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“Not for the politically correct.”

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DrudgeReport.com

• Hillary Claims Slick Lied to Her About Monica

• Study Links Depression, Suicide to Adolescent Sexuality

• Martha Stewart Indicted

• LA Police Sergeant Suspended for Tapping Criminal Databases for Private Investigator

• AOL Loses One Million Subscribers

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Standora, Leo. “Hil: Wanted to wring his neck.”  New York Daily News. June 4, 2003.

Sen. Hillary Clinton writes that her husband lied to her about Monica Lewinsky until the very end and that she wanted to "wring Bill's neck" when he finally came clean about the affair.

Hillary is trying to perpetuate the myth that Ms. Lewinsky was Slick’s only paramour. Given that she know about Slick’s other paramours this is as phony as Jesse Jackson bringing his pregnant mistress to the sessions in which he “counseled” Slick.

Peterson, Karen S. “Study links depression, suicide rates to teen sex.”  USA Today. June 3, 2003.

The Heritage study taps the government-funded National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. The Heritage researchers selected federal data on 2,800 students ages 14-17. The youngsters rated their own "general state of continuing unhappiness" and were not diagnosed as clinically depressed.

The Heritage researchers do not find a causal link between "unhappy kids" and sexual activity, says Robert Rector, a senior researcher with Heritage. "This is really impossible to prove." But he says that study findings send a clear message about unhappy teens that differs from one portrayed in the popular culture, that "all forms of non-marital sexual activity are wonderful and glorious, particularly the younger (teen) the better," he says.

This article does not contain the word “race.” If the reports of black illegitimacy are correct then black adolescents should be the most sexually active. If there was a direct link between adolescent sexuality then black adolescents should have the highest incidence of suicide.

Unless there is a higher suicide rate among sexually active black adolescents then there must be more factors involved.

“Martha Stewart Indicted.”  ABC News. June 4, 2003.

Martha Stewart and her broker have been charged in a nine-count indictment by a federal grand jury investigating her trades of ImClone stock.

“LA police sergeant suspended for allegedly tapping computers for personal use.”  San Jose: The Mercury News (AP). June 4, 2003.

A police sergeant was suspended for allegedly accessing confidential databases on behalf of a Hollywood private investigator who is facing felony weapon charges, authorities said.

…

Authorities said Arneson is the focus of a joint investigation by the FBI and the Los Angeles Police Department. Search warrants served on Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano found financial records that led to Arneson. The documents showed Arneson was receiving money in addition to his LAPD salary, sources told the Los Angeles Times.

Vise, David A. “AOL Subscriber Defections Continue, Top 1 Million.”  Washington Post. June 4, 2003.

America Online has lost more than 1 million dial-up customers since the dramatic decline in its subscriber base began late last year, sources familiar with the figures said yesterday.

The Dulles-based firm is rapidly losing customers to NetZero and other lower-priced bare-bones Internet services, as well as to higher-priced high-speed cable and telephone providers.

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 OpinionJournal.com

• Newspapers Start to Inch Away From Political Correctness

• Best of the Web Today

  • Karen Finley Returns!

  • The Skinny on the Rescue of Jessica Lynch

  • John Kerry Only Appears Moderate

  • No Government Has Complained About Saddam’s WMD Not Being Found

  • Maureen Dowd Inspires New Word: “Dowdification”

  • Hillary Is Shocked! Shocked! That Slick Lied to Her

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Taranto, James. “Indian Summer: In Jayson Blair's wake, newspapers inch away from political correctness.” OpinionJournal.com. June 4, 2003.

A refreshing change

 Wall Street Journal
 (Subscription Site)

• The Origins of the US Income Tax

Crossen, Cynthia. “Not Too Long Ago, Some Begged for an Income Tax.”  Wall Street Journal. June 4, 2003. p .

Less than a century ago, the U.S. Congress, responding to pressure from its constituents, voted to start collecting taxes on people's income.

Many Americans, especially small-business owners, farmers, trade unionists and people who lived in the Midwest, West and South, cheered the new tax. Finally, with this new tax, they might get some relief from their financial struggles.

