Bill’s Blog

“Not for the politically correct.”

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DrudgeReport.com

• Democrats Still Beating Bush Carrier Landing Dead Horse

• Navy Gave President Truman an Expensive Review in 1946

• Congressmen Have Been Flown to Carriers, Too

• Terrorist Attack in Riyadh

• Mayor Bloomberg Defends Nanny State Fascist Smoking Ban for NYC

• Iraqi Nuclear Plant Looters Cause Radiation Sickness

• Ted Turner Down to Last Billion

• Martha Stewart Negotiating With Prosecutors

• Woman Dies of Silicon Injections in Posterior at Florida Party

• 66% of Americans Can’t Name Any Democratic Presidential Candidate

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Modern Day Democrats continue to complain about President Bush's landing on a sea carrier -- and the resulting 'Top Gun' image...

Perhaps the Dems have started believing their own propaganda and forgot that Bush flew jet interceptors when he served in the National Guard.

… White House spokesman Ari Fleischer claimed yesterday that the president actually saved taxpayers money. Fleisher said the Viking jet costs just $7 more to operate each hour than does a helicopter. Said Fleischer: "Given the fact that it actually takes a Viking less time to travel than a helicopter, you can do the math."

BUT A FLASHBACK FROM 1946: Carrier Roosevelt Taking Truman To Big Navy Show; President To Get First Hand Review...

Using the military as a backdrop has been part of American politics for some time. Truman wasn’t out of place because he served n WW I.

President Truman is seeing one of the greatest shows on earth today-and from the best seat in the house. The Chief Executive is aboard the Navy’s mightiest carrier-the Franklin D. Roosevelt-for a first hand review of the brand of action which swept the Pacific clean of Japanese warships.

Meanwhile, congressmen in same boat...

Members of both political parties participated.

Navy records show that 25 congressional personnel, including 12 lawmakers, have flown to aircraft carriers in four separate instances since the beginning of the year.

7 AMERICANS AMONG 20 DEAD IN ATTACKS IN RIYADH...

Al Qaeda is an extension of the Saudi Wahabbi form of extreme Islam. The fact that they stuck in friendly territory could mean that they have trouble operating elsewhere.

Bloomberg Defends NYC Smoking Ban...

Bloomberg is unfairly singling out the Post; it turns out that The New York Times has fabricated “news” as well.

If he’s going to impose nanny state fascism he’d do far more to improve live there by making New Yorkers be polite.

"I don't think that anybody seriously takes something on the front page of the New York Post that has to do with smoking as gospel or as good scholarship or good science. C'mon," Bloomberg said. "I mean they're going to make up stuff no matter what."

Hundreds Of Iraqis Suffering From Radiation Poisoning After Nuclear Sites Looted...

Seven nuclear facilities have been damaged or effectively destroyed by ransackers since the end of the war last month. Technical documents, sensitive equipment and barrels containing radioactive material are thought to have been stolen.

Many residents in villages close to the huge Tuwaitha nuclear facility, about a dozen miles south of Baghdad, were exhibiting signs of radiation illness last week, including rashes, acute vomiting and severe nosebleeds.

TED TURNER DOWN TO HIS LAST BILLION...

It’s hard to feel sorry for someone who has $1 billion. It looks like his marriage to Jane Fonda turned him into a Leftist.

Ted Turner is a worried man. His media career is gone with the wind. His faith in the United Nations looks naive. He thinks humanity's on the verge of extinction, and he's down to his last billion.

Martha Stewart in talks with prosecutors...

One wonders if the stop-loss order with her broker is back-dated.

Ms Stewart has denied wrongdoing after coming under suspicion for selling about $225,000 worth of shares in a biotechnology company a day before the Food and Drug Administration rejected its promising cancer drug.

The homemaking multimillionaire said the trade was based on a pre-existing agreement with her broker at Merrill Lynch to sell her shares in ImClone once they fell below a certain level. Sam Waksal, ImClone's founder, has pleaded guilty to multiple insider trading charges.

