Day Time Television To Get Increased Dose of Obnoxiousness

Rosie O'Donnell is joining "The View."

A lesbian in a committed relationship and known for being outspoken, O'Donnell's addition will provide a challenge to the show's ego mix. Vieira, who was a mediating influence, is leaving to replace Katie Couric on NBC's "Today" show.

That might be a challenge to the "ego" mix, but it will certainly not be a challenge to the mix of political discourse. It will simply be more left-leaning political hand wringing with some forced guffaws thrown in for good measure. Exactly what we should expect from ABC.

From the Detroit Free Press.

Justice in Sweden

In an honor killing that involved the bludgeoning, burning (with hot oil) and stabbing (23 times) of another Muslim, an 18-year-old man is given 4 years of youth detention because he was only 17 when he committed the crime. From The Local in Sweden.

The 18 year old responsible for the brutal 'honour killing' of 20 year old Abbas Rezai in Högsby last year has been sentenced to four years' youth detention. His parents were cleared of all charges by Kalmar district court.

After serving his sentence, the 18 year old will be deported from Sweden and banned from ever returning.

Kalmar district court awarded Abbas Rezai's mother 113,000 kronor in compensation.

In its judgement, the court wrote that the crime for which the 18 year old was found guilty was deserving of life imprisonment. But the sentence of four years' secure youth detention was due to the fact that he was only 17 when the crime was committed.

This is social liberalism and Islamic fundamentalism all in one ugly portrait.

Found via The Religion of Peace.

Spanish Socialists: Simians are People Too!

Shortly after the Madrid bombings, the Spanish electorate put the socialists in power. They knew that they were buying their way out of that nasty war in Iraq. I wonder if they knew they were also buying this.

The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for "the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings." The PSOE's justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests "the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species."

According to the Project, "Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species's closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals."

To which Protein Wisdom says this:

...and 99% with mice. But then, mice aren’t quite so, y’know, powerful and nasty when you snap their little mice necks for gnawing through your cupboard and eating your Montecados.

Or shitting on the knives for that matter.

Via Little Green Footballs.

Nearly Half of Egyptians Believe Israel Behind Dahab Bombings

From the Big Pharaoh.

The poll above was posted on Egypt's number one web portal Masrawy.com. The question asks people whom they think was behind the bombings in Dahab yesterday. 48.9% of the respondents so far think that the Israeli Mossad was behind the terrorist attack. 4.2% believe it was Al-Qaeda and 21% think it was the work of internal terrorist groups.

The above poll is a clear indication of the trouble we as a nation are in. Up till now the vast majority among us and especially among our intelligentsia don't want to admit that we have a terrorist problem in our society, in our currently practiced religiosity. Up till now we don't want to look in the mirror and see what's wrong with us and with our culture. This is the reason why I don't see light at the end of tunnel anytime soon as far as our Arab/Islamic world is concerned.

Read the whole thing.

Bombing In Dahab

Picture and follow up from the SandmonkeyBlog.

It is time for Muslims to get serious about terrorism and violence.

Take your religion back!

Cal Thomas: "A Traitor In The Midst"

In Townhall today, Cal Thomas discusses the CIA leaks of Mary McCarthy.

What do you call someone who, in violation of her oath, reveals government secrets to a reporter, who then prints them and exposes a clandestine operation designed to get information from suspected terrorists that could save American lives?

Here is what one dictionary says about that word: "One who betrays another's trust or is false to an obligation or duty." The word so defined is traitor.

Me-Too Muslims

*** Updated ***

Eighty thousand people, including many Muslims that also hate terrorism, filled the streets in Brussels yesterday showing their solidarity against violence in the aftermath of the stabbing death of Joe Van Holsbeeck by two Muslim immigrants.

Marches of solidarity like this help the populace articulate their sorrow and disgust at such wanton and senseless killing. Unfortunately, the end result of this huge effort will have exactly zero impact.

If Muslims are worried about the abuse of their religion through terrorism, they must understand that they are the only ones capable of taking it back from the terrorists. How many Dutch laws will it take to keep violent Muslims from killing? How many EU officials will it take to denounce racism to the point that fanatical Muslims open their eyes and renounce violence toward and hatred of the infidel? How many welfare reforms will the French have to pass before rioting Muslims there embrace French culture and society? How many Belgian marches will it take to calm the terror inspiring mosques and schools?

The sad fact is that the only meaningful effort that has been made to arrest mushrooming Islamic terrorism has been by the west--which is woefully inadequate when it comes to confronting the seeds of terrorism. The West really has only one option; that of wiping out the seeds by force--and that is an option unpopular with both sides. However, we do not have the people or the time necessary to infiltrate and nuance a change in direction, so realistically, what else can we do other than hunt and kill? If a systemic change can be made it will have to be initiated by Muslims, and Muslims have not done nearly enough.

