I get mail...

Nobody special... said...

I must say, your "about me" thing rocks...

Thanks. Rage has always been my most endearing quality.

William Rusher: The end of evolution?

It's good to hear from Mr. Rusher, a conservative icon.

Wave bye-bye to the unproved theory turned religiopolitical dogma, kiddies.

In its June 21st issue, the New York Times reports on a most interesting decision by certain members of the scientific community. The Kansas State Board of Education was wrestling, this spring, with the question of what Kansas high-school students ought to be taught about the theory of evolution.

On one side were those who believe that the truth of the theory has been demonstrated so conclusively, strictly as a matter of science, that the contention that it is open to serious scientific question, and may require amendment, ought not to be considered at all. Any such suggestion, they insisted, should be banned from Kansas' science classes in toto.

On the other side were some serious scientists, by no means "creationists" or religious crazies, who subscribe to a relatively new and scientifically sophisticated theory called "intelligent design." This concept, whose exploration has been supported by the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Wash., argues (to oversimplify) that various developments that have occurred in the process of evolution are too complex to be explained – as Darwin explained them – simply as the result of random accidents.

Certain aspects of the development of the eye, for example, seem to these scientists to require, for their explanation, what has come to be called "intelligent design." The designer may, of course, be God, but the exponents of the concept don't insist on this. They contend only that the theory of evolution requires amendment to include acknowledgment of instances of (some sort of) intelligent design.

But this has, of course, roused tremendous resistance in some other parts of the scientific community. They insist that all natural phenomena can be explained as the result of random accidents, thus eliminating the need for "intelligent design." They regard the notion as merely a new way of slipping God into the realm of science, and denounce it wholeheartedly. People can believe in God if they want to, these critics argue, but they have no business bringing Him into the wholly separate field of science.

Kansas' Board of Education decided to hear exponents of both viewpoints, and invited them to participate in hearings on the subject. But some of America's most prominent scientific spokesmen refused even to attend. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, a heavyweight organization of researchers and teachers, for example, boycotted the hearings. The debate, critics asserted, would not be a scientific exchange but "a political show trial." They warned that the Board members would not choose which theory to teach, but instead "teach the controversy."

And indeed, that is what the Board finally voted to do. They found "credible scientific testimony that indeed there are significant debates about the evidence for key aspects of chemical and biological theory," and that it is "important and appropriate for students to know about these scientific debates."

In a way, one can sympathize with the scientists who refused even to discuss the matter. It must be exasperating to devote one's life to a theory as elegant as the theory of evolution, with all its implications for the nature of the universe, only to find it challenged, decades on, by people who believe it requires major and thoroughly unsettling amendments. Better to cast such carpers into the outer darkness, and refuse even to discuss their contentions!

Another reason to shop at Wal-Mart.

Retail giant refuses to carry'morning-after' abortion pill

The world's largest retail chain is coming under fire from abortion advocates because it does not stock the morning after pill at any of its 3,000 locations. Wal-Mart operates more pharmacies in the United States than any other chain, but it will not stock the Plan B drugs, which sometime cause an abortion.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Jacquie Young told the Associated Press that the retailer doesn't carry the morning after pills for "business reasons." She declined to elaborate, but previous Wal-Mart representatives have said the decision is in response to customer concerns.

"We don't carry a lot of products," she added.

That upsets abortion advocates like Ted Miller of NARAL.

For many rural women, Wal-Mart is their only pharmacy," Miller says. "That's what makes Wal-Mart's refusal to carry emergency contraception so disconcerting."

NARAL and Planned Parenthood are targeting Wal-Mart and other pharmacy chains with a lobbying campaign seeking to get them to stock the drugs and to post a sign saying all legal prescriptions will be honored.
Like other pharmacy chains such as Walgreens, Rite-Aid and Winn-Dixie, Wal-Mart allows pharmacists not to dispense a drug that violates their moral and religious views. However, the retailer asks pharmacists to help customers find the morning after pill drugs at another location.

From The Church Under Siege Department:

The only acceptable discrimination in America is anti-Catholicism. How about striking a blow for religious freedom. Vermont? Are you listening Vermont?

A lesbian couple filed a discrimination complaint against a family-run inn because the Roman Catholic owners said they would be reluctant to plan and host a civil union ceremony.

The inn owners, identified only as Jim and Mary, are charged with violating Vermont's Fair Housing and Public Accommodations Act.
The complaint by Susan Parker, filed with Vermont's Human Rights Commission, is based on one phone call with Jim.

Jim said he did not refuse Parker's request but explained that because of his beliefs about marriage, he would have difficulty putting his heart behind the project.

The inn owners, who will host seven or eight wedding receptions this year, usually are involved in the entire process of planning the event, acting as a wedding coordinator.

They run the 24-unit facility with their eight children and have their family residence on the same property.

Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based public-interest law firm representing the family, says that for one recent wedding reception, Jim spent about 40 hours with the couple prior to the wedding day.

Politically friendly forces.

Liberty Counsel – which filed a response to the charge, asking that it be dismissed – pointed out Jim said that if Parker still desired to hold the reception, he would be willing to meet with her to discuss possible arrangements.

The law firm argues there must be an exemption to the discrimination charge based on the free exercise of religion, free association and the right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.

Commenting on the case, Mathew D. Staver, president and general counsel of Liberty Counsel, said it "seeks to authorize the government to become thought police."

"This case also illustrates the radical nature of the same-sex agenda – to target a family-owned inn based upon one telephone call wherein the operator clearly admits that he could not put his heart into a same-sex civil union ceremony," he said. "Forget tolerance – this case is about forcing others to endorse same-sex unions."

Vermont's Human Rights Commission only has legal authority to investigate complaints, negotiate settlements and bring action in court. If illegal discrimination is proven to a judge and jury, the court can impose fines or monetary damages.

In 1994, the Vermont Supreme Court ruled that a Roman Catholic owner of a printing company could assert, as a defense to a claim of discrimination, that printing "pro-choice" flyers would cause the owner to violate his sincerely held religious beliefs. (Thanks to WorldNetDaily.)

Congress aims to blunt court's eminent domain ruling.

Thanks to USA Today via WND.

Lawmakers are trying to blunt a Supreme Court decision that says local governments can seize people's homes to make way for shopping malls and other private development.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said he hopes the "horrible" Supreme Court decision will make Americans lash out against it.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Thursday the high court had made "a horrible decision" and he hoped it would cause a backlash.

"The only silver lining to this decision is the possibility that this time the court has finally gone too far and that the American people are ready to reassert their constitutional authority," said DeLay, R-Texas, a critic of recent court decisions.

In a 5-4 ruling last week, the Supreme Court said municipalities have broad power to bulldoze people's homes and put up shopping malls or other private development to generate tax revenue. The decision drew a scathing dissent from Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as favoring rich corporations. DeLay agreed.

"Someone could knock on your door and tell you that the city council has voted to give your house to someone else because they have nicer plans for the property," DeLay said.

The House on Thursday approved by a 231-189 vote a bid by conservative Scott Garrett, R-N.J., to bar federal transportation funds from being used to make improvements on lands seized via eminent domain for private development.

Legislation in the works also would ban the use of federal funds for any project getting the go-ahead using the Kelo v. City of New London (Conn.) decision.

"They're going to have to find their own money, instead of coming to Washington," said Rep. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Susette Kelo, whose riverfront house in New London's Fort Trumbull neighborhood is set to be razed, said she's glad politicians in Washington are working against the decision. "I think the people in this country are outraged in this decision, and rightly so," she said. "Everyone in this country has just lost the right to own their own property."

Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., mentioned community development block grants as one type of money source that would be banned for projects advancing as a result of the Kelo decision.

Yes. Fine. Do that.

And

TAKE SOUTER'S HOUSE! TAKE SOUTER'S HOUSE!

Even more from "Hoodwinked": Alex Haley and his Roots are a fraud!

Editor's note: The following commentary is excerpted from Jack Cashill's eye-opening new book, "Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture," where he shows how, over the last century, "progressive" writers and producers have been using falsehood and fraud as their primary weapons in their attack on America.

© 2005 WorldNetDaily.com

Alex Haley's "Roots: The Saga of an American Family," first published in 1976, generated extraordinary reviews and spectacular sales, here and abroad. The mini-series based on the book captured more viewers than any series before it. And Haley won a special Pulitzer Prize for telling the true story of a black family from its origins in Africa through seven generations to the present day in America.

The only problem is that the book was a fraud from beginning to end,
Working backward through the book, Haley decides to trace his family's heritage to its African roots. All that he has to guide him are the tales his grandmother and great aunts have told him about "the farthest-back person" they could recall, "the African." According to his relatives, the African's master had called him "Toby" after he first arrived by ship in "Naplis."

Proud and defiant, Toby continued to call himself "Kin-tay." In time, Toby had a little girl named "Kizzy." Kizzy remembered that her father used to call a guitar a "Ko" and a nearby river the "Kamby Bolongo." Working from little more than this and the names of Kizzy's descendants, Haley finds his way back to the Gambia River, or "Kamby Bolongo." Here he learns firsthand from an old-time "griot," the true story of his own ancestor, Kunta Kinte.

The story unfolds tranquilly enough. Born in 1750, Kinte grows up in a peaceful, sheltering community along the Gambia River in West Africa. He is well schooled in math and writing and the Islamic faith. At age 17, Kinte is snatched from his youthful idyll by the evil, club-bearing "toubobs," or white people.

When he finally regains his senses four days later, Kinte finds himself chained in the stinking, claustrophobic hold of an ocean-going vessel, manned by ugly toubobs, all of them seemingly British or American. After a hellish journey, he arrives in Annapolis, attempts to escape four times, and is subdued only after some poor, white bounty hunters chop off half his foot. The year is 1767.

In Haley's tale, it is the whites who enter the forest and enslave the blacks, not Arab slave traders, not other blacks. Since Kinte is unconscious through the period of transaction, the reader has no picture of African participation in the slave market, nor of any Portuguese or Hispanic involvement in the slave trade.

As a Muslim, Kinte does not sense any virtue in Christianity. Indeed, it strikes him as crude and hypocritical. Coming of age during the revolutionary period in Virginia, Kinte sees the revolution as inherently fraudulent: "'Give me liberty or give me death,' Kunta liked that, but he couldn't understand how somebody white could say it; white folks looked pretty free to him."

Approaching 70 when "Roots" debuted, Harold Courlander was shocked to read it. For the previous 30 years or more, Courlander had been traveling the world collecting folk tales and writing about his findings.

In 1978, Courlander sued Haley in a U.S. District Court in New York for copyright infringement. The suit cited 81 passages that had been lifted from Courlander's "The African," as well as the plot and certain characters. Haley's defense fell apart when, during discovery, the plaintiff's lawyers found three quotes from "The African" among his typed notes, notes that he had apparently failed to destroy.

The last thing the judge wanted to do was to undermine a newly ascendant black hero. Midway through the trial, he counseled Haley and his attorneys that he would have to contemplate a perjury charge unless they settled with Courlander. They did just that to the tune of $650,000, or about $2 million by 2005 standards. In return, Courlander agreed to keep quiet about the suit, which he did until he died in 1996.

The media paid scant attention to the suit and even then failed to explore the real gist of the scandal: namely that the author of a "nonfiction" book plagiarized from a fictional one.

In the late 1970s, two leading genealogists, Gary Mills and Elizabeth Shown Mills, decided to follow up on Haley's work through the relevant archives in Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland. They found that Haley, like most amateur genealogists, made mistakes. But they found, too, that his transgressions went well beyond mere mistakes. "We expected ineptitude, but not subterfuge," observed Elizabeth, herself the editor of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

The records showed that in the pre-Civil War period, Haley got virtually everything wrong. In "Roots," for instance, Haley tells in great excited detail how he tracked down the very ship that Kunta Kinte had taken from the Gambia to 'Naplis, the Lord Ligonier in 1767, the very year that "the King's soldiers came" to the Gambia. In fact, as the Mills discovered, the man that Haley identifies as Kunta Kinte, a slave by the name of Toby in the possession of the John Waller family, could not have been Kunta Kinte or Haley's ancestor. Toby had been in America as early as 1762, five years before the Lord Ligonier arrived. Worse for Haley, Toby died eight years before his presumed daughter Kizzy was born.

Still, neither the lawsuit nor the unraveling of the genealogy dimmed Haley's star while he was alive.. The book and video remained a staple in history classes across America. The Pulitzer remained in his trophy case. And the awards and the money continued to roll in.

In 1993, a year after Haley's death, literary detective Philip Nobile did his best to blow the whistle on what he calls "one of the great literary hoaxes of modern times." In February of that year, he published "Uncovering Roots" in the influential alternative publication, the Village Voice. The article brought to a larger public the story of the Courlander suit and the Mills' genealogy. Nobile also revealed that Haley's editor at Playboy magazine, the very white and Jewish Murray Fisher, did much of the book's writing.

In the British Isles, the Nobile expose was a big story. It got serious coverage in all the major newspapers, and the BBC later made a documentary. The American cultural establishment, however, continued to turn its back on the story. The New York Times had exactly this to say about the controversy:

Two weeks ago, the charges about the authenticity of "Roots" and the integrity of Mr. Haley were raised anew in an investigative article by Philip Nobile in the Village Voice. Members of the Haley family have rebutted the accusations.

And that was that.

This may be the Book of the Year.

The death of civilization continues apace.

“Welcome to the Neighborhood,” an ABC reality series that pushes hot buttons of racism and anti-homosexuality, was pulled by the network before its debut.

The program had drawn criticism from groups claiming it risked fostering prejudice.

In a statement Wednesday, ABC acknowledged the delicate nature of the series in which families asked to pick a new neighbor are made to expose and overcome their biases.

“Welcome to the Neighborhood” demonstrates what happens when people are forced to “confront preconceived notions of what makes a good neighbor,” the network said.

“However, the fact that true change only happens over time made the episodic nature of this series challenging, and given the sensitivity of the subject matter in early episodes we have decided not to air the series at this time.”

The six-episode show, which was to debut July 10, follows three families in Austin, Texas, who are given the chance to choose a new neighbor for a house on their street.

Each family initially wants someone similar to them — white and conservative.

Instead, they must choose from families that are black, Hispanic and Asian; two gay white men who’ve adopted a black child; a couple covered in tattoos and piercings; a couple who met at the woman’s initiation as a witch; and a poor white family.

In the early episodes, one man makes a crack about the number of children piling out of the Hispanic family’s car and displays of affection between the gay men provoke disgust.

The series’ producers had said it was intended to promote a healthy and open debate about prejudice and people’s fear of differences.
The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, after viewing the series, expressed strong concerns.

While it ultimately carries a valuable message about diversity and acceptance, those watching the first episodes could be left thinking discrimination is “not that big a deal,” GLAAD spokesman Damon Romine said Wednesday.

“Regardless of how things turn out at the end of the last show, it’s dangerous to let intolerance and bigotry go unchallenged for weeks at a time,” he said, adding that GLAAD hopes a revised version might air.

