Category: News

John Kass, of the Chicago Tribune, reflects on what Abu Gharib says about America (registration required). Cripes, what to excerpt?

You might see these photos as evidence that we should never have been in Iraq, that we’re no different than our enemy, that we should pull out now.

I’d respectfully disagree with that.

We are different. There is no moral equivalency here, despite what some politicians want you to believe.

Those Americans who committed outrages at Abu Ghraib should be sent to prison, and not only the enlisted people and the strange woman with the dog leash, but their commanders as well. Let’s be clear on that. Torture and the mass murder of innocents was Saddam’s policy. That is not our policy. Just as the severing of heads and putting it on video is not our policy.

As a political tactic, comparing the United States to Saddam Hussein promotes uncertainty in selected constituencies, particularly the young. It is absolutely necessary that we reject it, because it saps American confidence. It is dangerous.

There is no other option but to accomplish the mission in Iraq, to develop some stable government and turn the country over to the Iraqi people. Yes, that might mean that U.S. forces will be there for years.

That should give you a taste, but you’ll have to read the whole thing to see him quote Victor Davis Hanson.

Overlawyered.com and Radley Balko report on the next target of Big Litigation: the alcohol industry.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, this cannot stand. I urge you to each contribute heavily to fill the coffers of the defense funds for the brewers, vintners, and distillers. I myself like to contribute and show my support by stopping by the liquor store frequently, and I plead that you do the same. And invite me over.

Thank you, that is all.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has uncovered:

Black students in the St. Louis area are more likely to attend a school in a district that is virtually all black than they were in the 1960s.

Fifty years after the highest court in the land declared school segregation illegal, the region’s student population as a whole has become more diverse. But still about half the area’s students – white and black – attend public schools where nearly all the children look like themselves, a Post-Dispatch analysis shows.

As part of its long commemoration of the Brown v Board of Education, the paper concludes that schools are still segregated. The paper, however, misunderstands or misrepresents a basic concept in segregation: Segregate is a transitive verb, wherein a subject segregates a direct object. Segregation was bad when governments segregated people based upon race because it did not allow them to choose the schools their children attended–the government assigned it by race. With Brown v Board of Education, the Supreme Court said that separate facilities for members of different races were inherently unequal.

Once governments quit segregating pupils by race, segregation ended. However, the Post-Dispatch, arguing in favor of expensive forced integration programs, intimates that since schools are not integrated, they’re still segregated. But schools are now segregated by choice, as people send their children to schools where they live and can choose where they live or they can send their children to private schools.

Hold on, some people would argue, parents are not free to choose where they live! A family living on a single service industry salary cannot live in the Ladue school district! Therefore, they are not free! They’re segregated to places they can afford to live and are thus not free and their children should be bussed to Ladue!

If you think that, I have two words for you: But since this blog is read by my mother-in-law, I won’t say them, but I will think them very hard in your general direction. First, you’re misrepresenting freedom to choose as freedom to make any choice or take any action. Freedom to choose means you can choose what’s available to you, not among all possibilities real or imagined. Just because I’m not free to travel astrally between the galaxies, soaring on the cosmic wind, that does not mean I am unfree to choose between the possibilities available to me. So parents are free to move, if they want, to places with better schools and/or to make sacrifices for their children’s educations if that’s what they value.

As for anecdotal evidence, I can only offer the following: A close friend of mine attended the Principia, an elite high school in the St. Louis area. Her mother had gone there. So she did. Of course, her mother made extreme sacrifices to send my friend to the Princip. Her mother was a single mother, raising two children in Colorado and New Mexico, but she moved the family to St. Louis and made sacrifices, deals, and relied on the help of others to ensure her children could attend the school she chose for them. She chose. Period.

So feel free to continue to ignore the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s perspective on this issue, and continue to take care of your children and your schools instead of forcing the government to waste its limited resources on creating a sixties Coke commercial world of properly rainbowed schools of which the Post-Dispatch would approve.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch approvingly reports:

The mother of accused serial killer Maury Travis, whose bizarre hanging death in the St. Louis County Justice Center was ruled a suicide, filed a suit Friday against the county, the architects who designed the jail and the contractors who built it.

The federal suit by Sandra Travis Harden claims her son’s civil rights were violated by negligence and building flaws while he was supposed to be on a suicide watch after his arrest in June 2002 on federal charges involving two kidnappings.

Her boy killed himself, but his civil rights were violated because the government did not restrict him enough so that he could not kill himself.

Don’t dwell on it too long, gentle reader, for it might cause your head to explode, and I don’t want to violate your civil rights by not preventing you from being informed.

At which time, I guess, your survivors could sue my family, the makers of the components within my computer, my Internet Service Provider, blogger, and the company that built the comfortable chair in which I am sitting. Also, to spare the company litigation, I would like to point out I am not drinking a delicious Guinness at this time.

Dan Caesar writes in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

With a week of retrospective, that seems to have played out to a “T” in the Blues’ nixing Fox Sports Net’s desire to keep Ken Wilson, who had broadcast Blues games for a record-tying 20 full seasons.

