MORE BAD PRESS for the Daily Illini. “In an effort to gratuitously antagonize a fresh new segment of the populace, the Illini has implemented a new policy prohibiting its staff from writing blogs.”
Archive for 2006
February 19, 2006
ANYONE WHO THINKS “PAPER TIGER” is a synonym for “harmless” has never been involved in litigation:
A soldier wounded in Afghanistan and the widow of his slain comrade were awarded a $102.6 million judgment from the estate of a suspected al-Qaida financier.
U.S. District Judge Paul Cassell said the lawsuit may be the first filed by an American soldier against terrorists under the Patriot Act. . . . Attorney Dennis Flynn said the U.S. and Canadian governments have frozen the assets of the elder Khadr.
Sic the trial lawyers on ’em. They’ll be begging for mercy.
UPDATE: Howard Bashman has more, including a link to the opinion.
MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT: I don’t blame John Ashcroft for this one.
I’LL BE ON PUNDIT REVIEW RADIO tonight at about 8:15 Eastern, talking about An Army of Davids, technology, politics, etc. You can listen live via WRKO if you’re interested.
ED MORRISSEY IS DOWN ON THE PRESS: “When our media has the testicular fortitude to report on terrorists honestly, then they will have gained the moral authority to lecture any White House on censorship and the responsibility of fully informing the public.”
UPDATE: Blackfive says they’re mythical.
THE FINAL WORD on the Cheney Kerfuffle, from Scott Adams: “I think it’s the worst kind of pandering to shoot a lawyer just because your popularity is low. But I’ll bet it works.”
Yep: “After a weeklong bump into the double digits, the Dick Cheney June 30 retirement futures at intrade.com have plummeted; they’re now below where they were before the shooting.”
MORE ON THE MASSACRE IN NIGERIA: Gateway Pundit has a roundup.
UPDATE: Tim Blair, meanwhile, reports from Australia, and notes another injunction from Australian Prime Minister John Howard to Muslim immigrants: stop “raving on about jihad.”
THE CARTOON WARS have TigerHawk rethinking “tolerance.” He’s opposed to the asymmetrical variety. He’s right to be. Tolerance is a two-way street. Those who do not grant it, have no right to demand it.
UPDATE: Related thoughts here.
THOUGHTS ON THE welfare – terrorism connection from the InstaWife. This is something that Kaus has noted, though at a greater personal remove, for a while.
CHINA AND THE INTERNET: An interesting story in the Washington Post. Excerpt:
No one told the editor in chief. For 90 minutes, he ran the meeting, oblivious to the political storm that was brewing. Then Li announced what he had done.
The chief editor stammered and rushed back to his office, witnesses recalled. But by then, Li’s memo had leaked and was spreading across the Internet in countless e-mails and instant messages. Copies were posted on China’s most popular Web forums, and within hours people across the country were sending Li messages of support.
The government’s Internet censors scrambled, ordering one Web site after another to delete the letter. But two days later, in an embarrassing retreat, the party bowed to public outrage and scrapped the editor in chief’s plan to muzzle his reporters.
Via Hugh Hewitt, who observes “The Party ought to require every member read An Army of Davids. (Who’s got the rights in the PRC Glenn?)”. Why limit it to Party members? I think that everyone in China should read it!
OKAY, I didn’t post these originally, since I don’t generally post other people’s work without permission (I’ll sometimes deep-link images with a link back to the source, but that’s different — and hard to do given that big-media folks haven’t been falling all over themselves to slap these on their websites). But by now I’m pretty sure the Danish authors don’t mind, and apparently various ignorant thugs are threatening sites that post them. So I guess that makes it my turn. Here are a couple of the better ones. More will follow if this nonsense keeps up.
Hardly worth rioting over, in my opinion. But the people who do this sort of thing don’t care much about my opinion. So why should I care about theirs?
UPDATE: James Hudnall makes an important point — in fact, the actual cartoons weren’t that controversial until the Danish Imams added three fake cartoons to fuel the fire. Perhaps the Danish Government should immediately imprison them for hate crime, to appease the mob . . . .
ANOTHER UPDATE: Various readers write to tell me how “brave” I am for publishing this. Not hardly. We’re at more risk from the Insta-Wife’s clients. . . .
IRAQ WANTS TO join NATO. I suspect they’ll prove more reliable allies than some we’ve already got.