Before ABC announced its decision, the Family Research Council said it was worried evangelicals would be made to appear judgmental and foolish.

Everyone is an idiot. No exceptions. Those who love the idea, those who hate it, those who fear it, those who "star" in it, those who want to watch it, those who want to boycott it. Every one an idiot.

Accused fetus-eater says he's vegetarian.

Now there's a headline you don't see every day.

The Kansas abortionist who had his license pulled and clinic closed after high-profile accusations by at least one employee that he microwaved a fetus and mixed it into his lunch says the charge is ''outrageous'' because he's a vegetarian who is squeamish about meat.

''I was raised very strictly,'' Krishna Rajanna told the Kansas City Pitch Weekly. ''My mother would commit suicide before she'd even think of touching a meat product.''

Too bad nobody threatened her with a corndog before he was a fetus.

Though he says his diet has become more lax since moving from India in the 1970s, he would never eat a fetus.

''This is outrageous,'' he said.

He says the accusation by former clinic staffer Julia Walton Garcia was just an attempt at revenge for firing her.

No charges were brought against Rajanna for the alleged fetus consumption, but not because law enforcement authorities disbelieved the accusation. The problem for the district attorney was that there are no laws against eating fetuses.

Here's more on this son of a bitch.

NBC anchor compares Founders to terrorists:Brian Williams equates 1st U.S. leaders to Iran president-elect.

Look on the bright side: Mr. Williams may just be a moron.

In his newscast tonight, "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams compared America's first presidents to the president-elect of Iran, alleged hostage-taker Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, saying they were "certainly revolutionaries and might have been called terrorists by the British crown."

At least six of the Americans held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran as hostages for 444 days claim Ahmadinejad was one of the leaders of the captors, having recognized him on television reports.

Williams' comment came in a question to reporter Andrea Mitchell.
At the end of Mitchell's report, Williams asked, "What would it all matter if proven true? Someone brought up today the first several U.S. presidents were certainly revolutionaries and might have been called 'terrorists' by the British crown, after all." (Thanks to WND.)

Taranto rides to the rescue of English.

Someone, Dig Them Up!

"For 20 years, the Vermont Youth Conservation Corps has been literally buried in the woods--small groups of young people quietly building trails, making rock steps and fixing bridges for communities around the state," reports the Burlington Free Press.

This leads to the obvious question: How can they do all these things when they're literally buried in the woods?

The misuse of the word literal has long been a pet peeve of ours (though not literally a pet peeve like when our cat walks on us when we're trying to sleep). Here's another example, from someone quoted in yesterday's Wall Street Journal (link for WSJ.com subscribers):

"People are starting to see through the façade," says Robert Orr, a retired state Supreme Court justice who runs the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law, which filed the suit. "Incentives are geared toward literally a handful of large, very wealthy and very powerful corporations at the expense of the other businesses."

Someone has big hands! These two examples use literally to mean its opposite, figuratively. Here's a different kind of abuse, from a story in Iowa's Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier:

Almost every band member, while slaving away in the garage, dreams of one day being on a massive tour with literally thousands of people focusing on him work the stage like a possessed madman.

In this case, the writer actually means "thousands of people," but there's nothing particularly unusual about thousands of people showing up to see a successful band in concert. It's like saying, "I literally ate a hamburger for dinner last night."

The proper use of literal is to make clear that the word, phrase or clause it modifies is meant to be taken at face value rather than as a metaphor or figure of speech. You might say "Grandpa is literally off his rocker" if what you mean is that he's splayed on the floor after someone pushed over his rocking chair.

Or, if we're away from work, we might say we've "gone fishing." But on Friday we literally went fishing. Littorally, too, come to think of it.
(Thanks to Best of the Web Today.)

Once again, get your kids out of the government schools.

Oh, yeah. I almost forgot.

TAKE SOUTER'S HOUSE! TAKE SOUTER'S HOUSE!

Most appropriate headline of the day...

Jimmy Carter's Legacy

Iran held a presidential "election" the other day, and the "winner" was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the "hard-line" mayor of Tehran. Now the Iran Focus Web site says it has identified Ahmadinejad as a terrorist depicted in a 1979 Associated Press photo "holding the arm of a blindfolded American hostage on the premises of the United States embassy in Tehran." Iran Focus offers this background:

Soon after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Ahmadinejad, who was studying in Tehran's University of Science and Technology, became a member of the central council of the Office for Strengthening of Unity Between Universities and Theological Seminaries, the main pro-Khomeini student body. . . .

Former OSU officials involved in the takeover of the U.S. embassy said Ahmadinejad was in charge of security during the occupation, a key role that put him in direct contact with the nascent security organizations of the clerical regime and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, which he later joined.

Although Al-Jazeera says some Iranian officials deny that the president-"elect" was involved in the attack, the Washington Times reports that several former hostages recognize him:

"As soon as I saw his picture in the paper, I knew that was the bastard," said retired Army Col. Charles Scott, 73, a former hostage who lives in Jonesboro, Ga.

"He was one of the top two or three leaders," Col. Scott said in a telephone interview. "The new president of Iran is a terrorist." . . .

Donald Sharer, a retired Navy captain who was for a time a cellmate of Col. Scott at the Evin prison in northern Tehran, remembered Mr. Ahmadinejad as "a hard-liner, a cruel individual."

"I know he was an interrogator," said Capt. Sharer, now 64 and living in Bedford, Iowa. He said he was personally questioned by Mr. Ahmadinejad on one occasion but does not recall the subject of the interrogation.

Col. Scott recalled an incident when Mr. Ahmadinejad berated a friendly Iranian guard who had allowed the two Americans to visit another U.S. hostage in a neighboring cell. Col. Scott, who understands Farsi, said Mr. Ahmadinejad told the guard, "You shouldn't let these pigs out of their cells."

Let this be a lesson to those who are calling for America to cut and run from Iraq. Jimmy Carter's stunning show of weakness in the face of the Iranians' act of war allowed the mad mullahs to solidify their hold on power, so that a quarter century later they are on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons.

It also sent a message to Islamist wackos everywhere that America didn't have the stomach for a fight--a message the subsequent three presidents reinforced by withdrawing precipitously from Lebanon and selling arms to the Iranian regime (Reagan), failing to fight the Gulf War to victory (Bush père) and bugging out of Somalia (Clinton).

Carter has been traveling the world these past few years advocating a policy of American weakness, but his legacy should be cause for pause for current officeholders who are inclined to agree. Not only did it create problems and dangers we're still dealing with a quarter century later, it wasn't even good short-term politics. After all, the voters decisively rejected Carter when he sought re-election in 1980, and in his ex-presidency Carter has accomplished something we'd never have thought possible: He's made Bill Clinton look like a statesman.
(Thanks to Best of the Web Today.)

Fyodor's Rule #9: If you are going to fight, then fight until you eliminate your enemy, because the only thing remembered longer than power is weakness.

Señor Spielbergo's next movie.

Señor Spielbergo (my favorite non-union Mexican director) courts controversy with his next magnum opus.

On Wednesday, Steven Spielberg's apocalyptic thriller "War of the Worlds" invaded movie theaters worldwide. But the director had already moved on. That night in Malta, Mr. Spielberg quietly began filming the most politically charged project he has yet attempted: the tale of a secret Mossad hit squad ordered to assassinate Palestinian terrorists after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

In the right hands, it could be a good movie.

