Right Wing Nut House

A United States Marine was sentenced today to 20 years hard labor for looking sideways at the Koran.

The offense occurred at the Guantanamo Detention Center where Muslim prisoners have filed numerous complaints against guards who they say routinely desecrate the Islamic holy book. Some of the desecrations include:

1. Wearing dirty white gloves while handling the Koran

2. Not being deferential enough towards the holy book. One inmate, Muhammed Ahkbar complained that Marine guards routinely failed to “bow low and scrape their heads against the floor” while in the presence of the Koran. “It is only right that the infidel dogs show homage to Allah in this manner.” Ahkbar said.

3. Guards not being ready for pop quizzes on the Koran by inmates.

4. Guards not washing their hands after urinating and then handling the Koran. This led to a rumor in the facility that a guard had actually peed on the holy book. But after a 6 month investigation costing taxpayers more than $1 million, no proof of the allegation could be found.

In addition to Koran desecration, inmates complain of torture and mistreatment. “My bed is lumpy.” said Saad Rafjani. “I prefer the Serta Extra Firm queen size but these defilers before Allah gave me the twin size.”

One inmate complained about the food. “The lamb is overcooked, the Khoubz tastes like the inside of my AK-47, and you can see right through the water!”

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita claims that the inmates are comfortable and well fed.

We live in an age when the confluence of the political culture and the culture of celebrity have merged to form a seamless, media driven whole, a world where rock stars and movie legends are asked to comment on a wide variety scientific and technical issues whose complexity and in some cases obscurity, would tax the combined faculties of many institutions of higher learning.

There are some, including author Theodore H. White who traces this marriage of cultures to John F. Kennedy’s fascination with Hollywood and in particular, his study of the question of why the notoriety of people like Clark Gable and Marlyn Monroe transcended the small artists community of Hollywood and made them larger than life characters to the American people. Kennedy was the first Presidential candidate to use Hollywood stars in a huge way. All of a sudden, reporters were asking Sammy Davis Junior his views on race relations (questions that Davis generally refused to answer). Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Kennedy’s brother in law Peter Lawford not only campaigned for the President, they were included in the Presidential circle of friends and thus identified closely with Kennedy’s personality and policies.

It was the Viet Nam War that galvanized Hollywood and made movie stars into activists. With the breakdown of the studio system where stars were virtual prisoners of movie moguls and thus subject to strict limitations on their public persona, movie stars were suddenly free to comment on and participate in anything they wished. While certainly a liberating experience, the war spawned a generation of Hollywood stars whose extreme liberal politics led them to ever more outrageous public commentary on things they knew very little about. Do the thoughts of these celebrities have real world consequences? Ask the apple growers of America.

In 1989. a little known preservative used by about 5% of apple growers called Alar became a focus of concern because of it’s possible cancer causing ingredients. CBS 60 Minutes produced a scary story about what it termed “the most potent carcinogen used in our food supply.” Less than a week later, Congress held hearings on Alar that featured several experts from the National Resources Defense Council, the EPA, and the National Academy of Science. The hearing also featured actress Meryl Streep, whose dramatic testimony was seen on all three network newscasts that evening.

It was a perfect storm of high profile celebrity marrying up with the politics of the environmental movement. And it caused a panic that cost the apple growers of America $375 million in losses.

The only problem with this story is that it was a fairy tale:

Mass hysteria ensued. At a parent’s request, state troopers chased a school bus to confiscate a student’s apple. School administrators had apples and apple products summarily destroyed. Apple markets rotted overnight.

The NRDC, however, prospered. Fenton, its media consultant, stated in an interview for Propaganda Review: “The [PR] campaign was designed so that revenue would flow back to NRDC from the public. The group sold a book about pesticides through a 900 number on the ‘Donahue’ show and to date 90,000 copies have been sold.” Fenton’s strategy succeeded to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

At the same conference, environmental-health expert A. Alan Moghissi, Ph.D., then of the University of Maryland, stated: “The Alar controversy is a classic case of poor science applied to a societal decision, resulting in a poor final decision.”

Also at the conference, Dr. Richard Adamson, then director of the NCI’s Division of Cancer Etiology, stated: “The risk of eating an apple treated with Alar is less than the risk of eating a peanut butter sandwich or a well-done hamburger.” More recently, Adamson described the cancer risk from eating Alar-treated apples as “nonexistent.”

