Bill’s Blog

“Not for the politically correct.”

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DrudgeReport.com

Iraq Operation Delayed Until March  | Biggest Hacker Theft | FCC Drags Heel on Phone Deregulation
 Simon & Garfunkle - Together Again | Wildcat Branded Uteri | Africa AIDS Due to Dirty Needles?

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This could be a problem because it will give the media and “anti-war” types more time to propagate the irrational fear of war.

U.S. military planners are now looking at mid-March as a starting date for a war against Iraq, a delay caused by diplomatic snags and difficulties in moving heavy Army divisions.

The majority of Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps combat units are in the Persian Gulf poised for an attack.

The timing of the war is critical, U.S. officials said, because it is best for troops and machines to fight in the Gulf's 70-degree winter weather than its oppressive desert heat of the summer.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The FBI is investigating a recent computer hacking incident in which as many as eight million credit card numbers may have been stolen from a company that processes transactions, industry representatives and investigators said on Wednesday.

In what is believed to be the biggest credit card hacking incident so far, Omaha-based Data Processors International, which processes transactions involving Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover Financial Services for merchants, said in a statement that it had “recently experienced a system intrusion by an unauthorized outside party.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is likely to keep many of its rules for local telephone competition on Thursday over the objections of agency chairman Michael Powell, several sources said on Wednesday.

Powell has been unable to convince a majority of his fellow commissioners that the industry needs to be deregulated quickly, industry and government sources said, and will likely issue a rare dissenting opinion when the FCC announces its revised rules on Thursday.

The expected ruling is a setback for incumbent local-phone giants like Verizon Communications, which have opposed rules that allow rivals like AT&T Corp. to lease their phone lines and other equipment at deep discounts.

This tour could easily devolve into a series of “anti-war” events.

They split up 33 years ago after creating some of the 20th century's most enduring music.

Now Simon and Garfunkel are set to reunite for a series of concerts which would see them earn hundreds of millions of dollars.

This could start a new trend in sports mania: women getting their uteruses “branded” for their favorite sports team.

LEXINGTON, Ky. - Nine women have asked to join a lawsuit against a Lexington surgeon who branded "UK" - the initials of his medical school alma mater, the University of Kentucky - into their uteri during hysterectomies.

Failure to sterilize needles is common in backwards countries. This goes a long way in explaining why heterosexuals in Africa have AIDS.

Poor medical practice may be to blame for the spread of Aids through Africa.

New research based on hundreds of studies suggests only about a third of HIV infections in Africa are sexually transmitted.

The authors suggest contaminated medical injections make up the biggest risk.

They said their findings have “major ramifications for current and future HIV control in Africa, whose focus has been almost exclusively on sexual risk reduction and condom use.”

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OpinionJournal.com

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“Freedom fries” sounds better than “liberty cabbage.”

An obvious lack of resolve on France’s part; French lack of determination in the 1930’s led to their defeat and occupation in World War II.

Eastern Europeans stand up to Chirac’s bullying. French unilateralism and treatment of other EU members as subordinates is an indication of imperialist sentiment.

Poland has a legitimate grievance with France, since France sat on its hands in September, 1939 while Germany invaded and dismembered Poland. Had France sent its forces into Western Germany World War II might have turned out differently.

Mugabe is the incarnation of the “progressive” cause of anti-colonialism, hence France’s support.

I haven’t encountered a mentions of Stalin’s “fewer but better” sentiment in my readings, but it isn’t surprising. Should the Zimbabweans succeed in reducing the population by over one-half they will have beaten the Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge), which reduced the population of Cambodia by one-fifth.

A restaurant in Beaufort, N.C., has stopped serving french fries--or at least calling them that. “We now serve freedom fries,” says owner Neal Rowland. His move recalls American anger at Germany during World War I. Back then familiar German foods such as frankfurters and sauerkraut were rechristened hot dogs and liberty cabbage. Polls show a full one-third of Americans now hold hostile views toward France, largely as a result of its government's refusal to enforce the U.N. resolutions calling on Iraq to disarm and otherwise comply with the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire. Just three months ago, France joined a unanimous Security Council in warning Iraq of “serious consequences” if it failed to take a “final opportunity” to comply “immediately.”