Indeed, the movie's terrain is so packed with potential land mines that, associates say, Mr. Spielberg has sought counsel from advisers ranging from his own rabbi to the former American diplomat Dennis Ross, who in turn has alerted Israeli government officials to the film's thrust. Mr. Spielberg has also shown the script to Mr. Ross's old boss, former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton's aides said Mr. Spielberg reached out to him first more than a year ago and again as recently as Tuesday. Mr. Spielberg is also being advised by Mike McCurry, Mr. Clinton's White House spokesman, and Allan Mayer, a Hollywood spokesman who specializes in crisis communications.

Yep, those Clinton boys are always boffo box office.

The film, which is being written by the playwright Tony Kushner - it is his first feature screenplay - begins with the killing of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich. But it focuses on the Israeli retaliation: the assassinations, ordered by Prime Minister Golda Meir, of Palestinians identified by Israeli intelligence as terrorists, including some who were not directly implicated in the Olympic massacre. By highlighting such a morally vexing and endlessly debated chapter in Israeli history - one that introduced the still-controversial Israeli tactic now known as targeted killings - Mr. Spielberg could jeopardize his tremendous stature among Jews both in the United States and in Israel.

Uh-oh.

Making matters more complicated, an important source for Mr. Spielberg's narrative is a 1984 book by George Jonas, "Vengeance," based largely on the account of a purported member of the Mossad's assassination team, whose veracity was later widely called into question.

Oy vey.


In the statement, Mr. Spielberg called the Munich attack - which was carried out by Black September, an arm of the P.L.O.'s Fatah organization - and the Israeli response "a defining moment in the modern history of the Middle East."

Oy vey.

Mr. Spielberg's interest in the question of a civilized nation's proper response to terrorism deepened, aides said, after the 9/11 attacks, as Americans were grappling for the first time with similar issues - for instance, in each new lethal strike on a suspected terrorist leader by a C.I.A. Predator drone aircraft. In Mr. Kushner's script, people who have read it say, the Israeli assassins find themselves struggling to understand how their targets were chosen, whether they belonged on the hit list and, eventually, what, if anything, their killing would accomplish.

"What comes through here is the human dimension," said Mr. Ross, formerly the Middle East envoy for Mr. Clinton, who has advised the filmmakers on the screenplay and helped Mr. Spielberg reach out to officials in the region. "You're contending with an enormously difficult set of challenges when you have to respond to a horrific act of terror. Not to respond sends a signal that actions are rewarded and the perpetrators can get away with it. But you have to take into account that your response may not achieve what you wish to achieve, and that it may have consequences for people in the mission."

Mr. Spielberg's statement indicated that, despite the implications for other conflicts, his movie - to be shot in Malta, Budapest and New York - was aimed squarely at the Israeli-Palestinian divide.

"Viewing Israel's response to Munich through the eyes of the men who were sent to avenge that tragedy adds a human dimension to a horrific episode that we usually think about only in political or military terms," he said. "By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today." (Thanks to the NYT via Drudge.)

OY FREAKIN' VEY!

TAKE SOUTER'S HOUSE!

TAKE SOUTER'S HOUSE! TAKE SOUTER'S HOUSE!

Proposal Made to Seize Souter's Property

Court critic proposes seizing Souter's home to build hotel

Critic tries to get Souter's home seized

Proposal: Take Souter home to build 'Lost Liberty Hotel'

Critic: Seize Souter’s home: Calif. man wants hotel on justice's N.H. land

Activist: Turn Souter's House Into Hotel

Souter suitor wants real hotel company

In Wake of Supreme Court's Ruling on Eminent Domain, Man Proposes Seizing Justice Souter's Property; U.S. Politics

Proposal Made To Seize Justice Souter's Property

Supreme fury targets Souter

Read more here.

"Go back where you came from" vs. "cracker".

Democracy marches on in Harrisburg, PA. If you have ever been in the Capitol building there, you know how difficult it is to be this ignorant in those magnificent legislative chambers.


A session of the state House of Representatives was suspended for more than an hour Wednesday after a black lawmaker, upset by a white colleague's comments about ethnic groups, referred to him as a "cracker."

The House was debating a bill that would allow residents of communities governed by homeowners' associations to fly the American flag on their property, even if association rules prohibited them from doing so. No vote was taken on the measure.

Rep. John Myers, a black lawmaker from Philadelphia, objected to comments that Rep. Thomas Yewcic, a white lawmaker from Cambria County made in support of the bill. Both are Democrats.

"I don't think we should be embarrassed or ashamed to support the American flag or what it represents," Yewcic said. "If any ethnic group wants to fly ... a flag, and they're embarrassed to fly an American flag, they should go back to their ethnic origins and fly it there."

Myers said that he supported a person's right to fly the American flag, a military flag or a state flag, but was bothered by what Yewcic said.

"The one thing that does disturb me is that if you disagree, that you almost use a belligerent, racist doctrine to explain the disagreement by telling people to go back where they came from," he said.

Myers asked House Speaker John M. Perzel whether Yewcic's comments violated House rules, and Perzel told him they did not.

"I think that those type of remarks would come from a cracker," Myers said, using a derogatory term for a poor, white person.
(Thanks to the EveningSun.com [Hanover, PA] via Yahoo! News)

Tommy Hearns returns to the ring at age 46.

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Former champion Thomas Hearns is planning to a return to the ring for the first time in five years, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

His opponent for the July 30 bout in downtown Detroit was scheduled to be announced Friday, spokeswoman Kathie Stonehouse said. The 46-year-old Hearns (59-5-1, 46 knockouts) will fight on the same card as his son, Ronald Hearns, a 26-year-old middleweight who is 6-0.

"There's a lot of fire built up inside of me," Thomas Hearns told The Detroit News in Thursday's papers. "It's the same way it was when I started boxing. It's inside of me because I feel this is what I want to do to make myself happy and better myself."

Thomas Hearns already has had a distinctive career with six world titles in five weight classes. He last fought in 2000 against Uriah Grant in Detroit, but was forced to quit the bout after an injury.

This is one of the worst things about The Sweet Science.

Bless and protect him Lord.

Fyodor solves our Constitutional crisis.

I propose a litmus test for all federal and state judges. I call it the Tenth Amendment.

All seeking to become judges must agree with the following:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

If any ruling or judgement by any judge contradicts the Tenth Amendment, that judge shall be removed from the bench immediately, barred from holding any public office for life, and shall be sent to the nearest federal or state prison for a term of one year.

Simple, no?

Saint of the Day and daily Mass readings.

Today we honor Blessed Junipero Serra, who was largely responsible for bringing Catholicism to California. This is also the Feast of St. Veep, who is not the patron of vice presidents. Pray for us, all you angels and saints.

Today's reading is Genesis 23:1-4, 19; 24:1-8, 62-67 .
Today's Gospel reading is Matthew 9:9-13 .


Everyday links:

The Blessed Virgin Mary
The Rosary
Our Mother of Perpetual Help
Prayers from EWTN


Memorare

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thy intercession,was left unaided.Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins my Mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful;O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy clemency hear and answer me. Amen.


St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse, pray for us.


Prayer to Saint Anthony, Martyr of Desire

Dear St. Anthony, you became a Franciscan with the hope of shedding your blood for Christ. In God's plan for you, your thirst for martyrdom was never to be satisfied. St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire, pray that I may become less afraid to stand up and be counted as a follower of the Lord Jesus. Intercede also for my other intentions. (Name them.)


PRAYER TO SAINT MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil; may God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the divine power, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Let's hear it for the "aspirational" humans.

