The Paper of Record?

On April 11th, Ray Cooper, the Attorney General for North Carolina, declared the three former Duke lacrosse players as "innocent" of rape charges brought against them last year. Cooper went on to state that Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong is guilty of "a rush to accuse." (link)

The New York Times published an editorial slamming Don Imus over his Rutger's "joke" directed at another group of "innocent" college athletes, but issued NO correction for the negative story it ran on the Duke players a while back. (link)

An August 25, 2006 Times story concluded: (link)

By disclosing pieces of evidence favorable to the defendants, the defense has created an image of a case heading for the rocks. But an examination of the entire 1,850 pages of evidence gathered by the prosecution in the four months after the accusation yields a more ambiguous picture. It shows that while there are big weaknesses in Mr. Nifong'scase, there is also a body of evidence to support his decision to take the matter to a jury.
...
In several important areas, the full files, reviewed by The New York Times, contain evidence stronger than that highlighted by the defense.

Exactly what evidence did the Times reporters review that was so convincing? Interesting question, since, as it now turns out, NONE existed.

This story from the so-called "paper of record" was somewhat harmful for the Duke players in the court of public opinion. I ran a fairly broad search on the Times website for some sort of apology, correction, update or mea culpa on this.

Nada.

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Paglia in the Spring

For her April Salon column, Camille Paglia answers questions sent in from her readers (link).

I find it hard to argue with most of what she has to say. Highlights below:

George W

Bush's swerve away from his father's preppy patrician style has ended up, as you note, as a hammy caricature of B-movie clichés about the folksy, plain-talking Westerner. His Texas accent has bizarrely gotten more pronounced since he's lived in Washington -- a defense mechanism of reverse snobbery.

I think Bush genuinely wanted to challenge and critique the establishment assumptions of his heritage and Ivy League education, but he lacked the verbal skills to do so. And his problems were compounded by his ineptitude in making top appointments. He got not sound counsel but fantasy and folly from Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney -- whose presence from the start signaled Bush's slack and even masochistic deferral to his father's administration.

Iraq

"Victory"-- a word constantly on President Bush's hopeful lips -- cannot be achieved in an amorphous insurgency or in a vast land with indefensible borders that is splintered among ancient sects and tribes. There is no distinct enemy, only a welter of saboteurs hiding among the population, whose loyalties cannot be assessed by a foreign force embarrassingly lacking elementary knowledge of local culture and languages. Our troops are being asked to convert, pacify and reconstruct even while waging war and hence are constantly being put in exposed positions where they can be killed or maimed with simple roadside devices.

Gun Control

As a Salon columnist (dating back to the founding of Salon in 1995), I have tried to provide a forum for defenders of the Second Amendment to make their case. The Northeastern major media, which remain heavily liberal, rarely permit these voices to be heard.

I do not own guns and have no interest in them. (Swords, those Homeric and chivalric emblems, have always attracted me more.) But as a libertarian, I read the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights as granting to private citizens the right to bear arms against the potential abuses of a government turned tyrannous. Furthermore, should police authority evaporate after a cataclysm of storm, flood, earthquake or terrorism, citizens have a right to defend their families and property against criminals and looters. If food and water are in short supply over a protracted period, expect predators and violence.

The horrendous problem of illegal guns now rampant among the urban underclass cannot be solved by depriving all American citizens of their Second Amendment rights. Major cities must address their internal problems, which include improving public education and vocational training, creating job-rich public works projects, and instituting on-the-street neighborhood policing. The major media, concentrated in their metropolises, should stop extrapolating their local issues to the nation as a whole.

Global Warming

... I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.

Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done.

Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault.

Ann Coulter

My problem with Ann Coulter is not the subjects she tackles, which are always substantive, but her carelessness of research and argumentation. She has frankly admitted that she now writes her books as if they were e-mails to her friends. I like her boldness and vigor, but I see no excuse for such indifference to craftsmanship.

Ideas, whether of the right or the left, deserve respect. But Coulter increasingly treats them like throwaway lines. The rapier thrust of true wit is not the bump-de-dump of a bad joke. But evidently Coulter can no longer tell the difference.

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Grin and Bear It

This is for real. What a hoot. (link)

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Jason Whitlock on Imus

Of all the blather regarding the Imus firing (the execs at MSNBC look like a bunch of spineless cowards) Jason Whitlock, of the Kansas City Star, has one of the most insightful perspectives:

"Imus isn’t the real bad guy"
http://www.kansascity.com/182/v-print/story/66339.html

Here's a sample:

I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage. But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

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Imus in the Moanin...