Even though both the EPA and the NAS testified at the hearing that the risk of eating Alar treated apples was extraordinarily low, it was Meryl Streep’s ignorant rant against apple growers deliberately trying to give children cancer that people heard.

And now Bob Geldof - rock star, concert promoter, organizer of famine relief for Africa, and all around celebrity saint - has decided to enter the world of international finance. The incongruity of someone who became famous through his participation in a punk rock band called “Boomtown Rats” who now wants to lecture the developed world on such arcane subjects as aid packages and third world debt relief seems to be lost on the media who are trumpeting Geldof’s latest brainstorm to the skies. Called “Live8″ because a series of concerts and protest march will coincide with a meeting of the G-8 in Britain this July, Geldof is following in the footsteps of that other globetrotting celebrity, U-2’s Bono whose expertise includes lecturing the developed world about famine, the AIDS pandemic, and other African issues that some have called little more than ignorant posturing.

According to its website, the goal of Live8 is as follows:

This is without doubt a moment in history where ordinary people can grasp the chance to achieve something truly monumental and demand from the 8 world leaders at G8 an end to poverty.

The G8 leaders have it within their power to alter history. They will only have the will to do so if tens of thousands of people show them that enough is enough.

By doubling aid, fully canceling debt, and delivering trade justice for Africa, the G8 could change the future for millions of men, women and children.”

Canceling some or all of Africa’s huge debt has been on the table of the G-8 for several years. It’s estimated that sub-Saharan Africa alone has $55 billion in debt that it can never repay. It would make sense to cancel at least some of Africa’s crushing debt burden and free up government funds for other development projects.

The problem with Africa, however, isn’t money. And doubling aid to the continent would be something akin to giving a convicted drunk driver his license back with a gift-wrapped bottle of Chivas Regal. Why does Geldof think that Africa has debt problems in the first place? Loans made by western banks and governments to the kleptocratic autocracies that pass for governments on that benighted continent have been swallowed up by both bad people and bad government:

Bitter experience suggests that even if these huge sums were multiplied tenfold, they would do little good. For Africa received £220 billion of aid between 1960 and 1997, the equivalent of six Marshall Plans, and finished up even poorer than before.

With the possible exception of President Robert Mugabe, everyone now accepts that Africa’s central problem is not a shortage of aid but “bad governance”. Put simply, the continent is filled with repressive and incompetent regimes whose chief pastime is grand larceny.

Decades of bitter experience have shown that authoritarianism is the enemy of development. But a British-sponsored commission has dodged an unambiguous demand for every African regime to embrace democracy. It is little short of incredible that this vital issue can still be skirted.

Still more depressing is the report’s coverage of corruption. This, we are told, is a “systemic challenge facing African leaders”. In a continent where Gen Sani Abacha, the late Nigerian dictator, was able to steal between £1 billion and £3 billion in less five years, this is no exaggeration.

Despite facts to the contrary, Geldof has decided that the western world must not only reform it’s aid programs but also “eliminate extreme poverty” whatever that means. And he’s holding western government responsible for this state of affairs due to “trade injustices.”

Breaking down trade barriers is always desirable. But what happens if the trade “injustices” are occurring on both sides of the trade divide? When African nations severely restrict food and electronics imports in favor of bolstering their domestic industries, why should western nations cut off their own noses to spite their faces and give Africans a break on their exports? According to Geldof, there apparently is no reason except “justice” whatever that is.

Geldof’s ignorance is not confined to issues. He also has the political instincts of a marmoset:

Anarchists from around the world are planning to cause chaos at next month’s G8 summit in Gleneagles as a row broke out last night between Bob Geldof and DJ Andy Kershaw over the absence of black musicians at events staged to benefit Africans.

With police fears mounting over Geldof’s call for one million people to protest at the summit, Kershaw last night condemned the almost exclusively white line-up for the pop concerts to coincide with the summit. “If we are going to change the West’s perception of Africa, events like this are the perfect opportunity to do something for Africa’s self-esteem,” he said. “But the choice of artists for the Live8 concerts will simply reinforce the global perception of Africa’s inferiority.”

But The Independent on Sunday can reveal that anarchist groups that have rioted at previous G8 gatherings are planning similar disruptions in Scotland and plan to hijack Geldof’s “long march to freedom” on 6 July and the Make Poverty History rally on 2 July. Anarchist groups will encourage protesters to “Make Capitalism History” instead.