UPDATE: Austin Bay looks at some history.
ARI FLEISCHER on the Cheney kerfuffle:
On why Vice President Cheney’s office should have handled the hunting accident differently
FLEISCHER: Well, I think this could have and should have been a one or two day story. It was a serious story, so I don’t know that it would have gone away instantly, but it could have and should have gone away much quicker. And so I do differ with the vice president about how it was handled…I do think that the vice president should have and could have announced this either Saturday night or Sunday morning.
On how the White House press corps were both right and “bonkers”
FLEISCHER: I think the White House correspondents were right on this one. They did have a legitimate beef. They should have been told about it. But I think you can be right and still go bonkers, and I think that’s what happened here…I do think there is an element here of the press going bonkers because they didn’t get the story. Somebody else did, and they wished it had been them. It should have been them, but that does feed into their anger.
(Via email from the Reliable Sources folks.)
Just yesterday, Hamas came into power. As I noted, its first order of business was to indemnify itself—rhetorically, if not legally—from the obligations of Oslo, and to assert that, no, the nation of Israel does not have the right to exist in this world. Despite Hamas’ being essentially a successor government (and thus required under international law to abide by treaties to which the previous government acceded), the party has renounced any treaty that recognized Israel.
Can you guess what the second order of business was? That’s right: to condemn Israel’s decision to cease sending cash to the Palestinian Authority. Specifically, $42.2 million. Since the PA and its new Hamas bosses run almost entirely on the swiftly-eroding goodwill of the rest of the world (terrorism doesn’t pay very well), Hamas is now demanding that Israel reconsider its decision to cut funding. A representative said: “This is a faulty decison, and the Israelis must reconsider their decision. It will only increase hatred.”
It really is like dealing with teenagers. Except, you know, for the murder part.
UPDATE: Bob Krumm writes that the Palestinians certainly understand the meaning of the term “Chutzpah.”
OVER AT GAYPATRIOT, a review of Norah Vincent’s Self Made Man. “Despite its hype, the book did not disappoint. Indeed, I would call it one of the most important books published in the past decade, particularly important for gay people as it deals with the difficult subject of gender difference.”
February 18, 2006
MORE IGNORANT THUGGERY: “Nigerian Muslims protesting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad attacked Christians and burned churches on Saturday, killing at least 15 people in the deadliest confrontation yet in the whirlwind of Muslim anger over the drawings.”
If Christians were burning mosques, it would be portrayed as proof of their inherent degeneracy and violence.
UPDATE: More here.
TAMMY BRUCE NOTES rampant Olympic discrimination against female ski-jumpers, who aren’t allowed to compete. I’m familiar with this: My stepcousin Karla Keck (you can see her in midflight here) was ranked first among women jumpers in the late 1990s — but never got to compete in the Olympics, because, you guessed it, women can’t compete. Lame.
SOMEBODY TELL BRYANT GUMBEL about this.
WELCOME to 21st Century London. I don’t think the tourism-promotion folks will like this story.
MORE colossal Kofi conflicts: “Kofi Annan has learned nothing from the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food scandal, in which Saddam Hussein’s billions corrupted the U.N.’s entire Iraq embargo bureaucracy. Earlier this month, Annan accepted from the ruler of Dubai an environmental prize of $500,000–a fat sum that represents the latest in a long series of glaring conflicts of interest. Call this one Cash-for-Kofi.”
Note to Condi: Why don’t we give this sort of outright bribery a try? It seems to be all the rage.
RYAN SILBERSTEIN posts a blog review of An Army of Davids: “This book is suburbia’s version of Thomas L. Friedman’s The World Is Flat.”
DAVID BERNSTEIN has much more on the ABA’s affirmative action policy. Given its earlier antitrust problems, I’m surprised the ABA is taking such an aggressive line here. Legal consequences aside, though, I think the ABA is in danger of further marginalizing itself, accelerating its move from an umbrella legal-profession organization to just another political interest group.
I HAVEN’T READ ROBERT FERRIGNO’S Prayers for the Assassin,
That may (or may not) be true — I haven’t read it — but from reading the entire PW review I’m not sure the Publishers Weekly reviewer likes me. . . .
Hugh Hewitt interviewed Ferrigno recently. The transcript is here. Ferrigno also has some interesting thoughts on how the Internet is affecting book sales.