Bill’s Blog

“Not for the politically correct.”

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DrudgeReport.com

• Portland, Oregon Pizza Restaurant Hires Homeless to Hold Signs

• Arizona Catholic Bishop Arrested in Fatal Hit and Run

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Kramer, Andrew. “Pizza company hires homeless to hold ads.” San Francisco Chronicle. June 16, 2003.

Instead of going Dumpster-diving for maybe a half-eaten sandwich and some cold fries, Peter Schoeff, a 20-year-old homeless man, was served a slice of hot pizza dripping with cheese.

All he had to do was hold a sign for about 40 minutes that read: "Pizza Schmizza paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money."

In a tactic that calls to the mind the hiring of unemployed men during the Depression to wear sandwich-board advertisements, a Portland pizza chain has hired homeless people off the street to promote the product. They are paid in pizza, soda and a few dollars.

Wagner, Dennis, and Slivka, Judd. “Bishop O'Brien arrested in fatal hit-and-run.” Arizona Republic. June 16, 2003.

After more than four hours of questioning, Phoenix police this afternoon arrested Bishop Thomas O'Brien in the fatal hit-and-run of a pedestrian this weekend.

O’Brien had gotten off obstruction of justice charges in a pedophile priests case the week before. Another example of the contempt for American law by the Roman hierarchy. It’s possible he beat the obstruction of justice charges because the prosecutor feared a backlash by Catholic voters.

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 OpinionJournal.com

• Controlling Access to Records Perpetuates JFK Myth

• Extreme Leftist’s Book Denies Bias in Media

• Best of the Web Today

  • Left Tries to Use Unfound WMD Issue to Create Another Watergate

  • Howard Dean Isn’t Telling the Voters That He Co-Authored the Patriot Act

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Would JFK have withdrawn from Vietnam? Give me a break.

Then withdraw? Joe Kennedy's competitive kid? The "green berets" guy? The "bear any burden" guy? Give me a break.

• Robert Dallek, author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, perpetuates the myth that JFK would have withdrawn from Vietnam had won a second term, a “notion has been assiduously spread by Kennedy acolytes for three decades now.”

• Thomas C. Reeves, author of A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy, “pointed out that the Kennedy Library is the only tax-supported presidential library that has a system of ‘donor committees’ controlling access to materials, and that Ted Sorensen, chief guardian of Kennedy mythology, was instrumental in the selection of Mr. Dallek to be the first historian to see a wide range of materials.”

• The records Dallek saw said nothing about Dr. Max Jacobson, known as “Dr. Feelgood” for his amphetamine cocktails. “Yet Dr. Jacobson was seeing the president about weekly, according to bills reviewed by Laurence Leamer, author of The Kennedy Men and The Kennedy Women.”

• Eisenhower briefed JFK the day before his inaugural, including advocating action in Laos. Eisenhower believed that Cambodia and South Vietnam would fall unless America resisted the Communists there. Later JFK would negotiate the “Laos accords, a coalition arrangement that gave the Communists de facto control of the Ho Chi Minh trail vital to infiltration into South Vietnam.”

Is anyone fooled by claims that the media aren't liberal?

… Attacking associations rather than actual public arguments is simply his attempt to discredit motives rather than argue facts. This is an old tradition of the left, going back to the 1930s when American communists would attack the motives of their accusers rather than the veracity of the accusation. …

This column discusses Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media?, which claims that the liberal media is small and under attack from a well-funded conservative press. Yeah, right.

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FrontPageMag.com

• Lowell Ponte: Moral Relativism Threatens America

• Steven Winn: America Is a Society That Expects Dishonesty

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And millions of our children now hear the Clinton message: “Don’t be suckers and play by the rules. Look at us. We broke every old rule of decency, and we’re winners. We’re millionaires. We’re celebrities. Cheating pays. Be like us.” This is the corrosive Clinton legacy, and unless repudiated it will deconstruct and demolish America.

Outstanding!

This, after all, is a culture that has come to accept and even expect skewed information at best, outright lies at worst, in everything from government to advertising to art. A generation after Watergate and Vietnam, scandals that made truth a casualty have lost their power to scandalize. We live in a society of widespread duplicity and deceit.