The 'Pro-Americans'

Recently the Pew Global Attitudes Project released another of its international polls finding that, ho-hum, a lot of foreigners don't like America. But columnist Anne Applebaum has an interesting take on it. Noting that a significant minority in many countries--"some 43 percent of the French, 41 percent of Germans, 42 percent of Chinese and 42 percent of Lebanese"--are pro-American, she looks at the demographics of this group:
Advertising executives understand very well the phenomenon of ordinary women who read magazines filled with photographs of clothes they could never afford: They call such women "aspirational." Looking around the world, it is clear there are classes of people who might also be called aspirational. They are upwardly mobile, or would like to be. They tend to be pro-American, too.
In Britain, for example, 57.6 percent of those whose income are low believe that the United States has a mainly positive influence in the world, while only 37.1 percent of those whose income are high believe the same. Breaking down the answers by education, a similar pattern emerges. In South Korea, 69.2 percent of those with low education think the United States is a positive influence, while only 45.8 percent of those with a high education agree. That trend repeats itself not only across Europe but in many other developed countries. Those on their way up are pro-American. Those who have arrived, and perhaps feel threatened by those eager to do the same, are much less so.
In developing countries, by contrast, the pattern is sometimes reversed. It turns out, for example, that Indians are much more likely to be pro-American if they are not only younger but also wealthier and better educated, and no wonder. . . . Some 69 percent of Indians with high incomes think the United States is a mainly positive influence in the world, and only 29 percent of those with low incomes agree. This same phenomenon may also account for the persistence of a surprising degree of popular pro-Americanism in such places as Vietnam, Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines. They're getting wealthier--like Americans--but aren't yet so rich as to feel directly competitive.
There may be domestic parallels here. The most anti-American Americans seem to come from the ranks of the superrich and the overeducated. And "working class" support for the relatively free-market Republicans, which so mystifies liberal Democrats, is at least in part aspirational.
(Thanks to Best of the Web Today)

The Vatican sometimes must lay with dogs to protect the flock.

Little, if any, good (and much evil) will come out of China until her people are free. That may not happen for quite some time.

So let us hope God, through His Church on earth will comfort the oppressed and thwart the will of the wicked.

The Vatican and the government-backed Chinese Catholic Church have agreed for the first time on the nomination of a bishop in a sign of warming relations after decades of strain.

The Chinese-backed Church ordained Joseph Xing Wenzhi as an auxiliary bishop of Shanghai on Tuesday in an appointment that was approved by the Holy See, according to AsiaNews, a Catholic news agency specialising in China.

China does not allow Catholics to recognise the authority of the Pope. Instead, they must belong to state-backed patriotic associations if they want to worship openly.

The communist government has repeatedly refused to allow the Vatican to appoint bishops officially, saying this would amount to interference in internal affairs.

That led to a two-tiered Catholicism in China, with pro-Vatican priests and bishops working underground while the pro-government clerics held the official posts. The Vatican officially has not recognised the pro-government church.

Asianews said Xing could eventually replace the elderly bishop of Shanghai, Aloysius Jin Luxian, the pro-government prelate who ordained the new bishop on Tuesday.

Last week, the Vatican's foreign minister suggested the chances of normalising relations with China were growing, saying there were "no insurmountable difficulties".

China has insisted the Vatican must break relations with Taiwan before it can forge diplomatic ties.

The Vatican estimates it has about 8 million followers in China, compared with about 5 million who follow the state-backed association.

A note to any conservatives left at National Review magazine.

On page 8 of NR's edition of July 4, 2005 this sentence occurred:

"In Iran, where one of the region's most repressive regimes is in charge, women came out in force to protest gender (Emphasis mine.)discrimination in...BLAH BLAH BLAH"

Either NR is hiring dopes now or the mag's editorial position in favor of legalizing dope is being taken way too seriously.

Here's the definition of the word GENDER:

Pronunciation: 'jen-d&r
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English gendre, from Middle French genre, gendre, from Latin gener-, genus birth, race, kind, gender -- more at KIN

1 a : a subclass within a grammatical class (as noun, pronoun, adjective, or verb) of a language that is partly arbitrary but also partly based on distinguishable characteristics (as shape, social rank, manner of existence, or sex) and that determines agreement with and selection of other words or grammatical forms
b : membership of a word or a grammatical form in such a subclass
c : an inflectional form showing membership in such a subclass

THE WORD YOU NEED TO USE IS SEX!

SEX!SEX!SEX!

National Review used to be Conservativism itself. No more.

Once it could be depended upon for spirited defenses of The Church, free markets, and the English language. I do not know how Holy Mother Church fares in their pages, but if they succumbed to the politicization of "gender" who knows what kind of crap goes on around there.

NR's wholehearted capitulation to chemical castration of the conscience was the last straw for me. I have not subscribed for years.

I do use National Review Online as a resource for conservative opinion, and it is a good one. But, caveat emptor.

The crackup of architecture appears to be never ending.

Freedom Tower, Schmeedom Tower.

The truth is architecture is dead. What you are witnessing is the twitching after the head has been severed from the body.

The WTC was ugly. Ugly and tall. And poorly designed. (Imagine if a large fire of non-terrorist origin had broken out in one of the towers which subsequently melted and collapsed. Then you'd know the name of the architect. But a plane? A plane! Who could build a building to withstand a plane ? )

The replacement could not help but be ugly, stupid, depressing, and boring, even without the security features. All that is built today is like that.

Here's the NYT's building critic dude. Why do I sense he is upset the My Lai Massacre wing of the Man Is Wolf To Man Museum might not make the cut? (Ha! I wish. Here's what the yahoos are proposing.)

(Thanks to Drudge for the heads way up.)

The darkness at ground zero just got a little darker. If there is anyone still clinging to the expectation that the Freedom Tower will become a monument of the highest American ideals, the current design should finally shake them out of that delusion.

Somber, oppressive and clumsily conceived, the project is a monument to a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness. It is exactly the kind of nightmare that government officials repeatedly asserted would never happen here: an impregnable tower braced against the outside world.

On Wednesday, New York officials formally unveiled the redesigned Freedom Tower, an 82-story signature building at the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. The enormous pedestal, with a budget estimated at $1.5 billion, would overlook the Sept. 11 memorial. "Construction will climax the greatest comeback in the history of our city," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

The new design by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings Merrill is a response to the obvious security issues raised by the New York City Police Department, specifically, the tower's resistance to car and truck bombs. The earlier twisted glass form, a pastiche of ideas cobbled together from Daniel Libeskind's master plan and the bright minds at Skidmore, Owings Merrill, lacked grace or fresh ideas.

The new obelisk-shaped tower, standing on an enormous 20-story concrete pedestal, evokes a gigantic glass paperweight with a toothpick stuck on top.

(The toothpick-like spire was added so that the tower would reach its required symbolic height of 540 meters, or 1,776 feet - a reference to the year independence was declared.)

The temptation, of course, is to dismiss it as a joke. And it is hard not to pity Childs, who was forced to redesign the tower on the fly to meet the governor's rigid deadline.

Unfortunately, the tower is too loaded with meaning to dismiss. For better or worse, it will be seen by the world as a chilling expression of how the United States is reshaping its identity in a post-Sept. 11 context.
The most radical design change is the creation of the base, which will house the building's lobby and mechanical systems. Designed to withstand a major bomb blast, the base will be virtually windowless. In an effort to animate its exterior facades, the architects have said they intend to decorate them in a grid of shimmering metal panels. A few narrow slots will be cut into the concrete to allow slivers of natural light into the lobby.

The effort fails on almost every level. As an urban object, the tower's static form and square base finally brushes aside the last remnants of Libeskind's master plan, whose only real strength was the potential tension it created between the site's various structures.

