Archive » 2004 » June

Am scheduled to appear on FOX & Friends tomorrow morning at 6:50am to talk about Hollywood and war. As you can tell from the timestamps on many of my posts, I am not a morning person. Tune in to see if the coffee works in time.
Speaking of FOX & Friends, the show’s news anchor Lauren [...]

Debra Saunders’ book on Al Gore is the best dissection of the mind of the Unhinged One.

On a lighter note, our HoverDisc arrived in the mail yesterday. Gotta love American ingenuity. All it is is an oversized Mylar balloon turned on its side…and my 4-year-old daughter loves it.
Other stuff we like:
Scratch Magic
Slamwich
Zingo
Sculpey
And for the baby, the indispensable Jumperoo.
Back to, uh, work!

Sam Hamod clears up some misconceptions about Islam and the Koran in the Washington Times:
The killings of Americans Nicholas Berg and Paul M. Johnson Jr. and South Korean Kim Sun-il � and that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Pakistan � are “an extreme form of execution that is most inhumane,” [...]

Oh, dear Lord. WBIR reports:
An East Tennessee man who runs an organization that works to memorialize American soldiers and police officers is now battling the U.S. Army.
Bob Parker runs a non-profit organization called “Fallen Friend.” Since 1996, Parker has sent special medallions to the survivors of soldiers and police officers killed in the line of [...]

The Jacksonville Times-Union comes to the defense of soldiers who want to listen to Rush Limbaugh. U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has offered an amendment to the fiscal 2005 Defense Authorization bill, requiring that the armed forces drop Limbaugh’s show or also add a liberal for balance. Excerpt:
There are plenty of liberal viewpoints on AFRTS, [...]

I know, I know. I said I hate Salon. Just watch the dumb ad and then read Mary Jacoby’s important follow-up to the Faisal Gill story. The Homeland Security inspector general has launched a very necessary and belated investigation.
“I was troubled by it, as I think anyone would be,” the inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin, [...]

“I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”
– (Seventy-one-year-old) Donald Rumsfeld, in a notation on a 2002 memo about interrogation tactics, which detailed how terrorism detainees may stand for up to four hours.

Ok, I love Peggy Noonan as much as anyone, but enough with the name-dropping Reagan funeral columns already…

Hey, Paul Krugman, make up your own damned Ashcroft attacks!
Turns out that his latest screed looks an awful lot like this online post from April 8 and this UPI commentary from March 14. Via economicbriefing.com
More from Donald Luskin and friends.

I promised myself I’d be a Clinton-free zone for the summer, but Bill Clinton’s resurrection of Hillary’s pathological lie about how she was named is too rich to pass up. From ABC News Online (via C-log):
Bill Clinton’s autobiography “My Life” has been raising eyebrows in New Zealand amid rumblings the former US president has been [...]

Ryan Anderson, the National Guardsmen accused of attempting to peddle sensitive military information to al Qaeda, will face a court-martial–but not the death penalty:
At a hearing in May, prosecutors presented a secretly recorded video showing Anderson meeting with two undercover military officials who were posing as members of al-Qaida.
In the meeting, Anderson offered information [...]

Habis Abdulla Al Saoub is dead–the FBI confirms that he was killed in a shootout in Pakistan last fall–so the feds have dropped terrorist charges against him. Now, that is how to fight the war on militant Islamists. Better to kill them on the battlefield before they hook up with lawyers like this and follow [...]

For all the hungry readers who have requested an RSS feed, it is now up! (God bless Sekimori.) My vocabulary has been growing exponentially in the last few weeks (puppy blender, technorati, .mu.nu, blogosphere ecosystem, Fisking, Hobb-ling, moonbats, assorted empires and alliances, etc., etc.). I had no idea what an RSS feed was until a [...]

Am told that Department of Homeland Security officials are at the scene of this Agawam, Mass., apartment, where bomb-making materials and chemicals were found.
Update: Looks like they weren’t, as Jeff G. wondered, Weapons of Mass. Destruction.
Now, if we could just get resolution on this.
Update II: Turns out the cache was pretty suspicious.

Column’s up: The lost patriots of Hollywood
Sigh. They just don’t make men like Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin and Steve McQueen anymore. Brad Pitt? Yawn. Colin Farrell? Ewww. Ben Affleck? Gag.
Anyway, I’m enabling comments on a trial basis and would love to hear about your favorite WWII flicks and scenes.
Me first: [...]

