Ho, ho, ho...

I'm staying out of England until this sort of thing stops:

BOSSES at the Eden Project tourist attraction have banned the word Christmas.

They do not want any mention of what they call the C-Word because they are worried it will offend followers of other faiths.

Management have renamed Christmas “Time of Gifts” — claiming this will appeal to everyone at the domed eco project in Cornwall which gets millions of pounds in funding each year from taxpayers.

A gift shop at the site has been re-named the Great Gift Grotto.

Staff have been told to stop visitors saying Christmas.

A Blue State story

This is probably why Chicago has such stringent gun-control laws:

Adrienne Leonard was traveling overseas last year on a missionary trip when she got a frantic phone call from her mother: The city had taken Leonard's car.

Booted and towed from in front of her South Side bungalow, her green 2001 Kia Sephia was gone.

Gone for good, it turned out.

The city demanded more than $1,000 for three parking tickets, and towing and storage fees.

Leonard was $300 short.

The city gave her 15 days to get the money, but she ran out of time.

The car became the city's -- an "involuntary surrender," the city calls it.

In January, the city sold the Kia to a politically connected towing firm that has an exclusive contract on city business.

How much money did the city get for the car?

Just $125.54.

That's right. The city sold a 3-year-old car for $125.54.

Leonard, 47, didn't get a dime from the sale and lost all the equity in her car.

She didn't even get a dime's credit toward those tickets, towing and storage fees. She's still on the hook for those.

And she still owes $13,800 for the Kia -- a car she no longer owns.

"The city stole my car," Leonard said, tears building in her eyes, as she learned from reporters what happened to her Kia. "I was robbed.''

A Blue state story.

Whine, whine, whine

This great picture of one of our brave men taking down scum in Iraq (Pulitzer materal, by the way) is producing the all too typical bitching and moaning from those who are always bitching and moaning:

How many kids trying to emulate heroic U.S. soldiers in Iraq will choose to slowly commit suicide as a direct result of your ill-conceived Marlboro pandering?

Be a responsible part of the community instead of simply leeching off it 25 cents at a time.

How much did Phillip Morris pay for the front cover advertisement?

Thank you for continuing to encourage the development of cancer. Mark Leininger

Manhattan

Your cover is a disgrace.

War is not a video game.

Actual people are losing their lives.

At least 10 U.S. soldiers died early in this battle, not to mention many innocent Iraqi civilians who hadn't left the area.

This man is not a cartoon character. He is a real man who has just been through some of the most trying moments of his life — moments that will most likely haunt him forever.

Yet, there you are exploiting him and promoting cigarettes.

It's disgusting. John Keenan

Manhattan

Scary map

Things like this do not let me sleep very well at night.

Who said this?

Ugly quotes...and then the source. I'm not surprised. Hat tip to Instapundit.

Rorschach Movie Review

You know, for some people, those old ink blot tests that the shrink gives you can reveal a lot. Seems to me that a certain writer at the New York Times could use some time on the couch after reading this movie review of The Polar Express:

Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

We don't see these things...but it would appear that this reviewer does. For God's sake, it's just a kids movie!

Dr. Harlin screws the pooch...again

Getting to a bit of local news here...the notorious Dr. Charles Harlin, whose controversial tenure as Tennessee Medical Examiner has plagued this state for years, has caused a mother to go through a living hell. This was posted on the AP State Wire a short time ago. It is long past time that Tennessee got themselves a new medical examiner. I doubt we're going to see any episodes of CSI: Nashville aired on CBS anytime soon.

Overdose murder charge dropped against mom of disabled teen

WINCHESTER (AP) — Saying the autopsy report was wrong, a prosecutor Friday dismissed a murder charge against a mother accused of killing her severely disabled with an overdose of medication.

District Attorney Mike Taylor told a judge that new tests showed 15-year-old Ashley Mignano, who had cerebral palsy, did not die July 4 from a fatal dose of phenobarbital. The teenager’s mother, Margaret Mignano, had been arrested in August and spent a week in jail before she was freed on $200,000 bond.

The autopsy report was signed by Dr. Charles Harlan of Nashville, a forensic pathologist who is defending his medical license against state charges of misdiagnosing causes of death in other cases and destroying evidence in criminal investigations.

Mignano’s attorney, Bob Peters, said he and Taylor were in court for an unrelated case when the prosecutor surprised him by telling a judge that “follow-up testing did not indicate a lethal dose” of the drug, used to control the girl’s seizures.

Neither the prosecutor nor the lead investigator in the case immediately returned a call seeking comment, but a court clerk confirmed that Taylor said the murder charge was dropped.

Harlan’s report included outside lab tests showing the teen had lethal levels of the barbiturate in her system. The defense argued that Mignano, who moved her family from Scotch Plains, N.J., about a week before the death, followed doctors’ orders in using the drug.