In its earlier incarnation, for example, the tower's eastern wall formed a narrow pedestrian alley that became a key entry to the memorial site, leading directly between the proposed Freedom Center complex and the Memorial's north pool. The alleyway, which was flanked on its other side by the Frank Gehry-designed performing arts center, was fraught with tension; it is now a formless park littered with trees. (Emphasis mine.)

This is what passes for cleverness in the greatest city in the world. And don't forget a nazi reference for good measure:

But if this is a potentially fascinating work of architecture, it is, sadly, fascinating in the way that Albert Speer's architectural nightmares were fascinating - as expressions of the values of a particular time and era. The Freedom Tower embodies, in its way, a world shaped by fear.

Whether the Speer comparison is apt or not is beside the point. The point is there is no point to all of this. I suppose we should be thankful the suggestion the two towers be rebuilt exactly was rejected.

Absurdly, if the Freedom Tower were reduced by a dozen or so stories and renamed, it would probably no longer be considered such a prime target. Fortifying it, in a sense, is an act of deflection. It announces to terrorists: Don't attack here - we're ready for you. Go next door.

Actually, it is defiance, not deflection: "Go ahead and attack here, you medieval goat molesters, our technology will keep us safe".

But, this is where building critic dude comes closer to the truth. Absurd, yes. But because all modern architecture is absurd, not just the Freedom Tower project.

Of course, if he admitted that, he would be out of a job.

Whatever happened to...

Jennifer Beal , of Flashdance fame, whom I loved very deeply, albeit briefly, in the early 1980's?

Wow. Jen in a cable TV drama about lesbians called The "L" Word . Knock me over with a feather! I never would have guessed Carter, Dukakis, Mondale, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, et al. were lesbians. You go girls!

Fighter Ray "Boom-Boom" Mancini?

Which reminds me of this:

Written By Warren Zevon
c. 1987 Zevon Music/BMI

Hurry home early - hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon
Hurry home early - hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

From Youngstown, Ohio, Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
A lightweight contender, like father like son
He fought for the title with Frias in Vegas
And he put him away in round number one

Hurry home early - hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon
Hurry home early - hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

When Alexis Arguello gave Boom Boom a beating
Seven weeks later he was back in the ring
Some have the speed and the right combinations
If you can't take the punches it don't mean a thing

Hurry home early - hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon
Hurry home early - hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

When they asked him who was responsible
For the death of Du Koo Kim
He said, "Someone should have stopped the fight,
and told me it was him."
They made hypocrite judgments after the fact
But the name of the game is be hit and hit back

Hurry home early - hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon
Hurry home early - hurry on home
Boom Boom Mancini's fighting Bobby Chacon

Warren Zevon , Requiescat in pace.



Musical group The Bus Boys?

Scriptural Snippets

Here is another of my favorites, regardless of what some might think.

1 Corinthians 4:1-5


1
Let a man so account of us as of the ministers of Christ and the dispensers of the mysteries of God.
2
Here now it is required among the dispensers that a man be found faithful.
3
But to me it is a very small thing to be judged by you or by man's day. But neither do I judge my own self.
4
For I am not conscious to myself of anything. Yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.
5
Therefore, judge not before the time: until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts. And then shall every man have praise from God.

Saint of the Day and daily Mass readings.

Today is the Feast of the First Holy Martyrs of the Holy Roman Church, or the Holy Innocents. These are the boys under the age of two slaughtered by Herod who was determined to stop the coming of the Messiah. Pray for us, all you angels and saints.

The reading for the Feast of the Holy Innocents is Romans 8:31-39 .
The Gospel reading for the feast is Matthew 24:4-13 .



Everyday links:

The Blessed Virgin Mary
The Rosary
Our Mother of Perpetual Help
Prayers from EWTN


Memorare

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thy intercession,was left unaided.Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins my Mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful;O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy clemency hear and answer me. Amen.


St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse, pray for us.


Prayer to Saint Anthony, Martyr of Desire

Dear St. Anthony, you became a Franciscan with the hope of shedding your blood for Christ. In God's plan for you, your thirst for martyrdom was never to be satisfied. St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire, pray that I may become less afraid to stand up and be counted as a follower of the Lord Jesus. Intercede also for my other intentions. (Name them.)


PRAYER TO SAINT MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil; may God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the divine power, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

More from "Hoodwinked": Arch pervert Alfred Kinsey.

Another helping from Jack Cashill's Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, where he shows how, over the last century, "progressive" writers and producers have been using falsehood and fraud as their primary weapons in their attack on America.

Even as a lad, Alfred Charles Kinsey was not quite what he seemed to be. A perfectionist, he could be hard on himself, both figuratively and literally. Perhaps as a way to punish himself, he inserted objects – ouch! – in his penis, graduating from straws to the handle of a hairbrush.

After two years of training as an engineer, Kinsey enrolled in Bowdoin College in Maine as a biology major, the first love of this budding naturalist. Indeed, his high-school yearbook had projected him, in a worthy bit of prophecy, to become "a second Darwin."

As a graduate student at Harvard, Kinsey lost his faith in God. Like so many of his progressive allies, Kinsey came to see Christianity as oppressive and the source of much of the evil in the modern world. Nature would become his god, biological laws his Ten Commandments.

Kinsey imagined his own godless heaven on earth, one where people would be "freed from religiously prescribed notions of right and wrong." Here, writes biographer James Jones, "People would be at liberty to act upon their sexual needs, without fear or guilt, provided, of course, their behavior did not harm others." As shall be seen, Kinsey's idea of "harm" and America's idea of the same would diverge dramatically.

In 1920, Alfred and his wife Clara "migrated" to Bloomington, Ind. At Indiana, Kinsey switched his field of application from gall wasps, about which almost no one cared, to human sexual behavior, about which almost everyone did. To address his own many sexual concerns, he had been quietly studying the field.

In 1935, he gave his first public talk – an angry one – on the subject of sex. He laid the blame for the sexual dysfunction then presumably rampant in America "at the door of the Christian church." As Kinsey saw it, Christianity channeled the essential animal nature of man into "cultural perversions" like celibacy and asceticism and away from healthier activities like those involving hairbrushes.

In 1938, Kinsey organized a course on marriage at Indiana University and went professional with his sexual interests for the first time. Appropriately, the course concluded with a discussion of procreation – more specifically, the various ways to avoid it. "In short," says Jones, "Kinsey was preaching a new sexual morality with respect for diversity at its center and himself as its prophet."

Kinsey was nothing if not a master of public relations. His 1948 epic, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," hit the market with more gusto than any book since "Gone with the Wind." Among its most ardent fans was an Illinois University student. "I wrote an editorial about it," remembers Hugh Hefner, "and commented that I thought it was the most important booklet of the year."

Hefner and others saw right through the countless tables and stacks of data to the heart of Kinsey's thesis. Scientists did not create the sexual codes of the Western world based on real biological data. Instead, priests and clerics had contrived them long ago out of little more than "ignorance and superstition." Bottom line: These codes had to go. "Society tries to restrict all sexual activities to monogamous relations," Kinsey notes disapprovingly. "And moral codes put a taint on many sorts of sexual gratification."

Hefner got the message. "The sexual revolution began with the 'Kinsey Report,'" he observes. "I've said many times that Kinsey was the researcher and I was the pamphleteer."

For all the buzz about the book, reviewers at the time glossed over the most disturbing part of "Sexual History" – the infamous tables 30 to 34, the ones that document the "orgasms" of boys as young as 5-months-old. Activist Judith Reisman has worked diligently to bring the truth behind those tables to light, especially about the one "researcher" who had proved most useful to Kinsey's studies.