So, for a concert to help call attention to African problems Geldof fails to book African acts? And to top it off, the moonbats are ready to hijack his “Long Walk for Justice” and turn it into a free-for-all. It appears that what Mr. Geldof is good at besides his many accomplishments as a musician is shallow thinking.

Chrenkoff, as usual, gets it exactly right:

It’s so much easier though to have a concert or an appeal for aid or debt forgiveness rather than for political and economic liberty. It’s difficult to imagine Robbie Williams and U2 playing for regime change in country X, or Madonna and Sting performing on stage for economic reform in country Y and international trade liberalization. But these are the things that actually matter. And so our boys from the 42nd Infantry Division are now doing more for the cause of solving world’s problems, than our boys from REM strutting the stage.

To believe that we can wipe out poverty simply by dumping a couple of hundred billion dollars into the hands of ruthless tyrants is worse than absurd; it’s morally dishonest. Proposing bad solutions is worse than not proposing any solutions at all. What Mr. Geldof is doing is using his celebrity to promote policies that not only are wrong, they’d be unattainable even if they were right.

In short, Geldof is fooling himself. And in the process, he’s fostering the notion among the uncritical young that world problems can be solved by singing and dancing and marching.

Would that t’were true. But like the Pied Piper, Geldof is leading the children astray. And what makes it unconscionable is that he’s achieving more notoriety in the process.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network

From Mike Krempasky, we have the definitive statement by those in favor of regulating blogs on what they really think of us:

Finally, we do not believe anyone described as a “blogger” is by definition entitled to the benefit of the press exemption. An individual writing material for distribution on the Internet may or may not be a press entity. While some bloggers may provide a function very similar to more classic media activities, and thus could reasonably be said to fall within the exemption, others surely do not . The test here should be the same test that the Commission has applied in other contexts - is the entity a “press entity” and is it acting in its “legitimate press function”?

Frankly, I could care less whether they want to define me as a “press entity,” which reminds me of something that Jean Luc Picard would be battling on Star Trek…

ATTACK OF THE PRESS ENTITY! Watch as this evil force consumes entire colonies. Will Data be able to figure out the creature’s weakness in time? Or will Picard succeed in communicating with it and discover it’s just a misunderstood evil force, not really dangerous?

Repeat after me; I will not obey any FEC regulations that restrict my freedom of speech.

Human Events Magazine has gone and done it. They assembled a distinguished and surprisingly diverse group of authors, critics, and intellectuals and listed the 10 Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. (HT: Citzcom)

…So many books to choose from…so few chosen…

The fact is they could have made it “The Hundred Most Harmful, etc.” and still come up short. And even though they included both Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man in the “Honorable Mention” category - perhaps as a gratuitous slap to contemporary humanists - they actually did a pretty good job. Here are their choices:

1. The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels

Or, How to Screw up the World In Five Easy Lessons

2. Mein Kampf by You-Know-Who

The first blogger, Hitler’s incoherent rants became a best seller in Germany only after he came to power and people started to give the book as a wedding gift. Also spawned numerous imitators and a cottage industry in accusatory epithets. (See here for the latest)

3. Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong

Little known fact: Even though it’s been referred to by moonbats as The Little Red Book when the Chicoms ran out of red paper, they remade the cover, coloring it with the blood of the Gang of Four (which rapidly ballooned into the Gang of Twenty Million). Unfortunately, they soon ran out of people to execute (figuring that 20 million was just about right) and ended up publishing it in China with an aqua-marine cover with a very nice gold leaf binding.

4. The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey

All your sex belong to us.

5. Democracy and Education by John Dewey

Take every crazy idea that’s come up in education over the last 50 years and it will have Dewey’s fingerprints all over it.

6. Das Kapital by Karl Marx

More looniness quoted today by loons who think a “dialectic” is some new kind of phone.

7. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Freidan

The reason why drop-dead gorgeous women are rarely feminists. One look at Freidan and most of her husky, pimple faced, hairy legged followers who think that sex is rape and good looking babes run for cover. The only mystique involved here is what man could have been so castrated as to marry this bitch?

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte

More God is dead stuff from a Frenchman. Two strikes right there.

9. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

God and Superman wasn’t enough for this moonbat, he had to saddle the western world with this incoherent screed against just about everything. Nietzsche was a pest. He was a pill. He was a burr under the saddle of rational thought. And he was Hitler’s fave to boot.

