Archive » 2004 » November

A plan to teach British youngsters the art of pole dancing has been canceled after an outcry from child welfare groups. The FReepers are all over the story. (Unfortunately, Buckhead has not yet weighed in.)
Update: Reader Greg Lawrence forwarded me a link that contained this cartoon. The artwork was done by “Mrs. R,” creator/webmaster of [...]

Steve Sailer destroys the 44% myth once and for all here.

Gaston Serrato of Rowland Heights writes the Los Angeles Times in response to this editorial:
You criticize President Bush’s attorney general nominee, Alberto Gonzales (editorial, Nov. 11), stating that he wrote a memo “arguing that suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan were not subject to protections under the Geneva Convention.” The Geneva Convention was designed to protect [...]

Love the cover of today’s NY Post…

…God bless them all!

According to this article, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales is the leading candidate to replace John Ashcroft as Attorney General.
This column by Robert Novak, written in January 2003, suggests that Gonzales is no friend of conservatives. An excerpt:
Gonzales’s views on affirmative action became widely known in Washington last year when, at a [...]

Several readers have sent me this ranking of states by IQ, purporting to show that people in red states are dumber, on average, than people in blue states. Like a lot of what the Democrats have spewed this election cycle, the IQ chart–pushed most prominently by Bush-hater Howard Stern–is a hoax.

The Generosity Index, compiled [...]

My column today compares the MSM’s love affair with Democrat Barack Obama with its apathy (at best) and bias against (at worst) minority Republican politicians. An excerpt:
Here are a few mainstream media rules of thumb:
Minority Democrats in public office are inspirational role models. Minority Republicans in public office are embarrassing sellouts.
Minority Democrat politicians are [...]

Belgium’s top court has banned the Vlaams Blok. Flemish historian/journalist Paul Belien has analysis here.
Last week, Belien wrote about the murder of Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh.

Shortly after I posted this two weeks ago, Slate issued the following correction:
Correction, 10/28: The authors originally stated that there has been no domestic terror conviction since 9/11. This was an overstatement, since there have been some convictions under a questionable new law prohibiting Americans from offering “material support” to foreign based terrorists. However, there [...]

According to this morning’s Washington Post, several previously-undecided DC council members have thrown their support to Mayor Anthony Williams’ plan to build a publicly-subsidized baseball palace. Their sudden change of heart was prompted by Williams’ promise to give them dubious pork barrel projects.
Don’t worry, most of the payola will go to DC’s neediest constituents. [...]

We got good news and bad news from the San Diego Union Tribune this morning.
The good news: Immigration authorities have detained 45 gang members in San Diego during the past five weeks and plan to deport them.
The bad news: Almost half of those arrested had previously been deported after serving prison terms. Their crimes include [...]

Enemy resistance in Fallujah is beginning to crumble. U.S. forces now control 70 percent of the city. Belmont Club is on top of the latest developments.
Update: More on Fallujah at Brain Shavings and The Adventures of Chester.

John Ashcroft has resigned. He was the most underappreciated, most maligned, most ridiculed, and most demonized member of the Bush cabinet. He endured a brutal, vicious nomination process. After 9/11, he was damned for doing his job too aggressively, and damned for not doing his job aggressively enough. He withstood the secular Left’s assaults on [...]

The sounds of these two Marines singing in Fallujah will stir your souls…
…so will this story of two Marine snipers, childhood friends, who were killed in action together during their second tour of duty in Iraq.

I was a bit of a gaming geek many, many, many years ago before career & children & meeting mortgage payments took over. Was addicted to King’s Quest and one of the biggest thrills during my stint in Seattle was meeting Sierra On-line co-founder Ken Williams, husband of KQ pioneer Roberta, when he launched a [...]

You know that story about the man who committed suicide at the World Trade Center because he was distraught over the election results?
Not true.
Still unanswered, as noted in the NY Daily News: How did a shotgun-toting man slip unnoticed into the guarded area [at Ground Zero]- a solemn tourist destination that is also a major [...]