The researcher, in fact, was a serial child rapist named Rex King. A government surveyor from New Mexico, King had kept exquisitely chronicled – and often illustrated – notes on the 600 pre-adolescent males and 200 pre-adolescent females who he had sexually violated. This was an individual capable of sexually abusing children less than a year old, dressing up their frenzied responses as orgasms, timing them, and counting them for periods up to 24 hours.

When Kinsey heard of the man's exploits from another sex researcher, he courted King with ardor. "I congratulate you on the research spirit which has led you to collect data over these many years," he wrote to the man, hoping he would cooperate. The courtship paid off. King agreed to meet.

Impressed by King's boldness, Kinsey specified the kinds of data he was looking for, especially the timed data that showed up in tables 30-34, and King happily obliged. "This is one of the most valuable things we have ever gotten," wrote a grateful Kinsey after receiving some prized information. "I want to thank you for the time you put into it and for your willingness to cooperate."

Kinsey went wrong in just about every possible way, and he likely did so knowingly. Before the publication of the report, he had consulted with one of America's preeminent psychologists, Abraham Maslow, who had warned him that volunteers in sexual studies skewed toward the unconventional.

Kinsey blew him off, and the problems with his samples went well beyond this natural skew. "Despite the huge number of histories he had compiled," writes Jones, "his sample was far from random and therefore far from representative – too many of his histories came from prisoners, too many from college students, and too many from subjects he knew in advance to be gay." As Jones makes clear, too, Kinsey did a good deal more with his homosexual subjects than interview them.

The results, of course, were predictably astonishing. "A considerable portion of the population," writes Kinsey, "perhaps the major portion of the male population, has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age." According to Kinsey, 10 percent of white males were "more or less exclusively homosexual" for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55.

The 10 percent quickly became received wisdom, as homosexual activists made it gospel through repetition. The fact that the number was roughly three to six times higher than that any other researcher had come up seemed irrelevant. Thanks to this politically inspired math and some dubious biology, the homosexual political bloc acquired a moral and numerical clout nearly that of African Americans. (Thanks WND)

Someone should get Joe Sobran a copy of this book. This is an excellent example of my commenting on his column earlier today. Modern society is more fragile than its predecessors. Instant worldwide communication makes more men vulnerable to infection by vermin such as Kinsey and Hefner every day.

The day of the holy hermit safe in his cave (or even the pioneer family in their Little House on the Prairie) is long gone.

Joe knows about the decadence. I am not so sure he knows whence it comes. If I had to hire a policeman, I would probably pick Andrew Vachss over Mr. Sobran.

Margaret Sanger, All-American racist Nazi baby killer...

... is just one of the mental and moral midgets you'll meet in today's Book of the Day - Jack Cashill's Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture. (Thanks to WND for the heads up.)

Although Planned Parenthood has tried desperately to shred the files of its founding mother, Margaret Sanger herself has left a detailed record of how she lived and how she thought. The most unimpeachable source of the former is her autobiography, written in 1938, and of the latter, her landmark book, "The Pivot of Civilization," written in 1922.

"A religion without a name was spreading over the country," Sanger enthuses about those heady days before World War I. "The converts were liberals, socialists, anarchists, revolutionists of all shades." Then living in New York, Sanger wanted part of the action.

Sanger found her own calling quite by chance. One evening, a scheduled lecturer at a meeting of socialists had to cancel, and the organizer asked Sanger to fill in. Knowing little about politics, she spoke about what she did know: health. And she made a great hit with the women present.

In 1914, Sanger launched her own publication, the Woman Rebel. Never one for subtlety, Sanger adopted the altogether revealing slogan: "No Gods. No Masters." In the first issue, the increasingly radical Sanger argued that women had a duty "to look the world in the eyes; to have an idea; to speak and act in defiance of convention." For the rest of her career, Sanger did just that.

Curiously, Sanger admits to having no great sense of compassion for the less fortunate, a seeming drawback for their would-be liberator. "I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor," she writes, "and never experienced that satisfaction in working among them that so many noble women have found."

Sanger saw the poor not as a people to be helped, but as a problem to be solved, and birth control offered the perfect solution. If "The Pivot of Civilization" is as loud and clear as a bell about this solution, "The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger" is almost entirely silent. It is not hard to understand the silence. The autobiography was published in 1938, the same year that Joseph Goebbels made the following declaration about his fellow National Socialists:

Our starting point is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked ... Our objectives are entirely different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.

Now consider the following declaration from Sanger's "The Pivot of Civilization," one that makes Goebbels' proclamation seem, by comparison, a model of restraint:

... the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism.

Planned Parenthood is forever chastising pro-life advocates for quoting Margaret Sanger out of context, but "Pivot" is all context. Sanger posits two primary reasons why birth control is necessary. The first, the one that has endured in progressive mythology, is "the liberation of the spirit of woman and through woman of the child." The second, the one that has been cleansed from the record, is "to prevent the sexual and racial chaos into which the world has drifted."

Sanger reviews the remedies for dealing with a nation half filled with "morons" and finds them all wanting. She reserves her greatest scorn, of course, for the traditional. The Catholic Church's claim that even deformed children have souls, (Emphasis mine.) she argues, has had "the practical effect of making this world a vale of tears." To "open-minded" individuals – presumably, like herself – such orthodoxy appears "crude and cruel" and a "menace to civilization."

Traditional philanthropy, if anything, is crueler still. "Organized charity," writes Sanger, "itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease." By keeping so many "defectives, delinquents and dependents" alive and breeding, charity at some point becomes an injustice for the self-supporting citizen and a "positive injury to the future of the race." Indeed, students of Sanger could not have been surprised by the massive progressive indifference to the torture and death of Terri Schiavo. The seed of that indifference has been deeply planted.

Sanger's American Birth Control League and its allies had enormous influence in their day. In 1927, in a now notorious case known as Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the state of Virginia's ruling that Carrie Buck and her infant daughter were mentally defective and thus deserving of forced sterilization.

"It is better for all the world," wrote famed progressive jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., "if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." Sanger could not have said it better herself.

Surprise! It did not start with the excretions of William O. Douglas' pudenda.

In 1946, with the full horrors of the Holocaust revealed, the American Birth Control League quietly changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In a memory purge impressive even by Soviet standards, Planned Parenthood and its friends in the cultural establishment proceeded to cleanse all trace of eugenics, positive or negative, from Sanger's record.

By the time Sanger died in 1966, the cultural establishment had transformed her into the Mother Teresa of birth control. "Eugenics" does not appear among the 2,200 glowing words in that ultimate arbitrator of establishment worth, the New York Times obituary.

The Margaret Sanger that the Times reader is asked to remember is a "dynamic, titian-haired woman whose Irish ancestry also endowed her with unfailing charm and persuasive wit." The only quibble that the Times raises is that her opposition to the Catholic Church led her to oppose the election of president John F. Kennedy.

Yes, yes. A true humanitarian and friend of womankind.

There is one more Sanger parallel with the ex-Catholic Goebbels. Both believed the bigger the lie, the easier it is accepted as gospel.

Sure, it's funny. Until somebody loses a soul.

King Goober II and voodoo, first reported by WorldNetDaily on December 14, 1998:

In this land where witch doctors carry more clout than conventional PhDs or professional campaign advisers, the average citizen has been provided a mind-boggling explanation for why Bill Clinton so handily beat President George Bush in 1992, triumphed to re-election easily in 1996 and is now facing impeachment.

Acting on the advice of a "houngan" or sorcerer, supplied by then-exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Clinton did not change his underwear the last week of the 1992 campaign, voodoo practitioners say.