…

Mr. Chirac’s bullying unilateralism did not go over well among his eastern neighbors. “We are not joining the EU so we can sit and shut up,” said Czech foreign minister Cyril Svoboda. His Polish counterpart, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, added: “In the European family, there are no mummies, no daddies and no kids. It is a family of equals. In particular, there are no kids who are not mature enough to be partners with other members of the family.” And Romania’s Prime Minister Adrian Nastase answered Mr. Chirac’s condescension in kind: “Every time I have a dispute with my wife, I shout at my sons. So the problem of Mr. Chirac apparently is with the Americans and not with Romania and Bulgaria.”

This isn’t the only case in which Mr. Chirac's is acting with contempt for the views of his fellow Europeans. He has also insisted that Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s dictator, be included in a summit meeting of African heads of state that begins today in Paris, despite EU sanctions, instituted in response to Mr. Mugabe’s atrocities, that bar him from visiting any member country. This week, the EU reaffirmed its sanctions, but in order to secure France’s approval it had to cave in to Mr. Chirac’s demand that the union make an exception for Mr. Mugabe's visit this week.

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The looming disaster facing Zimbabwe's 13 million people is not just the product of Mr. Mugabe’s seizure of white-owned farms or his reckless management of the economy. The New Republic recently noted that Didymus Mutasa, the administrative secretary of Mr. Mugabe’s ruling ZANU party, has admitted that the government has an explicit policy of, to paraphrase Stalin, encouraging fewer but better Zimbabweans: “We would be better off with only six million people . . . who support the liberation struggle. . . . We don't want all these extra people.”

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FrontPageMag.com

 Professor Head of Jihad | European Leftists Wrong | Liberal Talk Radio
 Iraqis Criticize Saddam | One Islamic World | Radical Left Joins Radical Islam
 Lies and Criminality of the New Left | Muslim Charities Fund Osama

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A “benefit” of “diversity” in education

TAMPA, Fla. — A Florida professor and seven other men were charged Thursday with operating a global terrorist organization that the federal government says is responsible for the deaths of 100 people in and around Israel.

University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian is the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Attorney General John Ashcroft said in announcing the federal indictment.

The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a U.S. government-designated foreign terrorist organization committed to homicide bombings and violent jihad activities, Ashcroft said at an afternoon press conference.

Link to my response

The difference between the Eastern Europeans and the Western Eastern “liberals” was that the “liberals” believed the lies without being coerced. No wonder they hated them.

The West grossly overestimated the Soviet economy; the truth was that their socialist economy couldn’t compete in an arms race.

An obvious manifestation of the belief that America is responsible for all the evil in the world.

British subjects perished in the World Trade Center on 9-11.

Did American lack of resolve in Somalia lead to 9-11?

The proposition that people who willfully deny the evil of tyrannical regimes are “decent” is  questionable.

Like a lot of Oxbridge lefties I ended up in the BBC current affairs department. Eight years after carrying my CND banner through Hyde Park I found myself in Eastern Europe. Amazingly, the Wall had, indeed, been torn down. My assistant producer had family in the old East Germany and he wasn’t too pleased to hear of my peacenik past. Did I have any idea how much people like him had hated people like me? Did I know how crushingly miserable life had been in Eastern Europe, that the image of healthcare and jobs for life was strictly for the consumption of visiting Guardian reporters, and that the reality was grey, oppressive and corrupt? And, most of all, did I not know how much it had meant when Reagan challenged the Soviet overlord, matching their SS-20s with his own missiles, inviting them into a spending race that they could not win?

… Why would a liberal want to dismiss the liberation of the Iraqi people? Because, for the moment, anti-Americanism trumps all her other instincts.

…

I was in Florida researching a book on the second world war on 11 September 2001. In the week after the attack the airlines were down, so I drove across rural Florida and Georgia, watching the flags come out and the patriotic messages go up on the billboards. People were calling the radio shows. One question dominated, the same one I heard in bars, shops and around dinner tables: ‘Why do they hate us so much?’ ‘It’s just a minority,’ I said.

I returned home and realised that it wasn’t a minority at all. To my astonishment, it included many of my liberal and left-wing friends, and writers and thinkers I admired. In that first week a cartoon in the Guardian painted President Bush as an ape dumbly trying to impersonate Winston Churchill, while the Independent offered a blind, deranged Bush firing his cowboy six-shooter and treading on a dead Arab. And all this before a single American bomb had been dropped on Afghanistan, and with 3,000 bodies — we still thought 10,000 then — warm beneath the rubble.