'Pumping Party' Trial: 'Bizarre, Flamboyant, Unusual'; Transsexuals Testify Against Men Accused Of Deadly Silicone Injection...

Picture of the unfortunate Ms. Lawrence

In the opening statements of a Fort Lauderdale murder trial, one lawyer told jurors to be ready for the "bizarre, flamboyant and unusual."

The trial is for two men, one who looks like a woman, both accused of killing a woman at a "pumping party" where they injected silicone to enlarge her buttocks.

Mark Hawkins and Donnie Hendricks, who prefers to use the name "Viva," are accused practicing medicine without a license, and of injecting so much silicone into Vera Lawrence (pictured, left) that it caused her death.

The pair is alleged to have injected 12,000 cc's of industrial strength silicone into each of Lawrence's buttocks.

CBSNEWSNYT POLL: 66% CAN'T NAME ANY DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE....

This article shows this in poll results without comment; the same poll showed that 64% of Democrats couldn’t recall any Democratic presidential candidates.

If these people are counting on the media to tell them what the 2004 Democratic candidate is about they won’t be casting informed ballots. Whatever happened to the civic virtue of keeping up with current events?

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 OpinionJournal.com

• Yankee Realizes That New York City Isn’t a Good Place to Live

• Best of the Web Today

  • Riyadh Bombing Suspects All Escaped After a Gunfight

  • Saudi Religious Police Launch New Web Site

  • Founder of HowStuffWorks.com Doesn’t Know How Capitalism Works

  • Democrat Texas Stage Legislators Hide Out in Oklahoma to Prevent Quorum

  • A Racially Uniform Student Body Can Be “Diverse”

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Conservative Southerners could have told him this decades ago.

… But there's more wrong with New York than billions of dollars debt, an economic recession and a depression--physical as well as economic--in lower Manhattan. Gotham has a large and loyal following who'd be loath to admit it, but except for the very rich, the quality of life in this city is worse than it should be and far below most of the rest of America.

A real estate broker said it to me best when I moved to this city nearly three years ago and was looking for an apartment: "If you've never lived in New York, you'll have to lower your expectations."

…

Mostly, though it's just plain expensive to live here. Anyone who wants to raise a family and isn't wealthy would be well advised to move out of the city. Almost everything costs more here, from private schools to groceries to furniture and even medicine. There are fewer choices on the supermarket shelves; limited real estate means limited shelf space. The Wal-Marts and grocery megastores are relegated to the suburbs.

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FrontPageMag.com

• People Against the American Way

• Former President of NOW Turns YWCA Into a Leftist Organization

• Leftists Attacking Second Amendment Dishonest and Corrupt

• Media Misrepresented the Looting of the Iraqi National Museum

• United Arab Emirates Ruler Funds Holocaust Denial, Coverup of Oppression of Jews in Arab Countries

• North Korea Illuminates American Helicopters with Laser

• Republicans Reach Out to Blacks

• North Korea Not Exempted from Preemption Doctrine

• Iraqi Official Papers Show Saddam’s Connection to Russia and France

• Ayatollahs Block ISP’s

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Horowitz compares the contemporary “anti-war” types to those whose supported Communism in the 1950s.

Howowitz says that Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party was “created” by the Communist Party, USA.

Horowitz calls People for the American Way “the largest and most influential hate group in America.”

“So yes opposition to the war on Iraq is opposition to the policy of the elected government of the United States in its entirety, and whose sovereign is the American people.”

Horowitz also says that, while we’re at war, people must decide between America and its enemies.

They have not taken a moment to reflect on their treacherous antics, which would have kept the Iraqi oppressors in power and anti-American terrorists on the loose; they have not reserved a second for regrets about blackening America’s image or weakening her citizens’ resolve in resisting the forces that would bring this nation down. But having attacked – in time of war -- their President as a “Nazi” and their country as “the real axis of evil,” the left is now complaining because others have called them to account.

