Archive » 2004 » September

An alert reader sends me a link to a rather interesting ebay auction. Here’s the auction description:
“Spend 60 minutes behind the scenes at 60 MINUTES. Meet the 60 MINUTES team including some of the on air correspondents and the producers who put the broadcast together every week. See where the stories are created and debated, [...]

The bloggers at SgtStryker.com (now known as “The Daily Brief”) have launched a new charity. They’re asking you to send your old pajamas to Dan Rather:
In order to offer an olive branch to show that we wish to assist in bringing CBS into the 21st century, I propose that we unite the blogging community and [...]

From a member of the The Dan Rather Fan Club:
Everything they said about Bush is true; they just haven’t found the evidence yet.
- Dale Channer, 34, florist, the Bronx, quoted in the New York Daily News

Via one of my blog heroines, Michele Catalano, there is good news for bloggers who use Movable Type and are sick of Reuters’ penchant for sanitizing Islamofascist killers (which I vented about here). A blogger in Brussels has invented a killer app that substitutes the word “terrorist” for every weasel word used by terrorist-sympathizing news [...]

My latest column highlights a mock terrorism drill in a Michigan public school district that substitutes homeschoolers for Islamic terrorists. Here’s an excerpt:
“The exercise will simulate an attack by a fictitious radical group called Wackos Against Schools and Education who believe everyone should be homeschooled. Under the scenario, a bomb is placed on the bus [...]

So, Muslim convert Yusuf Islam (a.k.a. Cat Stevens) was denied entry to America and the world thinks a human rights atrocity has been committed. Boo-hoo. As I’ve said many times before, there is no right to enter this country. It is a privilege.
The entitlement goons at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, of course, think otherwise [...]

Betsy’s Page notes that college students are receiving alarmist e-mails warning them they may be drafted if President Bush wins re-election. The text reads as follows:
Mandatory draft for boys and girls (ages18-26) starting June 15, 2005
There is pending legislation in the House and Senate, S89 and HR 163,to reinstate mandatory draft for boys and girls [...]

Blogging will be light the rest of the day. Complete chaos here at Malkin Central — new move, sick kid, home office full of half-assembled furniture (if I have to lock another cam, my wrist is going to fall off). Here are some IDOI book reviews in the meantime…
Thomas Sowell

John Leo
Andrew McCarthy

Bruce Ramsey
Three out of [...]

For those still interested:
Just received a call from the IUPAT, which has now identified the union member who grabbed the Bush/Cheney sign from Phil Parlock’s daughter and threw the pieces at the family as they left the event. “We are taking steps to deal with the individual,” the union told me. Meanwhile, President Bush sent [...]

In his otherwise stultifying appearance with Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa today, John Kerry noted the following intriguing tidbit, according to the Associated Press:
Kerry campaign donors apparently come in all sizes. He told Philbin and Ripa that a woman in New York gave him $385 that her 8-year-old son had raised selling homemade campaign buttons, [...]

ScrappleFace ’s Scott Ott has a new book out–a collection of his greatest satirical hits. It’s big-time funny. Buy here. Check out Scott’s latest Rathergate dispatch here.

Moved by the barbaric murder/beheading of American contractor Eugene Armstrong in Iraq, a reader remembered this poem by American poet/novelist James Dickey about a friend who was a pilot beheaded by Japanese captors during World War II. Coincidentally, the surname of the subject of Dickey’s poem was also “Armstrong.”

The Performance
by James Dickey
The last time I [...]

The irrepressible Phyllis Schlafly turned 80 this weekend. Her influence on grass-roots conservatism is profound. And she remains as incisive and impassioned and prolific as ever. Her latest of 20 ground-breaking books is The Supremacists: The Tyranny Of Judges And How To Stop It, but the one we’re reading now in the Malkin household is [...]

Daniel Pipes challenges Amnesty International and speaks the truth (as always) about national security profiling.

In a story headlined “FBI: Mortgage Fraud Is Rampant in U.S.,” the AP reports today that “fraud is running rampant in the nation’s mortgage industry, with nearly three times as many reports of suspicious activity so far this year compared with 2001.” The piece notes further:
Through the first nine months of 2004, mortgage companies and [...]

