Yet another column and Cheney bias

I've been buried with work and other things lately, but here's my take on this whole Cheney shooting thing.

Late in the week, media outlets were continuously stating that "questions persist" about the incident. Given the fact that they are the ones asking the persistent questions, this should be no surprise.

And a perfect example of this is Newsweek and Evan Thomas.

But the shooting incident once again drew attention to the unusual nature of Cheney's power. He remains by far the most powerful vice president in history, and one of the most secretive and mysterious public officials to ever hold such high office in America. He is caricatured as a Darth Vader, spooky, above the law; nefarious.

Yep. Caricatured by the media.

Has he been transformed, warped, perhaps corrupted—by stress, wealth, aging, illness, the real terrors of the world or possibly some inner goblins?

"Perhaps corrupted"??? - that sounds real fair and balanced, doesn't it? The story from Thomas is long, and full of more speculation and Beltway gossip than facts.

Guessing at the causes of his darkening persona is a favorite Washington pastime. A widely held theory is that Cheney, 65, was affected by heart surgery (he has had four heart attacks, angioplasty, a quadruple bypass and a pacemaker). It is true that heart patients sometimes undergo mood or even personality changes, but there is no solid evidence in Cheney's case.

No, but since Thomas writes for a major news organ, he tosses these charges around as if they were true. I'm still trying to figure out which organ he represents...probably the one that produces bile.

But please keep in mind the author's family history while looking for a motive to this bias...his grandpa was a very famous man...

"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."

-- Norman Thomas, Socialist Party Presidential Candidate in 1940, 1944 and 1948, co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Place your bids now

Someone could have a lot of fun with this if they have deep pockets. From eBay:

You are bidding on a speaking engagement with Cindy Sheehan. Cindy will come speak to a group of your choice (within the continental US)*, and any speaking fees and transportation costs will be waived (your group will only need to provide lodging for the night).

This is a wonderful opportunity to treat your group to an evening of motivation, inspiration, truth, and the indomitable power of a mother's love... and you get to help out the progressive cause, to boot! How great is that?

And in other moonbat news:

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is set to hold an 11 a.m. press conference Thursday in San Francisco regarding her potential run for the Senate.

Sheehan has considered running against current California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is up for re-election in November.

Today's total waste of newscopy

Just when you thought there the wire wasn't going to produce some politically correct bitching disguised as news, well....

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Male characters outnumbered females 3-to-1 overall in top-grossing G-rated films from 1990 to 2004, according to a study whose sponsors say the disparity diminishes the importance of women in children's eyes.

"We're showing kids a world that's very scantly populated with women and female characters," said actress Geena Davis, founder of See Jane, a program of the advocacy group Dads & Daughters that encourages balanced gender representation in entertainment for children.

In the 101 animated and live-action films examined, 28 percent of speaking characters were female, and just 17 percent of people in crowd scenes were female, researchers found in the study released Thursday by See Jane.

"It's important for what kids watch that as far as possible, they see the real world reflected, to see men and women, boys and girls, sharing the space," said Davis, co-star of the female-empowerment film "Thelma & Louise" and star of TV's "Commander in Chief" in which she plays the U.S. president. "They should see female characters taking up half the planet, which we do."

"Thelma & Louise"... that was the movie where you played a uplifting example of womanhood, right Geena? Packing a gun and running from the law is a real good example for our kids. A true, positive roll model for young girls.

Joe Kelly, co-founder of Dads & Daughters, said as much as he loves "Toy Story," the study made him think about the movie differently. The movie has a positive message about two characters - Tom Hanks' Woody and Tim Allen's Buzz Lightyear - overcoming their differences and working together, but it does have a flaw, Kelly said.

"It wasn't until the study that I went back and realized there's only one toy that's a female character, and it's Bo-Peep. She's standing at the window going, 'Oh, Woody, don't hurt yourself,'" Kelly said. "Not that I want 'Toy Story' to be changed. I don't think there should be any sort of gender formula. But there are other movies to be made with powerful messages featuring female characters."

Uhhh...maybe because the story takes place in a boy's bedroom?

Myself, I vote for more anime from Japan...they really know how to represent women.

Wacky fun with the Religion of Peace

You know, I try to be understanding of other cultures...really I do. But stuff like this (WARNING-BLOODY AND GRAPHIC) is what leads me to think that a large portion of the earth's population needs to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the 7th century. According to the BBC:

Falling on the 10th of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, Shia Muslims mark the death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson at Karbala with mourning rituals and plays re-enacting the martyrdom.

Men and women dress in black and parade through the streets slapping their chests and chanting.

Some Shia orders flagellate themselves with chains and blades to emulate Hussein's suffering - though this is frowned upon by others.

Also, take a look at this thread from Free Republic to get an idea how sick and weird this is.

Matheny update

Vorticity has an update about the current flap regarding State Rep. Judd Matheny.