So, when will the real rejection of terror begin in the Muslim communities? When will the me-too Muslims step with solidarity into the mosques preaching evil and the schools teaching evil? When will me-too Muslims (by all accounts 80% of the Muslim population) demand the end of terrorism? When will the me-too Muslims confront Muslim sponsors of terrorism? When will me-too Muslims themselves denounce the hate that drives the jihad, not with anonymity in the streets of Belgium, but openly in the mosques?

I applaud the me-too Muslims that took part in the marches, but I challenge them, because at the very most, this was the very least they could do. After all, how much bravery does it take to share the street with 80,000 others?

*** Updated *** 4/25

Belgian authorities have arrested a 16 year old Polish immigrant for the murder of Joe Van Holsbeeck. A second 16 year old Pole is also being sought.

The Brussels Journal reports.

Egyptian Bombings

We've all heard the accusations that the US and Britain are waging a global war on Islam.

Given all the evidence then, I wonder who is to blame for the detonations of three bombs in Egypt today that have reportedly killed over 100.

A very sad day in Egpyt.

*** Update ***

FoxNews reports the tolls include 23 dead and 60 wounded. Of the dead, 20 were Eyptians.

Gas Pump Politicians

I just love this post on Right Wing News today about politicians who are frothing at the mouth over oil company profits and executives' salaries.

Listening to politicians in Washington complain about how much money a corporation like Exxon makes is like an enormous, bloated tick complaining that the Cocker Spaniel it's attached to is using too much blood. The truth is that if you add in the state gas tax, the Federal gas tax, and the enormous taxes Exxon and its employees pay out, you'll find out that the government drives up the cost of gas far more than any profits Exxon takes, even at $3.00 a gallon plus.

Yet, they're mad that Lee Raymond is making "too much money." Because I'm not running for anything, I can tell you the unvarnished truth, which is that Lee Raymond is probably UNDERPAID. The guy has been the chief executive of Exxon for 12 years and just last year they made a $36 billion dollar profit (which incidentally, is only a 9.7% profit). Considering how much money he has helped them make over the years, if they paid Raymond a billion dollars, it wouldn't be too much.

See, you're not supposed to say that though. Nobody likes oil companies. Nobody likes rich people. People are mad about how much they're paying at the pump. But look, folks, we live in a world where Derek Jeter can get paid $189 million dollars to play baseball for 10 years and top Hollywood actors can make $20 million plus per film. So, why shouldn't Raymond be able to make a bundle for running a company the size of Exxon? Just because it turned out that gas prices were extremely high when he retired? Please!

It really does get down to basics, and Republicans like Dennis Hastert need to embrace free-market economics (like they have said they do) or they need to support market controls like the socialists.

You either have a economic philosophy or you don't. It sounds like Hastert does not.

Red Wings Win (According To Those That Could Watch)

From what I hear it was an excellent contest. It was close--two overtimes in fact.

Of course, given the widsom of the NHL and the Red Wings, I was unable to watch it. Mitch Album at the Detroit Free Press said it was, well, a playoff game.

Muslim Sensitive Toilets

I must admit I was a bit amused when I read about this in BBC News:

Facilities in a prison are being built so Muslim inmates do not have to face Mecca while sitting on the toilet.

The Home Office said two new toilet blocks are being installed as part of a refurbishment at Brixton jail in south London.

Faith leaders had told prison bosses it was unacceptable for Muslim inmates to face Mecca while using the toilet.

"The refurbishment has been carried out with due consideration for all faiths", a Home Office spokeswoman said.

If they aren't facing Mecca when using the bathroom, aren't they crapping toward it?

H/t The Religion of Peace.

Hockey Playoffs Open With a Personal Thud

I love hockey, and I believe I saw all but a dozen or so Red Wing games on television this year. Eighty two games is a lot of games, and I have watched a lot of hockey.

So the playoffs are here, and Detroit has won the President's Cup as having the most points at the end of the regular season. I was very excited about tonight's game against Edmonton, a formidable opponent.

Until of course I discovered that I will not be able to watch the game on television.

The NHL and the Red Wings have decided that the playoffs are not as interesting as the regular season, so they have scheduled tonight's game on local Detroit television (with no outstate coverage) or on OLN, a network that is not available on Dish Network.

Thanks guys!

Kitty Reflections

As animals go, I must admit, kitties are not my favorite. They are good at some things, such as catch and release programs with the local mice, and hitting the litter box a majority of the time. However, I think in retrospect, I'd much prefer an animal that eradicated the rodents entirely and crapped in the toilet (complete with flushing.)