10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes

We can thank this moonbat for the welfare state.

I’m surprised they didn’t find room in there for Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology which pretty much began the most destructive social movement of the 20th century, Deconstructionism. Although technically a book about literary criticism, Derrida’s followers pounced on his ideas of textual nonsense and turned literary criticism into damaging critiques of western civilization. We’re still trying to recover from that movement’s destruction of the rational left in Europe and to some extent the United States.

Finally, another really harmful book that didn’t make the list and was perhaps the book that had the most influence on Hitler and other Nazi leaders was Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundations of the 19th Century in which this befuddled Englishman’s theories on race so captivated the perverts who surrounded Hitler they just couldn’t wait to put them to good use. Hitler himself nearly swooned when Chamberlain told him at their first meeting in 1927 that he would rule Germany one day.

Good thing that one is out of print.

Boy, those Iraq’s must be gluttons for punishment.

It isn’t enough that we’ve brutally occupied their country, tortured and flayed their innocent citizens, robbed them of their oil, and tried to ram a puppet government down their throats. Now they want us to become even more involved in their affairs (Thank you sir, may I have another…):

To prevent the breakdown of Iraq’s troubled transition and a potential civil war, Iraq’s new government appealed to the Bush administration yesterday to take a much more assertive role, particularly on four key political and military issues, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials.

In talks with Vice President Cheney yesterday and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari requested greater U.S. and coalition help in crafting a new constitution. The deadline is now less than three months away, but deliberations have been slowed as Iraq still works on the composition of a constitutional committee.

With time running out for writing the constitution and then holding elections in December for a permanent government, Zebari warned that the United States has withdrawn too much, leaving the new government struggling to cope and endangering the long-term prospects for success.

International help in drafting their constitution would not be without precedent. Following the end of World War I, some of the most idealistic and gifted legal minds of Europe sat down with the new German government that overthrew the Kaiser and drafted what at the time was considered the “perfect” constitution. William L. Shirer describes it in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:

“The constitution which emerged from the Assembly after six months of debate…was on paper the most liberal and democratic document of its kind the 20th century had seen, mechanically well-nigh perfect, full of ingenious and admirable devices which seemed to guarantee the working of an almost flawless democracy. The idea of cabinet government was borrowed from England and France, of a strong, popular President from the United States, of the referendum from Switzerland…”

As Shirer points out, the Weimer constitution also had its flaws not the least of which was voting by lists (as they do currently in Lebanon) which leads to a multiplicity of small, splinter parties and in Germany’s case, made a stable majority in the Reichstag impossible.

While I’m sure the Iraqi’s would be grateful for our help, it’s best that we tread cautiously in helping draft a document that will act as a basic law of the land lest our own preconceptions of “democracy” and “freedom” override what is possible in an Iraqi society racked by sectional and sectarian differences. In short, we may end up making matters worse instead of better.

As for security issues, I don’t see how much more we could be doing. Any major anti-insurgent sweeps need to be carried out by Iraqi forces for the simple reason that we’re not going to be there forever and they may as well gain the experience and self-confidence that comes with succeeding in operations of this nature. If they get into trouble, we’re there to back them up. But we can’t make the same mistake we made in Viet Nam by continuously bearing the brunt of combat operations. Back then, we failed the Vietnamese military by not giving them a chance to prove themselves until it was too late. When they did go out into the field, they were ill-prepared and not well led. Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy was a disaster. It came after 4 years of American led combat ops and failed to adequately train a South Vietnamese army racked with corruption and ambivalence. The result was predictable.

One big help we could give to the Iraqi’s would come from our new Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad. Unfortunately, although named to replace John Negreponte three months ago, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has failed to hold confirmation hearings. Here’s the Captain’s take:

By the way, expect to see some mild fireworks at Khalilzad’s hearing. The Village Voice already alerted the Left that Khalilzad has — gasp! — worked for an oil company before. The nominee represented Unocal during the Clinton-era negotiations with the Taliban that hoped to establish a pipeline across Afghanistan to gain greater access to oil production in Central Asia and the Caucasus. The Ted Rall/Michael Moore contingent have long claimed that this effort was the true motivation behind the Afghanistan phase of the war on terror. This will give the Democrats an opportunity to show how far they’ve slid to the radical Left. If this thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory plays any role at Khalilzad’s hearing, we’ll know the lunatics have seized control of the asylum.