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We’re told that war will drive Muslims into the arms of al-Qa’eda. But remember what bin Laden said in the days after 9/11: ‘America is weak, it cannot take casualties, it ran away in Somalia.’ Throughout the 1990s the West responded tamely to attacks by bin Laden (the African embassy bombs, the USS Cole), to attacks by groups linked to Saddam (the Saudi barracks bomb, the assassination attempt on Bush’s father, the first World Trade Center attack), and to the continued refusal of Iraq to disarm as required by the Gulf war ceasefire. Ten years of this weakness only encouraged our enemies to be bolder.

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Eastern Europeans know that when they suffered oppression it was America which tried to help them, and the Western Left who marched in tacit support of their oppressors. The politburo, as we later discovered, never believed that Nato would respond to the deployment of its SS-20s. It thought that the protests of Phil Craig and Emma Thompson and lots of other decent liberal people would make it impossible. It was wrong, and when faced with Western resolve it slowly realised that the game was up.

The American Left already has “counterbalances”— ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, et. al.

It’s hard to be free when you don’t have choices.

Interesting, more conservatives listen to NPR than “liberals”

Conservatives consuming more news than “liberals” indicates that they are better informed.

Thus denying the fact of disproportionate  black crime

But liberals insist they need a radio network “to counterbalance the conservative tenor of radio programs like ‘The Rush Limbaugh Show.’” Rush has been driving them crazy for years. In 1994, CNN dedicated an entire program to figuring out how the “mainstream media” could combat Rush Limbaugh. The host, Deborah Potter, introduced the program’s topic: “Does Rush Limbaugh deserve all this attention, and what should the mainstream media be doing about it?” In 1996, the Democratic National Committee went so far as to establish a speakers bureau/talk radio initiative to strike back at conservative talk radio by monitoring talk radio and teaching liberals “radio skills.”

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Not surprisingly, when given a choice, people don’t want liberal hectoring being piped into their homes and cars. It would be like being Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984, forced to listen to Big Brother 24 hours a day. It's difficult to imagine a world in which people voluntarily choose to listen to liberals. There is no evidence that it has ever happened.

For years, liberals would pass off mediocrities as broadcasting geniuses for surviving the brutal competition of a monopoly market. In the pre-cable era, Phil Donahue was promiscuously called the “daytime guru,” a “legend,” “daytime television’s biggest star,” a “star” – even a “major star.” In 1993, Donahue was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Hall of Fame. His millions of viewers were touted as evidence of his gift for television.

Since liberal speakers lose in competitive environments, they can win only by force. In 1995, Mother Jones was haranguing its readers to “call your local talk station and demand some balance.” One of many failed “alternatives” to Rush, Jim Hightower recommended that liberals make “stronger efforts to insist that their voices be heard.” Conservatives, he said, “do this all the time.” They “hammer the networks and the owners to be heard.” That's how we ousted Katie Couric and Dan Rather from the airwaves and ended up with a solid lineup of authentic Americans on ABC, NBC and CBS. Oh, no wait. That didn't happen.

If liberals cared about ideas or knew any facts, they would cease being liberals. Even the audience for the Left's government-supported radio network,

National Public Radio, has more conservative listeners than liberal listeners. According to a Pew Research Center study released last summer, conservatives consume far more news than liberals – including listening to NPR and watching PBS more than liberals. (As Mickey Kaus said, “No wonder conservatives are so pissed off.”)

Liberalism thrives on ignorance. Their media are “Lifetime: TV for Women,” NBC’s “The West Wing” and 4 billion “Law and Order” episodes in which the perp turns out to be a Christian, white male who recites the Second Amendment before disemboweling a poor minority child.

Liberal persuasion consists of the highbrow sneer from self-satisfied snobs ladled out for people with a 40 IQ. This is not an ideology that can withstand several hours a day of caller scrutiny where their goofball notions can be shot down by any truck driver with a cell phone.

“In any other country, the leader would have resigned by now, don't you think?” an Iraqi government employee, who for obvious reasons does not want to be named, asks imploringly. A local political analyst who is normally much more cautious says angrily, “What kind of government is this? It drags its people into all kinds of dangerous adventures without even consulting us.”

In whispering, cautious tones, such criticism has become much more widespread than before the latest crisis that has befallen the country. U.N. Resolution 1441 and the American threat of imminent military action have at least prompted some people to feel more free to speak their minds. These tend to be people who firmly believe that in the end the Iraqi regime will be removed. “A superpower like the USA cannot afford to let a Third World country like Iraq win this confrontation,” says the analyst.

