17.html

Religion of Peace, Part VII

2005-03-18T12:14:00.001-05:00

The radio exchanges…depict a scene of chaos and previously unimagined horrors…with hellish reports of people jumping from windows, jet fuel blazing through office floors and colleagues stuck on upper floors above the fires from which there was no escape...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0308290322aug29,1,6770855

Victims jump from World Trade Center to escape flames, 9/11/01

http://www.political-comedy-central.com/wtc.html

Like omigod!

2005-03-18T07:49:00.000-05:00

Diapers?! Eeeeeewwwww!!!

"It's this reality. Like omigod, I have to tell the maid to buy diapers and get the pool boy to walk the dog? Can't I just make out with Kevin all the time? Being married sucks."

-- Britney Spears, complaining in Allure magazine about her grueling life as a stepmother to Kevin Federline's two kids.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45536-2005Mar17.html

Vampirella...

2005-03-17T21:03:00.000-05:00

In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.

But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.
William Butler Yeats, Oil and Blood (1933)
http://www.vampirella.com/

Religion of Peace, Part VI

2005-03-17T19:41:00.000-05:00

AP: Terrorists Train for Seaborne Attacks

Mar 17, 5:53 PM (ET)
By JIM GOMEZ

MANILA, Philippines (AP) - Two of the most dangerous al-Qaida-linked groups in Southeast Asia are working together to train militants in scuba diving for seaborne terror attacks, according to the interrogation of a recently captured guerrilla.
The ominous development is outlined in a Philippine military report obtained Thursday by The Associated Press that also notes increasing collaboration among the Muslim militants in other areas, including financing and explosives, as extremists plot new ways to strike.
In the past year, the Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiyah has given Abu Sayyaf militants in the Philippines at least $18,500 for explosives training alone, the report said...
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050317/D88T0KUO0.html

Hey Barbarella!

2005-03-17T13:01:00.000-05:00

hey barbarella
my babe interstellar
the universe belongs to you and to me

hey barbarella
my babe psychedella
when we're together all the planets stand still
hey barbarella
my babe twisterella
the milky way is made for you and for me

Religion of Peace, Part V

2005-03-16T16:13:00.000-05:00

New York Times March 16, 2005

U.S. Report Lists Possibilities for Terrorist Attacks and Likely Toll
By Eric Lipton

WASHINGTON, March 15 - The Department of Homeland Security, trying to focus antiterrorism spending better nationwide, has identified a dozen possible strikes it views as most plausible or devastating, including detonation of a nuclear device in a major city, release of sarin nerve agent in office buildings and a truck bombing of a sports arena.
The document, known simply as the National Planning Scenarios, reads more like a doomsday plan, offering estimates of the probable deaths and economic damage caused by each type of attack.
They include blowing up a chlorine tank, killing 17,500 people and injuring more than 100,000; spreading pneumonic plague in the bathrooms of an airport, sports arena and train station, killing 2,500 and sickening 8,000 worldwide; and infecting cattle with foot-and-mouth disease at several sites, costing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Specific locations are not named because the events could unfold in many major metropolitan or rural areas, the document says...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/16/politics/16home.html?ei=5090&amp;en=447b6571833ca6bd&ex=1268629200&partner=rssuserland&pagewanted=print&position=

A Mental Disorder Not In DSM IV (but should be)

2005-03-16T10:48:00.000-05:00

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (popularly known as DSM-IV), is published by the American Psychiatric Association and covers all mental health disorders for both children and adults. It also lists known causes of these disorders, statistics in terms of gender, age at onset, and prognosis as well as some research concerning the optimal treatment approaches. Bear this in mind as you continue reading this entry:

I have witnessed many political demonstrations in my 47 years of life, starting with the 1969 Vietnam War Moratorium that I actually participated in along with a few dozen of my fellow citizens in the small suburban town where I lived as a child. Since then, in my journey from left to right I have participated in protests which ranged from the somber--a solemn memorial for the victims of the Contras in Nicaragua (1981)--to the demented--watching many naked gay men roam about, some fondling others in broad daylight in the middle of the National Mall in Washington, DC, as RuPaul warbled her hit Supermodel from a stage outside the Capitol Building (1993). To my astonishment, I even witnessed a nude woman marching down New York’s Fifth Avenue in the midst of the 1994 Pride (Gay Rights) Parade, pausing outside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral for the sole purpose of mooning the shocked and appalled parishioners exiting the Church after Mass--and all this was done to the cheers and whistles and hollers of support from hundreds of marchers and sympathetic onlookers. Do I detect a pattern here?
For at least a decade the prevailing mood at leftist anti-war, pro-abortion, whatever, protest rallies has been one of street festival--sort of like a communist Mardi Gras. Giant papier mache puppets, protesters dressed as clowns, pierced-branded-and tattooed children of privilege leading Grand Guignol-like parades while crashing garbage can lids together and pounding on empty buckets…scenes like these are de rigueur at any respectable hate, er, protest rally.
I recently came across a photo of a protest staged outside the White House in 1965 by the Mattachine Society, the first major political group dedicated to the expansion of Gay Rights. What is striking is that in the photo the protesters—both men and women—are dressed neatly in shirts, ties, and dresses. This sort of decorum would be wildly out of place at today’s protests.
The fervor, the anger, the noise making and screaming, the sheer out-of-control lunacy of today’s protests marks them as a new development in the leftist world, and in leftist history. Street protests are common currency in the world of leftist discourse, whether the SDS riots in Chicago (1968) or the Paris Spring revolts of that same year, or any number of others. But only in the past decade has the typical leftist street protest/mass rally begun to resemble a collective temper tantrum.
For that is what it is—a collective temper tantrum. 25 years after the ascendance of the “Me Generation” and the politics of Personal Identity, and 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Americo-European Left has become an outlet more for the bizarre paraphilias of its members than a serious political force. In a time when Gay Rights Marches resemble BDSM scenarios and Anti-War Rallies have the look and feel of Punk Rock concerts, the organized Left is sweeping itself into the “dustbin of history”.

This article, written by John J. Ray, goes a long way to explaining this phenomenon. Ray makes a plausible case that the politics of the Left are rooted in a form of psychological disorder. Here is an excerpt:

What Are Leftists?

By John J. Ray FrontPageMagazine.com | June 20, 2002
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1226

“…Psychological Leftism

It is submitted here that the major psychological reason why Leftists so zealously criticize the existing order and advocate change is in order to feed a pressing need for self-inflation and ego-boosting -- and ultimately for power, the greatest ego boost of all. They need public attention; they need to demonstrate outrage; they need to feel wiser and kinder and more righteous than most of their fellow man. They fancy for themselves the heroic role of David versus Goliath. They need to show that they are in the small club of the virtuous and the wise so that they can nobly instruct and order about their less wise and less virtuous fellow-citizens. Their need is a pressing need for attention, for self-advertisement and self-promotion -- generally in the absence of any real claims in that direction. They are intrinsically unimportant people who need to feel important and who are aggrieved at their lack of recognition and power. One is tempted to hypothesize that, when they were children, their mothers didn’t look when they said, "Mummy, look at me".

This means that the "warm inner glow" that they obtain from their advocacy and agitation is greatly prized. So it is no wonder that anything which threatens to disturb it -- such as mere facts -- is determinedly ignored. This view of Leftism as a club of the righteous that must never be disturbed or threatened is explored in detail by Warby (2002). See also Ridley (2002) for a brief account of the way Lomborg’s findings were greeted primarily by abuse rather than by any serious attempt at refutation.

And, of course, people who themselves desperately want power, attention and praise envy with a passion those who already have that. Businessmen, "the establishment", rich people, upper class people, powerful politicians and anybody who helps perpetuate the existing order in any way are seen by the Leftist as obstacles to him having what he wants. They are all seen as automatically "unworthy" compared to his own great virtues and claims on what they already have. "Why should they have...?" is the Leftist’s implicit cry -- and those who share that cry have an understanding of one-another that no rational argument could achieve and that no outsider can ever share.

Envy is a very common thing and most of us have probably at some time envied someone but, for someone with the Leftist’s strong ego needs, envy becomes a hatred and a consuming force that easily accounts for the ferocious brutality of Communist movements and the economically destructive policies (such as punitively high taxation, price controls and over-regulation generally) employed by Leftists in resolutely democratic societies. So the economic destruction and general impoverishment typically brought about by Leftists is not as irrational as it at first seems. The Leftist actually wants that. Making others poorer is usually an infinitely higher priority for him than doing anybody any good. One suspects that most individual Leftists realize that no revolution or social transformation is ever going to put them personally into a position of wealth or power so the destruction of the wealth and power and satisfaction of those who already have it must be the main thing they hope to get out of supporting Leftist politics. For a fuller account of the enormously destructive nature of envy see Schoeck (1969).

Whether or not someone is important, rich, successful, famous etc., is however of course very much a matter of individual perception. If many of the world’s most famous sports stars were introduced to me, for instance, I might well in all innocence proceed to ask them; "And what do you do for a living?" And while Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is my personal hero, there are many, even in academe, who would never have heard of the Mahatma. This "relativity" of importance, prestige etc. would seem to explain why many active Leftists are in fact college or university professors. College or university professor is a generally high status occupation that provides an above-average income so might, on the face of it, be seen as already providing considerable recognition and praise. But if status is precisely why certain people have gone to the considerable trouble generally required to enter that occupation, it could well be that the ego need of that person is so big that even more recognition is then craved. A college professorship may be prestigious but still be seen as providing far too little power, public exposure and opportunity for self-display. "Seeing I am so smart, I should be running the whole show", is an obvious line of thought for such people. Just some power and fame is still not enough power and fame for them.

The need for self-display does however in most people tend to decline as they mature -- which is part of the reason why graduates tend to be less radical than students and why older people tend to be much more conservative than young people (Ray, 1985). To misquote Lenin (1952) only slightly, much of Leftism would appear to be "an infantile disorder".

And nothing above, of course, is meant to suggest that pressing ego needs, self-righteousness etc are confined to Leftists. It is merely meant to say that Leftism is the principal political expression of such needs. Such needs can also be met by religion etc. and it must be noted that Communism was often described as a religion by its critics. Why people choose politics rather than some other means of meeting their ego needs would have to be the subject of a whole new enquiry but it seems possible that the potentially very broad exposure that politics provides to an individual might attract the people with the very highest ego needs. This high level of ego need among Leftists would also explain the generally much greater political activism of the political Left compared to the rather somnolent political Right.