Google's not stopping with China

There's been plenty written about Google agreeing to censor content to Chinese Internet users...but what's disturbing is this:

Looks like one blogsite, The Study of Revenge, had Google pre-emptively (i.e. without warning) placed a warning label prior to entering this "hateful" website using big bold letters:

===========================================
CONTENT WARNING
Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog's content is hateful. In general, Google does not review nor do we endorse the content of this or any blog. For more information about this message, please consult our FAQ
===========================================

The site apparently gets the warning due to it's criticism of Islam and liberalism in general.

Like I said, disturbing.

Wellstone memorial - Part 2

I saw some of this cross the wires at work a while ago and it's a total shame that people take the opportunity to use the funeral of Coretta Scott King to hurl abuse at the president. Bush just had to sit there and take it. Of course, had he not attended, they would have slammed him even harder. Damned if you do...

LOWERY: We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew and we knew that there were weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance, poverty abound, for war billions more, but no more for the poor.

Jimmy Carter was at it too.

The Democratic Party: Every political rally a funeral. Every funeral a political rally.

Rock The Casbah

Let's party like it's 622 AD!

By order of the prophet
We ban that boogie sound
Degenerate the faithful
With that crazy Casbah sound
But the Bedouin they brought out
The electric camel drum
The local guitar picker
Got his guitar picking thumb
As soon as the shareef
Had cleared the square
They began to wail

CHORUS:
The shareef don't like it
Rockin' the Casbah
Rock the Casbah
The shareef don't like it
Rockin' the Casbah
Rock the Casbah...

Latest column

Almost forgot to post a link to my latest column, where I deal with the repercussions of just reporting what happened during my trip to cover the president

Fake cartoons?

This puts a new twist into the riots over the Danish cartoons:

Last Friday the CT Blog revealed how a delegation of Danish Muslims, led by Copenhagen imam Abu Laban, toured the Middle East in December and showed fabricated cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in a very offensive fashion, even though the pictures had never appeared on Jyllands Posten.

Plus, here's a little of the double standard that's being seen across the pond about this.

"What if" journalism

"I'm smellin' a lotta 'ifs' comin' off this plan..." Jayne Cobb, public relations officer of the cargo ship Serenity

Feb. 13, 2006 issue - In the latest twist in the debate over presidential powers, a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States. Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W. Bush's surveillance program. During the briefing, said administration and Capitol Hill officials (who declined to be identified because the session was private), California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury questions about the extent of presidential powers to fight Al Qaeda; could Bush, for instance, order the killing of a Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S. soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances.

Current and former government officials said they could think of several scenarios in which a president might consider ordering the killing of a terror suspect inside the United States. One former official noted that before Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, top administration officials weighed shooting down the aircraft if it got too close to Washington, D.C. What if the president had strong evidence that a Qaeda suspect was holed up with a dirty bomb and was about to attack? University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein says the post-9/11 congressional resolution authorizing the use of military force against Al Qaeda empowered the president to kill 9/11 perpetrators, or people who assisted their plot, whether they were overseas or inside the United States. On the other hand, Sunstein says, the president would be on less solid legal ground were he to order the killing of a terror suspect in the United States who was not actively preparing an attack.

More of those crazy Muslims...and the people who enable them

Flags and buildings burn as members of the Religion of Peace continue their objections to Danish cartoons that supposedly satirize Mohammed. But what's worse is that some are actually enabling these enraged primates.

For example:

In London, a crowd of 1,000 Muslims clutching orange placards demonstrated outside the Danish embassy. Two dressed as suicide bombers were allowed to stand next to a police van while officers - who had made no arrests the previous day - tried to prevent photographers from taking pictures of them.

The protesters chanted Allah Aqbar (God Is Great), and their placards bore slogans including: "Free Speech Equals Cheap Insults"; "Rudeness, Slander, Disrespect: Is This Freedom Of Speech?"; "Leave Muslims alone" and "Freedom is hypocrisy".

But was is really shocking is this:

The Vatican, while deploring violence, said that certain forms of criticism represented an "unacceptable" provocation. "The right to freedom of thought and expression cannot entail the right to offend the religious sentiment of believers," a statement said.

What? You mean like this?

Some over at Fox News are tucking their tail between their legs too.

Also Mark Steyn comments on this, which should be read in full:

NBC is celebrating Easter this year with a special edition of the gay sitcom "Will & Grace," in which a Christian conservative cooking-show host, played by the popular singing slattern Britney Spears, offers seasonal recipes -- "Cruci-fixin's." On the other hand, the same network, in its coverage of the global riots over the Danish cartoons, has declined to show any of the offending artwork out of "respect" for the Muslim faith.

Which means out of respect for their ability to locate the executive vice president's home in the suburbs and firebomb his garage.

Grandpa has returned to the basement

Bad news this afternoon:

NEW YORK -- Al Lewis, the cigar-chomping patriarch of "The Munsters" whose work as a basketball scout, restaurateur and political candidate never eclipsed his role as Grandpa from the television sitcom, died after years of failing health. He was 95.

Lewis, with his wife at his bedside, passed away Friday night, said Bernard White, program director at WBAI-FM, where the actor hosted a weekly radio program. White made the announcement on the air during the Saturday slot where Lewis usually appeared.