If there's anything worse than a personality who refuses to apologize for making a controversial remark (like Ann Coulter or Bill Maher who don't even understand why some people MAY be upset), it's when a celebrity is so clearly desperate to save their career that they grovel on the national stage for redemption.

This is the case with Don Imus.

It's fine and proper for Imus to meet with the Rutgers University women's basketball team and apologize. He should have JUST done that. But for him to beg forgiveness from Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson the way he has is pathetic. The new name for his show should be "I-WUSS in the Morning."

Frankly, I don't understand why politicians and journalists have fawned all over Imus anyway. His show is marginally funny (despite all of the in-studio yukking), his ratings have never been respectable, and he's been making ill-informed, stupid, derogatory remarks against people for years.

I'm fine with his two week suspension. True be told, were he to be fired, I wouldn't miss his show at all. Imus and Keith Olbermann's shows are the bookends of mediocrity in the MSNBC lineup. I say, lose both of them and put Chris Matthews on in the morning and Joe Scarborough at night (or vice versa).

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Hitchens on Iraq

Christopher Hitchens (no right-winger) strongly defends his suport of the Iraq war on it's the fourth anniversary.

So, Mr. Hitchens, Weren't You Wrong About Iraq?

Selected passages below:

Should it not have been known by Western intelligence that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction?

The entire record of UNSCOM until that date had shown a determination on the part of the Iraqi dictatorship to build dummy facilities to deceive inspectors, to refuse to allow scientists to be interviewed without coercion, to conceal chemical and biological deposits, and to search the black market for materiel that would breach the sanctions. The defection of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, had shown that this policy was even more systematic than had even been suspected. Moreover, Iraq did not account for—has in fact never accounted for—a number of the items that it admitted under pressure to possessing after the Kamel defection. We still do not know what happened to this weaponry. This is partly why all Western intelligence agencies, including French and German ones quite uninfluenced by Ahmad Chalabi, believed that Iraq had actual or latent programs for the production of WMD. Would it have been preferable to accept Saddam Hussein's word for it and to allow him the chance to re-equip once more once the sanctions had further decayed?

....

Was the terror connection not exaggerated?

Not by much. The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq had any hand in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But it did point out, at different times, that Saddam had scted as a host and patron to every other terrorist gang in the region, most recently including the most militant Islamist ones. And this has never been contested by anybody. The action was undertaken not to punish the last attack—that had been done in Afghanistan—but to forestall the next one.

....

So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003?

That's exactly what I mean to say.

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But WWJD

James Dobson's ridiculous statement regarding Fred Thompson (who I'm still on the fence about).

From US News:

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson appeared to throw cold water on a possible presidential bid by former Sen. Fred Thompson while praising former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also weighing a presidential run, in a phone interview Tuesday.

"Everyone knows he's conservative and has come out strongly for the things that the pro-family movement stands for," Dobson said of Thompson. "[But] I don't think he's a Christian; at least that's my impression," Dobson added, saying that such an impression would make it difficult for Thompson to connect with the Republican Party's conservative Christian base and win the GOP nomination.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, took issue with Dobson's characterization of the former Tennessee senator. "Thompson is indeed a Christian," he said. "He was baptized into the Church of Christ."

In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."

Here's the kicker (italics added):

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a possibility."

Dobson can kiss my ass. Oh wait, that's not very Christian of me...but then again, according to Dobson, I'm NOT one anyway.
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Sly, Say It Isn't So!!

Sly Stallone is using a body double for his next Rambo movie -- "Rambo: The Golden Years."

This saddens me more than Marcia Brady being on "Celebrity Fit Club".

From The Daily Mail (a UK news site):

Ageing actor Sylvester Stallone is to revive another of his most famous film characters - John Rambo - for one last mission.

But unlike his character in last year's Rocky Balboa, in which he was acclaimed for having a buff body, he will use a 30-year-old body double.

Then again, he did have his steroids confiscated.

The actor and his entourage of minders were stopped last month at Sydney airport en route to the Australian premiere of his sixth Rocky movie when a routine X-ray of the party's baggage revealed 48 vials of Jintropin, a so-called miracle drug.