Geez, I think that’s supposed to be a metaphor. Is he talking about tee-ball? A tie? I don’t know.

Bald eagle will be taken off threatened species list.

I mean, we already serve the runner-up for Thanksgiving.

Best of the Web Today pointed to a New York Post story wherein John F’n Kerry says he’ll support Bush’s proposal for more spending on Iraq:

John Kerry yesterday said he’ll back President Bush’s call for $25 billion in extra funds to support U.S. troops in Iraq, after taking lots of heat for voting against $87 billion for the troops last fall.

“The situation in Iraq has deteriorated far beyond what the [Bush] administration anticipated. This money is urgently needed and it is completely focused on the needs of our troops,” Kerry said in a statement.

Note, however, Kerry has not affirmed that he will bother showing up in the Senate to actually cast a vote on it. Working in the Senate is the job for which American taxpayers employ Kerry at a salary of over $150,000 a year, but for which Senator Kerry has been calling in sick for much of the year.

How presumptuous that John FU Kerry is conducting United States foreign policy on behalf of the flocked-up sheep citizens he’s bound to fleece slaughter protect:

Sen. John F. Kerry said Friday that despite public declarations from France and other European countries that they would not send troops to Iraq, there were indications some of the nations would be willing to change course with the right diplomatic effort.

“There are senators and … diplomats who have had conversations with other folks that I think indicate that — given the right equation, given the right statesmanship and leadership — it is possible to have a very different level of participation,” Kerry said Friday at his Washington campaign headquarters.

We used to have a set of united states hereabouts, wherein we spoke with a single voice internationally. Now, the red states have their duly-elected spokesman, and the blue have the self-appointed messianic one.

(Link seen on Wizbang!)

Shame on the editorial staff at The Wall Street Journal:

The rise of terrorism and so-called asymmetric warfare only reinforces the wisdom of making distinctions between legitimate POWs and unlawful combatants.

I would say, “A pox upon their writing abilities! A blight upon their style!” That, however, appears redundant and already happening.

Looks like Louisiana’s about to extend its nanny state to picking clothes for its children by outlawing low-riding pants:

House Bill 1626, also known as the “Baggy Pants Bill” states: “It shall be unlawful for any person to appear in public wearing his pants below his waist and thereby exposing his skin or intimate clothing.”

Have your attorneys file for an exclusive disjunction injunction. It will confuse the judge, undoubtedly, just as easily as I have confused myself and you.

Hidden in the ombudsman column of the Boston Globe wherein said ombudsperson explains the chain of events that led to the Globe printing a story about a rabble-rousing city selectman or whatever anachronism those staid New Englanders have in lieu of alderpeople who pee in trashcans during a filibuster who waved around a bunch of photographs depicting American soldiers raping Iraqi women–photographs long debunked here in the blogosphere as having come from topical pornography–we find this interesting admission from the ombudsperson:

Various sources last week said the photos displayed by Turner came from a pornography website, and they may well have, although I could not trace it to the source.

One has to wonder how hard Christine Chinlund scoured the Web for a particular set of pornographic pictures and how many sites she reviewed in the course of her research. And if it constitutes a “hostile workplace” for her co-workers, or if “I was looking for the source of photos of alleged improprieties on the part of American soldiers” works when the boss catches you.

(For more information, see Media Log by Dan Kennedy for May 14, 2004.)

It’s good to remember that some absurdity remains in the world:

Cuban President Fidel Castro launched an immense anti-American protest on Friday with denunciations and ridicule of President Bush, saying the U.S. leader was fraudulently elected and trying to impose “world tyranny.”

The Cuban leader led a sea of Cubans past the U.S. diplomatic mission here on the oceanfront Malecon Boulevard in a demonstration organized by the communist government against new U.S. measures aimed at squeezing the island’s economy and pushing out Castro.

The crowd chanted “Free Cuba! Fascist Bush!”

Are you sure they weren’t using a noun of direct address in their chants? “Free Cuba, fascist Bush!”

“So-Called” Watch: Linda Feldmann, The Christian Science Monitor:

Bush’s gains were notably big in the 17 so-called battleground states, those that were decided by a close margin in 2000 and promise to be close again this fall.

(Thanks, Pejman, for the link which gave another quarter-turn to the stick in my maw.)

Let me see if I get the attribution straight: An Instapundit post refers to something on Roger Simon’s blog which resulted, ultimately, in an essay on The American Thinker.

Read that essay.

The lead:

How do we account for the continued strength of President Bush in the polls, relative to his presumptive Democratic opponent, despite the stream of bad news from Iraq? Much of the journalistic and intellectual establishment is plainly baffled …and dismayed. The answer is not that complex: the public, unlike the class which defines itself as living the life of the mind, understands that we are at war, a war in which our very survival is at stake. This is a gut-level cognition.

Those who pride themselves on their ability to spin chains of logical reasoning, and sometimes arrive at a counter-intuitive conclusion, instinctively recoil from the obvious lesson, especially when it validates the positions of their political opponents. For them, the battle against the hated Bush is more important than the battle against Islamicist terror. Theories which blame the West as the source of all evil take precedence over actual evil, stariung them in the face.