But animals are what God made them, and who am I to second guess the All Mighty in his grand design to create purring mammals that I think suck. So, if I were to rate animals on a scale of 1 to 100, (100 being gold laying geese and 1 being blood-sucking lawyers) I'd put kitties at about 3.

Judging by her personality however, my kitty is clearly in the top half of all house cats, choosing to stay off the table and the couch, and for that I am proud. But, what does my opinion count? The mice give her an 89, and that is who she sleeps with.

Oil Prices Keep Rising

The cost of crude oil continues to rise, and filling up the old LaBaron at $2.89 a gallon today has the topic fresh on my mind. Much about the price of oil we have little control over. But, even in the areas we do (or should) have control, environmentalists are digging in their heels and trying everything that they can to keep the crude in the ground. Many of the loudest arguments of today are purely recycled hysterics of a few decades ago when oil was first discovered in Prudhoe Bay.

Townhall pointed me toward a report yesterday by R. Warren Anderson at the Free Market Project which examines many of the oft used 1970's arguments.

After the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, it didn’t take long for environmentalists to cry gloom and doom and for the media to hype those claims. From caribou dying to earthquakes to “all hell breaking loose,” there was no shortage of catastrophic predictions – though the Alaska pipeline now boasts great success roughly 30 years later.

An interesting read.

"UN: Women Better Off Under Saddam"

This report from NewsMax today:

In a report issued this week, the Integrated Regional Information Networks, a U.N. news agency covering sub-Saharan Africa, maintains:

"Women's basic rights under the Hussein regime were guaranteed in the constitution and more importantly [they were] respected, with women often occupying important government positions. Now, although their rights are still enshrined in the national constitution, activists complain that, in practice, they have lost almost all of their rights."

The UN group also complains that more men are ordering women to "take the veil" (wear coverings from head to toe), and fewer women are working in professional jobs than when Saddam was in power.

Yikes. How many millions of dollars to we ship to the UN every year?

Via RightNation.

Belgium Looks Away

Do you know this young man?



At only 17, Joe Van Holsbeeck has certainly not decided for sure what his life's ambition will be. Perhaps a doctor or lawyer. He could be a business leader, dockworker, scientist or engineer. In fact, at this young age with a full life ahead of him, a person can choose to become just about anything that they want to be. Unless, of course, that choice is ripped away.

Joe Van Holsbeeck was murdered by a gang of Muslim punks last week while standing on a crowded train platform during rush hour in Brussels Central Station. After Joe refused to give away his MP3 player to the thugs, they stabbed him five times in the chest.

Even aside from the sheer brutality of the attack, there are many other things about this incident that just plain hurt. First of all, on that crowded ramp full of rush hour commuters, no one had either the guts or the concern to try and stop the attack. It is a possibility that no one actually noticed the attack with the hubbub of trains arriving and leaving, but I find this possibility pretty hard to believe.

Secondly, the police, government and media have tried very hard to obscure the fact that the attackers were Muslims. Along this same line, investigators at the scene were particularly interested to know if Joe had used any ethnic slurs against the thugs before they knifed him, as if such a thing would justify a good stabbing.

But, most concerning of all is the response to the crime by leftist Cardinal Godfried Danneels who is placing the blame of the murder on the materialism and indifference of western culture. Huh?

From the Brussels Journal:

Joe’s murder has shocked the Belgians. For an entire week the police, the authorities and most of the media have tried to downplay the fact that the killers are Muslim youths. Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and Cardinal Godfried Danneels addressed the indignation, but gave it a spin of their own. How was it possible for such an atrocity to take place in a crowd with no-one interfering, they asked. Both Verhofstadt and Danneels said that Joe was a victim of “indifference in Belgian society.” “Where were you last Wednesday at 4 pm?!” the Cardinal asked the congregation in Brussels Cathedral during his Easter sermon on Sunday. The Cardinal blamed the murder on the materialism and greed of Western society “where people get killed for an MP3 player.”

There are horror stories out there where people have been murdered for a pair of sneakers, for a few dollars in coins, or over a simple insult. But, the horror of this isn't that someone had the audacity to own a pair of basketball shoes or carry around enough money for some fast food.

The horror of this is that Muslim youth rampaging about Europe and committing terrible crime is not an oddity, that the media is too afraid to mention it, that the common man is too scared to do anything about it, that the police are too worried about being called racists to properly investigate it, that the government is too steeped in social engineering to care about it, and that Cardinal Danneels wants to blame the West for it!

Wake up people! If you don't feel your culture and way of life is worth saving it will absolutely be lost. Heaven help Europe if the savior of that continent has to come from the same group of people that averted their eyes as a knife was plunged repeatedly into the chest of Joe Van Holsbeeck.