From Greenwich Village to Hollywood the American left is crying victim -- “McCarthyism,” “persecution” -- because Americans are revolted by what they said and did. And of course the left is once again -- in the same hypocritical breath -- presenting itself as a defender of the American liberties it refused to defend. And of course the left is yet again “defending” them not against the fascist threat from Iran and other terrorist states still at large, but from America itself. “A chill wind is blowing in this nation,” is how actor and anti-war leftist Tim Robbins characterizes his triumphant country while complaining about his “persecution” and “silencing” on national TV.

This is what happens when you put a radical feminist in charge of a respectable organization.

This column has a good short history of the YWCA.

Patricia Ireland has a new job. The former president of the National Organization for Women will soon be the new chief executive officer of the YWCA. For those unfamiliar with the contemporary focus of the Young Women’s Christian Association, it will come as a shock to find that the agenda of NOW under Ireland’s tenure is eerily similar to the agenda already employed by the YWCA.

…

Like NOW, the YWCA advocates for more Title X public funding to discuss sexually transmitted diseases, but opposes abstinence education, the only known guarantee of 100% protection from an STD. It treats “women’s health” as a euphemism for unfettered access to abortion, and opposes parental consent laws.

…

The YWCA is also a member of Martha Burk’s club, the National Council of Women’s Organizations, most recently in the news for her unsuccessful attack on the all-male membership policy of the Augusta National Golf Course. Most recently, the YWCA put out press releases calling for “tolerance” after radical Islamic terrorists attacked this country on 9/11, and opposed the U.S. attack on Iraq.

…

Its leftist connections are not limited to feminists. The YWCA mission statement says that it “seeks to eliminate racism.” To that end, it has allied itself with the Left’s civil rights community. It sponsors many national race-related events and in 1997 got President Bill Clinton to declare April 30th as the YWCA National Day of Commitment to Eliminate Racism. It is hard to imagine that the Protestant ladies who founded the organization to protect young women from lecherous men would have been as enamored of Bill Clinton as today’s YWCA.

The oath taken in courts of law has those testifying swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…" A half-truth can be as dishonest as an outright lie. Like so many news reports on CBS, what viewers got last Sunday was a patchwork of half-truths crafted to deceive.

…

Sarah Brady is rumored to have been receiving pay of $125,000 per year plus $5,000 per speech by the Leftist fat cats who fund this organization.

…

The trial lawyers are waging a methodical war against all private industry in America, bleeding one and then the next, and the next. Not surprisingly, trial lawyers have in recent elections provided 40 percent of campaign funds for the Democratic Party and its candidates, their lawsuit enablers.

Lockitch uses the parallel of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum by insiders with the insider “looting” of American museums mandated by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This includes a brief discussion of the Kennewick Man case.

Initial reports of the looting of the Iraqi National Museum sparked a frenzy of outrage. Denied their desert quagmire, their civilian massacres, their oil-fire eco-disaster, and their inflamed "Arab street," leftists all but leaped at the opportunity to denounce our armed forces—with some even urging that our soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes for their alleged failure to prevent the looting.

It turns out, though, that our troops were not standing "idly by" but were being fired at from the museum complex. And the number of missing artifacts—initially assumed to be in the thousands—is now thought to be closer to a few dozen. Most significant, however, is the evidence that the looting was an inside job, orchestrated by museum staffers. The most valuable artifacts were taken from locked vaults by thieves who had both the keys and the knowledge of which pieces were most important.

The Harvard Divinity School may return a $2.5 million donation from the United Arab Emirates ruler, Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan, earmarked to fund a Professorship in Islamic Studies. Why? As reported by Boston Globe reporter Jenna Russell, the benevolent Sheikh openly espouses a virulent Judenhass. …

North Korea's military fired a laser in March at two U.S. Army helicopters patrolling the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas in what U.S. officials call a provocative action, The Washington Times has learned.