Power Line’s John Hinderaker takes a closer look at the Associated Press report on how President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld supposedly gave the green light to unleash torture on al Qaeda detainees:
I found this paragraph, near the end of the AP’s account, astonishing:
“[Rumsfeld] approved 24 interrogation techniques, to be used in a manner consistent with [...]

Frank Gaffney and the Center for Security Policy step up the call to scrutinize the apparent Islamist penetration of homeland security:
For over two years, the Center for Security Policy has been warning that organizations and individuals sympathetic to or otherwise supportive of the radical, intolerant and jihadist subset of the Muslim faith known as “Islamists” [...]

How many times have you read a story about ethics or campaign finance that quotes “non-partisan” groups such as the Center for Responsive Politics, Common Cause, Democracy 21, Public Citizen and the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington? (A Nexis search I just ran for “non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics” brings up 421 hits.)
Well, [...]

Hostage Kim Sun-Il has been beheaded. For now, South Korea remains stalwart against the Islamobarbarians. From AP:
Kim’s kidnappers had initially threatened to kill him at sundown Monday unless South Korea canceled a troop deployment to Iraq. The Seoul government rejected the demand, standing firm with plans to dispatch 3,000 soldiers starting in August.
Pray for Kim’s [...]

From Jay Nordlinger’s indispensable Impromptus on the totally dispensable Frank Rich:
Oh, hang on, I wanted to say one more thing about Frank Rich: He wrote, “To conservatives, anyone who opted for even modest restraint in Reagan coverage . . . was guilty of insufficient sentimentality; anyone who criticized the man was a traitor. ‘Thoughtless, mean, [...]

Six years ago, Reagan conservative Reed Davis put his neck on the line in support of a grass-roots initiative to ban government racial preferences in Washington State. As chairman of the local GOP in ultraliberal King County, Davis made the first formal party endorsement of the effort. “We will do everything in our power to [...]

It’s mosquito season here and the fragrant mixture of OFF and Calamine lotion is wafting through the household. A couple of readers have criticized my decision to use a small amount of DEET on my daughter. But according to an article by Tara Parker-Pope in today’s Wall Street Journal, the risks of becoming sick from [...]

Salon sucks. I never visit the site unless someone points out something worth reading. I hesitate to link to the site, because in order for you to read what I want you to read, you have to subscribe or subject yourself to one of Salon’s ads and get a free day pass. Today, I make [...]

The GOP primary in Utah is today, and the race to watch is the battle for the Republican nomination in the 3rd Congressional District. It’s an important grass-roots versus elite battle between conservative challenger Matt Throckmorton and four-term incumbent Chris Cannon.
Cannon is full of himself. He’s a lying open-borders zealot. And he’s a chauvinist pig. [...]

Last week, I keyed off a Drudge headline about Time magazine’s “revelation” of Dick Cheney’s secret location, Site R. Turns out that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette blabbed about it nearly three years ago!
My bad for castigating Time. The Post-Gazette’s bad for endangering the Veep. Time’s bad for misleading people about not-new news. Drudge’s bad for paying [...]

Joanne Jacobs notes a move by San Francisco officials to put an initiative on the state ballot to let non-citizen parents of public schoolchildren vote in school elections:
I’d bet the majority of non-citizen immigrants won’t bother to vote if it becomes possible. After all, most citizens don’t bother to vote in local elections. I also [...]

In this otherwise unobjectionable Wall Street Journal op-ed by Alan Bromley, who recounts a typically dreadful experience at an Ivy League graduation last weekend, he complains:
The dean of the School of Education talked about our country’s isolation and “our need to learn more about” Islam and Muslims–not their need to learn about multicultural capitalism that [...]

When private schools fail, they shut down. When private nursing homes fail, they shut down. But when negligent government social service agencies fail, they stay open, get more money, and claim more victims. The latest horror story out of Washington state involves Suzy Sclater, a woman with cerebal palsy and the developmental abilities of a [...]

Connecticut governor John Rowland finally announces his resignation. He was an embarrassment to the nominal party of personal responsibility. Shame on Republican leaders for not being more vocal in condemning this lying dirtbag.
A reader responds:
You are right, it took him too long to do it and he is an embarrassment to the party. But [...]