I believe that the Koran commands the faithful to conquer unbelievers and forcibly convert them. (The so-called “peoples of the book,” i.e., Christians and Jews, are allowed to follow their faiths, but are to be treated as second-class citizens.) The Wahhabis are simply obeying the will of Allah.

Much of the contemporary tolerance of Islam is based on the denial of the full truth about it.

The president’s position is understandable and even commendable. He doesn't want to do anything to make it appear that he's leading an anti-Muslim crusade because this would drive millions of Muslims into the extremist camp with Osama bin Laden and his buddies.

The problem is that the ideology driving the terrorists is in fact religion-based. Wahhabism is more than just the state-sponsored religion of Saudi Arabia. It is a branch of Islam that is warlike, anti-Western and bent upon our destruction. These folks hate us as well as any Muslim that doesn’t dance to their tune. They have been responsible, in fact, for the slaughter of literally millions of their fellow Muslims in their drive to remake one of the world's major religions in their own image.

If the Wahhabis restricted their activities to the Middle East, it would be bad enough, but they're also active here. Thanks to their Saudi sponsors, they have leveraged resources to recruit followers on our college campuses, to create a virtual base in our prisons, and establish cells wherever Muslims gather. They control well over half the mosques in this country and virtually every organization that purports to speak for Muslim interests.

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David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with the Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental affairs firm.

No surprise here; the radical Left has supported the radical elements in the Middle East since at least the 1960s, when Palestine “Liberation” became a “progressive” cause. The Left also wanted to overthrow the Shah of Iran in those days.

The convergence of the radical Left and radical Islam continues. Former icons of social tolerance and sexual liberation are making common cause with the most intolerant and sexist social forces on earth. Left-wing American defenders of Slobodan Milosevic, on trial for his ethnic cleansing campaign to exterminate Muslims from the former Yugoslavia, now welcome U.S. Muslim groups as building blocks in their coalitions. Trendy supporters of revolutionary cop-killers like Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal link their heroes’ murderous causes (while proclaiming Peltier and Mumia’s innocence) to those of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the various Islamic Jihad terrorist groups.

On February 15 and 16, they joined forces in the streets of hundreds of cities and towns around the world  – literally from Boston to Baghdad – in coordinated protests unseen in size and scope since the Soviet Union ran the nuclear freeze movement two decades ago.  Remnants of the old Communist Party USA like Leslie Cagan coordinated protests on one end through her United for Peace and Justice entity; the fanatically pro-North Korean Workers World Party (WWP), via its International Action Center (IAC) and International ANSWER front groups, organized on the other, pausing to wish a happy birthday to Kim Jong-il, who turned 61 over the weekend. Kim’s party paper, Rodong Sinmun, exhorted followers to “burn with hatred and hostility in their hearts” toward the United States.

Some of the nation’s most prominent Muslim groups, or more correctly, a collection of small but vocal groups that claim to speak for American Muslims, joined the protests.

The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), at the state level, endorsed the U.S.-out-of-Iraq demonstrations coast to coast. In Chicago, CAIR endorsed the protests, calling itself “one of the initial endorsers and organizers” for the event. CAIR formally joined the ANSWER coalition in Los Angeles.

Nationally, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) joined the ANSWER coalition, urging the “community” to take to the streets against President Bush’s efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein and liberate the Iraqi people. In a weird February 11 statement, it asked “Americans” to “defend White House employees” – a reference to a low-ranking White House staffer whom critics say has a pattern of clearing pro-terrorist Muslim American activists into meetings with President Bush and other senior officials.

Recalling the crimes of a radical Left terrorist group.

Riot schools are to Leftists as party schools are to frat boys.

Notes similarities of Stalinism and German National Socialism (Nazism)

Not all of his generation believed the lies.

The last major figures in the so-called Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) have been sentenced to prison for murder. They include a man named Michael Bortin, aged 54.

Like most Bay Area leftists who were adults at the time, I remember vividly the explosion of the SLA into public awareness a quarter century ago. Beginning with the assassination of Oakland school superintendent Marcus Foster in 1974, the ragtag gang of lowlifes and losers continued their terrorist campaign by kidnapping Patricia Hearst. Most of them died in a fire in Los Angeles, unmourned by even the most intransigent members of the radical Left. But Patty Hearst and others of their hangers-on survived to commit more crimes. An obvious airhead dressed like a disco queen, Kathleen Soliah, stood up in a Berkeley park with her silly grin and threatened the SLA dead would be avenged.