Two Apache attack helicopters were illuminated by lasers in early March by a weapon that had the characteristics of a Chinese laser gun, an indication that North Korea has deployed a new and potentially lethal weapon.

North Korea has done these provocations since the end of the Korean War, and they can be seen as an indication that North Korea isn’t ready for peace.

They are meeting quietly in heartland cities like Indianapolis — black Republicans with a plan they hope will garner 25 percent of the black vote for President Bush next year.

Bolstered by unprecedented Republican overtures to black voters, such as the $15 billion AIDS package to Africa and the Caribbean, appointments of blacks to key Cabinet positions, and the faith-based initiative, black Republicans are convinced they have a viable product to sell.

The Republicans’ challenge is to attract black voters without compromising their principles. If they can it will be a significant improvement in the American political climate.

The Bush administration yesterday rebuffed a call by South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun to exempt North Korea from the U.S. military doctrine that allows for pre-emptive attacks on rogue states that develop weapons of mass destruction.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States will keep "all options open" in the nuclear standoff with the communist North, effectively denying the request made by Mr. Roh in an interview with The Washington Times published yesterday.

This is a way of keeping the pressure on North Korea. We’ll have more success in convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program if we negotiate from a position of strength.

… Recent discoveries in Iraq now indicate the relations between those two countries and Saddam Hussein’s regime were more extensive than publicly disclosed and were possibly in violation of U.N. sanctions against the Iraqi regime. …

If UN Security Council members won’t obey its sanctions then there’s not much hope that the UN can bring about world peace.

Iran has ordered new restrictions on the Internet, requiring service providers to block a number of critical news and immoral sites in the latest stage of a long-running crackdown on independent media.

Newspapers said a list some 15,000 sites to be blocked had been issued.

Many reformist publishers had turned to the Internet to get around strict press laws following hard-line judiciary bans on some 80 newspapers and magazines over the last three years.

With the Iranian people becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the Ayatollahs’ rule, they’re trying to restrict news from outside. Given the capabilities of modern communications system, the Iranian people will still find out what’s going on in the outside world.

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Jewish World Review.com

• New York Post Reporter Exposes Media Bias on Iraq

• Joke Compares Alabama Hiring Mike Shula to 2000 Presidential Election

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NEW YORK POST reporter Jonathan Foreman has confirmed my worst fears about media bias in this war. And what makes Foreman's report so shocking to his buddies in the press is the fact that he is naming names.

…

Now you would think that being unceremoniously tossed out of the closet like this would embarrass biased outlets like the L.A. Times and Associated Press? But of course, it doesn't. These media giants have an agenda, and they're going to push it on you every day, even if the truth stands in their way.

As Leftists, the biased reporters see promotion of politically correct causes as  their highest goal. Anything else, including accurate reporting, comes in a distant second.

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JWR

Jesse Jackson vowed to protest Alabama hiring Mike Shula as football coach at the state capitol. The school chose a white guy whose father was a legend in the profession. Jesse Jackson insists Al Gore won the coaching job fair and square.

Excellent satire.

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JWR

 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
 (Subscription Site)

• In the news

• North Korea Voids Nuclear Proliferation Signed in 1992

• 13 School Districts Are on Arkansas’ Economically Distressed List

• Commissioners Vote to Remove State Senator Tracy Steele for Failing to Take Leave

• Sam Perroni Held in Contempt in Case of Trials Scheduled on the Same Day

• Former Tyson Managers Sentenced to Probation, Fines in Illegal Alien Case

• SEC Rules That Reliant Resources Overstated Revenues

• Editorial Whining About Leon Holmes

• Laudatory Editorial of “Firebrand Social Reformer” Mamie Ruth Williams

• Mike Masterson: Politicians Spend Plenty on Themselves as They Claim the State is Hurting

• Former State Legislator: School Consolidation Isn’t New

• Letters

• Clare Short, the British international development secretary resigned. She had promised to resign if Britain participated in the Operation to Depose Saddam.
• Larry Wallace, former high-ranking Atlanta official, was sentenced to four years for bribery.
• Linda Saunders, a former aide to North Carolina Agriculture Commissioner Meg Scott Phipps pled guilty to extortion in scheme to cover her boss’ campaign debts.