It would also explain why Leftists so often have a "spare me the details" or "Don’t worry about the facts" orientation. For most Leftists, it is the activism itself rather than what is advocated that is the main point of the exercise. As long as the cause advocated is both generally praiseworthy and disruptive to implement, that will suffice. The insincerity of the Leftist is of course an abiding theme in the many writings of Ayn Rand (e.g. Rand, 1957) -- who sees the hunger for power as the real motivation behind everything that the Leftist does…”

Hitler Demoted

2005-03-16T08:50:00.000-05:00

The existing Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem has been given a post-modern revisionist makeover (The Holocaust at Human Scale -- New Museum in Jerusalem Reflects Change in Israelis' Perspective on Tragedy -- By Molly Moore, Washington Post Foreign Service, Wednesday, March 16, 2005; Page A16 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36823-2005Mar15.html). Taking an (unacknowledged) cue from Daniel Goldhagen's 1997 book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, the museum now emphasizes the role played by large numbers of bureaucrats rather than just the Nazi leadership in fomenting the European Jewish Holocaust. This quasi-Marxist tactic (class analysis) is, of course, common in leftist circles (and the academic Holocaust memorial establishment is most certainly leftist in politics). Says Dan Michman, chief historian at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum: "Forty or fifty years ago, we tended to put the emphasis on Hitler as being a grand architect who designed everything and gave orders," said historian Michman. "We now know he was important, but he only set the framework. The collaboration of many spheres in the bureaucracy and among the German and European population was the major reason why so many people could have been exterminated."

God help us all.

The Most Important Sites in Cyberspace--Really

2005-03-15T16:37:00.000-05:00

Jihad Watch
http://jihadwatch.org/

Dhimmi Watch
http://jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/

The Middle East Media Research Institute
http://memri.org/

"Fight against such as those to whom the Scriptures were given [Jews and Christians]...until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued." (Koran, Surah 9:29)

Teenage Haiku, 1973

2005-03-14T22:45:00.000-05:00

Frequently depressed

as a boy: because I played
Days of Future Passed

Breathe deep, the gathering gloom...

Shocking, Unbelievable, Incredible, Earth-Shattering, Mind-Blowing News: MSM Biased Against Bush

2005-03-14T19:24:00.000-05:00

Study Shows U.S. Election Coverage Harder on Bush

Mon Mar 14,10:01 AM ET By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. media coverage of last year's election was three times more likely to be negative toward President Bush than Democratic challenger John Kerry according to a study released Monday.
The annual report by a press watchdog that is affiliated with Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism said that 36 percent of stories about Bush were negative compared to 12 percent about Kerry, a Massachusetts senator.
Only 20 percent were positive toward Bush compared to 30 percent of stories about Kerry that were positive, according to the report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The study looked at 16 newspapers of varying size across the country, four nightly newscasts, three network morning news shows, nine cable programs and nine Web sites through the course of 2004…

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=2&u=/nm/20050314/ts_nm/media_report_dc

Revealed: Israel plans strike on Iranian nuclear plant

2005-03-14T19:15:00.000-05:00

March 13, 2005

By: Uzi Mahnaimi The Times of London

ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans for a combined air and ground attack on targets in Iran if diplomacy fails to halt the Iranian nuclear programme.
The inner cabinet of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, gave “initial authorisation” for an attack at a private meeting last month on his ranch in the Negev desert.
Israeli forces have used a mock-up of Iran’s Natanz uranium enrichment plant in the desert to practise destroying it. Their tactics include raids by Israel’s elite Shaldag (Kingfisher) commando unit and airstrikes by F-15 jets from 69 Squadron, using bunker-busting bombs to penetrate underground facilities...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1522978,00.html

Orthodoxy Under Attack (for the past 150 years)

2005-03-14T17:36:00.000-05:00

As we approach Holy Week, it is a good time to see what it means, historically, to be a Christian. Popular fads come and go (see article by self-styled “born-again Christian” and left-wng radical Jim Wallis, below), but as the psalmist wrote, “That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes 1:9, KJV. For almost 1,600 years the parameters of orthodox Christianity were defined by a small number of creeds, chief among them the Nicene Creed.

The Nicene Creed, or the Icon/Symbol of the Faith, is a Christian statement of faith accepted by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, and major Protestant churches. It gets its name from the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), at which it was adopted and from the First Council of Constantinople (381AD), at which a revised version was accepted. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed).

Here is the full text of the Nicene Creed:

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who, for us men for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Amen.

One hundred and fifty years ago a new movement arose in thee social upheaval attendant with the United States’ rapid industrialization. It was a secular socialistic movement whose founders cloaked their new ideas in the mantle of Christianity. This is what is today known as the Social Gospel Movement. How this previously unheard of amalgamation of Gospel truth and the utopian social mysticism of Fourier and Saint-Simon came to be lies in large part in the fact that in 19^th Century America Protestant theologians were the most credible public thinkers. It seems bizarre to us today, but a century and a half ago the tone of public discourse was set by eminent preachers such as Henry Ward Beecher. So, it is entirely plausible to imagine why these proto-socialists would adopt the demeanor and trappings of such men—it gave them automatic credibility among the burgeoning middle-class and thus an outlet for their new ideas. Wikipedia puts it succinctly: “The phrase Social Gospel refers to a liberal movement within American Protestantism that attempted to apply biblical teachings to problems associated with industrialization. It took form during the latter half of the 19th cent. under the leadership of Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch, who feared the isolation of religion from the working class. They believed in social progress and the essential goodness of humanity. The views of the Social Gospel movement were given formal expression in 1908 when the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America adopted what was later called “the social creed of the churches.” Advocated in the creed were the abolition of child labor, better working conditions for women, one day off during the week, and the right of every worker to a living wage. With the rise of the organized labor movement in the early 20th cent. the Social Gospel movement lost much of its appeal as an independent force. However, many of its ideals were later embodied in the New Deal legislation of the 1930s.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Gospel)

Nowhere in the Social Gospel movement is found anything resembling a historic creed of Christianity. In fact, by positing that man is an inherently good and ethical creature, and that man is justified by works alone, the Social Gospel preachers flew in the face of 2,000 years of Christian orthodoxy: See, for two of myriad examples, Romans 5:12: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned” and Ephesians 2:7-9: “⁷in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. ⁸For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God– ⁹not by works, so that no one can boast.”

This entire concept is absent from the 19^th Century origins of the Social Gospel movement, just as it is in today’s manifestation.

The Social Gospel movement is on one hand a primitive sort of non-scientific socialism, steeped in a weak “do-goodism” and thus ideal for today’s sentimental leftist romantics who find this sort of thing appealing. On the other hand, the Social Gospel movement is a Christian heresy, due not to it’s emphasis on a mawkish “can’t we all just get along” ideas, but, rather, to it’s insistence in the non-sinful nature of man and the validity of salvation through works.

As traditional American—indeed, all Western—culture withers away with alarming speed, so too disintegrates traditional Western Christian culture. It can be said with certainty that Social Gospel tenets have all but replaced the historical traditions of the Mainline Protestant and Catholic churches in the United States. The reasons for this are complex and will be the subject of a future post in this blog. So it is with sadness and sorrow that we read the article below, from the left-wing AlterNet web site. To atheists, deists, left-wingers, nominal Christians, liberals, Communists, Socialists and radicals of all stripes what the author writes seems good, fair, and “compassionate”. It may be many things. But it is not Christian:

What Jesus Wouldn’t Do

By Jim Wallis, AlterNet

Posted on March 9, 2005,http://www.alternet.org/story/21428/

The politics of Jesus is a problem for the religious right.

In Matthew’s 25th chapter, Jesus speaks of the hungry, the homeless, the stranger, prisoners, and the sick and promises he will challenge all his followers on the judgment day with these words, “As you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.” James Forbes, the pastor of Riverside Church in New York City, concludes from that text that, “Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor!” How many of America’s most famous television preachers could produce the letter?

The hardest saying of Jesus and perhaps the most controversial in our post–Sept. 11 world must be: “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.” Let’s be honest: How many churches in the United States have heard sermons preached from either of these Jesus texts in the years since America was viciously attacked on that world-changing September morning in 2001? Shouldn’t we at least have a debate about what the words of Jesus mean in the new world of terrorist threats and pre-emptive wars?

Christ commands us to not only see the splinter in our adversary’s eye but also the beams in our own, which often obstruct our own vision. To name the face of evil in the brutality of terrorist attacks is good theology, but to say they are evil and we are good is bad theology that can lead to dangerous foreign policy. Christ instructs us to love our enemies, which does not mean a submission to their hostile agendas or domination, but does mean treating them as human beings also created in the image of God and respecting their human rights as adversaries and even as prisoners. The words of Jesus are either authoritative for Christians, or they are not. And they are not set aside by the very real threats of terrorism. The threat of terrorism does not overturn Christian ethics.

The issue here is not partisan politics, and there are no easy political solutions. The governing party has increasingly struck a religious tone in an aggressive foreign policy that seems much more nationalist than Christian, while the opposition party has offered more confusion than clarity. In any election we choose between very imperfect choices. Yet it is always important to examine what is at stake prayerfully and theologically.

This examination among evangelicals became clear in the 2004 Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility, an unprecedented call to social action from the National Association of Evangelicals. In contrast to the Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson era, evangelicals are now showing moral leadership in the fight against global poverty, HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, and sustainability of God’s earth.

These changes represent both a reaction against overt partisanship and a desire to apply Christian ethics to a broader set of issues. Many people of faith have grown weary of the religious right’s attempts to narrow the moral litmus test to abortion and gay marriage. For example, when likely voters were asked in a 2004 poll whether they would rather hear a candidate’s position on poverty or on gay marriage, 75 percent chose poverty. Only 17 percent chose gay marriage. Any serious reading of the Bible points toward poverty as a religious issue, and candidates should always be asked by Christian voters how they will treat “the least of these.” Stewardship of God’s earth is clearly a question of Christian ethics. Truth telling is also a religious issue that should be applied to a candidate’s rationales for war, tax cuts, or any other policy, as is humility in avoiding the language of “righteous empire,” which too easily confuses the roles of God, church, and nation.

War, of course, is also a deeply theological matter. The near unanimous opinion of religious leaders worldwide that the Iraq war failed to fit “just war” criteria is an issue for many Christians, especially as the warnings from religious leaders have proved prophetically and tragically accurate. The “plagues of war,” as the pope has referred to the continuing problems in Iraq, are in part a consequence of a “Christian president” simply not listening to the counsel of religious leaders who tried to speak to the White House. What has happened to the “consistent ethic of life,” suggested by Catholic social teaching, which speaks against abortion, capital punishment, poverty, war, and a range of human rights abuses too often selectively respected by pro-life advocates?