TSA wants to know: Have you seen a stray Piper PA 25 Pawnee crop-dusting aircraft? It was stolen last week in Mexico.
“Although there is currently no indication that this has any connection to terrorist activity,” the TSA said, “the theft is cause for concern. Past information indicates that members of al-Qa’ida may have planned — [...]

Regarding Barbra Streisand’s blog blunder, three quick points:
1) Hasn’t one of her P.C. friends told her yet that it isn’t fashionable to be quoting from correspondence between two dead white slave owners?
2) Couldn’t she at least have given credit to Elizabeth Edwards, who posted the quote as consolation at the Democratic Underground on Nov. 5? [...]

As I noted a few days ago, exit polls showing that 44 percent of Hispanics voted for Bush last week are flawed. This Steve Sailer column and this Houston Chronicle article have the details.
Despite the clear imperfections with the exit poll data, many post-election analyses cite the 44 percent figure as if there is no [...]

From Denver’s 7NEWS, a disturbing homeland insecurity report:
The FBI is contacting its Joint Terrorist Task Forces in Washington and around the country after 7NEWS Investigator John Ferrugia asked federal officials about hundreds of gallons of missing liquid propane gas.
About 100 propane gas cylinders have been stolen since July and so far, none of them has [...]

John at Castle Argghhh! has fun comparing the success of “The Incredibles” with the failure of “Alfie,” which is causing no small amount of indigestion among some Hollywood liberals.
Related: Four thumbs up for the Incredibles at NRO from Rod Dreher and Frederica Mathews-Greene.

As the battle in Fallujah unfolds, the following dispatch from Centcom is worth keeping in mind. The “insurgents”–the Islamofascist killers–will stop at nothing to sabotage democracy in Iraq, including targeting innocent Iraqi children:
November 5, 2004
Release Number: 04-11-12
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
INSURGENTS TARGET CHILDREN OF RAMADI
CAMP RAMADI, Iraq — An Army unit assigned to I Marine Expeditionary Force, [...]

Over the weekend, Maureen Dowd demonstrated just how out of touch the MSM is with political reality in her column attacking Karl Rove. She cast him as a disgruntled nerd, avenging his Kennedy-era high school grievances against liberals by pandering aggressively to backward evangelicals in support of President Bush.
The truth? It’s much, much closer to [...]

I’m scheduled to be on Fox News this morning around 6:50 am to talk about turnout myths and the youth vote.

Captain’s Quarters has a thought-provoking post today discussing the failure of campaign finance reform to reduce the role of money in politics (”Campaign Finance Reform Lays A Very Expensive Egg“).
“You can’t write legislation for every loophole that opens up,” said Sen. John McCain in a New York Times post-mortem that inspired Captain’s Quarters’ post. “It’s [...]

In today’s New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert argues that President Bush won last week because the American people are ignorant. He suggests in passing that Kerry could have won if only more people (presumably less ignorant people) had voted:
Last week’s election was extremely close and a modest shift in any number of factors might [...]

Today’s WaPo editorial:
IN HIS ELECTION campaign, President Bush didn’t put forward a health care plan so much as a handful of ideas about health care, none of which will extend coverage to all Americans and few of which are likely to cut skyrocketing costs. Although some of his suggestions, such as private health savings accounts [...]

So, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes that America is heading back to the Dark Ages, as the Bush Administration rushes to replace science with religion:
W.’s presidency rushes backward, stifling possibilities, stirring intolerance, confusing church with state, blowing off the world, replacing science with religion, and facts with faith. We’re entering another dark age, [...]

About six weeks ago, I criticized an LA Times op-ed for understating the degree of mobility in the blogosphere. A quick look at Truth Laid Bear’s latest traffic rankings confirms my argument. Today there are a dozen sites averaging more than 100,000 visits per day, including rising stars like MyDD and Polipundit.
My internal traffic statistics [...]

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