The same houngan also cast a "malediction" on President Bush by manipulating a doll made in the president's image, goes the story. The torment climaxed when the houngan caused Bush's projectile vomit into the lap of the Japanese prime minister as the world press looked on, disgracing him with the public.

Those and other bizarre stories were being told the Haitian people through the Lavalassien, a newspaper published by Aristide's ruling Lavalas party. They were written by the Rev. Gerard Jean-Juste, who was a priest in Aristide's entourage. The Rev. Gerard claimed that Aristide had developed a powerful grip on Clinton's psyche through the power of voodoo.

Psyche my eye. He put on a wig and dangled a Freudian cigar. That is all that was ever needed to captivate ol' Goober II.

That hoodoo that you do so well.

Bill Clinton's affair with Voodoo
(This must have been before he switched to fat white chicks.)

"You remind me of a man."

"What man?"

"The man with the power."

"What power?"

"The power of hoodoo."

"Hoodoo?"

"You do."

"Do what?"

"Remind me of a man."

"What man?"

"The man with the power."

"What power?"

"The power of hoodoo."

"Hoodoo?"

"You do."
(Myrna Loy and Cary Grant in The Bachelor and The Bobby Soxer - 1947)

When it comes to dabbling in the black arts, former U.S. President Bill Clinton has much in common with deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Saddam reportedly wore a stone around his neck to ward off evil. When he was ensconced in his Iraqi palaces, he summoned up the jinn (genies) to do his bidding.

According to historian Joel A. Ruth, a Voodoo sorcerer, supplied to Clinton by the exiled-by-coup John-Bertrand Aristide, once put a curse on incumbent President George W. Bush, "by manipulating a doll made in the president’s image."

Neither Saddam’s magic stone, a special talisman meant to keep the Grim Reaper at bay, nor the Voodoo sorcerer’s curse against George W. worked. Saddam languishes in prison awaiting trial. Clinton, relegated to the public speaker’s tour, was last week paid a $300,000 fee to address a business audience in Bogotá, Colombia.

The long road of destruction Aristide carved through poverty-stricken Haiti was paved in part by one William Jefferson Clinton.

Clinton’s friendship with Aristide, a former Catholic priest turned Voodoo practitioner dates back to 1991 when Aristide, ousted in a coup, took up residence in Washington, D.C. Joining the cocktail circuit and networking for the political aid needed to help restore his power, he soon found his way within the inner circle of the soon-to-be Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Clinton.

As time would tell, Clinton paid more than a politician’s lip service to the practice of Voodoo.

According to the Haiti Observateur, "During a March 31, 1995 visit to Haiti under Aristide’s restored rule, Clinton took part in a Voodoo initiative ceremony intended to keep him impervious to Republican attacks and to guarantee his re-election." (FrontPageMag.com, Feb. 20,. 2004).
No Voodoo ceremony could ward off Monica Lewinsky and the rest, as they say, is history.

Freudian Cigars: The Next Generation. (Ok...um...it's like this, girls and boys. Sometimes Sigmund Freud's cigar was smoked by his wife's younger sister.)

And what, pray tell, are the wages of sin?

The children of Port-au-Prince continue to die of hunger. Marauding armed guards still loyal to Aristide battle police and there are signs of UN corruption.

A recent spate of violence in which at least 20 people were killed, is forcing U.S. officials to consider deploying American troops to help maintain order ahead of a general election slated for the last quarter of 2005.

While Aristide is living a life of a king’s ransom in exile, most Haitians are subsisting on less than a dollar a day.

Meanwhile, it will take more than black magic to clean the slate of Bill Clinton in a country whose mantra is "Haiti is cursed". (Thanks to Canada Free Press.)

From The My Idiot Italian Cousins Department:

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (via WND) comes this news item that makes me wonder how long it took them to forget the Brigate Rosse.

Italian prosecutors want to extradite 13 CIA officials accused of kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric and transporting him to Egypt where he reportedly was tortured, and they've asked Interpol to help track down the Americans, a court official said Tuesday.

A man identified as the former CIA station chief in Milan is among the 13, according to a report by the judge who issued the arrest warrants. The American was traced by cell phone records to Egypt in the days after the abduction when the cleric was "likely undergoing the first" rounds of torture, according to the report obtained by The Associated Press.
The Egyptian preacher was snatched in 2003, purportedly as part of the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program in which terror suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, subjecting them to possible ill treatment.

The order for the arrests in the transfer of the cleric - made public last Friday - was a rare public objection to the practice by a close American ally in its war on terrorism.

The leftist opposition said Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government will respond in parliament Thursday to their demands to know whether Italian officials were involved.

"It appears to be the most serious violation of national sovereignty in the history of the republic," said opposition deputy Marco Minniti.

From The Modern Phrenology Department:

Erin White of The Wall Street Journal warns prospective employees they may be probed.

Rodney Archer, a 51-year-old engineering consultant in Silicon Valley, had spent several hours interviewing for a job at a tech company when his would-be employer posed an unusual request: Would he submit a handwriting sample?

Baffled, he asked why. It turned out the company had an analyst in Israel who regularly reviewed potential employees' handwriting. "It's a very effective way to find out what people's true personalities are and what they're like to work with," he recalls being told.

But for job candidates themselves requests like these pose a quandary: You're asked to do something in the hiring process that just seems weird, and makes you uncomfortable. If you express hesitation or flat-out refuse, you risk losing the job. Employers may label you uncooperative or overly sensitive. But if you suppress your discomfort and perform the task, you may be ignoring a red flag telling you this company isn't the place for you.

"Some of these odd things really are sort of shining a light on what some of the company quirks are, and maybe you need to make the decision that it's not a good fit," says Linda Dominguez, an executive coach based in Coarse Gold, Calif. Of course, "when you're unemployed, that's a really hard thing to do."

A few years ago, a client came to Ms. Dominguez after receiving an odd request. The woman was meeting with an internal recruiter at a real-estate company about a senior human-resources job. The recruiter asked the woman to have her photograph taken. When she asked why, she was told only that the hiring manager liked to see candidates before interviewing them.

She felt uncomfortable but obliged. Later, she wished she had declined because she didn't think the company should have needed to know what she looked like before landing an interview with the hiring manager, Ms. Dominguez says. She wasn't offered the job, but ended up at a different company with a better job title, higher pay, and a culture she felt was a better fit.

Simply expressing reluctance to comply with a request can hurt your chances of landing a job, career counselors say. Dan Squires, a career coach in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., recalls an acquaintance who was interviewing for a senior executive position at a company in the entertainment industry. He was asked to take a psychological test. He was so taken aback that he said no. A few hours later, after asking Mr. Squires for advice, he called the company to say he would take the test after all. But by then, Mr. Squires fears, the damage may have already been done. When people refuse to do things, Mr. Squires says, employers may think, "What else are we going to ask him to do and he'll say, 'uh-uh, not me?' " He didn't get the job, and Mr. Squires suspects it was at least partly because he initially balked about taking the test.

It's hard to tell whether an odd request is indicative of a broader problem at the company, or just a meaningless quirk of its hiring process. That's why it's so important to research the company by talking with as many people as possible inside and outside the firm. "You should have some sense [whether] this is an anomaly or something they do because they think it's warm and wonderful," says Dave Opton, chief executive of ExecuNet, a career management and recruitment network for executives and recruiters, based in Norwalk, Conn.

Mr. Archer felt uncomfortable when asked to take the handwriting test. "It really made me think about what was going on with this company because I actually started to have doubts about whether I wanted to work there," he says.

"It made me wonder what other processes this company had that would be kind of 19th century," he says.