The religious right’s grip on public debates about values has been driven in part by a media that continues to give airtime to the loudest religious voices, rather than the most representative, leaving millions of Christians and other people of faith without a say in the values debate. But this is starting to change as progressive and prophetic faith voices are speaking out with a confidence and moral urgency not seen for 25 years. Mobilized by human suffering in many places, groups motivated by religious social conscience (including many evangelicals not defined by the religious right) have hit a new stride in efforts to combat poverty, destructive wars, human rights violations, pandemics like HIV/AIDS, and genocide in places like Sudan.

In politics, the best interest of the country is served when the prophetic voice of religion is heard—challenging both right and left from consistent moral ground. The evangelical Christians of the 19th century combined revivalism with social reform and helped lead movements for abolition and women’s suffrage—not to mention the faith-based movement that directly preceded the rise of the religious right, namely the American civil rights movement led by the black churches.

The truth is that most of the important movements for social change in America have been fueled by religion—progressive religion. The stark moral challenges of our time have once again begun to awaken this prophetic tradition. As the religious Right loses influence, nothing could be better for the health of both church and society than a return of the moral center that anchors our nation in a common humanity. If you listen, these voices can be heard rising again.

What Took So Long?

2005-03-13T22:35:00.000-05:00

Let's suppose for a moment that these Islamic clerics' motives are pure and not a prophylactic measure against anti-Muslim sentiment on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Madrid slaughter...what took them so long? And why haven't the tens of millions of other "Muslim Clerics" in the world also done so?

Bin Laden fatwa as Spain remembers
MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Muslim clerics in Spain have issued what they called the world's first fatwa, or Islamic edict, against Osama bin Laden as the country marked the first anniversary of the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people.

They accused him of abandoning his religion and urged others of their faith to denounce the al Qaeda leader, who is believed to be hiding out near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
The ruling was issued by the Islamic Commission of Spain, the main body representing the country's 1 million-member Muslim community. The commission invited imams to condemn terrorism at Friday prayers.
The fatwa said that according to the Koran "the terrorist acts of Osama bin Laden and his organization al Qaeda ... are totally banned and must be roundly condemned as part of Islam." (Full story)
The action took place on the eve of the first anniversary of the country's worst-ever terror attack -- which many observers have coined as Europe's 9/11, a reference to the al Qaeda attacks on the United States in 2001.
More than 1,500 people were injured when 10 backpack bombs exploded on packed commuter trains on March 11, 2004...

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/03/11/madrid.anniversary/index.html

White Kittens

2005-03-12T08:50:00.000-05:00

I couldn't stop laughing when I saw and heard this!
http://www.rathergood.com/punk_kittens/

Fell in love wth a cat...

Break Time

2005-03-06T17:21:00.000-05:00

In George Orwell's 1984, protagonist Winston Smith describes the neologism doublethink this way:
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.'

This morning over coffee I read two articles in today's Washington Post. What Has Floppy Ears And a Subversive Tale? By David Montgomery (a misleading, ignorant, sarcastic (that is, ignorant and sarcastic toward Conservatives) look at a group of heroic liberals attending a local Washington, DC dissenting Presbyterian Church—dissenting because they are a Gay and Lesbian Church, with a Gay Minister and thus in administrative conflict with their denominational sect, the liberal Presbyterian Church USA—to watch the so-called ‘subversive’ PBS kids TV show about a cartoon character with a lesbian mother) and Right With God - Evangelical Conservatives Find a Spiritual Home on the Hill By Hanna Rosin (an insulting, demeaning, hateful, and sardonic look at evangelical Christians on Capitol Hill). Both “articles” – actually, they’re both leftist polemical screeds disguised as objective articles -- were so rife with doublethink that upon completing the “articles” I was overcome with a real sense of despair. I though, hoping against hope, that perhaps I was being to harsh with the writers, and that they had written such fallacy-filled, one-sided propaganda because they simply didn’t understand the subject (religion) that they are writing about. But of course they know what they are writing about, so I had to accept the fact that rather than being intellectually lazy they were being willfully ignorant and disingenuous…and that’s worse. As a former liberal, I understand the far-left anti-American agenda of the MSM and I used to appreciate it. But now my eyes are opened, and it makes me sick. The Washington Post, the New York Times, Slate, MSNBC, CNN, NBC/CBS/ABC… None of them even makes an attempt at telling the truth. But of course, the editors of these organs of the left barely believe in the concept of objectivity, if they believe in it at all. It makes me sick at heart. So, I have decided to refrain from posting anything to this blog for one week, or, indeed, from reading anything published in the MSM, until Saturday, March 12, in order to cleanse my spirit. Then, if I do feel better, I will resume this blog. Thanks for your patience.

Et datum est ei os loquens magna et blasphemiae et data est illi potestas facere menses quadraginta duo et aperuit os suum in blasphemias ad Deum blasphemare nomen eius et tabernaculum eius et eos qui in caelo habitant et datum est illi bellum facere cum sanctis et vincere illos et data est ei potestas in omnem tribum et populum et linguam et gentem (The Apocalypse Of St. John the Apostle, Chapter 13, Verses 5-7)

Europe 2015

2005-03-05T10:10:00.000-05:00

http://www.strangecosmos.com/images/content/104810.jpg

Breaking News: Left-Wing Extremists Uncover Metaphysical Nature of God

2005-03-05T09:48:00.000-05:00

Kristen Lombardi (extreme leftist gay-activist writer, Boston Phoenix), Jim Wallis (extreme leftist neo-christian, founder of radical Sojourners magazine), and Michael Lerner (extreme leftist self appointed Rabbi, founder of radical new-age Tikkun magazine) offer their sage advice to St. Hillary on how to "get religion":

God Is a Centrist Democrat
Hillary Clinton moves self, whole party into the religious middle
by Kristen Lombardi
If it's true that the Democratic Party is about to get religion, then Hillary Clinton is first at the altar. Much has been made of Clinton's newly softened image—the way she tore down her old liberal icon and got spiritual over abortion, for instance. She told an Albany crowd on January 24 that abortion represents "a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women," and singled out "religious and moral values" as an antidote to teenage sex. Never mind the New York junior senator's continued advice that pro-choice activists find "common ground" with their anti-abortion counterparts...
http://villagevoice.com/news/0509,lombardi1,61604,6.html

Revolutions

2005-03-04T15:26:00.000-05:00

The Road to Damascus

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, March 4, 2005; Page A21

Revolutions do not stand still. They either move forward or die. We are at the dawn of a glorious, delicate, revolutionary moment in the Middle East. It was triggered by the invasion of Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and televised images of 8 million Iraqis voting in a free election. Which led to the obvious question throughout the Middle East: Why the Iraqis and not us?
To be sure, the rolling revolution began outside the Middle East with the Afghan elections. That was followed by the Iraqi elections. In between came free Palestinian elections that produced a moderate, reform-oriented leadership, followed by an amazing mini-uprising in the Palestinian parliament that rejected an attempt to force corrupt cronies on the new government.
And it continued -- demonstrations in Egypt for democracy, a shocking rarity that led President Hosni Mubarak to promise the first contested presidential elections in Egyptian history. And now, of course, the "cedar revolution" in Lebanon, where the assassination of opposition leader Rafiq Hariri led to an explosion of people power in the streets that brought down Syria's puppet-government in Beirut.
Revolution is in the air. What to do? We are already hearing voices for restraint about liberating Lebanon. Flynt Leverett, your usual Middle East expert, took to the New York Times to oppose the immediate end of Syria's occupation of Lebanon. Instead, we should be trying to "engage and empower" the tyranny in Damascus.
These people never learn. Here we are on the threshold of what Arabs in the region are calling the fall of their own Berlin Wall and our "realists" want us to go back to making deals with dictators. It would be not just a blunder but a tragedy. It would betray our principles. And it would betray the people in Lebanon who have been encouraged by those principles.
Moreover, the cedar revolution promises not only to liberate Lebanon but to transform the Middle East. Why? Because a forced Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon could bring down the Assad dictatorship. And changing Damascus would transform the region.
We are not talking about invading Syria. We have done enough invading and there is no need. If Bashar Assad loses Lebanon, his regime could be fatally weakened.
This is for two reasons: economics and psychology. Like all Soviet-style systems, the Syrian economy is moribund. It lives off Lebanese commerce and corruption. Take that away and a pillar of the Assad kleptocracy disappears. As does the psychological pillar. Dictatorships such as Assad's rule by fear, which is sustained by power and the illusion of power. Control of Lebanon is the centerpiece of that illusion. Its loss, at the hands of unarmed civilians no less, would be a deadly blow to the Assad mystique.
Bashar Assad has succeeded Saddam Hussein as the principal bad actor in the region. Syria, an island of dictatorship in a sea of liberalization, is desperately trying to destabilize its neighbors. The Hariri bombing is universally believed to be the work of Syria. The orders for last Friday's Tel Aviv bombing, designed to blow up the new Palestinian-Israeli rapprochement, came from Damascus. And we know that Syria is sheltering leading Baathist insurgents who are killing Iraqis and Americans.
There was a brief Damascus Spring five years ago when Syrians began demanding more freedom. Assad repressed it. Now 140 Syrian intellectuals have petitioned their own government to withdraw from Lebanon. They signed their names. The fear is lifting there, too. Were the contagion to spread to Damascus, the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Iranian border would be on a path to democratization.
This could all be reversed, of course. Liberal revolutions were suppressed in Europe in 1848, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Tiananmen Square in 1989. Determined and ruthless regimes can extinguish revolutions. Which is why the worst thing we can do is "engage and empower" tyrants.
This is no time to listen to the voices of tremulousness, indecision, compromise and fear. If we had listened to them two years ago, we would still be doing oil for food, no-fly zones and worthless embargoes. It is our principles that brought us to this moment by way of Afghanistan and Iraq. They need to guide us now -- through Beirut to Damascus.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5695-2005Mar3.html

New, "Hidden" Syndrome Discovered

2005-03-04T08:09:00.000-05:00

This story is making the rounds in the 'anti-war' leftist world (www.notinourname.net; www.albasra.net; www.cnn.com):

Key Iraq wound: Brain trauma Body armor prevents death, not damage

By Gregg Zoroya USA TODAY
A growing number of U.S. troops whose body armor helped them survive bomb and rocket attacks are suffering brain damage as a result of the blasts. It's a type of injury some military doctors say has become the signature wound of the Iraq war. Known as traumatic brain injury (TBI), the wound is of the sort that many soldiers in previous wars never lived long enough to suffer. The explosions often cause brain damage similar to “shaken-baby syndrome,” says Warren Lux, a neurologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. “You've got great body armor on, and you don't die,” says Louis French, a neuropsychologist at Walter Reed. “But there's a whole other set of possible consequences. It's sort of like when they started putting airbags in cars and started seeing all these orthopedic injuries.” The injury is often hard to recognize — for doctors, for families and for the troops themselves. Months after being hurt, many soldiers may look fully recovered, but their brain functions remain labored. “They struggle much more than you think just from talking to them, so there is that sort of hidden quality to it,” Lux says.
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/index.htm

Thank You, Condi!