Eleven months after the fiery end of the main terror cell, the remaining conspirators robbed a bank in Carmichael, Calif., with the participation of Hearst. A 42-year old bank customer, Myrna Opsahl, was killed by a blast from a shotgun held by the visibly stupid Emily Harris, today Emily Montague.

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I took little further notice of these parasites, although I became a friend of William Randolph Hearst III, and accompanied him to the U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco when Patty was arrested in 1975. But everything changed when I heard that Michael Bortin was involved. Michael Bortin I knew. We are the same age, and he had sat beside me at Lowell High School in San Francisco in the mid-60s.

… We gravitated to universities like Berkeley and Madison because they represented a high standard, not because they were riot schools, the leftwing equivalent of party schools – although we helped turn them into another, more sinister kind of party schools.

…

I now believe the speed with which the ‘60s Left turned utterly rotten had more to do with a particular ideology than with inexorable historical laws. Between the Bolshevik revolution and the surrender of the global Left to Stalinism required the passage of 20 years, the imprisonment and massacre of numerous revolutionary “pioneers” of that time by the Soviet secret police, and the rise of Stalinism’s homologue, Nazism. Yet with all the moral evil of Bolshevism, its lies were resisted by many radical intellectuals.

Our lies went unresisted.

We told our generation that the Cold War had been created by the U.S. as a scheme to perpetuate an undefined “imperialism” – a lie echoed today by the marching morons who parade in defense of Saddam.

We told our generation that the only alternatives were peace or war, i.e., acceptance of Russian expansionism or a devastating nuclear conflict.

U.S. authorities recovered a list of 20 financiers they suspect funneled money to Osama bin Laden and others extremist Muslim causes among a cache of documents that provide insight into the financing of terrorism, an unsealed court record shows.

The seized documents are a “treasure trove” and among other things indicate al-Qaida military leaders were at times paid salaries from Muslim charity proceeds and purchased weapons with money from charity leaders, prosecutors said in the once-secret court filing.

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BOSTON — A judge refused to dismiss more than 400 sexual abuse lawsuits Wednesday against the Boston Archdiocese, rejecting arguments that the Constitution bars the courts from interfering with church operations.

Superior Court Judge Constance Sweeney’s ruling clears the way for the lawsuits to move forward. However, settlement talks are under way.

The lawsuits allege church officials were negligent in their supervision of priests accused of molesting children.

Church lawyers had argued that the court does not have jurisdiction over cases that involve the relationship between a church supervisor and a priest because that involves church policy, which is protected by the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion.

But the judge disputed that Wednesday, saying: “The cases... do not lure the court into involving itself in church doctrine, faith, internal organization or discipline.”

…

Attorney Roderick MacLeish Jr., whose firm represents 270 alleged victims, said the decision “recognizes that the church - merely by its status as a religious institution - is not above and beyond the law.”

The court correctly ruled that the First Amendment doesn’t protect criminal behavior. Would an ethical organization even use this argument?

Amen.

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Jewish World Review.com

 Jihad Against Textbooks | NY Demonstration

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Alexander the Great observed that the peoples of Asia were enslaved because they had not learned to pronounce the word "No."

One man’s jihad can be another man's mission of distortion. The Islamist terrorists who attacked America on September 11 cited their murderous rampage as a “jihad.” The suicide bombers who set out to terrorize Israeli schools, restaurants and malls call their mission their “jihad.” But American school kids might never know anything about that.

…

Islam and the Textbooks, a 35-page report compiled by the American Textbook Council in New York, analyzes seven history textbooks widely used between the seventh and 12th grades and finds that millions of American schoolchildren are being cheated of accurate history. Politically correct advocacy groups have thoroughly intimidated teachers, administrators and school boards - and in a way that the most fundamentalist of Christians or the most orthodox of Jews never could.

Fletcher Pratt’s outstanding Battles That Changed History is a good antidote to politically correct history.

Leftists don’t give a fig about the First Amendment unless it advances “progressive” cause.

 new york diarist
Who's on First?
By Jackie Mason & Raoul Felder

Alexander the Great observed that the peoples of Asia were enslaved because they had not learned to pronounce the word "No." This certainly was true of the world in 1938 and 1939, and it is equally so today.