Sometimes, I think Bush does things like this just to goose the moonbats. Seriously, the clock is ticking on the constitution as the deadline is a little more than 3 months away. The Iraqi’s have made every single deadline we’ve set so far. Let’s hope they keep it that way.

You remember the Iraq WMD? You know, the WMD that doesn’t exist, that’s just a figment of Bushitler and eeeeevil Karl Rove’s imagination who went into Iraq to steal the oil and kill Arabs? Well…according to the UN, it’s gone missing:

U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses.

In the report to the U.N. Security Council, acting chief weapons inspector Demetrius Perricos said he’s reached no conclusions about who removed the items or where they went. He said it could have been moved elsewhere in Iraq, sold as scrap, melted down or purchased.

Previously, we’ve had the non-existent WMD going to Syria in Russian trucks and the phantom weapons being removed and taken to the Bekka Valley in Lebanon.

For imaginary items, they sure get around, don’t they?

To be fair, the UN is talking about so called “dual-use” equipment, especially in the biologic weapons sphere. Fermenters and miles of pipes that could be used to make both pharmaceuticals and bio-weapons are valuable commodities and could have been sold or simply moved out to the desert and buried.

But the fact remains that something was removed from sites that the UN previously determined contained weapons of mass destruction. If they were used for innocent purposes, why move them?

This kind of logic will escape the moonbats who continue to ignore evidence of Saddam’s ties with al Qaida as well as evidence that while not present in the kind of stockpiles thought by western intelligence and the United Nations , Saddam’s WMD programs could have been reconstituted if his oil for food bribery schemes had been allowed to bear fruit and sanctions against him lifted.

UPDATE

Jonathon at GOP Bloggers:

So the stuff that Saddam didn’t have is now missing. At this point, the UN should be kept around for its wonderful sense of humor, if nothing else.

Hee.

And Matt at Blogs for Bush is scratching his head.

Alpha Patriot has an accounting of the missingWMD that doesn’t exist.

By the way, Good Luck to the Patriot as he’s leaving the Watcher’s Council after a long and illustrious stay. If you haven’t already, blogroll his site and visit often for some really good stuff!

The votes are in from this week’s Watcher’s Council and once again, it was a tough choice. I was lucky enough to walk away with top honors for my post on the possible Bird Flu pandemic entitled “A Killer in the Shadows” but there were several other worthy posts in the Council category I’d like to highlight.

Dr. Sanity has become the poet laureate of the Council lately with this gem about the beheader Zarqawi and the hope that he’s close to death as a result of wounds he recently received in “A Prayer for Zarqawi:”

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord your soul to keep;
And if He keeps it very well,
It’s sure to find its way to hell.

But if you don’t, it’s no surprise–
A coward never lives his lies.
You’ve sent so many to the Lord,
It’s only fair you face His sword.

E-Claire has some advice for the President regarding the schmucks at Amnesty International in “Hey Dubya: Don’t Feed the Moonbats:”

I heard a rep. of “Human Rights Watch” on the raadio yesterday. He out and out said that they hold the US to a “higher standard” than they do “people with less developed armies.” Talk about Racist…. He might as well have come out with it: “Those little brown people just aren’t as capable as you taller, whiter, more technologically advanced people. We expect so little of them and so much of you.”

The blind credulity of these infantile dopes is beyond comprehension. Whyinhell would the White House even deign to respond to them?!?

Good question, although Gregory Djerejian believes the Prez should have taken the opportunity to come clean about prisoner mistreatment worldwide.

I agree with Greg up to a point. He wants a blue ribbon independent panel to look into the allegations of torture. I think a panel like that could easily morph into a 9/11 Committee - a partisan tug of war that wouldn’t do anyone much good in the long run. For the moment, all the critics of the Pentagon’s handling of torture allegations have on its investigations is that they’re moving too slowly. Given the nature of the charges and the conflicting testimony of the participants, I don’t see how they could go much faster. That being said, I think the President should get out front of the various torture investigations. Right now it’s like Chinese water torture. The information is coming out in dribs and drabs which only allows his enemies to take each allegation out of context and dwell on it lovingly, massaging it and milking it for all that it’s worth.