2005-03-03T20:34:00.000-05:00

A Lebanese protester waves a flag during a daily sit-in in the capital Beirut March 2, 2005. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad flew to Saudi Arabia on Thursday for crisis talks on the future of Syrian troops in Lebanon as Russia and Germany joined international demands for their speedy withdrawal. REUTERS/Jamal Saidi

Ban the Weekdays!

2005-03-02T20:01:00.000-05:00

High Court Debates Commandments Display

(AP) - With demonstrators shouting religious slogans outside, Supreme Court justices questioned, argued and fretted Wednesday over whether Ten Commandments displays on government property cross the line of separation between church and state. Back-to-back arguments in cases from Texas and Kentucky were the court's first consideration of the issue since 1980, when justices ruled the Ten Commandments could not be displayed in public schools...
http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=US&cat=Church___State_Issues

Proposal Against the Days of the Week

From: Suburban Cowboy
To: SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States)

Esteemed Justices:
In the spirit of the current debate over whether Ten Commandments displays on government property cross the line of separation between church and state, we propose the following. The days of the week commonly used in the English language must be excised from use in the United States, because we believe that their very names violate the spirit, and the law, of the separation between church and state that is (or should be) the law of this land. To wit: The names of Monday (moon), Saturday (Saturn), and Sunday (sun), being named after pagan deities, and Tuesday (Tiwaz), Wednesday (Woden), Thursday (Thor), and Friday (Freya) being named in honor and reverence of phallocentric eurocentric gods, contravene the principles of secular atheism that this country is (or should be) founded upon. Merely saying the names of the days of the week constitutes an unconstitutional government endorsement of religion, albeit not the discredited homophobic, racist, sexist, Christian church. But religion nonetheless. Moreover, such government endorsement of religion is the root cause of grievous bodily injury in countless numbers of sensitive liberal minded Americans, who find that their pulses race and blood pressure rises in the face of government-sanctioned theocracy, impacting their health and well-being. It is therefore proposed that the hate-speech called "weekdays" and the loathsome "weekends" be renamed in a gender-neutral, inclusive manner. We suggest "1","2", "3"... etc. Of course, this may result in numerous other causes of action, as such numerals, being used in the discredited western philosophic, religious, and societal systems, are hardly inclusive of non-european-descended Americans, such as Aleuts, Tongans, Inuit, Samoans, the various tribes of indigenous pre-Columbian hunter-gatherers, and other as yet undiscoverd marginalized ethnic groupings...

In a Nutshell, 9/11

2005-03-02T19:18:00.000-05:00

OPINION: The Making Of A 9/11 Republican
By Cinnamon Stillwell
Thursday, February 24, 2005

As one of a handful of Bay Area conservative columnists, I'm no stranger to pushing buttons. Indeed, I welcome feedback from readers, whether positive or negative. I find the interplay stimulating, but I am often bemused by the stereotypical assumptions made by my critics on the left. It's not enough to simply disagree with my views; I have to be twisted into a conservative caricature that apparently makes opponents feel superior. They seem not to have considered that it's possible to put forward different approaches to various societal problems and not be the devil incarnate.
But in some ways I understand where this perspective comes from, because I once shared it. I was raised in liberal Marin County, and my first name (which garners more comments than anything else) is a direct product of the hippie generation. Growing up, I bought into the prevailing liberal wisdom of my surroundings because I didn't know anything else. I wrote off all Republicans as ignorant, intolerant yahoos. It didn't matter that I knew none personally; it was simply de rigueur to look down on such people. The fact that I was being a bigot never occurred to me, because I was certain that I inhabited the moral high ground.
Having been indoctrinated in the postcolonialist, self-loathing school of multiculturalism, I thought America was the root of all evil in the world. Its democratic form of government and capitalist economic system was nothing more than a machine in which citizens were forced to be cogs. I put aside the nagging question of why so many people all over the world risk their lives to come to the United States. Freedom of speech, religious freedom, women's rights, gay rights (yes, even without same-sex marriage), social and economic mobility, relative racial harmony and democracy itself were all taken for granted in my narrow, insulated world view.
So, what happened to change all that? In a nutshell, 9/11. The terrorist attacks on this country were not only an act of war but also a crime against humanity. It seemed glaringly obvious to me at the time, and it still does today. But the reaction of my former comrades on the left bespoke a different perspective. The day after the attacks, I dragged myself into work, still in a state of shock, and the first thing I heard was one of my co-workers bellowing triumphantly, "Bush got his war!" There was little sympathy for the victims of this horrific attack, only an irrational hatred for their own country…
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2005/02/24/cstillwell.DTL

How to Make Friends and Influence People, Democrat Style!

2005-03-01T17:44:00.000-05:00

The Electric Chair for Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell

By Stephen Crockett
Feb 26, 2005, 09:01
I think that Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell deserve the death penalty for their actions as state election officials in the 2000 and 2004 elections. Current federal law does not permit the death penalty for their actions and Constitutional restrictions make it impossible to give them the electric chair by changing the law. However, I still believe that their actions in a morally sound legal system would see them on trial for their lives!
Katherine Harris as the Republican Secretary of State in Florida during the 2000 elections seemed to be using her office to promote the election of George W. Bush over the wishes of Florida voters. She was co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida while serving as the top election official in the state...
www.DemocraticTalkRadio.com

Anti-War Activists Bring Their Message to Boston (By any means necessary)

2005-03-01T17:29:00.000-05:00

FBI: Anarchists operating in Hub
By Michele McPhee/ HERALD EXCLUSIVE
Monday, February 28, 2005
Local Joint Terrorist Task Force investigators are keeping close tabs on a group of anarchists hellbent on creating a classless society - using armed resistance if necessary, the Herald has learned. Anarchist Black Cross Federation, an organization that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller calls an ``emerging revolutionary group,'' has active members in Boston who have distributed fliers against the war in Iraq, including one that reads: "Synchronized bombing is a lie. But we can be more precise.'' The flier, released by Anarchist Black Cross Boston, goes on to list the address of Boston Police Headquarters in Roxbury, FBI headquarters in Government Center, the IRS building and a military recruiting center on Summer Street. There is also a list of corporate sites, including Fidelity, the Gap, Niketown, and Raytheon's Waltham location. ``We are aware of this group, and the flier. The potential victims were notified,'' said FBI spokeswoman Gail Marcienkiewicz…
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=70734
All we are saying...
Is give peace a chance!

Winner! Cruelest Article Ever Published

2005-02-28T09:47:00.000-05:00

From the Phillippine newspaper, Sun Star Zamboanga:

Bizarre baby born with extra body parts dies
By Jun Felciano

Thursday, February 24, 2005
A SEVEN-month-old pre-mature baby was born a freak -- having the unusual look similar to an alien to poor parents of Barangay Tumaga, this city, Tuesday night.
The baby, who died after about an hour when delivered at the Zamboanga City Medical Center (ZCMC) by her 24-year-old mother, Evelyn Ataca, through Caesarean procedure, possessed an extra pair of legs, two nostrils, two mouths, two buttocks, one of its two eyes centered at the forehead, but with only one heart, one head and one chest...Relatives said Evelyn looked normal during her conceiving period, as she never craved for any urge for a particular delicacy that could have affected her baby...
http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/zam/2005/02/24/news/bizarre.baby.born.with.extra.body.parts.dies.html

Breaking News: Washington Post Sacrifices Reality, Math, for Leftist Political Agenda

2005-02-28T09:20:00.000-05:00

Letter to the Editor, from today's WaPo, Monday, February 28, 2005 page A16.

As a high school senior, I took particular interest in Ylan Q. Mui’s Feb 23 Metro article, “MD Targets School snacks.”
Kathleen Lazor said the school administration is saying, “Make smart choices,” but removing food options for students, some of whom are old enough to drive and even vote, is not about smart choices; it’s about no choices—or the choices the school system is happy to make for you.
Moreover, I am perplexed by the statement that “about 16 percent of children across the country are overweight, meaning that their body-mass index is in the 95^th percentile for their age group.” If 16 percent of children have higher body-mass index than 95 percent of children, doesn’t that mean that 11 out of every 100 children have a higher BMI than themselves?
Or, put another way, that’s 111 percent.
Andrew Ward, Gaithersburg

DNC Chairman Howard Dean Reaches Out To Republicans By Calling Them 'Evil'

2005-02-27T19:30:00.000-05:00

Dean roars into town
Democrats welcome new DNC leader

By Joel Mathis, Journal-World, Saturday, February 26, 2005
There were plenty of screams Friday afternoon at Liberty Hall, but none of them came from Howard Dean. Instead, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee was cheered enthusiastically by a sign-waving crowd gathered to hear Dean's message that the party must build its strength in traditionally Republican states such as Kansas.
And concluding his backyard speech with a litany of Democratic values, he added: "This is a struggle of good and evil. And we're the good."
http://www.ljworld.com/section/citynews/story/197427

NBC In League With Satan (What Else Could Explain This?)

2005-02-27T19:14:00.000-05:00

From the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. I am not a Roman Catholic, but this is just nauseating. Maybe Rome should send an exorcist to 40 Rock. Hear that, Bob Wright? (Vice Chairman and Executive Officer, GE; Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, NBC Universal)
http://www.catholicleague.org/05press_releases/quarter%201/050224_nbctv.htm

NBC-TV SHOW ANGERS CATHOLICS NATIONWIDE

February 24, 2005

During the February 22 episode of the NBC-TV sitcom, “Committed,” two non-Catholics are mistakenly given Holy Communion at a Catholic funeral Mass. Nate, who is Jewish, and Bowie, a Protestant, don’t know what to do with the Eucharist, so they make several failed attempts to get rid of it. For example, they try slipping it into the pocket of a priest, dropping it on a tray of cheese and crackers, etc. At one point, the priest, who is portrayed as not knowing the difference between the Host and a cracker, goes to grab the “cracker” from a tray of appetizers; he initially balks when he discovers that it is the last one. Then he changes his mind, saying, “Oh, what the hell.” By far the most offensive scene occurs when Nate and Bowie accidentally flush what they think is the Host down the toilet...