With millions already committing cultural suicide, who could possibly care enough to notice the death of one young Belgian man in their very midst?

Protest Backlash

Now, some people inside the immigration protest circle are debating the benefit of another huge protest (and work stoppage) currently scheduled for May 1st.

From Yahoo:

LOS ANGELES - Organizers of the movement that has led hundreds of thousands of immigrants onto the nation's streets are split over whether to press ahead with the next big protest -- a May 1 national work stoppage and student boycott. Backers of the protest want to dramatize the importance of immigrants to the U.S. economy by leaving construction sites and restaurants undermanned, crops untended and hotel rooms uncleaned. They also hope empty classrooms will demonstrate that immigration reform is a major issue for future voters.

Protest all you like for all that I care. However, you do need to know that these things will have repurcussions.

What I really need to see is another graphic of how much money we American taxpayers are spending on the illegal immigration problem. Pictures of empty classrooms (built by American taxpayers) and staffed by teachers (paid for by American taxpayers) might be just exactly what I'm looking for.

I want to see millions of empty classroom seats! I want to see millions of Mexican flag waving immigrant students out in the streets on May 1st. Then I'm going to multiply each of those empty seats (or walking butts, depending on the photos) by $10,000 (a national educational spending average by student) to arrive at a dollar amount.

Then, I'm going to write my Congressman.

March, baby, march!

Poor, Poor Zacarias

It is pretty hard to feel sorry for the likes of Zacarias Moussaoui despite the fact that he lived a difficult childhood, but that is what the prostitute attorneys of Moussaoui would like you to feel. They would like you to feel it in your gut. They would like you to feel it in your heart. In fact, they would like you to feel it in every fiber of your being. Because, without that sort of total body numbedness, it will be very hard to forget that little poor Zacarias, is a cold blooded murdering pig.

Michelle Malkin isn't buying any of it. From Townhall.

A social worker and a psychologist offered pathos-laden testimony about Moussaoui's difficult childhood. His abusive father. The anti-Muslim taunts of schoolmates. The hostility of the parents of his French girlfriend, under whom Moussaoui "suffered a lot of pain about not being accepted." The courtroom soap opera climaxed with video testimony exhibiting his troubled sisters, who called their beloved Zacarias the "little sweetheart of the family." Sniffle.

According to The New York Times, which headlined its story "Moussaoui's Childhood Is Presented as Mitigating Factor," Dr. Xavier Amador told the jury Monday that Little Orphan Moussaoui "suffered from schizophrenia of the paranoid variety."

Let me throw away the medical dictionary and give my diagnosis of the defense team's diagnosis: Bull.

Incidentally, I'm not buying either.

Palestinians Demand Apology

In what has to be considered echoes from the depths of mental illness, Palestinian militants are asking for an apology from Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for condemning the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that occurred Monday.

From Haaretz via Little Green Footballs:

Palestinian militant groups demanded an apology Tuesday from Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for condemning Monday's deadly suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, in their harshest criticism yet of the moderate leader over his stand on violence.

The criticism, including from armed groups within Abbas' own Fatah party, underscored a growing debate among Palestinians over the use of violence against Israel.

"We ask President Abbas to apologize to the entire Palestinian people because of the offense he committed," the groups said in a joint statement by a coalition of militants read by a masked gunman at an open-air news conference in Gaza.

Let me see here, a terrorist abuses Islam by blowing up some Jews. Then the terrorists feel abused by a Muslim authority condemning the bombing. Now the abused Muslims (I reckon by both the bombing itself and the apology for it) abuse Islam again by comdemning the condemnation. Islam sure is taking a lot of lumps these days.

This EU language stuff is getting tough to figure out. (Thanks Bernie.)

Thomas Sowell: "An Ugly Reality"

Writing in Townhall today, Thomas Sowell nails it on the head in his description of the anti-American protesters supposedly seeking to gain legal status in the United States.

Somebody must have told them that their Mexican flags that dominated the earlier marches were not making a good impression on television, so they started flying American flags. But such cosmetic changes did not keep the ugly reality from coming through in their hostile speeches.

These were not the speeches of people who wanted to join American society but people who wanted their own turf on American soil -- in disregard and defiance of what American citizens want.

Previous millions of immigrants have come to our shore to find freedom and opportunity. Of necessity in that quest was a willingness by immigrants to throw off their burdens of nationality and culture and to assume a new identity--an American identity.

This generaion of immigrants has no intention of becoming Americans. They want to remain cultural foreigners on American ground. We desperately need new immigrants with a desire to be Americans. However, if all we can get are foreigners seeking the benefits of our society without a willingness to shoulder the costs, not only do we gain nothing, we lose a great deal.