This article fails to point out that Abraham Lincoln’s income tax was unconstitutional and that high tariffs were a Republican policy that were one of the causes of the Civil War.

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FrontPageMag.com

• Zimbabwe’s Mugabe Uses Force to Quell Demonstrations

• Thomas Sowell: India Is Different from Idealized Version Portrayed by the Left

• Chris Weinkopf on the Failure to Find Iraqi WMD’s

• Clinton Administration Used Violence Against Abortion Providers Task Force for Political Purposes

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A photographer for Reuters news agency in Harare saw police forcing about 50 people, some of them women, to lie on the street while they beat them with batons and homemade whips.

…

Mr. Mugabe was returned to power last year in an election so marred by violence, fraud and intimidation that many Western countries, including Britain and the United States, refused to recognize the result.

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U.N. food agencies estimate that 70 percent of the country's 12 million people now live under conditions of famine, blamed by the opposition on a coercive land-reform program by Mr. Mugabe begun two years ago.

This makes Mugabe a sort of African Bull Conners.

The June issue of National Geographic contains one of the rare honest looks at India. The article "India's Untouchables" gives a shocking picture of some of the most persecuted people on earth.

For far too long, India has been one of a number of countries used by the intelligentsia to denigrate the United States. The image or the insinuation has been that we are materialistic, they are spiritual; we are violent, they are peaceful -- and so on.

Instead of picturing every country as it is, warts and all, too often the picture of the United States has been warts only and other countries -- whether India, Cuba, China, or at one time the Soviet Union -- have had their blemishes and worse passed over in silence.

Beleaguered British MP George Galloway may have another problem, in addition to be investigated by his own Labour Party for a possible relationship with Iraqi intelligence. Now the British government has frozen the assets of a Muslim charity with links to Galloway.

But after spending months complaining about the war’s manifold justifications, the left is now able to remember only one: The WMDs, or, more accurately, the inability of American forces to unearth any so far.

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Yet as they were all too eager to point out just a few months ago, the war was never just about WMDs. It was about all the reasons the Bush Administration outlined, and in hindsight, most of those have been amply justified:

The FBI that was too busy raiding a New Orleans brothel to put together the telltale clues it possessed that could have prevented the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center? The FBI had time to focus on Christian groups?

President Bill Clinton’s administration devoted vast law enforcement resources to monitoring Christian groups. In August 1994, to cite but one example among many, Attorney General Janet Reno launched VAAPCON, the Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy, that directed the activities of the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, U.S. Postal Inspectors and U.S. Marshalls.

VAAPCON was justified as a way to stop "terrorist" violence against abortion clinics, and such deadly violence has certainly happened. Rudolph will first be tried in the case of an Alabama abortion clinic bombing that killed one off-duty police officer, and he would not be the first human to justify hatreds in the name of religion. (His opposition to abortion reportedly is linked to Rudolph’s belief that white mothers aborting their babies is genocide against the white race.)

But VAAPCON, like so many Clinton police state operations, also justified government surveillance of any and every group opposed to abortion or other politically-correct Leftist policies supported by the Clintons.

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Jewish World Review.com

• Most Popular Vehicle in Iraq Is Named After Monica Lewinsky

• Argus Hamilton’s Political Humor

• Separation of Church and State Group Want to Stop Federal Grant for Boston’s Old North Church

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In Iraq, no set of wheels is held in higher regard than the large, mostly white Toyota Land Cruiser sport utility vehicles long favored by government officials, intelligence agents and VIPs from Basra to Kirkuk.

Locals call the vehicles "Monicas," as in Lewinsky, after the former White House intern whose appearance meets Iraqi standards for both feminine and automotive beauty.

…

"They are a very tempting car," said Marwan Shaban, a car dealer in the nearby northern city of Mosul. "Just as Monica tempted Clinton, they will tempt you."

Curiously, this article doesn’t say whether the Iraqi Muslims are put off by Ms. Lewinsky being Jewish.