As If He Could Say Anything BUT This!

2005-02-27T16:31:00.000-05:00

Clinton: Hillary would be an ‘excellent president’

BILL!!!

See, honey, ...it was all a big mistake...!

The Associated Press, Updated: 3:57 p.m. ET Feb. 27, 2005
TOKYO - Former President Clinton said Sunday that his wife, Hillary, would be an excellent choice as the first female leader of the world’s most powerful nation...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7041441/

Breaking News: Media Exhibits Bias Against Church, Scouts, Normality

2005-02-27T08:21:00.000-05:00

No one should be judge in his own cause -- Publilius Syrus, Maxims. The MSM would do well to remember this. Consider the following MSM headlines, concerning the apprehension of alleged serial slaughterer Dennis Rader:

Arrest Is Made in Series of Killings in Kansas
By Monica Davey, Published: February 27, 2005
…The man the police had arrested was a longtime neighbor, a leader at one of their churches, a father with a wife and two children, who had once, neighbors said, led a scouting troop for boys. http://nytimes.com/2005/02/27/national/27btk.html?hp&ex =1109566800&
amp;en =025a7bc6ff7d50eb&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Cub Scout Leader Arrested in BTK Killings
By Roxana Hegeman, Associated Press Writer
...Rader, a Cub Scout leader who was active at his Lutheran Church...
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20050227/ap_on_re_us/btk_killings

Report: Daughter of BTK suspect alerted police
59-year-old Kansan accused of killing 10
He was a one-time president of a Lutheran church, according to KAKE, and a father of two.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/27/btk.investigation/index.html

Wichita police: 'BTK is arrested' -- 10 killings blamed on 59-year-old suspect
The Associated Press, Updated: 3:16 a.m. ET Feb. 27, 2005
Rader, a Cub Scout leader who was active at his Lutheran church…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6988048/

Wichita Police Arrest Suspect in BTK Serial Killings
By Peter Slevin and Lois Romano, Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, February 27, 2005; Page A01
WICHITA, Feb. 26 -- It took 31 years and countless clues delivered by the killer himself, but jubilant Wichita police on Saturday named a Lutheran church leader…as the notorious BTK strangler...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55705-2005Feb26.html

Hollywood Star Discovers New Race; Proves that He is an Idiot

2005-02-24T11:24:00.000-05:00

The United States now has its second consecutive Black Secretary of State. Some of the biggest popular stars today are bi-racial (Lenny Kravitz, Halle Barry, and Mariah Carey come immediately to mind). Close to 4% of the total United States population consists of married Black - White couples and their offspring. A Black person sits on the United States Supreme Court. Tens of millions of Black Americans live in total racial harmony with their White fellows. Yet to Hollywood Action-Star Will Smith, romantic scenes between Blacks and Whites are "taboo" because of the ingrained racism of the average American White person.
The idea that American society has been, and continues to be, based on the oppression of racial minorities has long been dogma in the worldview of the liberal-leftist-Democrat Party cadres. According to that Article of Faith, the socioeconomic situation of one particular racial minority—Black Americans—has not only not improved, but has actually deteriorated. That there is no hard evidence of this (and little anecdotal evidence as well!) is of scarce interest to the left wing, post-modernist True Believers. To them, America is an oppressive, racist, sexist, homophobic Leviathan—yes, it must be so, because if the alternative is true then the only logical conclusion is that the left’s entire Weltanschauung is destitute of meaning.
With this in mind, consider the following, reported in today’s MSNBC:

"Was race an issue in ‘Hitch’ casting?
By Jeannette Walls
MSNBC Updated: 2:48 a.m. ET Feb. 24, 2005

Casting Will Smith’s love interest in “Hitch” was not a simple black or white decision. Eva Mendes was given the role opposite Smith because the moviemakers were worried about the public’s reaction if the part was given to a white or an African American actress, according to Smith. The actor is saying that it was feared that a black couple would have put off worldwide audiences whereas a white/African American combo would have offended viewers in the U.S.
“There’s sort of an accepted myth that if you have two black actors, a male and a female, in the lead of a romantic comedy, that people around the world don’t want to see it,” Smith told the British paper, the Birmingham Post while promoting the flick overseas. “We spend $50-something million making this movie and the studio would think that was tough on their investment. So the idea of a black actor and a white actress comes up — that’ll work around the world, but it’s a problem in the U.S.” Eva Mendes — who is of Cuban descent — was seen as a solution because apparently, the black/Latina combination is not considered taboo. Sony didn’t return calls for comment."

There are three problems with Smith’s statement (at least). First, what evidence is there that “a black couple would have put off worldwide audiences”? There is no evidence for this, of course, outside of the world of leftist orthodoxy. “There’s sort of an accepted myth that if you have two black actors, a male and a female, in the lead of a romantic comedy, that people around the world don’t want to see it” Really? By whom is this myth accepted? Second, Smith informs us that “the idea of a black actor and a white actress comes up — that’ll work around the world, but it’s a problem in the U.S.”…now, let me understand this. According to Smith, Black Male + Black Female = NG in Europe and in USA; Black Male + White Female = OK in Europe, NG in USA. Yet, direct evidence demonstrates that intermarriage between Blacks and Whites has increased since WWII at an unbelievable rate, resulting in 7 million Americans classifying themselves as mixed-race, primarily Black/White.*** Third, it seems that Smith has discovered a new creature, a new racial being that is neither black nor white. Even the most racist white man in Smith-world can enjoy a movie showing a love scene between this crypto-caucasian and a Black person. The name of this new, not-quite-white creature? “Eva Mendes — who is of Cuban descent”. She “was seen as a solution (not as a person, not as an actress, but as a ‘solution’ – Suburban Cowboy) because apparently, the black/Latina combination is not considered taboo.” The tortured logic underlying Smith’s vile racial bedevilment is so ridiculous, so fantastic, that he might consider applying for a position as Professor of Sociology at Yale University once his box-office magic fades away.

*** Smith's convoluted reasoning is not only contradicted by objective reality, but by uncharacteristically lucid statements from his fellow Leftists:

NUMBERS OF MIXED RACE PERSONS ACCORDING TO VOLUNTARY US CENSUS CLASSIFICATION

…nearly 7 million Americans described themselves as multiracial in the 2000 Census, in terms of a voluntary self classification category introduced for the first time. This figure is much higher for children under 18, of whom 4.2 percent were registered as multiracial, compared with 1.9 percent of adults. The major reason, census officials said, was that the number of interracial couples more than quadrupled.
(Washington Post, Tuesday, March 13, 2001; Page A01)

Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America

Harvard University Press (2003)
By Renee Christine Romano
Annotation
The startling rise of inter-racial marriages during the last half of the twentieth century retraces a fascinating history that begins with the end of World War II, when segregation was the law throughout most of the country.
Review
Romano, a white (Harvard) professor of African American studies who is married to a black man, examines the deeply embedded taboo of interracial marriage in the U.S. Citing studies, surveys, court accounts, media coverage, and interviews with interracial couples, Romano explores how attitudes have evolved, eventually eroding that taboo, within the last 60 years. She notes that the nation's long-held policy of "prohibiting interracial marriages while condoning interracial sex between white men and black women reinforced gender and racial hierarchies." Romano outlines the forces that eventually led to the breakdown of the taboo, from the integration of armed services during World War II to the migration of southern blacks to the North for war-related jobs, exploring the political, cultural, and social history of black-white marriages since the 1940s. The interviews are particularly powerful in conveying the challenges of interracial marriages and the changes in social attitudes since the 1940s. But Romano cautions that the increase in black-white marriages does not signify the end of structural racial inequalities in American society. ((Reviewed February 15, 2003)) Copyright 2003 Booklist Reviews.
http://booksmatter.com/b0674010337.htm

'Neither black nor white.' - mixed race people demand new census race category
Ebony, Nov, 1996 by Lisa Jones Townsel
A major controversy has exploded over the demand for a new census category for African-Americans who say they are neither Black nor White. Within recent months, the "Neither Black nor White" faction has marched on Washington D.C., and filled letters to the editor pages, sharing personal perspective on the issue. The highly sensitive subject has also triggered lively debates on the Internet. A number of celebrities have joined the debate. Among them are three-time amateur golf champ-turned-pro Tiger Woods who says he is 90 percent Oriental; actresses Halle Berry and Salli Richardson who say they are Black; singer Mariah Carey who say she is Black, Venezuelan and Irish; and the former Miss USA, Chelsi Smith who describes herself as half Black and half White…
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_n1_v52/ai_18814136

Happy Birthday, Wrangler Jane!

2005-02-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

Melody Patterson - Wrangler Jane on TV's F Troop

http://www.wranglerjane.com

Tortured High School Valedictorian, Supported by Press and Political Activists, Charged in Plot to Assassinate President Bush

2005-02-22T18:28:00.000-05:00

The Justice Department finally charged “high school valedictorian” Ahmed Omar Abu Ali with conspiring to kill President Bush. This move is not without controversy, at least among the Islamofascists and the American Leftist Press (aka, the Mainstream Media), both of which stress that 1.) the suspect was tortured while being held in Saudi Arabia (though why this is surprising, or should be relevant, is unclear), and 2.) that the suspect was the 1999 valedictorian of his high school class.