Harlan, who continues to practice while fighting the state charges, declined to comment Friday about the Mignano case. A woman who answered the phone at his office referred questions to the prosecutor.

“We have passed on all the retesting and re-retesting to the district attorney general,” the woman said she was instructed to tell reporters.

Be afraid

Not much to say about this, except that I hope that this is just a few lone nuts that don't have the stones to carry this kind of thing to it's conclusion. It makes me nervous. Very nervous.

Michael Medved did an entire show on these swine yesterday. Archived here.

And in other related news...

Ratings war?

Arrogance Means Having to Say You're Sorry

UPDATE: Follow up here.

You have got to be kidding me...

Uh...it was just an election, dude...and your guy lost:

VINCENT D'Onofrio, the star of "Law & Order: Criminal Intent," passed out while shooting the hit TV series yesterday morning — prompting insiders to gossip that the actor is "losing it."

"Ever since John Kerry lost the election, [D'Onofrio] has lost his [bleep,]" said our on-set insider.

"He has been getting into fistfights with people, and when he passed out today, we all thought he was faking it. But then he insisted they call 911."

NOW, he's dead, Jim...

It's official. The head Palestinian terrorist is dead.

About that unity thing...

Hardly a week has past since the election and guess what?

Kerry denounces Ashcroft, says administration will be better without him

At least one lawmaker seems happy to see John Ashcroft resign -- John Kerry.

The former presidential candidate has issued a statement calling the attorney general "one of the most divisive faces in this administration."

This must be part of the healing he talked about. The "working together" idea, right?

Are they nuts?

Coming from the south as I am, and being a decendent of Confederate veterans that fell at Shiloh, I find this kind of talk crazy and dangerous:

STUNG BY DEFEAT, puzzled and adrift, Democrats spent much of the past week turning to history, looking back at the great many-colored tapestry of the American past, in order to find where we--the people--find ourselves, now that George W. Bush has been reelected. And after consulting textbooks, and opening biographical dictionaries, and talking to some of the most renowned figures in the American academy, they have settled on an answer: America is on the brink of civil war.

"Not since the Civil War," Columbia University professor and noted art critic Simon Schama wrote in the Manchester Guardian on Sunday, "has the fault line between [America's] two halves been so glaringly clear, nor the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable."

Princeton University history professor Sean Wilentz agrees. He told Dean Murphy in Sunday's New York Times that there are only "two instances in history" when the American electorate has been so divided. "They are kind of scary examples," Wilentz said. "One is 1860, and we know what happened after that one . . ."

Yeah...the Union came through and burned everything to the ground. Looted, murdered and pilaged. Neighbors turned against neighbor. Right here in my backyard.

Tolerance and Diversity

Looks like trouble is brewing on campus in the city known worldwide for its tolerance and diversity:

Over 300 Arab student protesters surrounded the table of the local College Republican Club at San Francisco State University, prompting 13 campus police officers to protect the political organization's property and volunteers.

According to columnist Lee Kaplan writing in FrontPage Magazine, the protesters – "Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and radical leftist students" – surrounded the outdoor table the morning after President Bush's re-election victory, when the Republican activists had hoped to recruit more members.
----
Two days earlier, Arab students confronted members of the Republican club who were distributing Bush-Cheney flyers on campus, with one woman reportedly slapping one of the conservative students. The columnist says the Republicans were accused of the "murder of Palestinian babies" due to their support for Bush.

Wrote Kaplan:

"Lee Wolf, another College Republicans member, described one of the women on Monday as shouting, 'The only way we can defeat you is to kill as many as possible! I'd rather die a suicide bomber's death than to call myself an American!' He continued, 'In my opinion, these were terrorist threats.'"

According to the report, the Arab protesters have called for the Republican club to be banned from campus. Flyers were even distributed at the university that said: "Don't Let the College Republicans Commit Racism and Bigotry Against Arab Women."

Meanwhile, down at the border

While our government foolishly sucks up to Mexico by tempting the crooked government south of the border with new plans to overhaul immigration rules, other visitors are seeping through:

As our cameras had captured this day, hundreds of illegal entrants sneak into Arizona from Mexico.

Items left behind, like a Muslim prayer rug and a diary written in Arabic have led some to believe not all crossers are from Central and South America.

In our original story.sources. including a former Border Patrol supervisor, say people from terrorist-related countries are crossing the border at will.

This agent says it's certainly happened, describing one incident with a detainee near Naco, Arizona.

"So they took him back to the Naco station for further investigating there, and when they entered his fingerprints into the AFIS database, which is maintained by the FBI, several minutes later they received a phone call from someone on the other end -- I'm not sure who it was."