My tangental epiphany:

Major news media are the same as reality television.

Face it, they’re not just people who point cameras and shoot stuff. They’re content providers who need to sell a story. They don’t just dish out facts and events. They start with a story, and then they cut the video and stage it as needed to have a narrative arc, complete with villains who are just people trying to do the best they can, but whose actions the “narrators” cast in unflattering lights and out of context–but within the narrative arc.

Major news media are nothing but entertainment, folks, and the pictures they paint and the artistry they employ might be actually, you know, entertaining or compelling. If they weren’t talking about something vitally important, and if they weren’t trying to base it as a true story. Perhaps “Inspired by Actual Events” would better describe it.

This damn cheap verbal construction sticks in my craw and wiggles and twists. I don’t care to hear this abomination spoken (and I have one friend who applies it to his conversations like barbecue sauce on over-cooked hamburgers), and I find it disreputable when professional writers use it in things for which they were paid.

Current offenders:

• Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times:
  

  Conservative commentators who seized on this tragedy to complain that the so-called liberal media was more interested in abused Iraqi prisoners than a murdered American civilian are either lying or stupid.

• Sara Shipley, St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
  

  The Howard Bend Levee District is nearly finished with a $25 million upgrade designed to protect against a so-called 500-year flood, or one that has a 1 in 500 chance of happening in any given year.

Face it, “so-called” is the “alleged” without the elegance and without, you know, actual allegations. So-called is the drop-in equivalent of an “authorities say” asterisk in a headline, a written sneer that would be denied if someone questioned a speaker who added the equivalent tone of voice. It’s making air-quotes with the English language, and it deserves all the mockery we can summon.

I’m almost tempted to start a “So-Called Watch” blog, but given the underwhelming popularity of Pop-Up Mocker, I think not.

In his column today, Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times endears himself to the other half:

You go first.
In a recent column you brought out the big guns, God and the Vatican,
to condemn Rush Limbaugh for his support of the troops in the so-called
Iraqi prisoner abuse. Who you gonna call on now to comment on the
televised beheading of an American civilian — the liberal high
authority Michael “Freaky” Moore? Let’s just see if this cold-blooded
murder gets as much air time from the media as the naked butts of Iraqi
prisoners.

Alberta Dabrowsky, Lake Zurich

The entire world
should be condemning that horrific, cowardly murder. As for press
coverage: the beheading of the American civilian is a huge story and
was treated as such. Conservative commentators who seized on this
tragedy to complain that the so-called liberal media was more
interested in abused Iraqi prisoners than a murdered American civilian
are either lying or stupid.

My response, of course, is that I read his column online every day Monday through Thursday, so I guess it’s obvious which of the two I am.

Mr. Roeper can be reached for comment at rroeper@suntimes.com.

I, too, have a crush on my best friend!

Should I tell her?

Signed,
Are You A Psychic, Too, Because Your Columnist Name Sounds Like What A Psychic Would Call Herself -Notice How I Subtly Slipped A Second Question Into My Letter For Free

At OpinionJournal.com, Peggy Noonan examines the terrorist threat to Newark. Her analysis:

• Because the Port of Newark is an easy target:
  

  He [Tony Soprano] comes across a documentary about the potential use by terrorists of the nearby Port of Newark. The Port of Newark, the biggest port on the eastern seaboard, receives millions of ship containers each year; the feds say they can check only 2%; terrorists could easily smuggle in a dirty nuke.

  Tony becomes alarmed. He knows Port Newark. The mob is there, his people are there. It is corrupt, lazy, badly run. Suddenly he realizes there’s nothing between his home and kaboom but a chain-link fence and a mall.

• Because the Port of Newark is an attractive target:
  

  Port Newark is just beyond the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. A hit on Newark would cause panic in al Qaeda’s great target, New York–stock market crash, terror in the streets. A hit on Port Newark would deal a blow rich in practical and symbolic terms.

• Because New Jersey is becoming the center, in America, of the movement for cloning:
  

  But there’s more and for me it’s more central, and the reason my pings began. New Jersey is becoming the center, in America, of the movement for cloning. Its governor just signed the most liberal cloning bill in the United States. There is money in cloning research, and status: We’re the coming intellectual center of science! We’re not just the Meadowlands and the mob, we’re Princeton and Einstein! There is greater suburban affluence to be gained, and higher tax revenues for politicians to spend on community centers built through no-bid contracts by big contributors. The Robert Torricelli Psychotherapy Institute for the Differently Abled. The Jim McGreevey Carpal Tunnel Trauma Research Facility.

Cripes, spare me further “Why do they hate us?” projection of whatever bugaboos the commentator has about America in the discussion of terrorism. Who cares? Don’t solve the projected problem, eliminate those who would blow up Newark for whatever reason.

And prevent Peggy Noonan from being cloned, ever. For her sake, and for the sake of generations of future Americans who read conservative commentators.

Check out John Kerry’s bravado here:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry warned his political opponents on Monday against attacking his outspoken wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, saying, “They’re going to have to go through me.”

That’s a pretty metaphor, Massachusetts. But we here in the midwest respect our elders just enough to not beat them to a pulp when they start talking smack.