Archive » 2004 » December

The latest Big Nanny move out of Bellingham, Wa.: Banning civilians from owning Tasers Concerned about criminals and the untrained using Tasers, stun guns and other electro-shock weapons, Bellingham City Council voted to become the first city in the state to ban energy weapons from civilian use Monday night. In a 6-1 vote, council members [...]

Can you imagine if an al Qaeda bureaucrat had ordered the 19 Sept. 11 terrorists to wear “I heart Osama” T-shirts when they embarked on their murderous flights? No idiot would send his men on a covert mission wearing clothes that would so blatantly give them away, right? Wrong. Meet Federal Air Marshal Service Director [...]

I’m scheduled to appear on The O’Reilly Factor tonight at around 8:15 pm eastern.

Foul-mouthed rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg just inked a deal with 20th Century Fox to produce a film titled “Coach Snoop.” According to the Chicago Sun-Times: The picture will be inspired by the entertainer’s real-life experiences of coaching his son’s youth football team. “This film is about how I learned to be a good father through [...]

Joe Gandelman takes note of the Hollywood angle on Bernard Kerik’s downfall. The MSNBC headline reads: Scandal might cancel Bernie Kerik biopic. Jeannette Walls writes that “a source says that Miramax ? which bought the screen rights to Kerik’s autobiography ? is seriously reconsidering the movie it’s making on the controversial lawman. Miramax bought the [...]

Yikes. Check this out. (Ten-gallon hat tip: Rod Dreher) Update: Reader Robert Durbin notes on the flyer that NBA player Tariq Abdul Wahad of the Dallas Mavericks will be a “special guest.” Update II: Well, well, well. They took down the link. Here’s the Google cached page.

Last week, I noted the death of Spc. David Mahlenbrock, who died in Iraq when a roadside bomb detonated. In a letter he wrote before his death, preparing for the possibility that he might be killed in the line of duty, he asked his family to play Toby Keith’s “American Soldier” at his funeral. Via [...]

Oh, man. The gubernatorial election is still not over in Washington state. The Seattle Times reports today: King County election officials yesterday admitted a major error in tallying votes in the governor’s race that could reverse the results and make Christine Gregoire the winner in the hand recount now under way. The discovery that 561 [...]

My friend Dave Oliviera, associate editor of the Spokesman-Review, has put together a list of Red State gripes in response to liberals who are habitually offended. Read it here. Dave blogs for the newspaper at Hot Potatoes.

Yeah, you read that Drudge teaser right: SOURCES: NY GOV PATAKI WORKS BEHIND SCENES TO BE CONSIDERED HOMELAND SECURITY SEC… DEVELOPING… Um, we already tried one GOP governor with zero antiterrorism/law enforcement/immigration enforcement experience. Pataki’s homeland security record consists of issuing press releases about his pork-barrel prowess. Get serious.

Reuters reports in Italy: Mobsters Bully Terror Suspect in Prison International terrorism charges and allegations of ties to al Qaeda might be enough to scare away some cellmates, in some countries. But Italian mobsters jailed on the island of Sardinia, apparently outraged by terrorism, beat up an Algerian terror suspect and threatened to kill him [...]

It’s up at Protein Wisdom. I think “shirts with bigger collars” is missing.

The Washington Times picks up on Hillary’s tough-on-borders posturing, which I noted several weeks ago here. Powerline weighs in here.

So say nine of the New York Times‘ own employees, who have filed a lawsuit against the paper charging they were subjected to racial and religious discrimination at the paper’s Edison, N.J., printing plant. According to The Jewish Times, the suit includes complaints that supervisors aimed racial and religious epithets at employees ? or ignored [...]

I find it annoying that Bernard Kerik is getting praised in some quarters for “coming clean” and “accepting responsibility” for his “mistake.” From all accounts, including Kerik’s own, President Bush’s aides asked him upfront about the nanny question several times during the vetting process and he did not come clean. Kerik didn’t just make some [...]