The problem is exactly the opposite of what his critics charge; the incidents are isolated and disconnected. If torture was administration policy - like the Nazis “Final Solution” or even Stalin’s “gulag” - it would be easier to trace. Holocaust historians have Heydrich’s train schedules and accountings from the death camps themselves to go by. In the administration’s case, critics like to point to the Justice Department memos that explored a myriad of interrogation options, all of which were eventually rejected. The fact that they were even discussed causes these critic’s imaginations to take flight and not set down until they end up in the same place as Amnesty International - La-La Land.

Finally, in the Council category The Smarter Cop blogs the recent arrest of terror suspects here in America in “Terrorists in your Backyard:”

Next time you’re in a mall’s food court with your daughter and you see a kindly old man smiling at her, try not to overreact, but at least consider this:

Shah saw a girl nearby looking at him and he smiled back.
The Bronx man, the son of a Malcolm X lieutenant, then turned to the agent and said, “I could be joking and smiling and then cutting their throats in the next second,” the complaint said.

This is Exhibit A for the point many have been trying to put across both to the general population and to our ignorant bureaucrats who seem to be caving to CAIR and other organizations sympathetic to Islamicists - it’s their intended goal to blend into our society and appear as we do, even as every moment they wish to shed our blood. They’re just waiting for the right time.

Chilling, that.

In the non-Council category, the winner was Bloggledygook’s “Taking Islam Seriously” in which Daniel Berczik fisks this column by Frank Rich right smartly:

In today’s Dubai, home to cutting-edge resort design and prestigious golf and tennis tournaments (in which, we presume, women sometimes wear shorts or tennis skirts) it is still unlawful to be allowed entry into the country if one’s passport is stamped by Israeli Customs. Will keeping the pages of an odd Koran or two dry really change the rancid philosophy that holds 1.5 billion people in a death grip of shame, perversion and hatred?

Yet Mr. Rich can’t let himself go that far, because that would actually serve to put him to the right of this administration even as it would install him directly in the center of American public opinion. Those complaining about Koran abuse see the latest yawning episode as either a shameful display of America’s arrogance and disrespect for the world’s second largest religion or one more foul-up by a government and its military that only serves to make the fight harder.

Great writing. Great thinking.

If you’d like to participate in the weekly Watcher’s Vote, go here and follow instructions.

I missed this when it came out a couple of weeks ago:

A doomed Queens man’s chilling computer entry led cops to a suspect who allegedly robbed and killed the victim and his sister to finance a return to China, police said yesterday.

Jin Lin, 23, was charged with first-degree murder yesterday in the bloody slayings of Sharon and Simon Ng in their Kew Gardens Hills apartment Thursday, officials said.

Cops zeroed in on Lin, who once dated the woman, because Ng typed a journal entry into his computer fingering his sister’s ex-boyfriend as the suspect, police said.

Here’s the poor guy’s blog entry made minutes before he was murdered:

Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister’s former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon, oh yeah working on the jap report as we speak!

I guess it had to happen sooner or later. I’ve seen blog entries when all sorts of things are in progress; tsunamis, riots, ballgames, beauty contests, even sexual trysts (sorry, no link!). But this has to be the eeriest example of the power of the new media. It allowed the young man to reach from beyond the grave and finger his murderer.

John Cole alerted me to this story:

A conservative Christian group launched a boycott against Ford Motor Co. Tuesday, saying the second-largest U.S. automaker has given thousands of dollars to gay rights groups, offers benefits to same-sex couples and actively recruits gay employees.

“From redefining family to include homosexual marriage, to giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to support homosexual groups and their agenda, to forcing managers to attend diversity training on how to promote the acceptance of homosexuality… Ford leads the way,” American Family Association chairman Donald Wildmon said in a statement.

Yes…and your point is? If Ford Motor Company wants to include in its outreach programs Gay Rights groups, what the hell business is it of AFA and loonbat Wildmon?

Quite simply, this is getting embarrassing. Yes Bill Ford, CEO of Ford Motor Company is a moonbat of the first order:

Young Bill got a prep school education before going to Princeton and MIT. He is a tae kwon do blackbelt, a student of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism and a folk guitar player.

His most notable contribution since becoming chairman 2 years ago has been to try to make Ford the most environmentally friendly automaker. He has horrified many in the industry — and many at the company — by publicly blaming auto emissions for greenhouse gases causing climate change. He speaks passionately about a future with cleaner alternative fuels, recyclable cars and compostable parts.