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JWR

Howard Dean called John Kerry a copycat for stealing his applause lines. The crop of Democratic candidates is just pitiful. If these guys don't get more interesting, Hillary Clinton could be the first member of her family to be drafted.

Hillary Clinton promotes her White House memoir on ABC's 20/20 Sunday. Is this necessary? In this time of war and recession, the last thing the country wants to read is another tell-all by a woman who claims that she slept with Bill Clinton.

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Interior Secretary Gale Norton recently announced a grant of $317,000 to help preserve an aging edifice of historical importance to the nation. Whereupon Americans United for the Separation of Church and State objected. Why? Because the group sees a manifest violation of church and state in the new policy under which the Park Service made the grant.

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 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
 (Subscription Site)

• In the news

  • Woman Charged for Breastfeeding Infant

  • Danish Pastor Suspended for Atheism

• Sleeper Cell Convictions in Detroit

• Surgeon General Favors Tobacco Ban

• Trees Contribute to Ozone Pollution

• May State Revenues 1.6% Less Than May, 2002

• City Board Renames Asher West of University

• Motion to Keep Steele as Executive Director of MLK, Jr. Commission Fails

• Downtown Partnership Head Says “Homelessness is a growing problem”

• Canadian Man Thought to Have Had SARS Recovers, Leaves State

• Remains of Cammack Village Black Bear Will be Used for Education

• Sammy Sosa Caught Using Corked Bat

• State’s Business Climate Ranks 48th in Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C. Survey

• Paul Greenberg Uses Johnson Quote on Second Marriages

• BBC Tries to Pour Water on Private Lynch Rescue Story

• Meredith Oakley: Mike Bebee Knew MLK, Jr. Commission Is Part of Executive Branch

• Gene Lyons Blames Whitewater on NY Times’ Poor Journalism

• Letters

  • Stars and Bars Not Confederate Battle Flag

• Benjamin James Johnson, pled guilty to stealing paintings from Odai Hussein’s palace.
• 32-year-old Shannon Denney was charged with “outraging public decency and public morals” for breastfeeding an infant at a Stigler, Oklahoma day care center without the parents’ permission.
• Danish Lutheran Pastor Thorkild Grosboel was suspended for saying “there is no heavenly God, there is no eternal life, there is no resurrection” in a recent interview.

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ArkDemocrat

DETROIT — Two Arab immigrants accused of gathering intelligence on potential targets from Disneyland to an air base in Turkey were convicted of conspiring to support Islamic terrorists Tuesday, the first guilty verdicts involving a "sleeper cell" uncovered after Sept. 11, 2001.

A third man was found guilty only on a fraud charge, and a fourth was acquitted of all counts.

Surgeon General Richard Carmona said Tuesday that he supports the banning of tobacco products — the first time that the government’s top doctor and public health advocate has made such a strong statement about the subject.

Testifying at a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee hearing on smokeless tobacco and "reduced risk" tobacco products, Carmona was asked if he would "support the abolition of all tobacco products."

"I would at this point, yes," he replied.

Is Carmona a Clinton appointee? If not, why is an allegedly conservative administration doing promoting nanny-state fascism?

Recent data gathered by state environmental regulators suggest that trees are responsible for about 45 percent of the ozone that forms over the region each summer.

Plants produce oxygen during the day as a byproduct of photosynthesis. Unfortunately, the article doesn’t say if the ozone is part of the oxygen production.

The state government in May collected 1.6 percent less revenue than in the same month last year, narrowly missing the lowered forecast issued for the month on May 2.

It was the second month of the current fiscal year in which state collections fell below collections in the same month last year. It also happened in January.

One wonders if there has been a corresponding drop in state spending.

A stretch of Asher Avenue passed away quietly Tuesday after city leaders voted to change the name of part of the Little Rock artery to "Colonel Glenn Road."

With no discussion or debate Tuesday, the Little Rock Board of Directors voted 10-0, with City Director Stacy Hurst absent, to rename a 2-mile section of the road west of University Avenue.

Typical Little Rock problem-solving: change the name instead of fixing the problem. That the same street changes names at the middle of a major intersection apparently didn’t enter into the decision; it is sure to be confusing in the future.