Don’t you hate it when politicians go on TV and use the verbal crutch “to be perfectly candid?” Or some other variation: “Candidly speaking, blah blah blah.” Or “In all candor, blah blah blah.” You know whatever blah-blah-blah that follows is almost certainly the opposite of honest.
The CBS media executives’ version of this annoying [...]

Many thanks to Professor Bainbridge, who points out that an op-ed in the LA Times mischaracterizes my views.
Ah well, it’s nothing new.

*Check out the super-sized weekend edition of Jewish World Review.
*LaShawn Barber, always a must-read, on Irreverent Reverends.
*And the prayer of the day, via Ben Domenech:
God of life,
there are days when the burdens we carry
chafe our shoulders and weigh us down;
when the road seems dreary and endless,
the skies grey and threatening;
when our lives have no music [...]

There’s more depressing, disgusting news on the Big Government Conservatism front. As is typically the case with government estimates, the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription drug entitlement expansion cost estimates are wrong. In the wrong direction.
The Washington Post reports:
President Bush promised Congress that his Medicare prescription drug benefit would cost no more than $400 billion over [...]

Nope, not Dan Rather. Not Mary Mapes. Seattle’s CBS affiliate radio station, KIRO-AM, has fired radio talk show host Brian Maloney for criticizing Rather.
According to the Seattle P-I:
SEATTLE — A radio talk-show host said Saturday he has been fired for criticizing CBS newsman Dan Rather’s handling of challenges to the authenticity of memos about [...]

All you need to know from today’s lengthy Washington Post tick-tock article reconstructing (deconstructing?) Rathergate:
*Rather also dismissed the notion that CBS was negligent: “I’m confident we worked longer, dug deeper and worked harder than almost anybody in American journalism does.”
*[60 Minutes" executive Josh] Howard said he believed some of the outsiders’ questions about superscript and [...]

Sgt. Stryker is looking for military bloggers to join its group blog. Sgt. Mom extends “an invitation for active duty, retirees and veterans of any military service? American, Canadian, British and Australian? to audition for a place in the Stryker collective. (I will consider DOD civilians also, especially if accompanied by literary brilliance!)”
If you meet [...]

Yes, that Korematsu.

Some critics of my most recent book have accused me of being a self-hater. Eugene Volokh deconstructed this argument here. Today, reader Richard J. Shinder points out that the accusation is based on an absurd assumption about Asian solidarity:
The left in general (and particularly leftist Caucasians) would have us believe in some sort of [...]

Unbelievable: Maryland Teacher Faces Possible $10,000 Fine For Bookmark
Kathryn Harrington, 52, of Laurel, Md., was flying home from vacation last month when airport screeners found her bookmark.
They thought the 8?-inch leather strap, with small lead weights at each end, resembled a weapon that could be used to knock people unconscious.
Airport police charged the teacher with [...]

On Sunday, C-SPAN2’s BOOK TV will air my speech at UC Berkeley as a featured program. You can catch it at 1:15pm or at 9:00pm eastern. I can safely say it was the most memorable experience I’ve had in my career. So break out the popcorn and tune in!
Update: Great photo essay on the UC [...]

Just got off the phone with Phil Parlock, who is amused by desperate liberal rumor-mongering that the man wearing an IUPAT t-shirt and holding a piece of his little girl’s Bush/Cheney sign is his own son.
“That’s ridiculous. This is a small town,” Parlock told me from his home in Huntington, W. Virginia. “Everyone would recognize [...]

Democrats accused of ripping Bush signs (Kerry supporters rip up toddler’s Bush/Cheney sign)

LI man arrested in air rage case (Drunk Kerry supporter attacks Bush supporter on airplane)
Family Of Killed Soldier: Vigil Crowd Threatening (Peace activists threaten and taunt relatives of a veteran killed in Iraq)

9/11 Memorial Vandalized (Anti-war activists at the University of Tennessee desecrate [...]

News item from Arutz Sheva:
Confirmed: Arafat Paid Father of Dolphinarium Terrorist
18:18 Sep 14, ‘04 / 28 Elul 5764
(IsraelNN.com) Recently released documents captured during Operation Defensive Shield confirm that the family of the suicide bomber who attacked the beach front Dolphinarium dance club in Tel Aviv was awarded $2000 by Yasser Arafat. Arafat also sent the [...]

Sekimori, our brilliant website designer and blogress extraordinaire, asks for help for her mother-in-law, whose home was damaged by Hurricane Ivan. Lend a hand if you can.