Walking west from Sutton Place, we were prevented from crossing First Avenue and going about our usual Saturday business by the hordes of people demonstrating in the name of peace. Looking over the crowds, and putting aside the unworthy thought that there was not a handful of them that we would even want on our side if we were in the Army, it occurred to us that these were the same sort of historically myopic people that in 1939, 1940 and 1941 demonstrated against this country entering war against Hitler and Imperial Japan.

…

The masses of people on First Avenue were as diverse a group as imaginable. Some held up signs advocating the legalization of marijuana, some were still protesting against the Vietnam War, a few demonstrating against cruelty to animals. None were there to protest against a regime that tortures its citizens, gang rapes women while their families are made to watch, and has used chemicals and poison gas against its neighbors and its own citizens.

…

Clearly, if this were Iraq, and people in that country rallied in public against the government's policies, it would be a one-way ticket for them to the torture chambers and then execution. Why do these First Avenue demonstrators have the arrogance to believe that they should be entitled to any more rights than an oppressed Iraqi citizen? Edmund Burke observed that “All that is necessary for evil to succeed, is for good men to do nothing.” In an interconnected world, evil somewhere is evil everywhere. This bunch should ruminate on the thought that if we do nothing, there could come a time when there may be nobody left to demonstrate on First Avenue -- or there may not even be a First Avenue.

The isolationists weren’t “historically myopic;” the interventionists were. The isolationists believed that even if we could defeat the Axis Stalin would be the big winner. Instead of saving the world for democracy we saved Stalin’s bacon. The Cold War proved that Stalin was a far bigger threat to the U.S. than Hitler.

Huh? The demonstrators won the Vietnam War, so why are they still carrying signs?

Where have Mason and Felder been? Denial of the tyrannical nature of the state for which they were demonstrating has been around as long as the Left has. The Vietnam war was a prime example.

Energy Company Shuts Plant for Profit | State Budget Cut $62 |
 Conflict of Interest Reverses Murder Conviction | I-40 West Project
Former Lt. Gov Candidate Indicted | Doctors Duped for Tort Reform
 Educator Charged with Sexual Assault | Ex-Deputy Lied to Feds
Convicted Felon Commits More Crimes | Parolee Pleads Innocent to Murder
Gitz on France | Lynch on LR City Government

HOUSTON — It was June 2000, months before the California energy crisis, but traders for Reliant Energy Inc. were already celebrating in Houston. They had just turned a losing bet on power prices into a moneymaker by shutting down one of the company’s five generating plants in California.

“Everybody thought it was really exciting,” an unnamed trader told a Reliant operations manager, according to a transcript of a conversation published by federal regulators. “It’s got people thinking.”

“Cool,” the operations manager said. “That was fun.”

It also may have been a crime, legal experts say.

Transcripts of conversations among Reliant workers over four days in 2000 include detailed discussions of how they planned to boost power prices. The records were part of the evidence that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission considered before ordering Reliant last month to pay $13.8 million to customers.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer and the U.S. Justice Department are examining whether Reliant workers broke laws when they withheld power, said Erik Saltmarsh, director of the California Electricity Oversight Board, one of several state agencies pursuing refunds on behalf of consumers.

The Reliant transcripts are “direct and rather gleeful admissions,” Saltmarsh said.

Federal prosecutors have brought charges against traders at Enron Corp., Dynegy Inc. and El Paso Corp., accusing them of efforts to manipulate Western energy markets.

The problems of an unregulated wholesale market in electricity and conflict of interest when an electricity trading company also owns generators.

Outrageous. Rigged markets are hardly conducive to a free market economy.

Gov. Mike Huckabee announced Wednesday the fourth state government budget cut in the current fiscal year, trimming $62 million from what agencies previously were authorized to spend.

“This is major stuff,” the governor said.

The cut comes with about four months left in fiscal 2003, which ends June 30. It follows dismal revenue collections in January and news that an $18 million Rainy Day Fund for emergencies was drained two weeks ago for the Medicaid program.

As usual, public schools will bear the biggest share of the new cut, about $30 million, because they get the lion’s share of the state’s general revenues.

Huckabee also announced that he was cutting $54 million from his proposed fiscal 2004 budget and $40 million from his proposal for fiscal 2005.

He used the occasion to talk up his proposed five-eighths percent increase in the state sales tax, state government reorganization and school consolidation. His reorganization plan has gotten through only one legislative chamber. Bills on his school and tax proposals, both in deep trouble in the Legislature, have yet to be introduced.