"and they stated, whoever is working on this particular terminal, they need to separate that gentleman right away. He was later determined to be from Pakistan. And he had affiliations with a terrorist group. It wasn't al-Qaida, but it was another terrorist group and this gentleman was wanted out of France for trafficking in heroin."

Babs' Jefferson quote: Anti-semintic?

Babs has finally spoken out about last week's election results on website, however a Freeper took it upon his or herself to actually look up the context of the Thomas Jefferson quote she and others on the left are using:

Jefferson is writing about calls for secession over political disputes with the New England Federalists (he’s against it). But, what is so interesting, and what the liberal bloggers ignored, are the sentences preceding the one quoted. Here they are unexpunged:

“Seeing, therefore, that an association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry, seeing that we must have somebody to quarrel with, I had rather keep our New England associates for that purpose than to see our bickerings transferred to others. They are circumscribed within such narrow limits, and their population so full, that their numbers will ever be the minority, and they are marked, like the Jews, with such a peculiarity of character as to constitute from that circumstance the natural division of our parties. A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to it's true principles. It is true that in the mean time we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war & long oppressions of enormous public debt.”

So, paraphrasing, the Federalists are “witches,” but they’re also “Jews” and therefore inherently suspect. This is hardly one of Jefferson’s most insightful moments.

Ooops.

Hitting the couch

I suppose that this was inevitable:

More than a dozen traumatized John Kerry supporters have sought and received therapy from a licensed Florida psychologist since their candidate lost to President Bush, the Boca Raton News learned Monday.
Boca Raton trauma specialist Douglas Schooler said he has treated 15 clients and friends with “intense hypnotherapy” since the Democratic nominee conceded last Wednesday.
“I had one friend tell me he’s never been so depressed and angry in his life,” Schooler said. “I observed patients threatening to leave the country or staring listlessly into space. They were emotionally paralyzed, shocked and devastated.”
Schooler’s disclosure comes after the weekend discovery of a Kerry volunteer’s corpse at Ground Zero in New York City. Georgia resident Andrew Veal, 25, reportedly killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head due to Kerry’s loss and a girlfriend problem.

I'm only worried about those who want to take out their problems on other people aside from themselves. And you just know its coming sometime down the pike. They should take this advice.

Finally...or maybe not

He's dead, Jim.



Maybe this time they mean it. Must have found the money...

...or maybe not.

Verbal Bitch Slap of the Left

And we are supposed to "reach out" to these people?

Feel the hate

After reading this, it looks like things are going to get worse between the liberals and conservatives before they get better.

We should let you rot. We should secede and leave you to fend for yourselves. Then you will see firsthand just how dependent you are. We are sick of fighting for you by fighting against you. Perhaps, when you see how dreary your lives have become without us, you will finally develop the spine to fight for your basic, human rights. And then we will gladly confront the plutocracy alongside you. We need your help to defeat the Blue Republicans, who, I assure you, are just as decadent as we are, though often richer.

Beyond belief...even for the New York Times

I don't read the Times, unless I have to...so I missed this one. LGF has the details:

What the hell is going on at the New York Times?

I expect the bias. I expect Paul Krugman’s distorted op-eds, and Maureen Dowd’s incoherent babbling. I expect the pro-Palestinian, anti-American articles that flow from the Old Grey Lady in a constant stream.

What I don’t expect to find is a thinly veiled cry for an “act of God” to remove President Bush from office—in an article that describes previous assassinations of US presidents as “acts of God.”

Waiting for the USSS to do their job....meanwhile here's more at Powerline with Democrats Ponder Alternatives: Vote Suppression, Secession and Assassination.

Mainstream Media Bias? Naw!

This large piece in the latest Newsweek points out a lot of what we already knew: That the MSM hid a lot of negative stuff on John Kerry.

Not an honorable death

Political insprired suppuku. Not recommended.

Best county by county map of election

Here's an eye opener. Much better than the USA Today map. Look at all the dead people voting in Chicago.

Unbelievable

"Thou Shalt Not Kill" = racist

In the Netherlands, artist Chris Ripke reacted to the murder on Theo Van Gogh by an islamic fundamentalist by painting a mural with the text "Gij zult niet doden" ("Thou Shalt Not Kill"), one of the ten commandments of the Christian religion.

But because the head of the nearby mosque complained to the police that this was 'offensive' and 'racist', the cops came and sent in city workers to sandblast the mural. A local journalist, Wim Nottroth, who wanted to protest against this by standing in front of the mural was arrested.

Eating their own

Attacked by Catwoman. There are so many reasons that this is funny. Now that the election is over, it appears they're turning on each other.

Meeoooow.

Condescension and Hostility...get a clue

From the Washington Post:

Republicans find themselves on the majority's side of the cultural divide because they don't display the Democrats' condescension and hostility to the moral sentiments and concerns of most Americans.