Leftist Press:
Man charged in alleged plot to assasinate Bush
U.S. citizen detained in Saudi Arabia for suspected al-Qaida links
The Associated Press

Updated: 12:07 p.m. ET Feb. 22, 2005

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A former Virginia high school valedictorian who had been detained in Saudi Arabia as a suspected terrorist was charged Tuesday with conspiring to assassinate President Bush and with supporting the al-Qaida terrorist network. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 23, a U.S. citizen, made an initial appearance Tuesday in U.S. District Court but did not enter a plea…He contended that he was tortured while detained in Saudi Arabia since June of 2003 and offered through his lawyer to show the judge his scars… http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7012172/

Islamofascist Press:
Public Court Hearing for Ahmed Abu-Ali
Ahmed Abu-Ali is a 24-year-old U.S. citizen born in Texas and raised in Virginia. He is an honor student who graduated valedictorian of his high school class…
http://www.masnet.org/pressroom_release.asp?id=2125

See also, Outsourcing Detention
Cagprisoners.com Date: 20-Dec-2004
http://www.cageprisoners.com/articles.php?aid=4354

“High School Valedictorian”— the phrase conjures up images of a young woman or man who has devoted long hours to studying, sacrificing much but gaining the prestigious position of first in class. Accused terrorist Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was valedictorian of his 1999 graduating class at the Islamic Saudi Academy (www.saudiacademy.net) in Falls Church, Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC. But this Islamic Saudi Academy is no regular school:

Saudi School in Virginia Draws Criticism
NewsMax.com Wires, Tuesday, Aug. 3, 2004

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A school that caters to children of Saudi diplomats is teaching first-graders that Judaism and Christianity are false religions, according to a Muslim group concerned that such teachings breed hatred….Free Muslim Coalition Against Terrorism is calling on Islamic Saudi Academy to remove the textbook used to teach first-graders. The teachers' edition of the textbook outlines several points of emphasis, including the statement, "All religions other than Islam are false religions." http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/8/3/155525.shtml

Look who's teaching Johnny about Islam
Saudi-funded Islamic activists have final say in shaping public-school lesson on religions
by Paul Sperry
WorldNetDaily.com, May 3, 2004

He says many of the academy's textbooks he has reviewed contain passages promoting hatred of non-Muslims. For example, the eleventh-grade text says one sign of the Day of Judgment will be when Muslims fight and kill Jews, who will hide behind trees that say: "Oh Muslim, oh servant of God, here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him."…"Christians and Jews repeatedly are labeled as infidels and enemies of Islam who should not be befriended or emulated, and are referred to in eighth-grade textbooks as 'apes and pigs,'" the report said. In addition, it found that "some Saudi government-funded textbooks used in North American Islamic schools have been found to encourage incitement to violence again non-Muslims." http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/1148

Royal Navy Goes Back To Basics

2005-02-22T15:42:00.000-05:00

Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash. – Winston Churchill

New Course by Royal Navy: A Campaign to Recruit Gays

New York Times February 22, 2005
By Sarah Lyall
LONDON, Feb. 21 - Five years after Britain lifted its ban on gays in the military, the Royal Navy has begun actively encouraging them to enlist and has pledged to make life easier when they do. The navy announced Monday that it had asked Stonewall, a group that lobbies for gay rights, to help it develop better strategies for recruiting and retaining gay men and lesbians. It said, too, that one strategy may be to advertise for recruits in gay magazines and newspapers. Commodore Paul Docherty, director of naval life management, said the service wanted to change the atmosphere so that gays would feel comfortable working there…
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/22/international/europe/22britain.html

1954 Looks At 1984

2005-02-21T22:36:00.000-05:00

Winston spies Julia: Va-va-voom!

Amnesty International: Iraqi Women 'No better off' Post-Saddam Hussein

2005-02-21T21:03:00.000-05:00

This is truly sick. That's all that El Naar and I can say about this.

Read this...
Iraqi women 'no better off'

By Jeremy Lovell in London
22-02-05 From: Reuters

NEARLY two years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, women there were no better off than under the rule of ousted dictator Saddam Hussein, the human rights group Amnesty International said today…
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12334428-23109,00.html

...then consider this...
See men shredded, then say you don't back war
March 18, 2003
By Ann Clwyd, Times of London

Another witness told us about practices of (Saddam's Ba'athist) security services towards women: “Women were suspended by their hair as their families watched; men were forced to watch as their wives were raped . . . women were suspended by their legs while they were menstruating until their periods were over, a procedure designed to cause humiliation.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3284-614607,00.html

...and this:
Women Tortured Under Saddam Seek Justice
July 10, 2004, The Times of Pakistan

BAGHDAD: Women who claim they were arrested without charge, tortured and sentenced to long years in jail under Saddam Hussein demanded on Friday the injustices they suffered also be taken into account in the trial of Iraq’s former dictator. Saddam faced seven charges at a preliminary hearing last week of crimes against humanity and war crimes such as during the 1990-1991 occupation of Kuwait and the gassing of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja two years earlier.
http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/jul2004-daily/10-07-2004/world/w19.htm

U.N.'s Ongoing Shame: Cuba On Human Rights Panel

2005-02-21T15:47:00.000-05:00

Read this...
Cuba makes most of 'human rights' post
U.N. hands Castro propaganda coup with appointment

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42953
February 21, 2005

WASHINGTON – Despite the U.S. State Department condemnation of Cuba's appointment to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, the island dictatorship is making the most of the propaganda coup.
"When the Latin American and Caribbean group of the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission elected Cuba to the Standing Committee, it was unanimous acknowledgement of Cuba's immensely prestigious reputation following a decade of work with that organization," boasted a report in the official Cuban newspaper Granma…The Cuban official made clear he intends to use his new position on the commission to embarrass the U.S. – mentioning "thousands of reports on tortures in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib."

...and Consider This
Address of Ambassador Armando Valladares', Chief of the United State's Delegation to the United Nations Human Rights' Commission. Geneva, Switzerland, February 23, 1988

Mr. Chairman, I am not a career diplomat, and I am not an expert on the technical aspects of this organism. I will not speak in a detailed manner on the reports and topics submitted under point 10. There will be other interventions during which we will listen to opinions on those important matters. Mr. Chairman, today I want to speak about torture, about what it means for a human being to be tortured, to be humiliated, or what may be even worse, to watch a friend, a companion, or a relative being tortured. As many of you know, I spent twenty-two years in prison for political reasons. Perhaps, I am the only delegate in this Commission who has spent such a long time in prison, although there are several persons here who have known in their own flesh the meaning of torture. I do not care about their political ideology, and I offer to you my embrace of solidarity, from tortured to tortured. I had many friends in prison. One of them, Roberto López Chávez, was just a kid. He went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses. The guards denied him water, Roberto lay on the floor of his punishment cell, agonizing, deliriously asking for water. water… The soldiers came in and asked him: "Do you want water?"… The they took out their members and urinated in his mouth, on his face… He died the following day. We were cellmates; when he died I felt something wither inside me. I recall when they kept me in a punishment cell, naked, with several fractures on one leg which never received medical care; today, those bones remain jammed up together and displaced. One of the regular drills among the guards was to stand on the steel mesh ceiling and throw at my face buckets full of urine and excrement. Mr. Chairman, I know the taste of the urine and the excrement of other men… that practice does not leave marks; marks are left by beatings with steel rods and by bayonet thrusts. My head is still covered with scars and you can feel the cracks. But, what can inflict more damage to human dignity, the urine and excrements thrown all over your face or a bayonet's blow? Which is the appropriate article for the discussion of this subject? Under which technical point does it fall? Under what batch of papers, numbers, lines and bars should we include this trampling of human dignity? For me, and for innumerable other human beings around the world. The violation of human rights was not a matter of reports, of negotiated resolutions, of elegant and diplomatic rhetoric, for us was a daily suffering. For me (it meant) eight thousand days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement, of cells with steel-planked windows and doors, of solitude…

http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=625

Russia Today; Europe Tomorrow; America...?

2005-02-21T14:26:00.000-05:00

Russian Forces Kill Besieged Caucasus Rebels

Sun Feb 20, 8:09 AM ET
By Oliver Bullough

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian troops on Sunday used heavy weaponry and gas to kill three rebels holed up in a house near Chechnya, local media reported. The rebels were besieged in an apartment block for more than a day, before dozens of Special Forces troops with armored vehicles subdued them, leaving their apartment in flames. The firefight in the town of Nalchik, some 75 miles from Chechnya where rebels have fought Russian rule for a decade, was a graphic example of the extent that Muslim radicalism has spread through the North Caucasus. Police said the raid was the culmination of a three-day operation to break militant Islamic groups who have intensified attacks on Russian forces in the region of Kabardino-Balkariya over the last year. "Today we ended a well-organized special operation to destroy several terrorist groups that have prepared terrorist acts on Russian territory," said Deputy Interior Minister Arkady Yedelev in televised comments. RIA Novosti news agency quoted him as saying the attacking troops had pumped in tear gas before the storm. The battle, the latest in a series of firefights outside Chechnya itself in recent months, started in the early morning when the rebels refused to surrender after being surrounded on Saturday morning. It was not clear who the rebels were, but Yedelev said Russian troops had detained five men before attacking the house. Rebel Web site www.chechenpress.co.uk reported that they did not belong to an Islamist group called 'Yarmuk' which was the target of a similar attack from Russian forces in Nalchik last month, but referred to them as Muslim fighters. Islamic militancy has increasingly spread from Chechnya to the nearby regions of Ingushetia, Dagestan, North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkariya -- where Nalchik is the capital -- since Russia sent troops back into Chechnya in 1999.
Shamil Basayev Aslan Maskhadov
"They all belonged to a reactionary branch of Islam ... and were in the general structure of bandit groups headed by (Aslan) Maskhadov and (Shamil) Basayev," said Yedelev, referring to the Chechen rebel leaders blamed by Russia for militant attacks throughout the country. Maskhadov and Basayev say they are currently observing a cease-fire, and rebel Web sites carried no reports linking them to the killed militants.

What Would America Be Like Under Islamic Law?