Steele’s critics complain that one person should not hold two public jobs (he’s paid $54,337 a year at the commission slot and $13,442 as a senator). Act 34 of 1999 allows legislators to hold state jobs they had before they were elected. Steele became executive director of the commission in 1994. He won a state House seat in 1998, serving until 2002, when he won the Senate seat.

…

Steele also has NAACP critics. In an October 2001 letter, Dale Charles, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Arkansas branch, demanded that Steele resign from both jobs. Charles threatened to refer the issue to the state Ethics Commission. He called Steele "the rabid mouth of racism for the Democratic Party" after Steele, chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, spoke against a legislative redistricting plan favored by Huckabee and the NAACP.

Meredith Oakley’s column points out that the MLK, Jr. Commission is part of the executive branch, so its employment of Steele is a form of disregarding the separation of powers. Whether this is legal will be up to the courts.

"Homelessness is a growing problem that we need to address now," Millie Ward, president of the nonprofit Downtown Partnership, said Tuesday. "We’re going to look at a comprehensive plan and the best practices for this problem."

Unfortunately, this article doesn’t explain exactly how the homeless problem is “growing.” One would think that it means that there are more homeless people, which raises questions about what is happening in our community.

The patient who was reported to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as Arkansas’ first probable SARS case has fully recovered and has been discharged from the hospital where he was being treated, the state Department of Health said Tuesday.

In addition, the initial lab results from the CDC indicate the patient — a Canadian man traveling in Arkansas on business — may not have had SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Four men in the Early Arkansaw Reenactors Association "skinned out" a black bear that fell to its death from a tree in a crowded Cammack Village neighborhood over the weekend. The bear’s preserved body parts will be used to educate the public about the role bears played in early Arkansas history.

The Cubs had runners at second and third when Sosa broke his bat with a grounder to second that at first appeared to drive in a run.

But crew chief Tim McClelland gathered with the other three umpires to examine the bat. Cubs Manager Dusty Baker came out and the umpires showed the bat to him.

Mark Grudzielanek was sent back to third base, the run was wiped out and Sosa was ejected as he stood in the dugout.

Sosa claimed that the corked bat was one he used for batting practice.

Arkansas’ tax climate for businesses is one of the worst in the country, according to a report released late last month by the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C.

Arkansas ranks 48th in the foundation’s State Business Tax Climate Index, ahead of only California and Mississippi. The Tax Foundation, which annually publishes a Tax Freedom Day report, bills itself as a nonprofit tax education organization.

Mideast summits are, like Dr. Johnson’s definition of second marriages, a victory of hope over experience. If peace does stand a chance now, it will not be because of the presence of any new factor. It will be because an old one is conspicuously absent from these proceedings: Yasser Arafat, the man who never takes Yes for an answer. That’s why the last, Clinton Era negotiations failed. Given just about everything he sought, Yasser Arafat walked out—because what he really sought was war.

According to The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page:  Marriage page the quotation is “The triumph of hope over experience” (from Boswell’s Life of Johnson).

The BBC, a British news organization that took a dim view of the war and remains unreconciled to the coalition’s swift victory, took the lead in trying to debunk the legend of the rescue of Pvt. Lynch. With a certain malicious glee, the BBC said the raid was unnecessary, that the U.S. military greatly exaggerated its dangers and seemed to suggest that the raid might even have been faked.

To which the only reasonable reaction is: So what?

This is not to suggest that, contrary to the attorney general’s opinion, Steele’s continued employment would be constitutionally suspect. After all, the senator is an employee of the commission, not a member of it.

It would seem, however, that whatever the source of his confusion on this point now, Beebe knew well enough to which branch the King Commission belonged when he also co-sponsored Act 1414 of 1999.

Related news article on the Steele controversy.

In the end, my reporting held up. Badly written Times dispatches filled with semi-facts and half-truths did not. Reporting a $200,000 real estate deal ain’t brain surgery. Correct the errors, fill in the blanks and Whitewater’s "scandalous" aspects disappeared.

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