About those ads...

I'm just about to drop Google AdSense due to the overwhelming amount of "impeach Bush" links and other such crap that is 180 degrees the opposite of my views. I'm having to constantly edit the settings, only to find them other such ads replacing them. While I'm well aware of their political leanings, I feel they have no right to push them on other sites that sign up for their service. Watch for changes soon.

More border fun...

While I missed the State of the Union address on Tuesday, I did get a chance to cover Bush's speech in Nashville in person on Wednesday, which was basically a recap of the night before. I have to say, I didn't care for his approach to the immigration problem:

I believe a very significant part of enforcing our border, make it easier for our Border Patrol to do the job, is to end this system that encourages smuggling and pressure on the border by people sneaking across, and saying if there is somebody that's willing to do a job an American won't do, let's give him a fool-proof pass so they can be here on a temporary basis.

Now, I'm against amnesty, and the reason I am is I believe if you grant amnesty to people that are here, it will cause another wave of people to want to come. (Applause.) But I am for recognizing reality and saying that if you're doing a job, if you're an employer and you're looking for somebody to do a job an American won't do, then here is a card for a temporary worker.

It's hard for me to take this seriously when I read things like this:

HOUSTON — A West Texas sheriff's deputy warned federal lawmakers Friday that drug traffickers are helping terrorists with possible al Qaeda ties cross the porous Texas-Mexico border into the United States.

Terry Simons, the chief deputy in Val Verde County, offered little evidence of his claims. An FBI special agent in Houston, Shauna Dunlap, said there is "no credible evidence" that supports the warning.

Or this:

Federal agents and local police assigned to a border security task force have seized two homemade bombs, material for 33 more, grenades, machine gun assembly kits and other weapons, drugs and cash in separate raids in Laredo, Texas.
The bombs and other paraphernalia are thought to belong to or be destined for rival drug cartels across the Rio Grande in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, where a brutal yearlong war over the control of drug and alien smuggling routes into the United States has raged.
More than 150 people -- including the police chief, a city councilman and 13 police officers -- have been killed in the Mexican border town over the last year.

Followed by this:

In the past few days, Hudspeth County Sheriff's Department deputies and their families have received threats to stay off the Rio Grande. Sheriff Arvin West told ABC-7 Thursday morning, before departing for Houston that the Mexican military is behind all of this.

Sheriff West said, "There is no doubt in my mind -- from the first time going back to a couple of years ago and every time in between --- it's the Mexican military. In a nutshell, everybody's been trying to tell everybody that they were here...they've been here ...[and] they come here quite often, regularly."

Now Sheriff West is having to deal with threats being made against his deputies and their families. One Sheriff's Deputy, who refused to appear on camera out of fear, described the situation today in Hudspeth County as "very dangerous." and now, he said, "it's getting personal."

Meanwhile in the 11th Century...

...things are going pretty much like they've always have; the primates are calling for more heads, this time over some cartoons.

MUSLIM protesters threatened more terrorist attacks as they converged in their hundreds outside the Danish Embassy in London yesterday for what organisers said was the start of a new holy war in Britain.

As opposed to the old one from several weeks ago...

Parading banners that called for the killing of newspaper editors and broadcasters from the BBC who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, they marched across the capital from the mosque in Regent’s Park after Friday prayers.

Meanwhile...

‘We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible,’ one preacher told worshippers at the al-Omari Mosque in the Gaza Strip as tensions spread over the publication of the cartoons, first in Denmark and later in Norway, France, Germany and Spain. ...

‘We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us,’ prominent Muslim cleric Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi told worshippers in Qatar. ‘We can buy from China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia... we will not be humiliated.’

In Lebanon, thousands of Palestinian refugees marched through the streets of their camps, burning Danish and Norwegian flags and calling on Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader, to avenge the Prophet Mohammad.

‘We will not be satisfied with protests. The solution is the slaughter of those who harmed Islam and the Prophet,’ said Sheikh Abu Sharif, spokesman for the militant Osbet al-Ansar group, at a rally in Lebanon’s largest camp, the southern Ein al-Hilweh.

Let me get this straight, Muslims, who are upset at Islam being portrayed as a violent religion, are threatening death and beheadings to those who say Islam is religion of violence?

They are freaking out over a cartoon which reflects exactly what they are really saying.

OK...and now CNN is just reporting that mobs have set the Danish embassy in Damascus ablaze over this.

When is the world going to wake up and deal with these animals as they should be dealt with instead of worrying if they are going to "offend anyone" like the spineless wimps in our state department did yesterday?

Also, according to Instapundit, The Boston Globe is siding with the barbarians, comparing the Danish cartoonists to Nazis.

One thing about be being under the weather...

...is that I miss things like this. Now, I have most of these on DVD, but there's something about seeing these classics on the big screen as they were meant to. Then there's this I'd like to check out too. Maybe if I feel better.

I've been exposed

This is a first. I was covering the president's visit to Nashville yesterday and little did I know that Brittney from nashvilleistalking.com was there as well...

And took my picture standing in the press pool.














I'm standing second from the left.