Considered a performance-enhancing hormone, its use is strictly controlled in Australia. Stallone did not appear in court in Sydney, and is expected to be fined up to a maximum of £9,000.

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Paglia's Latest

How'd I miss this Camille Paglia column from March 14th. My favorite parts hightlighted below:

Barack and Rudy:

The blatant manipulations of the mainstream media are betrayed by the way that mercurial polling data has been relentlessly promoted about the candidates of both parties for more than a year. That material simply assesses name recognition in an ephemeral beauty contest. Thus we've had endless reports about Hillary and John McCain as front-runners, despite rampant dissatisfactions with them among embers of their own parties. Now we're onto the challenger-with-momentum drama starring Obama and Rudy Giuliani, which may be equally short-lived.

Hillary Clinton:

Hillary didn't help herself with her over-the-top sermon at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, two weeks ago. Her aping of a black Southern accent from the pulpit was so inept and patronizing that it should get a Razzie Award for Worst Performance of the Year. At times, it approached the Southern Gothic burlesque of Bette Davis chewing up the scenery in "Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte."

Fox News:

What is this morbid obsession that liberals have with Fox? It's as if Democrats, pampered and spoiled by so many decades of the mainstream media trumpeting the liberal agenda, are so shaky in their convictions that they cannot risk an encounter with opposing views. Democrats have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and 98 percent of American humanities professors to do their bidding. But no, that's not enough -- every spark of dissent has to be extinguished with buckets of bile.

But Fox is certainly disingenuous with its absurd "fair and balanced" motto. Oh, come on, give it up! Why can't Fox honestly admit its conservative agenda, as do major radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and simply argue that it represents a culturally necessary antidote to the omnipresent liberal line? Yet for Democratic presidential candidates, who will be assessed by voters for their ability to stand up to China, North Korea or al-Qaida, to run squealing from a Fox moderator as if he or she were a boogeyman with blood-dripping fangs makes the whole pack of them look like simpering wusses.

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Marcia, Marica, Marica??

Sigh...

I'm not sure what make me feel older:

The fact that Marcia Brady (Maureen McCormick), is 150 lbs and on the new season of Celebrity Fit Club or that Sally Fields has osteoporosis.

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Don't Mess with Texas

From the Post Chronicle:

Texas Legislators Expand Self Defense
By Staff
Mar 22, 2007

Texas lawmakers have approved a broad self-defense law that expands the use of deadly force against attackers to locations outside the home.

Supporters say the new legislation will strengthen a resident's right to defend not only his home but also while in his vehicles and businesses.

The proposal passed the state Senate unanimously, 30-0, last week and the state House of Representatives, 133-13, on Tuesday.

Texas Rep. Joe Driver, R-Garland, the lead sponsor of the measure in the House, said Tuesday, "With the enactment of this bill, law-abiding Texas citizens can defend themselves against criminal attack in their home, car or business without having to worry they will be prosecuted."

Works for me.
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Feed a Fever and Starve a Cold

The only thing more frustrating than watching George Bush try to string together two sentences during his press conference on the Gonzales situation, was listening to Al Gore drone on and on yesterday at the Senate hearings on global warming.

His baby analogy was laughable:

"The planet has a fever," Gore said. "If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it's not a problem.' If the crib's on fire, you don't speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action."

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They Couldn't Wait a Month?

Bwah ha ha...

Some things just write themselves:

Participants in the Interfaith Walk for Climate Rescue, a group advocating environmental issues who are walking between Northampton, Mass., and Boston, trudge through a spring snowstorm on the first day of the walk in Northampton on Friday.

Stay tuned for the "Global Cooling" summit in July or August.
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Maul Madness (Part 2)

Round 1 results. Biggest upset was Deadwood's fall to South Park.

• Round 2: Saturday, March 24th
• Final: Saturday, March 31

Battlestar Galactica Scarborough Country Rescue Me South Park

Rome The Office Law and Order The Shield

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SUV Drivers for Peace

After picking up my usual from Starbucks the other day (plain coffee with cream), I was assaulted by the sight of a bumper sticker on the back of a sports utility vehicle which was parked next to me in the lot. The car's owner was probably still in line waiting for their half-caf, low fat frappuccino latte del rio deluxe.

The bumper sticker read: "You Cannot Simultaneously Prevent And Prepare For War - Albert Einstein 1879-1955." It was applied right next to a "Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Kerry" sticker and some other limousine Liberal paraphernalia.

Sigh...