The problem with funding local school districts with the state general fund.

Huckabee could be using the budget cuts as a lever for higher taxes. If we had wanted higher taxes we’d have elected a Democrat.

Reagan, who pleaded innocent, told authorities he stumbled and fell on the child, causing her injuries with his knee.

Reagan and Blinkard were represented by the same attorney, Comrade W. Knauts of Piggott.

Wright noted that the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to legal representation that is free from conflicts of interest. She cited a 1991 ruling saying, “In general, a conflict exists when an attorney is placed in a situation conducive to divided loyalties.”

Although the crime occurred in Clay County, the trial was moved to Greene County before state Circuit Judge David Burnett.

The prosecutor warned Burnett that a potential conflict existed, but Burnett decided there was no conflict. Wright disagreed, finding that “it is clear that there was a conflict of interest and that joint representation of [Reagan] and Blinkard adversely affected counsel’s performance.”

Chief U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright rendered this decision.

For $57.2 million, two contractors say they will rebuild and widen a 6.4-mile section of Interstate 40 between Interstates 30 and 430, which runs by the Levy and Burns Park areas of North Little Rock.

The project also includes replacing three main-lane bridges, including the 1,017-foot span at Levy, and one bridge overpass.

One hopes that “widen” means going from 4 lanes to six lanes.

A Little Rock psychiatrist who ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 1998 billed insurance companies for dozens of surgeries and hundreds of office visits that never occurred, according to affidavits filed by the Arkansas Insurance Department.

Dr. James C. Dilday, 46, of 1801 Champlin Dr. pleaded innocent to theft and insurance fraud charges Friday in Little Rock District Court and was released after posting a $50,000 cash bond. In documents prepared in support of 12 counts each of theft of property and insurance fraud, an Insurance Department investigator listed 234 office visits and 39 surgeries that never occurred.

The doctor received more than $127,000 from insurance companies on those claims, the documents say.

…

In 1998, Dilday was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor. In a profile in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Dilday identified health-care reform as his main concern.

“We’re constantly being shackled by a system that doesn’t want to pay what people have already bought,” Dilday said. “You’ve already paid your premiums. Why don’t you get the care you need? Why can’t you see the doctors you need or want to? Why can’t you get the medications you need? Because a well-financed, managedcare, health-care system has bought off every Republican politician in this country.”

Dilday was defeated by Win Rockefeller by a 2-to-1 margin.

The Democrats are the party of crooks in this state.

Sometimes Arkansas voters get it right.

Opponents of proposed tort reform legislation painted doctors as “hostages” of the insurance industry on Wednesday, saying health-care workers have been duped into going to bat for a bill that won’t solve their problems. “They’re scared, but why are they scared? They’re scared because they’ve been told things that aren’t true,” Hugh Crisp, an attorney who represents plaintiffs in malpractice cases, said of physicians, hospitals and nursing homes.

If doctors are as smart as they claim why did they get duped?

The unanswered question in tort reform is why the courts are awarding judgments in “frivolous” cases.

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ArkDemocrat

HOT SPRINGS — A teacher at the Arkansas School for Mathematics and Sciences was arrested Wednesday afternoon after an investigation into allegations he had sex with a 17-year-old student several times, police said.

Michael Shane Willbanks, 32, of Little Rock is charged with first-degree sexual assault, a felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

Willbanks went to the Hot Springs Police Department with his attorney and turned himself in shortly before 3 p.m. He also has resigned his job teaching science and biology at the school.

…

Under Arkansas law, a person commits first-degree sexual assault if he engages in sexual intercourse or activity with another person under 18, is a professional in a position of trust or authority over the victim, and uses the position to engage in sex.

Consent is not a defense for the felony offense, said Cpl. Walt Everton, a spokesman for the Hot Springs Police Department. He said Willbanks was accused of having “deviant sexual activity with another person who is less than 18.”

The Arkansas School for Mathematics and Sciences was part of Slick’s “education reforms.” It looks like they staffed it with people like Slick.

It’s possible Slick may have broken this law while he was governor. He’s likely to have covered up a great many things.

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ArkDemocrat

Another fine moment in Arkansas law enforcement.

The ex-deputy should have asked for the deal that Slick got. He lied to the Feds, too.

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ArkDemocrat

“Neither Rhonda Carek nor Michael Stearns, both of Ward, was injured when investigators say Tyrell Benson fired at Carek’s car. But Pulaski County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Kim Wilson said the car was hit twice.