The fact that his most “notable” contribution since becoming chairman has been to turn Ford into a green oasis will catch up to him soon enough. One would think that the most notable contribution a CEO could make to his company is to, like, you know, make some effing money for the shareholders! The fact that his interests lie with Buddhism rather than profits may eventually be his downfall. And if he wants to waste the time of his managers on “diversity sessions” rather than building cars he better brush up on that folk guitar because the only job he’ll be able to get after the stockholders fire his ass is street musician.

Well, that won’t happen…after all he is a Ford.

This still doesn’t excuse the AFA and Mr. Wildebeast from going after companies that…do what”

Laymon added that other automakers — including General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp. — provide benefits for same-sex partners and market their vehicles to the gay community.

“It is one of the things that makes us proud to be part of the auto industry,” Laymon said.

It’s high time that the Republican Party started to distance themselves from these crazies. You can’t tell me that a majority of Republican lawmakers find this sort of thing acceptable. You can’t tell me that 10% of Republican lawmakers agree with this. It’s loony politics. Why take a position that’s opposed by a vast majority of the American people who support most of the rights for gay people outlined in the boycott statement? I’m the first to line up against things like teaching 8 year olds the why’s and wherefore’s of gay sex (or any kind of sex for that matter). But this? This is nuts.

It’s hard to defend the religious right sometimes when people like Wildmon and Dobson constantly make such gigantic asses of themselves.

If the first rule of government spending is “Why have one when you can build two at twice the price?” then the first tenet of government rule making should be “Why make one rule when four will serve the same purpose?”

Friday, June 3 is the deadline for comments on proposed FEC rules affecting the internet. And while they’re aren’t any daggers aimed at the heart of bloggers, there certainly appears to be plenty of pins ready to prick us till we bleed.

The good news is most of the 10 million or so blogs in the Shadow Media will be totally exempt from the regs. If you mention how much you hate Bush in between stories of teaching toilet etiquitte to your tot, you are safe from the long arm of the bureaucrats. If however, your ambitions include using your blog as an advocacy platform, things get a touch more complicated.

Disclosure seems to be the goal of the Feds. If you’re taking ads from a candidate or being paid by a candidate to promote the campaign, you will have to declare that on your site. But where? The Online Coalition makes a good point in their response to the proposed rules:

Furthermore, we cannot understand how a disclaimer would work in practice. Must the site feature a disclaimer on every entry? Only ones related to the campaign that made the payment? Suppose the blogger is paid by the campaign but does not write about the campaign specifically, but instead debates important current events? Is there some kind of “express advocacy” rule? How would disclaimers work with sound or video files? While we strongly oppose a disclaimer requirement, if the Commission insists upon pursuing this idea, it must set forth clearly what is required to comply with the rule.

The way these rules are written, it’s abundantly clear that the FEC simply does not understand who or what a blogger is or what we do. Neither do they understand the technical aspect of blogs (I don’t either but I’m not attempting to curtail free speech by regulating it now, am I?)

Then there’s the FEC’s problems with the English language. Now, admittedly, English is one of the more difficult languages to master - just listen to Pamela Sue Anderson try to give a speech . But generally speaking, if you’re going to write the definition of a rule and then write the rule ignoring the definition you just made, you’re going to have more confusion than even Pamela Sue could imagine:

The exemption is crafted in such a way as to apply only to communications by any broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication. This awkward wording suggests that the FEC means to distinguish between newspapers and periodicals, whose Internet media activities are exempt, and some classifications of other persons and organizations, which are not. Yet, the explanation for the proposed rule states “the proposed regulation expressly rejects a policy that only a bona fide press entity with an off-line component is entitled to protection in their online news stories, commentaries and editorials.”

In short, the rulemakers can’t seem to make up their minds. Are bloggers journalists? Are blogs on-line publications or commercials for candidates?

There’s an easy way to fix this entire mess. There is a bill in Congress to exempt internet activities from FEC scrutiny. Entitled The Online Freedom of Speech Act,” the bill would exempt bloggers and other online publications from rulemaking by the FEC.

All we can be certain of is this: If the FEC goes ahead with their proposals for the internet, there’s little doubt that those who are targeted by the rules will find a way around them. This has been the pattern every single time that campaign finance laws have been changed.

Every. Single. Time.