I’m offering signed books for sale here, and am now set up to accept credit card payments. Orders received by Wednesday December 15th will be delivered before Christmas Day.

Still a very mild season, despite the shortage of the flu vaccine. Not a single pediatric death has been reported so far. Meanwhile, this article reports that demand for flu vaccine shots is ebbing.

We bought our first real Christmas tree this year–a six-foot, North Carolina Frasier fir. My four-year-old daughter, a.k.a. Keeper of the Care Bears, claimed the honor of hanging the first decoration: Cheer Bear can stay, but I’m drawing the line at Bratz doll ornaments.

UPI’s Christian Bourge and Washington Times occasional writer Joel Mowbray each have good pieces providing details of immigration-related provisions that made it into the “intel reform” bill. The final product gives lie to the criticism that immigration/homeland security was “extraneous” to the measure. In truth, it was the other way around! As Bourge notes: In [...]

Agh. They won’t go away. If you have kids or are an overgrown kid, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, count yourself lucky. Their presence has raised the nation’s Annoyance Alert to Code Red.

As the armor gap controversy boils inside the Beltway, you should know about a non-profit charity that is enlisting ordinary citizens to help solve the problem. Soldiers’ Angels was established in June 2003 by Patti Patton-Bader, mother of Spc. Brandon Varn, who has recently returned from a year’s deployment to Iraq. One of their many [...]

The family of Specialist David Mahlenbrock, a 20-year-old combat engineer who was killed in Iraq last Friday when a roadside bomb detonated, has a special request. They are asking radio music stations to play Toby Keith’s “American Soldier” on Wednesday, Dec. 15, at 1pm, in memory of Mahlenbrock, who will be buried at Arlington National [...]

Italians are currently debating a very important global issue: the politics of Nutella: “Only Italians could turn something like this into an ideological question,” said Gigi Padovani, who put the question to a group of students at the Velso Mucci Institute, a technical school for chefs and waiters in this small town in northern Italy. [...]

From Beijing: Nike on Thursday apologised for a “blasphemous” television commercial which was banned by China after a wave of protest, saying it was only intended to inspire courage among youngsters. China imposed a nationwide ban on the advert which featured United States basketball star LeBron James defeating a kung fu master, two women in [...]

“Happy Ramahanuqwanzmas.” (Hat tip: Reader Garth Olson) Update: Another reader clues me in to the origins. It’s a Glenn Beck thang!

The Lebanon-born Muslim Marine who was reportedly taken “hostage” in Iraq in July, was feared beheaded, and then mysteriously turned up in Lebanon safe and with his head still on, has now been charged with desertion. Here’s what Wassef Ali Hassoun said at his news conference on July 19: CPL. WASSEF ALI HASSOUN, U.S. MARINE [...]

Legal Affairs has unveiled a poll asking readers to name “the country’s most influential and important legal thinkers�the ones whose ideas are pushing the law forward (or backward, as the case may be).” The magazine lists 125 academics, judges, and writers/commentators. To compile the list of legal academics, the editors say they relied on rankings [...]

The Earth Liberation Front is “neither confirming nor denying” complicity in the Charles County, Md., arson fires. Locals speculate that the culprits might be anyone from ecoterrorists to local hunters irked about development to disgruntled contractors or even white racists mad about black families moving into the area. “They’ve been putting racial slurs up on [...]

The latest Drudge scoop highlights an embedded reporter’s self-congratulatory e-mail claiming to have coached a soldier to ask Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld about the shortage of armor for Humvees. The reporter sounds like a bit of a creep, but his heart seems to be in the right place and whether or not soldiers were “coached,” [...]

The man who said this… Kroft: Are you saying, at security screening desks, that a 70-year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida, would receive the same level of scrutiny as a-a-a Muslim young man from Jersey City? Mineta: Basically, I would hope so. …is staying in the Bush administration. Flashbacks: Rich Lowry on Mineta, January [...]