Lowell Ponte’s column discusses this column.

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Jewish World Review.com

• Argus Hamilton’s Political Humor

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Washington Huskies coach Rick Neuheisel was fired Thursday. The school cited his gambling on NCAA basketball, although he says the school gave him permission. That night, Hillary Clinton went on Barbara Walters and said she believed his story.

Hillary Clinton told British TV she's forgiven her husband for all the times he has cheated on her and embarrassed her in public. It made Britain wistful. If Princess Diana had only been this lacking in self-respect, she would be alive today.

Michael Jordan convinced a judge Friday to throw out a five-million-dollar lawsuit against him by a former lover. She never had a chance. The judge ruled that a promise to pay hush money to a mistress is unenforceable under the Clinton Doctrine.

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JWR

 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
 (Subscription Site)

• In the news

• Web Sites for 2004 Presidential Candidates

• Demographic Shifts Change Drug Enforcement

• New State Law Requires Schools to Use Policies to Prevent Bullying

• Little Rock Man Shoots Three Who Broke Into His House, One Dies

• Hydrogen Leaked from Fuel Cells May Harm Ozone Layer

• University of Calgary Virus Writing Class Infuriates Software Companies

• Microsoft Software, Including Outlook Express,Blocks Web Bugs

• Former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating reportedly plans to step down as chairman of a national panel to investigate sexual abuses by Roman Catholic priests.

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ArkDemocrat

BENTON — Restrictions on how police seize property in drug cases and the decline in popularity of powder cocaine have had a tremendous impact on Arkansas’ drug task forces in the past decade, according to state and local officials.

So, is this law enforcement or a business?

More Arkansas counselors will be using examples like Curtis’ this fall now that a law requires the state’s school districts to add bullying to their discipline policies and adopt counseling programs designed to prevent it from happening.

Bullying became the target of legislators and guidance counselors during a spate of school shootings in the late 1990s.

Thirty-two other states have enacted legislation that recommends how districts should prevent bullying and harassment, according to Education Week’s "Quality Counts 2003."

Only half of those states require schools to adopt prevention strategies, though, said Mark Weiss, education director for the New York-based nonprofit Operation Respect, which distributes curriculum called "Don’t Laugh at Me."

A Little Rock man shot and killed one of three intruders in his residence late Saturday night, police said.

NEW YORK — First the University of Calgary announced plans to offer a class in writing computer viruses and other destructive programs. Then Wired magazine published the code of a viruslike program that caused mass havoc on the Internet this year.

Both developments infuriated virus-fighting companies and illustrated the high-stakes dilemma of computer security: Do you keep vulnerabilities secret or spread the knowledge so problems can be remedied faster?

The antivirus industry is squarely in the first camp.

Privacy advocates say a shift by Microsoft could effectively marginalize a particularly intrusive use of Web bugs, the tracking and profiling devices used by online marketers and spammers.

Last month Microsoft retooled its Hotmail service, adding a feature that allows users to block Web bugs placed inside e-mail messages. A similar option exists in the most recent version of Microsoft’s widely used Outlook Express e-mail program, and the company says the next release of its other e-mail program, Outlook, will block the tracking mechanisms by default.

 Technical Links

• John Dvorak: Music Industry’s Legal Assault on File Sharing Fruitless

The music industry has had plenty of time to change its business model since the MP3 format first appeared in the mid-1990s. And the industry must have had a clue by 1998, when it began to track down pirated albums on CD-R. By the time Napster came along and tried to cajole the industry into adopting it for distribution, everyone but the RIAA knew that the game was altered.

 Other Links

• State of Texas Overturns Travesty of Justice in Tulia

Host Bob Edwards talks to NPR's Wade Goodwyn about the release from prison of 12 black residents of Tulia, Texas, who were convicted of dealing illegal drugs on the sole testimony of one white undercover sheriff's deputy. No drugs were found, and the deputy has since been indicted for lying under oath. Altogether 38 people, most of them black, were convicted in the racially-charged case.