…

The two sentences, one for each conviction, will run concurrent to each other. Piazza, however, stacked them on top of a 30-year sentence Benson received earlier this year on three aggravated robbery convictions.

Stearns told jurors that he and Carek were sitting in her car as Carek’s daughter and her boyfriend walked over to the swings at the park. While they waited, two men walked to the car and asked for directions, and then one pulled a gun.

…

Prosecutors say that while Benson was out of jail on bond in this case, he robbed and raped a woman at an apartment complex on Riverfront Drive in Little Rock. He is to stand trial on those charges next month.

So why was this guy running around loose if he had been convicted of three felonies?

Why did he get a bond if he had been convicted?

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ArkDemocrat

Are there any statistics on how many parolees commit murder?

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ArkDemocrat

The sheer nerve and effrontery of it—East European governments lining up one by one in support of the Bush administration. Or, put differently, East European governments lining up one by one in opposition to Jacques Chirac and the French.

The contrast with the ingratitude and tackiness of the French and Germans, i.e. “old Europe,” couldn’t be more glaring. It was, after all, the United States that liberated France and the rest of Western Europe from Nazi occupation, and it was the subsequent policies of America that produced both Germany’s democratic institutions and its eventual reunification within NATO.

If it hadn’t been for America’s role in World War II, the Germans would still be teaching, and the French would still be learning, the lyrics to the Horst Wessel Song, and if it hadn’t been for American protection from the Red Army in the decades thereafter, French and German buildings today likely would have statues of Stalin and Brezhnev in front of them.

Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. also steadfastly supported the efforts of the East Europeans to resist Soviet tyranny. Ronald Reagan, the man snotty French and German diplomats derided as a cowboy, almost certainly did more by himself on behalf of the spread of democratic institutions and human rights in Europe than all French and German statesmen (and the term is used advisedly ) combined.

…

The French, you see, are running the show in Europe. And in NATO and the United Nations as well. Or at least trying to. And, as such, only they have the right to instruct the riffraff in the East on when to hold their tongues and line up properly in the presence of their Gallic betters.

One can only wonder what Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and the other East Europeans who stood so bravely for freedom and against Red Army tanks must think of such a French spectacle.

An outstanding critique of current French foreign policy.

The “Horst Wessel” is a German National Socialist (Nazi) song.

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ArkDemocrat

It is definitely possible to craft a proposal that will direct funds into a specific category of city spending, but it will be a lot harder to point those moneys away from certain favored pet projects within the designated grouping. So long as Dr. Dean Kumpuris is on the city board, we better expect every spare dime to get hijacked to the River Market. The very able backers of the seemingly dormant Summit Mall might come back to life, just like Frankenstein rising from the slab, if they caught the faintest whiff of fresh new money drifting around.

In short, there are as many ways to steal public money as there are clever and greedy special interests.

Speaking of special interests, am I the only one whose blood ran cold at the mention of Little Rock real estate developer David Jones’ name in Monday’s article about Lichty’s grand plan? Jones is not to be blamed for taking care of commercial real estate developers. “Prince of Darkness” is his job description, and do not forget his membership in the secretive clique of elitist civic visionaries, Fifty for the Future.

The inclusion of Jones in Lichty’s inner circle suggests more of an interest in “improving” places where nobody lives. Of course, this is always accomplished at the expense of those of us residing in established and stable neighborhoods. It must be made very inescapably clear to Jones and the Little Rock real estate enclave that developers must bear the costs of their big money-making daydreams and that taxpayers have their hands full taking care of existing areas.

Lynch is a Clintonite, but he’s right on in this column. The problem is that Lynch hasn’t figured out that the people he’s talking about are probably FOB’s.

Public governance for private gain is the bane of life in Little Rock.

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ArkDemocrat

NPR's Rob Gifford talks to North Korean military defectors living in South Korea's capital, Seoul. They offer a glimpse of what life is like for those on the inside of one of the world's largest standing armies. One says the North’s army has been so badly weakened by shortages of food and fuel that it would quickly collapse in a new Korean war. But analysts say the North's ability to do tremendous damage should not be underestimated.

 One also said that the army is disenchanted with the regime and that there have been coup attempts by generals. The lack of fuel may mean that its mobility and re-supply capabilities are impaired, and static defensive positions can be vigorously bombarded.

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