2005-02-21T11:44:00.000-05:00

Found on the Counter-Jihad Educaton Taskforce web site, this excerpt is funny, sad, and gives the reader a glimpse of how the unfortunate people (especially women) in Iran, Yemen, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and so on actually have to live, and that's not funny. See,
http://www.co-jet.org/cjet/1files/shariaamerica.htm

SHARIA IN AMERICA

By Ayesha Ahmed

Omar M. Ahmad founder of CAIR said: ‘Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant' he said. 'The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth,' he said.
Americans should give a serious thought to CAIR's (Council of American-Islamic Relations) agenda. If Islam and Shari’a is adopted in America, It will be great.
Muslims are right. None of the existing Islamic countries are truly Islamic, that is why they don't progress and most of them are poor, corrupt and miserable. We must implement 100% Shari’a and Sunna to get full benefits of Islam. Inshallah we will try to do it in USA to make it the first real Muslim country after the days of rightly guided khalifas consider the following advantages:

America can go to jihad against non-Muslim countries. It will bring immense wealth in booty and millions of captured women. Canada and Mexico can be easy targets and are conveniently located for easy assault and hauling of booty.
Since slavery will be allowed government can open slave markets to sell it's 20% share of the captured women.
Captured women/slave-girls can provide affordable domestic help for house wives and clean enjoyable sex for their husbands.
Enslaved men can be used as farm labor and factory workers at a much lower cost than unionized labor.
Unemployed men from the prohibited non Islamic businesses like TV, Photography, computers, mortgage companies, music industry etc can be hired as religious police for the Ministry of Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtues. They can be used to beat up women violating burqa laws, arrest men with undersize beards and whip the non religious types found loitering at prayer times.
Since men will be allowed four wives and unlimited number of slave girls, population boom will result in making the fastest growing religion grow even faster.
All non-Muslims will live under Dhimmi rules and pay heavy Jizya. Budget deficits will be a thing of the past.
Stoning of adulterers, whipping of alcohol drinkers, cutting of hands and feet of thieves and beheadings of apostates can be carried out after Juma prayers on Fridays in the local stadium. Gate charge for this gory and exciting weekly spectacle can generate a lot of revenue.
Unemployed male gynecologists can be hired to carry out circumcisions of new male converts.
Female circumcision can be made mandatory to promote piety and holiness and discourage lewdness among women.
Marriage age for girls can be lowered to 6 years. That will reduce the burden of support of large poorer families and also promote a Sunna, the tradition set by the holy prophet (peace be up on him).
Whole Ramadan will be declared as public holidays so that every one can pray and recite the Quran. Why work in the only month in which all ibadah and Quran recitals are worth 70 times the normal sawab (reward)?
Shia Muslims on temporary out of town business assignments will be able to do a temporary marriage (Muta) and enjoy home comfort outside of home.
Since menstruation is a disease according to Quran all menstruating women will be given time off to rest in bed during their periods.
All toilet seats in the public rest rooms will be reoriented so that one does not defecate facing Mecca.
All public toilets will have buckets of stones instead of toilet tissues for claiming after defecation as a movement to implement Sunna in the country.
Separate bins along roadside will be placed to drop bones and dried animal feces for Jins to snack on.
Spiraling medical costs can be brought down by the following two prong approaches:
Imams can be placed in the clinics to recite Quranic ayas (verses) and blow on the patients and pray for them. Their fee will be a fraction of what doctor's charge.
All pharmacies will be required to dispense black cumin, honey, Indian incense and camel urine as cure for all diseases as recommended by the holy prophet (pbuh). The cost will be a fraction of today's medicines.
Spiraling prison costs will come down due to the following:
All men serving time for the crime of rape will be freed if four male witnesses had not testified in the trial. Even if four male witnesses had testified, the criminal will be freed under insanity provision, since only mentally insane will rape in front of four witnesses.
All men serving sentences for beating wives will be freed, as under new American Shari’a law wife beating will be allowed.
All thieves will be freed after cutting their hands and feet.
All pedophiles will be freed, as sex with children will not be against law any more.
All slayers of unbelievers will be freed if they converted to Islam.
All these result in savings and prosperity and happiness for all. Inshallah!

Goodbye, Sandra Dee

2005-02-21T09:06:00.000-05:00

April 23, 1944 - February 20, 2005

Still True...More Than Ever

2005-02-20T08:08:00.000-05:00

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

Barry Goldwater, accepting presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention, San Francisco, July 16, 1964 .

Twelve Appalling Words, Then and Now

2005-02-20T00:38:00.000-05:00

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need -- Karl Marx

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"; have twelve more appalling words, words which by their very nature portend such wretched suffering, death, and annihilation, ever been uttered? Yet this is the creed of liberals throughout the United States.

This evening, driving to a friend’s house for a party, El Naar and I tuned into the Tammy Bruce Show (www.tammybruce.com) on the car radio. Tammy, who El Naar and I agree is one of the greatest living feminists, was in the midst of a rueful and sardonic polemic against the socialistic "national health plan" that Hillary Clinton is threatening (yet again!) to shove down our throats. Like Tammy, we agree that nothing good can come by the revolutionary overthrow of what's left of the American enterprise system by the imposition of a Soviet-style guaranteed-to-fail health care system. The liberal/leftist/Democrats in this country virtually rend their garments and anoint their heads with ashes over the "appalling" lack of socialized medicine in the United States, using rank sentiment ("Think of the children!") and appeals to greed ("Why should health care cost so much?") to make their point. But what would the real cost be of "free" national health care?
As I listened to Tammy my thoughts turned to the famous story of the "20th Century Motor Company" in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. That story within the novel concerns the 20th Century Motor Company, a thriving automobile manufacturer built from nothing by the blood, sweat and tears of a Mr. Henry Starnes. When he dies, his heirs--his three adult children--inherit the company. The three dissipated, cruel, unfeeling, and hate-filled "do-gooder" children, each of whom is a representative of one aspect of the leftist/liberal ethos, soon drive the 20th Century Motor Company to utter ruin and bankruptcy, all in the name of collectivism--"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". While that in itself is a tragedy, the most horrendous result developed during these liberals' stewardship of the company is the havoc that it plays with the workers' lives. Without the incentive to work, without pride, without the self-respect that comes from the sense of ownership, the men and women of the company become as animals, as brutes, spiritually. And therein lies the true tragedy. With that in mind, I have reprinted sections of that chapter, below. Read them as a cautionary tale:

"there was something that happened at the plant where I worked for twenty years The Twentieth Century Motor Company.

It was when the old man died and his heirs took over. ... They let us vote on it too, and everybody -- almost everybody -- voted for it ....
The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need. ... they made it sound like that anyone who'd oppose the plan was a child-killer at heart and less than a human being.

... Do you know how it worked, that plan, and what it did to people? Try pouring water into a tank where there is a pipe at the bottom draining it out faster than you pour it in and each bucket you bring breaks the pipe an inch wider, and the harder you work the more is demanded of you, and you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six -- for your neighbor's supper -- for his wife's operation -- for his child's measles -- for his mother's wheelchair -- for his uncle's shirt -- for his nephew's schooling -- for the baby next door -- for the baby to be born -- for anyone anywhere around you -- it's theirs to receive, from diapers to dentures -- and yours to work, ... with nothing to show for it but your sweat, with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure, for the whole of your life, without rest, without hope, without end ...

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need ... It took just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars --rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn't belong to him, it belonged to "the family," and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his "need" -- so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife's head colds, hoping that "the family" would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because its miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm -- so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that his need was worse than his brothers... what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

... What was it that they'd always told us about the vicious competition of the profit system, where men had to compete for who'd do a better job than his fellows? Vicious wasn't it? Well, they should have seen what it was like when we all had to compete with one another for who'd do the worst job possible. There is no surer way to destroy a man than to force him into a spot where he has to aim at not doing his best, where he has to struggle to do a bad job day after day.

... Amusement was the first thing they dropped. Aren't you always supposed to be ashamed to object when anybody asks you to give up anything, if it's something that gave you pleasure? ... There was a man who'd worked hard, all his life, because he'd always wanted to send his son through college. Well, the boy graduated from high school in the second year of the plan -- but "the family" wouldn't give the father any "allowance" for the college. They said his son couldn't go to college, until we had enough to send everybody's son to college -- and we first had to send everybody's children through high school, and we didn't even have enough for that. The father died the following year, in a knife fight with somebody in a saloon, a fight over nothing in particular -- such fights were beginning to happen among us all the time.

Then there was an old guy, a widower with no family, who had one hobby: phonograph records -- "personal luxury", they called it. But at that same meeting, Millie Bush, somebody's daughter, a mean ugly little eight-year-old, was voted a pair of gold braces for her buck teeth -- this was "medical need," because the staff psychologist had said that the poor girl would get an inferiority complex if her teeth weren't straightened out.
The old guy who loved music, turned to drink instead.

... But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls into trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra disability allowance, they got more sickness than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes -- what the hell, "the family" was paying for it!

They found more ways of getting in "need" than the rest of us could ever imagine -- they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.... Yet this was the moral law that the professors and leaders and thinkers had wanted to establish all over the earth.

If this is what it did to a single town, where we all knew on another, do you care to think what it would do on a world scale? ...To work -- with no chance of an extra ration, till the Cambodians have been fed and the Patagonians have been sent to college. To work -- on a blank check held by every creature born, by men whom you'll never see, whose needs you will never know, whose ability or laziness or sloppiness or fraud you have no way to learn and no right to question -- just to work and work and work -- and leave it up to the Ivys and the Geralds (two of the wealthy socially-conscious liberals who own the company) of the world to decide whose stomach will consume the effort, the dreams and days of your life.

And this is the moral law to accept? This -- a moral ideal? ... Our agony took four years, from our first meeting to our last, and it ended the only way it could end: in bankruptcy.

Ivy Starnes made a short, nasty, snippy little speech in which she said that the plan failed because the rest of the country had not accepted it, that a single community could not succeed in the midst of a selfish, greedy world ..."

Religion of Peace, Part VI

2005-02-19T18:56:00.000-05:00

With the MSM focused on the situation in Iraq (in its never ending quest for somthing negative to say about our military), it's easy to forget that Islamic extremists are spreading their plague in other parts of the world, Europe, Australia, even Cambodia...and the Philippines:

Philippines bombings kill at least 9
Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf claims responsibility

MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- Three bombs jolted Manila and two other Philippine cities Monday, killing at least nine people and wounding more than 100 others, police said. The Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf claimed responsibility for the blasts. The group said the bombings were retribution for a major military offensive against Islamic militants in the southern Philippines, where 60 people have been killed in recent clashes. "You can attribute this to us," an Abu Sayyaf leader, Abu Solaiman, told DZBB radio 20 minutes after Monday's first two blasts. "There is one more to come," he said before the Manila bombing. In a second telephone call, Solaiman said the bombings were a Valentine's Day "gift" to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. National police head Gen. Edgar Aglipay ordered the 114,000-member police force to tighten security in vital installations and commercial establishments nationwide. "These are despicable acts of terror, and we ask the people to brace themselves against these attacks on our freedom and security," presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye said. "We're not going to sleep tonight," added national security adviser Norberto Gonzales. The Manila bombing occurred about 7:30 p.m. on a bus along a busy highway just below a station for an elevated train and near the Intercontinental Hotel. Police said three people were killed and at least 60 others injured as the bus exploded in flames and sent debris that hit two other buses. The back of the bus was destroyed by the blast and all of its windows were blown out. The charred body of one passenger was still seated with a hand holding the seat railing. President Arroyo later visited the site. A blast outside the Gaisano Mall in southern General Santos city about an hour earlier could be heard one mile away, witnesses said. Police said at least five people were killed and at least 36 others injured. National police chief Edgar Aglipay said the bomb was believed to have been placed in a bag at a stand for three-wheel taxis about 30 yards from the mall entrance. Another bomb, believed to have been made from a mortar shell, killed a 12-year-old boy and injured at least eight people when it went off almost simultaneously at a bus terminal in Davao, also in the southern Philippines, home to a restive Muslim minority, terror groups and criminal gangs. Mayor Rodrigo called it "the handiwork of terrorists." Abu Sayyaf leader Solaiman promised more attacks in the future. "Our latest operations -- planned and executed with precision by the gallant warriors of Islam -- is our continuing response to the Philippine government's atrocities committed against Muslims everywhere," Solaiman said. "We will find more ways and means to inflict more harm to your people's lives and properties, and we will not stop unless we get justice for the countless Muslims lives and properties that you people have destroyed." Officials had expressed concerns over the prospect of a terrorist attack as the military carries out an all-out assault on Jolo island against a group of gunmen who recently attacked troops in the region, sparking clashes that have killed at least 60. The gunmen are believed to include followers of jailed Muslim leader Nur Misuari, backed by Abu Sayyaf members.