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ArkDemocrat

North Korea said Monday that a 1992 agreement with South Korea to keep the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons was nullified, citing a "sinister" U.S. agenda.

The accord was the last remaining legal obligation under which North Korea was banned from developing atomic arms. In January, Pyongyang withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a global accord to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

This agreement was negotiated by Jimmy Carter on behalf of the Clinton Administration. As events have shown, the North Koreans had no intention of abiding by it. Thus Clinton followed his usual practice of pushing his problems into the future for someone else to handle.

At a time when legislators are trying to deal with the unconstitutional funding of the state’s public schools, a record 13 school districts wound up Monday on the state’s latest "fiscal distress" list.

None, though, are being taken over by the state.

Another example of Clinton’s pushing problems in to the future. When his education “reforms” were being sold to the people of Arkansas we were told that they would solve the state’s educational problems.

The commissioners’ vote was based on the executive director’s failure to take leave time to make up for hours not worked during the Legislative session, Sylvester Smith III said.

But state Sen. Tracy Steele, D, North Little Rock, said he does take leave for times when he isn’t able to work 40 hours a week as the commission’s executive director during the legislative session. He calculated Monday afternoon that he will lose about 180 hours of leave this year as a result of the regular and special sessions.

Steele’s appointment to the MLK, Jr. Commission appears to be an unhealthy form of patronage. The arrangement for his time off while the legislature is in session should have been made clear as soon as he was elected to the state senate.

Sam Perroni, 54, has said he could not appear Feb. 11 in Pulaski County Circuit Court because he simultaneously represented another client in a jury trial in federal court, and he felt the federal court case took precedence.

He has said Circuit Judge Tim Fox would not allow him to reschedule the state trial or let another defense attorney take over the case, and forbade him from requesting a postponement of the federal trial.

Perroni was the campaign manager for Judge Fox’s opponent in the last election, so one suspects personal pettiness is involved. If so, Fox doesn’t deserve to be on the bench.

U.S. District Court Judge R. Allan Edgar ordered probation Monday for two former Tyson Foods managers who assisted the government in its failed immigration prosecution of the world’s largest meat producer.

Spencer Mabe, 52, and Truley Ponder, 59, each received one year of probation and a fine.

The pair provided prosecutors with information and testified at the six-week trial that Tyson Foods Inc. and some of its key managers recruited and hired illegal immigrants as workers.

Federal regulators, in a new action related to power companies’ alleged manipulation of Western energy markets, on Monday announced that Reliant Resources had violated securities laws by misstating its financial condition through the use of phony power swaps that often inflated its revenues.

Free markets don’t work unless there is an authority to make sure that those involved obey the rules.

Neither Bork nor Holmes belong on the Federal bench. Bork was on the wrong side of one of the biggest states’ rights cases of the 1980s.

… We’re talking about the women who got their baptism of fire in politics with the Women’s Emergency Committee of Little Rock—a group that set out to save the public schools when the men proved unable to. …

… She had a table as big as her heart; there was always room at it for rookie reporters, SNCC workers, and a whole succession of starry-eyed idealists who thought there was actually a chance of beating Orval Faubus during the Furious Fifties. …

My recollection is that the SNCC backed the Vietnamese Communist victory back in the 1960s. It’s quite probable that she may have had a place in her heart for the Viet Cong terrorists.

Link to laudatory obituary

Gov. Mike Huckabee says he plans to fly this week to the sun-splashed U.S. Virgin islands in an expenses-paid jaunt to attend the Council of State Governments. As president of the organization this year, he’s heading up this steeldrums shindig for state officials.

Arkansas once had 5,112 school districts and now there are 310.

Unfortunately, former state representative Lancaster doesn’t discuss the subsidization of the small school districts.

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