The laughable irony is that before the second World War, Einstein feared Hitler so much (and with good reason), that he lobbied VERY hard for the United States to build atomic weapons.

Here's a different quote of Einstein's that unfortunately wouldn't fit on a bumper sticker. It's from a letter he sent to Franklin Roosevelt in 1939:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard inAmerica - that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reactionin a large mass of uranium,by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appearsalmost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable - though much less certain - that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.

BTW, Alfred Nobel, of "Nobel Peace Prize" fame, invented dynamite (hee hee).

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Maul Madness

Place your bets:

• Round 1: Saturday, March 17th
• Round 2: Saturday, March 24th
• Final: Saturday, March 31

Battlestar Galactica Scrubs Rome The Simpsons Deadwood South Park Fox and Friends Law and Order

Curb Your Enthusiasm Scarborough Country American Chopper The Office Rescue Me Imus in the Morning The O'Reilly Factor The Shield

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Can't a White Man Be Attractive?

Senator Barack Obama on John Edwards while campaigning in Iowa last weekend (italics added):

"I want to wait and hear what John Edwards has to say, he’s kind of good-looking," Obama envisioned Iowa caucus-goers from the small town of Clinton telling themselves. During an appearance in West Burlington, Iowa, the phrase appeared again, this time with Edwards as "kind of cute."

I can just see the "Clean and Cute in '08" bumper stickers now.
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More on Coulter

Amazingly, the Ann Coulter remark is still in the news.

As usual, I'm of two minds on this.

On the one hand, it seems that many of the Liberals who are complaining the most are usually the "free speech" fanatics that would yell the loudest if, say, an artist who dips crucifixes in urine lost their government funding.

Dan Savage, editor of the Stranger, a Seattle alternative news weekly get it's right:

I don't have a problem with people using the word 'faggot.' I use the word 'faggot' all the time," said Seattle's Savage. He started a public humiliation campaign against former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a Republican, after Santorum made derogatory statements about gay men. But he does not think there should be a campaign to silence Coulter.

"When we start acting like the thought police, it plays into the right-wing paranoia that we are going to force them all to say only nice things about us in public," Savage said. "I think we would gain ground faster in the gay and lesbian civil rights movement if we drop the Sally Field act of, 'You like me! You really like me!' "

On the other hand, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, also makes a very effective argument:

Referring to John Edwards by using a word meant to demean homosexuals? What was she thinking? Ann Coulter has never been married. She has been known for once dating Bob Guccione, Jr., son of the Penthouse magazine magnate. John Edwards, on the other hand, has been married for almost thirty years to his wife, Elizabeth. Together they have had four children, Wade, Cate, Emma Claire, and Jack.

Wade died in a tragic car accident at age 16, throwing the Edwards family into a grief that often tears spouses apart. Their marriage not only survived the tragedy, but went on to produce Emma Claire and Jack. John Edwards stood by his wife through her more recent fight with breast cancer, and there has never been a scandal associated with their long marriage.

I oppose John Edwards' political platform, but not John Edwards the man, husband, and father. I do not want to see him elected President of the United States, but this has everything to do with his political positions, not his personal life. I do not appreciate his crude oversimplification of the challenges that face our nation, but I must oppose any crude talk about John Edwards the man.

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Okay, Coulter Isn't Funny, But She's Still Sexier Than Sandra Oh...

Ann Coulter created another controversy when she used the "f" word to refer to John Edwards at the Conservative Political Action Conference:

"I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I _ so kind of an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."

When I first heard it, I had no idea what she was referring to. So, it didn't strike me as funny at all.

Someone had to point out to me that Coulter was making a vague reference to the rift on the set of "Grey's Anatomy" (which I never watch). One of the cast members, Isaiah Washington, used that term to denigrate another cast member, T.R. Knight. Apparently, Washington uttered the slur while he was choking a third cast member, Patrick Dempsey. As a result, Washington is now or was in some sort of anger management retreat.

Ah, I get it now. Still not funny.

I'm not sure what disappoints me more -- the fact that Coulter made such a lame joke or the fact that she watches "Grey's Anatomy."
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Area 51 To The Rescue

Former Canadian defense minister Paul Hellyer wants top secret alien technology to be applied to global warming:

"I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation ... that could be a way to save our planet," Paul Hellyer, 83, told the Ottawa Citizen.

Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told the newspaper...

..."We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know. Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough," he said.

Classic!

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