Who Is Abu Sayyaf?

2005-02-19T17:48:00.000-05:00

Interesting, and quite accurate, article from Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Sayyaf) that sheds light on the horrors faced by average citizens held hostage to fear by Islamic extremists. Will it happen here? That's unlikely, at this time. But for many European countries such a nightmare scenario is possible, and soon.

Abu Sayyaf
The Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), also known as Al Harakat Al Islamiyya, is a separatist group of islamist terrorists based in and around the southern islands of the Philippines, primarily Jolo, Basilan, and Mindanao.
Khadaffy Janjalani is named as the nominal leader of the group by the Armed Forces of the Philippines. It is reported that they recently began expanding into neighbouring Malaysia and Indonesia. The group is responsible for bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, and extortion in order to promote an independent Islamic state in western Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago and create an atmosphere conducive to the creation of a Pan-Islamic superstate in the Malay portions of South-east Asia. The name of the group is Arabic for Bearer (Abu) of the Sword (Sayyaf). The ASG is the one of the smallest and arguably the most radical and dangerous of the Islamic separatist groups in Mindanao. Some ASG members have studied or worked in Saudi Arabia and developed ties to muhajadeen while fighting and training in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Martin and Gracia Burnham, Christian missionaries kidnapped and tortured by Abu Sayyaf. Martin was executed as the Philippine Military closed in

History
Members of the ASG were once part of the Moro National Liberation Front, but started on their own in 1991 under the leadership of Abdurajik Abubakar Janjalani. Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, both of whom were involved with Operation Bojinka, took scuba trips to Puerto Galera. The trips may have been a cover for the training of Abu Sayyaf militants. After Ramzi Yousef bombed Philippine Airlines Flight 434, killing a Japanese passenger, a man stated in a telephone call, "We are [the] Abu Sayyaf Group. We explode[d] one plane from Cebu." The bombing was supposedly a test for Operation Bojinka, which was discovered by Manila police on January 6, 1995. Abu Sayyaf's first large-scale action was the beachhead assault on the town of Ipil in Mindanao in April 1995. It is responsible for the kidnapping and murder of more than 30 foreigners and Christian clerics and lay-workers. Abdurajik Janjalani was killed in a clash with the Philippine National Police on December 18, 1998. Khaddafy Janjalani, his younger brother, is said to have succeeded him. The death of Aburajik Abubakar Janjalani, otherwise known as Abu Sayyaf, marked a turning point in ASG operations, shifting from its ideological focus to more general kidnappings, murders and robberies. The ASG primarily operates in the southern Philippines with members occasionally traveling to Manila, but the group expanded its operations to Malaysia in 2000 when it abducted foreigners from two different resorts. A commander named Abu Sabaya was killed in 2002 while trying to evade forces. See, (http://www.ict.org.il/spotlight/det.cfm?id=796). Galib Andang, aka Commander Robot, was captured in Sulu in December 2003. (http://www.sunstar.com.ph/static/net/2003/12/08/commander.robot.s.capture.big.blow.to.abu.sayyaf.(12.31.p.m.).html) Abu Sayyaf is estimated to have a core membership of 200 with an extended membership of over 2000. The group was originally not thought to receive funding from any government, but intelligence reports from the United States, Indonesia, and Australia have found intermittent ties to the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist group. On February 27, 2004, a bomb exploded on the Superferry 14 near Manila, killing 116 people. Abu Sayyaf claimed responsibility. It has been their deadliest attack to date.

Iwo Jima vet: I was proud to be part of it

2005-02-19T17:25:00.000-05:00

Marines raise American flag on Mount Suribachi
By Jules Crittenden Saturday, February 19, 2005

Veterans of wars from the Pacific to Iraq gathered at the State House yesterday to mark the 60th anniversary of the U.S. Marine Corps' bloodiest battle - the monthlong fight to take Iwo Jima in 1945. "It was an honor to be there with them,'' said James Crosby, 20, a wounded Marine veteran of Iraq who was assisted out of his wheelchair to stand at the podium and address the crowd. "You see the statue and you hear about it,'' Crosby said, referring to the Iwo Jima flag-raising that has become a Marine Crops icon. ``It inspires Marines today. But no one can understand what it's like to be in combat until they've been there.'' Robert Johnston, 83, of Woburn, was one of several Iwo Jima veterans who remembered friends that didn't survive the bitter fighting. "It's heartbreaking. My best friend was killed the first day . . . Out of 60 in my platoon, there were 19 of us left when we left the island,'' said Johnston, who was awarded the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star and received a battlefield promotion from corporal to lieutenant. But Johnston said, "I was proud to be a part of it.''
Nearly 20,000 Marines were wounded and 6,821 were killed taking the island so it could be used as an emergency landing base for B-29s bombing Japan. The Medal of Honor was awarded to 27 men - more than in any other battle. An estimated 20,000 Japanese were killed.
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=69368&format=text

Shock Jock Rocked: Shock Stock Probe

2005-02-19T10:12:00.000-05:00

Michael Powell's revenge? Just asking...

SHOCK STOCK PROBE
By TIM ARANGO

February 19, 2005 -- The Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an insider-trading probe of shock jock Howard Stern's deal to join Sirius Satellite Radio. In the two weeks running up to the blockbuster announcement last October, Sirius stock soared nearly 40 percent. Even though there had been some speculation in the press that Stern might jump to satellite radio, the feds want to determine if someone who knew the deal was coming started buying up stock in anticipation of shares skyrocketing when the news got out. When Sirius made the surprise announcement, the stock jumped another 15 percent. Yesterday, New York gossip journalist Chaunce Hayden, a frequent guest on the Stern show, received a subpoena from the SEC.
He was told he needs to appear before the SEC on Wednesday to answer questions about what he heard in Stern's studio around the time of the Oct. 6 announcement that Stern was leaving free radio for Sirius… http://nypost.com/news/nationalnews/40825.htm

Babe In Toyland

2005-02-19T08:49:00.000-05:00

The Anti-Hillary

Faster, Pussycat! Pass Me That Charcoal Pencil

2005-02-18T20:06:00.000-05:00

Strip club artfully slips by anti-nudity law
Fri Feb 18, 2005 01:15 AM ET
BOISE, Idaho (Reuters) - A strip club in Boise, Idaho has found an artful way to prance past a city law that prohibits full nudity.
On what it calls Art Club Nights, the Erotic City strip club charges customers $15 (8 pounds) for a sketch pad, pencil, and a chance to see completely naked women dancers.
In 2001 the Boise City Council passed an ordinance banning total nudity in public unless it had "serious artistic merit" -- an exemption meant to apply to plays, dance performances and art classes. "We have a lot of people drawing some very good pictures," said Erotic City owner Chris Teague, who has posted many of the drawings around the club.Teague said he got the idea when a customer asked if he could get in for free to sketch the dancers. Realizing that "art classes" were exempt from the law, Teague decided to bill Mondays and Tuesdays as art nights, and let the dancers go without their G-strings and pasties. In the two months since they began, Art Club Nights have drawn full crowds of 60 people but no police citations, he said.

There's Music, and Then There's DAHV

2005-02-18T20:00:00.000-05:00

A friend turned Suburban Cowboy on to this web site. Well, there's always hope, I suppose... http://dahv.com

Shi'ite Festival Ashura Begins

2005-02-18T16:34:00.000-05:00

Shi'ites celebrate Ashura, 2004.
The Day of Ashura falls on the 10th day of Muharram in the Islamic calendar. It commemorates the death of Husayn bin Ali, the grandson of Muhammad and the third Imam of the Shi'as, at the Battle of Karbala in the year 61 AH (AD 680). The word ashura means simply ten in Arabic; hence the festival's name, literally translated, means "the tenth day". This day is of particular significance to Shi'a Muslims, who consider Husayn a rightful successor of Muhammad. Many Shi'a make pilgrimages on Ashura to the Mashhad al-Husayn, the shrine in Karbala, Iraq that is traditionally held to be Husayn's tomb. Some Shi'as also express mourning by beating themselves on the back with chains (actually, Shi'ite men beat themselves with specialized barbed steel floggers; another preferred method is cutting the scalp with a knife or straight-razor--Suburban Cowboy). This is intended to connect them with Husayn's suffering and death as an aid to salvation on the Day of Judgment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aashurah

How Soon They Forget...

2005-02-18T09:18:00.001-05:00

Kerry concedes, says national healing needed
November 3, 2004 (AP)
"We talked about the danger of division in our country and the need -- the desperate need -- for unity, for finding common ground and coming together," Kerry said. "Today, I hope we can begin the healing," he said. "America is in need of unity and longing for a larger measure of compassion," he said. "I hope President Bush will advance those values in the coming years."
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/election/s_269037.html

Richard Perle, Republican; Birkenstock Sandal, Democrat

Protester Throws Shoe at Richard Perle
February 16, 2005

By Rukmini Callimachi, Associated Press Writer

PORTLAND, Ore. - Howard Dean, the newly minted leader of the Democratic Party, and former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle made clear their opposing views on the war in Iraq during a debate marred by a protester who tossed a shoe at Perle…Perle had just started his comments Thursday when a protester threw a shoe at him before being dragged away, screaming, "Liar! Liar!"… In his new role as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Dean has stressed that Democrats are stronger than Republicans on defense. "Defense is a lot broader than swaggering around saying you're going to kick Saddam's butt," Dean said Thursday, drawing cheers from the crowd in this city that overwhelmingly voted Democratic last November…
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20050218/ap_on_re_us/dean_perle_debate

Lest We Forget

2005-02-17T21:38:00.000-05:00